I have this idea that I probably have to get through writing a number of bad blog posts before I can hope to have a decent blog again.

Why?

practice

“Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards sorta being good at something” — Jake, The Dog (from Adventure Time)

In general, I like seeing myself get better at stuff through repeated efforts. I value practice, and I know I’m out of practice writing about stuff for the internet.

habit, maybe?

Honestly, probably not. I feel disrupted and distracted so much because of life, parenting, the state of the world… that habits mostly feel like setting myself up for failure. But in an ideal situation, maybe I’d have a “habit” of blogging on a regular basis. (See potential post on writing as part of thinking, unclogging/reflecting on/linking ideas, somewhat inspired by Cory Doctorow talking about the Memex Method)

remembering the mechanics of posting

This will be my second post on my self-hosted blog. I’m writing this in a local text editor. I forget what software the blog is running. I forget entirely how to make it go. But I think I put all my blog stuff in a private repo on github and left myself a readme.

intentionally setting a low bar to avoid some kind of perfectionist trap

This is reminding me of a story of my first academic talk, how I flubbed a thing so bad I cringe to think of it, but most other speaking opportunities afterwards were fine.

So. I had to give a 60 second preview of my first ever talk at this conference called Foundations of Digital Games. I had to submit 5 slides in advance (it felt like 6 weeks to a million years in advance), to each be shown for 10 seconds, so I put some pretty pictures together with no idea how they’d come back to haunt me. In the day or two before the conference, I had to revisit my slides and figure out what I’d say to go along with them. My friend gave me three index cards and I wrote what I was going to say for each of the five slides down on three index cards. 5 statements, 3 index cards. Naturally, I wrote some things on the front, and some things on the back of the cards. When I got on stage, there was a SIXTH SLIDE with my name and paper title. I didn’t have anything to say for the 10 seconds that slide was up though! Stunned, I was! Finally, my own slides came up… but I had like, 1 second’s-worth of speaking per slide and had to wait for the slides to advance to say my next point. So it was getting super awkward. But then guess what happened after I read my first three cards! I started reading the 1st card again!! The horror! I had forgotten whatever little flip of the cards I meant to do to get to the back sides! And then.. then! Then I literally said out loud into the mic, “Oh no! I messed up my thinggies!” Thinggies?? Why?!? My inner monolog leaking out, for all to witness!

Apparently I gave up on my cards at that point, and started saying actual unscripted things about my project, and it was fine. I lived.

As for my actual talk a few days later, I got more used to the space, I did a little practice run in the room, I had all my speaker notes properly aligned with the timing I wanted for my slides.. And although there was actually a big snafu with the projector in the room I was in (it shut off a couple times during both talks in that session), it was fine. I was unfazed; the projector was not my thinggy I had messed up.

Anyway, I’m (somewhat) grateful to have that low point to refer to when I’m nervous about presenting, and also to recognize that I’ve grown and gained experience since then. I was but a baby, a child, at the beginning of my career!

I don’t want to purposefully write an embarrassing or cringe-worthy blog post, but I do want to aim for mediocre (but maybe enjoyable?) so I can write a better post another day.