Imperfect

preserve then add

Inspired by Pinewind's my first month on Bear Blog.


Modify past works

While you can do what feels right to you, I would strongly discourage deleting what you don't love or didn't get right. Many people, most likely including myself, have deleted or removed posts and other such data from places where I wish it still existed. For example, check out this excerpt from sharing is buoyancy:

I think about a piece Sridhar wrote then apparently deleted, The Detritus of Our Lives, which compared the state of past renowned musicians' living quarters after they have passed. Seeing a 404 error page show up as the living quarters of a past artist only gives such a purview into what their experience was. One would think enough link rot and bit rot organically piles up to avoid purposefully adding detritus to the pile.

I would find appending your work with improvements or your feelings about them preferable. Preserving your knowledge chain and legacy allows others to preserve their own. That cycle ideally continues ad infinitum. Do what you can to keep the cycle going.

Success by longevity

I think the chances of success by participation (including gathering attention or profiting monetarily or otherwise) exponentiates the longer you stick around. While consistent and rapid iteration helps with the above, approaching quantity at whatever size, cadence, or other factors can help too. Time away from practice can be valuable just like time embedded within practice. Once you find your calling via analysis and emergence, then you can double down on quality and depth. Embrace both your poor and great works: their lessons and synthesis will help you reach that point of inflection.

Dedicated gaming quarters

While I write about gaming sometimes, renting separate spaces for them makes sense. One of my biggest inspirations for this are tabletop role-playing game blogs. As someone who doesn't even remotely play them, I find outlines for custom settings, characters, and rules inscrutable. Similarly, I don't know how cohesively full-blown reviews, logs, and playthroughs would mesh with my existing writing. Moving such works under another umbrella would create a free pipeline for that self free of distractions, scheduled posts, or other blockers.

For example, fellow blogger Wouter maintains a separate personal game log website at Jefklak's Codex. While he blogs about gaming and related topics sometimes, the codex has his take on hundreds of video games and counting. Owning a fresh public face for said hobby could induce similarly strong devotion and feedback loops, molding me into a more serious gamer that learns better lessons in-game and elsewhere. Connecting gaming thoughts back to another presence of mine can then be done without having gaming content drowned out by disparate surroundings.

My overall insight is that you can create a dedicated virtual space for anything under the sun. May you gradually create as many as you can maintain. Perhaps you will find a property that becomes more central to you than the rest.