I took away the subscription box

I don't want you to read this on RSS. I don't like the feeling of sitting at my command center and watching all the info drain down the pipe toward me. I want to go get it. I want to visit the content, not have the content visit me. I know you (and by "you" I mean most savvy Internet users) are different. But like any artist, I prefer to exert control over the art's delivery.

That's how I think of what I'm writing. I'm broadcasting art over an Internet channel. You must choose to tune in, to aim your attention at what I'm transmitting. It is not meant to be read amid the lolcats and foursquare squirts and other people's tweets. It has its own space, requires a separate effort.

My blog design is sparse, and not far from its original template. But still, I made it look like this on purpose. The white and the orange and the different fonts, they are meant to convey too. You miss part of the message when these words shoot down the pneumatic tube of your feed reader.


I don't think I can stop QT from appearing in existing feeds, and I don't plan to spend any time trying to figure it out. I'm not even sure that having removed the subscribe option means anything. You might be able to snag it with or without my permission.

And if that's the case, why dig my heels in? I don't know. This is something I haven't got named yet. There's an idea behind it I'm still excavating.

But if you're curious, that's what's happening.

Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.

Blogaday 2009 Wrap-up

Another Blogaday ends. Time for the wordy wrap-up!

• This year, I did 61 days instead of the previous 30. I have gone into this before with about 2 weeks of semi-prepared content with the expectation that I'd get back to the rest of it later. This time, those 2 weeks were 25% of the total content instead of 50%, so mid-November left me with some head scratching.
  
• The head scratching point is where the magic happens. Not saying that was the best content, but that's where I have to start thinking and stop coasting.
• "Start thinking and stop coasting" should be tattooed on my arm or something.
• Will Rogers used to write a daily newspaper column. He wrote it daily, in the field, and he made it funny. For most other humans, an essay a day is hard work. After my realization that I'm not built up to write an original piece of polished thought every day, I started posting pithy stuff, some that could have just been Twitter fodder. That was okay too.
• I still prefer essays here.
  
• It's actually not hard to think up something to put on a blog every day. I'm walking around thinking alla time. What's hard is noting that something I'm thinking could be put on a blog. The blog has to occupy a balcony seat in your head. I imagine there's a list of things in your head that you compare new experiences to, that you use to contextualize experience. A blog just has to make it onto that list.
• I missed a day in late November again. One of these years I'm going to try not to miss a day.

I'm also trying to top last year's post count, so I'll probably post more in December. It's Advent again, and Art Shop is this Friday -- come by if you're in Philadelphia! -- so I'll have things to talk about. Peace out, blogaday bitches.

Once you condense a mote of wisdom into an aphorism, it becomes more ornamental than instructive.

Affiliated

I'm an Amazon affiliate now. When I mention various purchasable media here, I'll be including links to buy the thing on Amazon.

To many bloggers, this is a Duh-level decision. But I have always quietly deemed QT an ad-free zone. This blog was about writing down things I think, and would serve no other master. So I had to consider the decision to commercialize it via any third party. (Pushing my own stuff is fair game.)

I decided to do it based on a few factors. Amazon links are:

• unobtrusive
• substantively informational in addition to commercial
• testing grounds for my bid to become Internet Famous

I have to imagine pretty hard to see how this could become a problem. But just in case it does, I declare now that I will try to sell out as little as possible, and to be up front about it when I do.

Now go! Go and click on yesterday's board game links, and from there, commence all your Christmas shopping at Amazon in one purchase, without closing your browser window, within 24 hours of first click-through.

Cheating at Internet

I have written things this week, and been unhappy with them, and so shelved them to work on later, a typical ploy.

But simmering doesn't become a daily schedule. I've wound up back-dating things two days later, still dissatisfied. This is not how you do daily content, it's how you lie to historians. Back to work today, now with less ambition!

The Rules

For all the time QT has been around, I've operated with a set of rules I've never spelled out here. I've never done it mainly because it's almost a full-on swipe from someone else, who made such great rules, I wanted to follow them too.

His name is Robin Laws, a writer and game designer who seems to have the personal resources to do nearly anything he desires, and has chosen to write for roleplaying games. Fascinating.

Here are my rules, based lavishly (though not slavishly) on those of Mr. Laws:

1. I must strive to be interesting. I owe it to you and to me to make something worth reading when I write.
2. I will not write an entire post apologizing for a long absence. If you see a long absence in writing, it is because I have not taken the time to work at being interesting. When I make the time again, I will skip straight to the interesting part.
3. At no point will I tell you what I had for breakfast.
4. I will avoid links and one-liners to the latest Internet point of interest. The dramatic chipmunk was truly hilarious. It was hilarious all those other places you saw it too.
5. My writing will not serve as a bulletin board for petty complaints. I shall seek to avoid detailing:

• Minor illness. Unless it is integral to the more interesting anecdote I am relating.
• Computer problems. This one actually isn't about you. I find this boring.
• Bureaucratic annoyances. Although I have many.
• Anything else that might characterize a tween's cat blog.
  

Sometimes I break my own rules. I recommend not analyzing the rules too deeply. Trust, gentle reader, that I am looking out for you, and that there are guidelines to help the process.

Blogaday 2009 -- Now!

Blogaday has become a yearly phenomenon here at QT. On some level, I'd prefer Blogaday to be perennial rather than annual. But I collapse under pressure.

Instead, I slide challenges to myself casually, leisurely. If I were to direct myself to begin writing on my blog every day, I would fold like an accordion. However, if I conduct a series of increasingly demanding "experiments" on myself, I come closer to achieving whatever goal I'm actually after. My mind balks at conquering the mountain, but clambers happily if it thinks we're just scaling to take in the view. I do not understand it, but it is so.

This is all my roundabout introduction to Blogaday 2009 -- the 60-day trial! In previous years, Blogaday was a November occurrence, my nonfiction response to NaNoWriMo. In just 3 years though, it's become its own animal, a modest self-experiment with discipline, consistency, and composition.

This year I'm experimenting with doubling the length. Please, stop back every day for the next two months. I will strive to be interesting! And hope in your good nature when I am not.

Caring about what I'm doing here

Yesterday I was reading Wil Wheaton’s blog, and he had a post about how to run a good D&D game. It was solid information, but nothing groundbreaking. Anyone who’s been running D&D for a while could come up with the basics of that list.

But his comments section was full of people telling him what great ideas he had, and how awesome he was for having such great ideas.

Wil Wheaton has had enough going on in his life for lots of people, me included, to care. But this is an area where Wil is not an expert. I am more expert than he is in this area. Yet people seemed to care enough to post on the internet to tell him that they cared about what he thought.

My default assumption is that people do not care about what I have to say. Whatever I think has to be justifiable by some vague personal standard to ever say out loud, or post on a blog. It has to be funny enough or meaningful enough, or I have to establish myself as expert enough for me to think anyone will want to hear it.

Getting dressed this morning, it suddenly occurred to me that people might care what I have to say, whether or not I can justify myself to them. Readers/listeners might just intriniscally care. I might not have to prove myself.

How I title blog posts these days

For years, I've attempted to cleverly title my posts here. Puns mainly, but under inspiration, I've slipped in a triple entendre or two and subtle allusions that I doubt anyone else gets or cares to get.

But I've changed my thinking recently, because I find, as I browse the archives, that I have no idea what some titles refer to. I'm not getting my own in-jokes anymore.

I'm reminded of blog advice I've seen at various places. Most of those articles are tiresome. I don't care about making this blog optimized for search engines; I'm not interested in selling ads here. But I do want to optimize for human reading. Some of the same principles apply:

• Keep it short.
• Pull the reader into the first paragraph.
• Make it sensible so that if a reader is picking it out of an RSS feed, he or she can get a sense of it.
• Provoke.

These principles are also good to keep in mind because although I don't want to make money here, I am slowly, slowly gathering momentum to try to make some money off blogging. That ship has sailed several times by now, but there's room for more ships to come in. So while I wait, I'm learning to craft better post titles.

BlogaDay Dos

BlogaDay 2007 was a success in the sense that it encouraged consistent readership, and also, consistent writership.

Unflummoxed success is rare enough that I like to build on it when I find it. So for 2008, I present an all-new BlogaDay. Visit Quickthinking every day in November to see what thing I think.

Posts will not be mere one-liner links to something on the Internet that someone else went to the trouble of creating, but will contain original thoughts and opinions, developed into short paragraphs. Similar to real writing!

Also new for 2008: Blogger supports scheduled posts! Via the miracle of science, expect updates each new day, even if I am too drunk to press buttons.

Furthermore, if any of you reading this are also bloggers, feel free to join the BlogaDay movement by writing a new, original post every day in November. We will be doing it together, only very far apart! Leave me a comment with your blog address if you're in.

It all starts tomorrow! November 1! Here is a brief excerpt from tomorrow's post:

"the"

Barn Door's Open

You might have noticed the slowdown last week when trying to access the site. I had an all-time high of readers -- 13 in one day! Didn't know why until I was cruising around my normal sites tonight, and found a hat tip from Bird Dog over at Maggie's Farm.

It's startling every time when people I link to wind up linking back. I've stopped trying to keep QT a secret, but I sure as hell don't advertise. I get lulled into thinking that my half-dozen readers are the only people paying attention. Even though everybody keeps telling me the Web is 2-way, I still think of it as a 1-way thing, like the phantom books or newspaper articles I imagine myself writing.

Which is goofy; it's like nailing your manifesto to a telephone pole and expecting only the people you tell about it to read.

In addition to being surprising though, it's -- ok, I admit -- gratifying to know someone else is paying attention. I like thinking I might have an unexpected positive effect on someone outside my normal influence.

Maggie's Farm posters do not appear, on the surface, to be kindred spirits. They are quick and sure with their many opinions. I am often neither, and only occasionally in agreement with them when I am. Also, they are proud Yankees, and regardless of my address, I am a Southerner at core.

Nonetheless, I like reading the Farm Report! They help me think differently over there. Any time one of the regulars deigns to brave the Mid-Atlantic, door's open, y'all. Drop on by.

BlogaDay: Repost Month

I forgot to mention, I'm doing BlogaDay again this month, trying to post at least once a day for all of May.

I'm changing the rules, because I'm not bothering with all-original content this month. Many Mayposts will be pointers to things I found other places, with little or no commentary.

Posting more, saying less. It's like conservation of energy, only with teleology.

Speaking of energy, here's today's link:

We might be able to get biofuels from a microbe that we don't have to kill in the process, and that can live in seawater.

Go microbes!

Gut Check

Fiddling with the blog's guts today. Appearance may change suddenly (though not necessarily drastically) in the near future.

BlogaDay: In Review

Again, didn't get around to posting during the 24-hour period. But my rule for years and years has been: It's not tomorrow until I sleep, so I'm calling this November 30. Shame that Blogger doesn't support flexible dating. It's enough to drive a man to WordPress, or Moveable Type if he's feeling adventurous.

BlogaDay lessons learned:

• This is hard. I wrote the first week all at once in a fit of pique, and then wrote several more days ahead of time during the first week. I ran out of prepared content halfway through and started riffing.
  
• But it’s not that hard. A couple hundred words a day is doable.
• I got more polished stuff in the first half, but the second half was more surprising. I think I prefer polish.
• I’m not sure if anyone else thinks this, but I think I’m funnier writing late at night. You probably can't tell which ones I wrote at night, since the time stamp only occasionally corresponds to the writing time. I said things in late-night posts that I wouldn’t have said under the sun, and occasionally questioned the next day. But I didn’t take it down either. (Although I feel a little bad for calling Russel Davies an Internet douchebag.)
• Posting every day gave me impetus to do other things. I finished books and completed projects that I wouldn't have worked as hard on if I hadn't wanted to use it for blog fodder. That word puzzle, for instance, has been sitting around half-finished for over a year. Using it as a rainy-day post impelled me to finish it, AND got it out in front of an audience.
• Interactivity is challenging. I'm uncomfortable in front of an audience that talks back. I prefer media where I can put it out there and fade behind the layers between me and the reader.
• This forced march has been a good experience. I don't think I had the self-discipline to do it before now in my life, and I know I didn't have the grace to let myself miss a day like I did and keep going without feeling terrible about it.
• I have momentum, and I haven't decided what to do with it. I'm in the habit of posting every day now. According to Google Analytics, I'm up to 4-6 discrete daily readers. Seems a shame to put it down.

Chances are good I won't post tomorrow, but I'll be back on Sunday. Thanks for reading BlogaDay!

BlogaDay

I have ideas for posts allatime, but mostly I'm all eloquent and shit when I'm driving, which is possibly the worst time to be that way, unless you count being in secret prison for crimes nobody will charge you with. I suppose that's a worse time to try to write down your clever little thoughts.

Point being that November is rapidly becoming National [Accomplish Something] Month. Novels or operas or giant bas relief sculptures (NaBaReSculMo). As we all know, by the time something's been properly parodied, the original phenomenon is dying. And by the time I get around to parodying it, you're looking at faded daguerreotypes of the original phenomenon, wondering why no one ever smiled back then.

ALL YOUR DAGUERREOTYPES ARE BELONG TO US.

But I'm doing it anyway, my own little dog-and-pony variation of NaNoWriMo. All November long, I'm posting here every day. It's called BlogaDay.

I just made this up. Don't look for a BlogaDay signup site and t-shirts and freaking podcasts. Although if you send me $30, I'll make an awesome BlogaDay t-shirt for you.

The main reason I'm doing this is I'd really like to break out of the killing habit of making sure that what I have to say is well-researched and original before I post it. Those sound like good criteria, but I never write anything doing that.

So November? In November? I'm writing something every day here. It might just be a repost of whatever I saw that day at Neatorama, but damn the photon torpedos.

For the love of Christmas, I just spent 4 minutes trying to find a Klingon translation of the word "damn" for a joke that approximately zero people will get. This is what I have to contend with. This is why I only post once every locust year.

So. Every day. Something. I will still try to be clever or interesting, but really, you'll just have to smile politely when I'm not. Ready? Go.