An in­tro­duc­tion

I’ve been writ­ing in blogs since the early 2000s, but it’s been over a decade since I’ve hosted one on a per­sonal web­site. In my mind, this is the newest in­car­na­tion of an on­go­ing se­ries, but since we have a new stage, an in­tro­duc­tion is still in or­der.

Previously, I’d post (infrequently) on Tumblr, but since I get the im­pres­sion that it’s los­ing its com­mu­nity to but­toned-up cor­po­rate in­ter­ests, I feel like the party is start­ing to wind down and I def­i­nitely want to be on my way out be­fore it be­comes awk­ward that I’m still hang­ing out there.

And then there’s my oc­ca­sional posts on Medium. I’ve in­tended to use that plat­form for my pro­fes­sional soap­box, but it re­ally feels like I’m not my­self over there. Like I’m sell­ing you some­thing, us­ing neb­u­lously ill-de­fined in­can­ta­tions of what­ever I think thought lead­er­ship is, and my goal is to trick you into buy­ing the prod­uct, a knock-off ver­sion of me that slots eas­ily into an of­fice chair.

I usu­ally name these blogs the Lou Huang pub­lic re­la­tions dis­as­ter so that I can re­mind my­self to write be­cause I want to write for my­self, hon­estly, and not nec­es­sar­ily for you, the reader, who­ever I imag­ine you to be—per­haps a re­cruiter type with hir­ing power. Of course, the blog is not en­tirely just for my­self: by putting these words out in pub­lic, I’m aware of an au­di­ence, and yes, I hope that you en­joy the show. So for the peo­ple who found me in a pro­fes­sional ca­pac­ity, there will def­i­nitely be some ca­reer-friendly posts here about pro­gram­ming, or city plan­ning, or some such. But I also want to re­mind you that I’m also go­ing to be jot­ting down some to­tally use­less and silly bull­shit just be­cause I feel like it.

I wrote some­thing over at the Tumblr that still res­onates with my in­cli­na­tions to­day, so I’ll just paste it here, with a few copy-ed­its:

For me to re­ally get into writ­ing more fre­quently, I needed less of an au­di­ence, and a more dis­or­ga­nized way to ex­press thoughts. I like to write things in tem­po­rally mis­aligned bits. In other words, not front to back; I also talk this way, ap­par­ently, where I start in me­dia res be­fore re­veal­ing the over­all sto­ry­line. Think of this as an on­go­ing con­ver­sa­tion thread where I might write parts of chap­ter five to­mor­row, and the end of chap­ter one next week. Then I might go back and edit chap­ter five to smooth out all the con­ti­nu­ity goofs. This is the kind of blog this will be.

So, I’m go­ing to be run­ning an ex­per­i­ment in un­streamed con­tent. By this I mean, in­stead of hav­ing a steady “stream” or “feed” of time­stamped posts, this will be a cu­rated col­lec­tion of hope­fully-ever­green thoughts, as a way of coun­ter­act­ing the Internet’s ten­dency to value only the most re­cent stuff. I’ll prob­a­bly have more to say about this at some point (maybe even in a fu­ture edit here!), but I’d start with The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield, a post writ­ten in 2015. I men­tion the year of the post iron­i­cally, but it’s still rel­e­vant to­day.

I thought about elim­i­nat­ing time­stamps en­tirely, but they do pro­vide con­text when the con­tent be­comes out of date, mak­ing the dif­fer­ence be­tween in­for­ma­tion be­ing dan­ger­ously mis­lead­ing as op­posed to charm­ingly anachro­nis­tic. So the com­pro­mise I’ll make is that I’ll have a “last up­dated” time­stamp, in­stead of a “posted on” date.

So, thanks for com­ing by. We’ve got a great show for you, so stick around, and we’ll be right back!

Last up­dated on 26 June, 2019.

• Universal Translator FAQ →