What to write about

I’m not sure what to write about now that I don’t necessarily want to write about tech, or technical topics.

I can write about work and labor, that’s something I still do lol. I can write about my feelings, I still have them.

I wish I felt passionate to write about something, but I haven’t made passion a requirement for writing in the past. This blog first started when I made a goal to write every week. If you do that for a period of time, you will by force of time, end up with stuff.

My first post 🥲

The first post on this blog is about PuTTY and using cd and ls to navigate folders¹. 2010 Pam considered that to be sysadmin work. (I mean technically that is relevant to the administration of a system… but remembering that at some point I learned cd/ls is a good reminder that I started learning somewhere).

I wrote about that because it’s what I learned. My blog posts were where I wrote things down to make someone else’s life easier to find the answer to what they wanted to do. That person often included my future self referencing past blog posts (although I am quite familiar with cd these days. I’ve made it!).

~ Feelings ~

To return to the meta-feelings: I started writing out this snippet (now post) because these thoughts were blocking me from writing something else. Now I’m sharing it because this … “what do I write about now, that I don’t want to write about technical minutiae” might be relatable, and maybe you can tell me what you think.

There’s something in my feelings as well about what sharing content means, or what creating things at all has. Particularly in the attention economy, where the ~platforms~ have ~creators~ who drive the traffic for the platform-holder to get advertising revenue, which is all very … ugh.

A side rant: A post of mine was on the front-page of HN a couple months ago, which caused a spike in traffic that I then had to pay my webhost for. I don’t have ads on this blog! That was annoying! If that happens again, I’m commenting on the thread with a pay-me link.

Why do we create?

Not everything created must be shared, but that’s often an intention with creation. “Look what I made” happens at the end, and reception is part of the creative process. We rehearse plays in order to perform them; audiences matter.

So if you read this, I’ll say I appreciate you contributing to that side of the equation. The scales of consumption and creation are a difficult thing to balance – what we consume inspires us (or ideally generates some reaction), but as an organism we synthesize that consumption into something else. What have you created lately? What inspired it, if you can put a name on it?

[1] Note: early posts on this blog may have some missing images, because this was originally a Posterous blog and some things are long lost after that migration.