welcome to rinky-dinkhaven

we'll see how this goes

While there were a couple earlier posts, in my mind Apriiori only really kicked off on September 24th¹¹ Well, it says I published two posts on loop the 24th, but I wrote and published the first of those before going to sleep the night of the 23rd, so in my mind I still kind of count that as a string of nine daily blog posts from the 23rd to October 1st.. At that point, I kept it up daily until October 1st and then stopped, which I assume no one was interested in bothering me at all about because my grandma died²² Or because it takes a lot of fans before anyone is bothered so much by a nine day hiatus that they will say anything about it.. Despite traveling for the funeral, and then being pretty sick once I got home³³ I’m not quite done getting over that yet. I think it was just an unusually bad cold, though now that I think about it I suppose unusually that unusually bad colds have some chance of being COVID nowadays, and it hit Roofon who had more recently had a COVID shot much less harshly than it hit me. But then, it didn’t really hit Celene at all, and I don’t think she’s gotten a COVID vaccine in the past year. I’m not really sure what my probability distribution over the set of viruses should look like., I did still get seven blog posts up in October, which isn’t nothing. That’s like, the same amount Scott Alexander did, if you count generously⁴⁴ Generously to me, not to Scott. “This is an announcement of who’s getting money from your grants program, it’s not really a blog post” might make a sort of sense on its own but it sure isn’t a compelling argument that Apriiori has been as productive as Astral Codex Ten lately..

And now, it is November 1st, the first day of Inkhaven—which I am not participating in. But mercury, my inspiration to start blogging, did daily posts all throughout September just to steal Inkhaven without having to pay for it. And I did manage to keep daily posts up for a little over the first week of Apriiori’s run, so I certainly seem to be able to do it. I am going to try.

Those September posts were often shorter than many of my October posts⁵⁵ Substack kept telling me I was approaching or exceeded the length of post that can fit into an email, which I didn’t realize was a limit that existed until October.—not so much because I worked on my October posts for more than a day each, but more because for most of October I didn’t end up writing a post unless there was some topic I was able to talk about at length. When you’re posting daily, you might need to pick a random idea and run with it, instead of only going and writing a post when you come across an idea that you feel especially inclined to blog out. And the latter sort of post premise seems to me to lead to kind of long posts, whereas the first sort might end after merely a few hundred words⁶⁶ I hope Ozy’s comment about thousand-word blog posts calling them an evil moron in their post today about why you shouldn't be a blogger has nothing to do with my 1025-word blog post arguing that bees obviously experience cognitive biases which calls a passage from one of their blog posts “poppycock”. Surely it doesn’t.. Which is, of course, fine, because I’m not in school anymore⁷⁷ …how often did school ask for more than a thousand or so words, anyways? If there’s about 250 words on a double-spaced page… I think my college Humanities class maybe asked for six pages, sometimes? That’s a whole 1500 words. That’s like, 28% of a scary numbers.. But my point is, maybe expect a return to the September form, at least partially.

For those actually in attendance at Inkhaven, there are stakes. You get kicked out if you fail to post at least five hundred words on any day—with wiggle room if you, for example, post a poem which took a roughly similar amount of work to a 500 word blog post. I think I clear 500 words even if I don’t pay much attention to length, but Substack doesn’t have a—wait, no, there’s the word counter. We’re at 655 words by now⁸⁸ Oh, I was cheating by spelling it “Ink Haven”. Whatever, that doesn’t matter., excellent. I just need to keep up my footnoting habit.

Anyways, I’m not sure if I want to set any stakes other than, you know, the pride I’d experience if I succeed. Maybe I can get myself some sort of treat. Or maybe one of you guys will come up with an amusing penalty that you’d find funny to watch me make myself partake in. Perhaps I could refuse to contact or read the blogs of any of the Inkhaven advisors or collaborating writers until the end of the month, which is arguably sort of like what happens to the Inkhaven people who get kicked out of Lighthaven.

If I were actually in attendance at Inkhaven, I might feel like it would be a little gauche to start off with a post largely about plans to blog daily for a month. But this blog has been going for a little over a month, now, and that totally seems like a fair point at which to take a step back and look at how the blog has been going and how I expect it to go in the future, so I have an excuse.

Blogging is nice. I’ve always written somewhat long Twitter threads or Discord posts from time to time when the mood strikes, and I’ve written a few threads of glowfiction, and it’s not too rare for me to write several paragraphs at once when having a conversation with Claude—it’s not like I’m new to writing in full generality⁹⁹ People keep telling me I’m good at it, even, which I have been trying to take at least a little seriously even if I feel like the majority of my writing on the internet is just pretty silly. I’m strongly considering hunkering down and sending out a bunch of job applications for stuff like technical writing, soon.. But Twitter and Discord are ephemeral, in a way, and glowfiction threads are long sprawling things that continue without any end in sight (or at least, I’ve never seen an end in sight) so in a sense it feels like, well, there’s a couple threads, each of which had somewhere between one and a handful of periods¹⁰¹⁰ No, I don’t mean 40 minute intervals, there were probably at least like a hundred of those that I updated a glowfic during. of active updates, that’s like, not even that many things. And then I scroll through Apriiori’s archive, and there’s like, twenty things, which is a lot of things. And each of them takes up a certain amount of room on the page, they have like a title and usually one of those thingies that is allegedly supposed to be a subtitle, and some of them even have little pictures that I mostly stopped bothering to include during October because I didn’t know what to add and adding pictures if I’m typing on my phone is a moderate pain, like there isn’t even a way to add captions, and my laptop is broken so I haven’t always had access a computer easily whenever I want¹¹¹¹ Today we set up a profile for me on an extra mini computer we have, so I still have access to one when Roofon is using the desktop. That might help.. It makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something, in a way that tweets don’t, even if they’re good ones and really the only difference between them and a blog article is what website they’re on.

So, I’m going to try to keep it up. If all goes as planned, you’ll have thirty new Apriiori posts to read before December¹²¹² Well, okay, twenty-nine if you think you’ve read far enough into this one that it doesn’t count as “new” anymore. But then, maybe you’ll get more than one post some day.. Because I’m a masochist the kind of person who apparently doesn’t consider “maintain a blog daily for a month” enough to ask of myself even though many of the fine folk at Inkhaven are pretty much just spending an entire month on that¹³¹³ I try not to spend an entire month on anything, because I would die., I’m going to try to start sending out job applications this month and I’m going to try to make at least semi-consistent progress on my Minecraft adventure map¹⁴¹⁴ Dedicated fans of my glowfiction may remember Melting, which friends from the development team of the associated Minecraft map have asked for more updates of. But Celene says it’s her tag, so, we’ll get to it whenever she has motivation :p. that I and some friends of mine have been making only sporadic progress on for like, at least seven years. I might also try to work on a Super Mario 64 ROM hacking project with a friend of mine, she seems to be getting back into that and I can’t let her make progress faster than I am, that would be losing.

But mostly we’re aiming for the blogging and the job applications. Posts I’ve said are upcoming are, what, a post on quotient agents and the boltzmann brains ii that’s implied by my titling the Boltzmann brains post “boltzmann brains i”¹⁵¹⁵ And also explicitly promised at the end of boltzmann brains i. …Can I use the word “promise” for things that don’t explicitly use the word “promise” without you all concluding that anything I describe as being a “promise” is meant as seriously as like, a serious promise or assurance would be? Is there a word I could have used instead of “promised” there which would have meant the same thing with fewer connotations of seriousness? Oh well.? What even is a quotient agent. How am I going to write a post on that. Did anyone expect that I wasn’t joking when I said I’d write a post on that?

Well, if anyone is eagerly awaiting my takes on any particular topic, please let me know. I have signed myself up for writing many blog posts and I am sure I can get around to your idea at some point.