The following is an email sent to the subscribers of this blog that I’m posting publicly since I posted something for the first time in about a year just now.
So I sent a bunch of people who subscribe to this – it’s in the low two digits, if you’re wondering – telling them that I was done with a blog for now. And now the first thing I’m doing is posting for the first time in a half a year.
Here’s a secret: I don’t quite know what I’m doing. A long time ago, I had a semi-regular blog that was ultimately disappointing. I wish it was just bad writing but there was a bit too much wannabe writer boy, a little too much virtue-signalling, a little too much self-loathing and -deprecation too
More importantly, for readers, I didn’t know who I was writing for. I wrote for myself, but that’s a pretty low bar. Not just that though, I had no why. In my old blog I tried to write about bikes and records because that’s what I spent my time on. For this site though, I didn’t really realize I didn’t have any particular place I was coming from.
I mean, I thought I did. Having a blog with lots of posts was supposed to show how I had all kinds of great ideas, so you would want to hire me. That was supposed to be whether I talked about speech technology or anything else I thought was related.
Like, you know, Lynda Barry’s ability to observe the speech of children. Hong Kong protest slang. The semiotics of the word “metal” as a musical genre. And okay, those are about words, in a way, so, I guess sort of related. The bits about the phenomenology of parsing language? Duh, deep insight into the nature of human-computer interaction. And the review of Sore Eros’ lp from a couple years back? Well, you want to work with someone who has broad interests, right?
Yeah, no.
Now I’m going to be a lot more generous with myself. My why is: Become a better writer. So I’m going to write here with that goal in mind. You might want to read that, and you might not. That’s okay. It was folly to believe I could just plunk myself down and dash off a brilliant blog.
I guess that’s why they want to make generative AI: what supposedly smart people do naturally is pretty crappy a lot of the time. So I’m taking a minute to see if I can’t do better next time.
Thanks for joining me again.
D