I can tell how much I’m procrastinating actually writing a blog post because of how much time I’ve spent messing around with the appearance of this website, and other fiddly deatils – which is a bummer because they were supposed to be secondary.

As a lifehack for coming up with a first topic to write about my first post will be so naval-gazey and meta that I’ll want to quickly write another one to hide how horrible this first one is.


So why am I, a person who has a twitter with 0 tweets, a facebook page devoted almost enirely to the once-a-year phenomenon of people being reminded about my birthday, and who otherwise spends his time lurking rather than posting, making a blog?

1) Other places never felt right

It feels weird to blather on about the topics I’m interested in on social media sites. Perhaps I have an overly- compartmentalized identity, but I don’t love the conflation of friendship with the expectation that you’ll be interested in what I have to say about, for example, data visualization. At best, posts on social media feel to me like two people shouting a conversation to make sure everyone hears how smart/funny/whatever they are. I hope by separating my writing away, I won’t be doing that.

2) Need to practice writing

I’m trying to change my atitude from “I’m (inherently) not good at writing” to “I’m not good at writing (yet)”, since the pop-psychology of the day says this can be effective. We’ll see if it replicates ;)


I remember enough from high school english that I should have 3 points to my thesis

  • but this new rebel version of me trying to actually enjoy writing refuses.