I’m wallowing in online information sites where you read stuff rather than watch videos. Digital video is erasing everything else.
What’s the point. I keep cramming text into my brain just like I’ve been doing every day for the last eight decades. Reading is my life. What good is reading? All it does is increase my level of dissatisfaction with my own life in the real world.
Video does the same thing, except faster. A hundred years ago, people growing up in backwoods shitholes didn’t know about the rest of the world. Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.
Now everybody can compare themselves to the apex of existence they see portrayed on their phone every moment of the day. It’s better somewhere else. You’d be better off if you were not like the way you really are.
There’s an online story that is not being covered a bit on the TV news channels. The youngest black man ever to become a professor at the University of Cambridge at age 37 resigned the other day after controversy surged regarding his accomplishments. Jason Arday was diagnosed autistic as a baby, did not learn to talk until he was 11, could not read or write when he was 18, but overcame all that to earn a PhD and publish a book and run 30 marathons in 35 days. His PhD thesis was discovered to be a blatant plagiarism. His book has not actually been published yet because it is not yet written. And the controversy is because evil white racists don’t believe his claims. So what if he can’t document a single one of them? That’s raciss.
He’s another guy who climbed the ladder due to anti-racism preventing anybody from checking his claims. He’ll probably land some great job elsewhere in the academic community. Claudine Gay, the black woman who was ousted from the presidency of Harvard due to plagiarism found another prestigious academic job. It’s racist if you decline to hire her.
What about my claims. I don’t make them. I’m internally constrained against self-promotion because I know I’m not the best and it’s folly to make that claim. I’m competent. A journeyman. My masterpiece was the Seymour Duncan brochure. In the original meaning of “masterpiece,” that is, not the modern conflation of “greatest thing he ever did.” Not the apex of a career, but the start. A piece that proves one is a master of the trade.
A master’s degree?
The more you learn about writing, the more daunting it is. All the great work has already been done.
So why am I still blabbing away every day?
It’s my replacement for conversation. Writing forces me to organize my thoughts into a stream of English sentences.
Made me remember trying to talk to Misha at the bar at the Hard Rock Café in Las Vegas while we were at the Defcon hacker’s convention. Hadn’t seen each other in quite a while. The music was so loud that I took out my pen and pad and we wrote notes to each other. It was just like being online with him, except we were on neighboring bar stools.
1045am
I saw an article that was behind a paywall implying that George RR Martin is unable to complete the long-awaited sequel to GAME OF THRONES because of dementia. Time happens to us all, was the gist of the clickbait, as proven by this letter from Martin behind the paywall.
I notice a decline in my abilities. I’m stuck more often when trying to think of an alternative word that eludes my grasp. Or seeing a remarkable congruity between this photo and that guy from a movie I can’t remember the name of.
The last time I saw my mother she did not have much vocabulary left. She told me she left the whatchamacallit in the thingamajig next to the gizmo.
As far as I can tell, my prose is still plain, clear, active, and concrete. Flesch-Kincaid tells me that my stuff is strongly readable.
But I don’t have anything to say. My career has been to say what the client needs to say.
All I have to say is that people will read it if you make it readable.
Readability seems to be the last thing on the minds behind the tech sites I see. Who cares if people read this or not, it’s their loss if they don’t. Our true customers will bull their way through our words even if they have a low Flesch-Kincaid score, Rik Pierson told me. Owner and creative director of a third-rate ad agency. What’s their incentive to read it, I asked. It’s right there in the final sentence, he said. Yeah, but how do they know the incentive is there when they’re starting to read it? They have to slog through it to find out why they should slog through it.
At the Startup meeting on Tuesday, a group of four people was talking about how you could look at a website and read it and not be able to figure out what they were saying, what they were offering. I attempted to enter the conversation but it was a mere passing moment to them and they returned to discussing their opinions of the World Cup games.
My long-term experience with the Startup Circle is that I have not met anybody who cares about creating websites. No writers, no graphic designers, no video directors, no web designers. For a while Mika merged the group with a list of Python programmers but they had nothing to do with websites except as coding databases. I was unable to enter conversations with the Python coders.
There was that one graphic designer who worked at Photothermal, he and I got along well but he was at the Startup meetings because he was an entrepreneur of games, he had several board games he was trying to peddle and I wrote some text for his website.
I have not met any of the Santa Barbara web shop operators. I tried to meet the owner of Oniracom several times, but Jacob Tell eluded all of my attempts. He now shows 28 people on his staff, but in the past when I searched those individuals they had no mention of working for Oniracom.
Oniracom hasn’t sent me any newsletters lately. Ever since they landed the Kia Forum client they haven’t done anything else, it looks like. Maybe now Jacob Tell is able to focus more on the LSD evangelism that is the core of his being.
All I see is creeps in this pretty place.
Write what you know, is the old advice.
That’s not what Mario Puzo used, though. He didn’t know anything about Italian mobsters, so he just made up everything in THE GODFATHER. Made it sound plausible. Or maybe Puzo read MURDER, INC.: The Story Of The Syndicate, by Burton Turkus, which topped the best-seller list in 1951. I read it in 1958 or so. GODFATHER wasn’t published until 1969, so Turkus’s non-fiction book almost certainly was a source for Puzo.