A few days ago someone posted on Hacker News a tool that tells you how many words you have written in the comments of the Hacker News forum. I put in my username (tombert) and got this as a result:
Half a million words. Granted, over the course of ten years, but holy shit that is a lot of typing. That is about fifty thousand words a year. War and Peace has just shy of six-hundred-thousand words in it, and I’ve written almost that much in the fucking comment sections on a nerdy forum. Apparently, I am in the top four hundred posters on the entire site.
A few things stuck out to me: does this just mean I post a lot, or are my posts simply too long winded?
Almost certainly the latter; pretty much any of my friends can attest to the fact that I will send them walls of rambling text about whatever bullshit I’m thinking about. While I’m sure they absolutely love that, part of the reason that I’ve been trying to write more on this blog is to help spare them from much of the spam from me. Well, and so I can LARP as someone who has social media without actually having social media.
I’m not sure if long-windedness is a sign of intelligence or idiocy, but it definitely describes me. Part of the reason I was never able to get into Twitter is because I have trouble expressing things within 280 words, let alone characters. I always preferred Tumblr, since that allowed for a mix of small and large posts, but for what I am sure are complicated and boring reasons, Tumblr is mostly dead now.
I mean, look at this fucking post. This could probably have been the screenshot and one pithy statement like “I think I need more hobbies” or something, but instead I’m spending multiple paragraphs meandering about my rambling nature.
I’ll stop myself there before I get too recursive or introspective.
I rebooted this blog because of a comment I made on Hacker News (that I am having trouble finding), where I stated that I could probably turn some of my longer HN posts into blog posts without too much effort. It has been like that for years, but I realized that there really isn’t any reason to not post my thoughts on a blog; that way I am not constrained to replying to whatever people are talking about on HN.
Of course, that means I need to think of my own topics instead of simply commenting on someone else’s, which of course is easier said than done.
Or I guess I could do what most software people do and just add a bunch of useless features to the blog instead of actually writing things. That works too.