Slow This Bird Down

Blogging, hgjohn, 2012

In 2010 I managed to drag this blog from the verge of antipathetical annihilation. It's strange that while I had heaps of spare time in 2009, as work had never been easier that year, I managed to produce not even 3,500 words. While 2011 was nowhere near as bad, it was a slump and the quality of the posts was patchy in my opinion. That's the challenge - I could be a perfectionist and turn next to nothing out, or I could pump out posts to meet quotas. 2012 was more of the former at the start of the year, though it was a case of maintaining a work rate. Blindly burning through my long-standing buffer of about twenty drafts would leave me at the mercy of current events to provide material. Luckily my trip to London provided impetus and I got awfully chatty about Gran Turismo 5 at the end of the year. From September through to February I was writing around 4,000 words a month, except in December when I wrote double that and January when I wrote a colossal 11,250 words - that's 55% of the word count of the entirety of 2011. You could say I was burnt out by the end of February.

Ask (GA-Slag FAQ 2)

Prijatelj, Rubberducky, Artemis, Llena, Altavoz

It's hard to imagine things would move on so far that the GA-Slag became part of a different decade. At the time we really were living in the present. By sixth year most of Les Enfants Terribles was in the don't-know-what-we'll-do-after-school class while the majority of the year were in the university application classes. We spent most of that class having a laugh; regularly at the teacher's expense, though she would say at our own expense. It is what it is, and this is the tenth anniversary of the night I was bored and got a freeware FTP application to work and uploaded the familiar black and red image of James Dean Bradfield from the NME. The first rant pre-dates that by almost a full month, but at the time it was being hosted on Stephen's GA-Master site, and so this is really the point at which I took the idea and ran with it. Let's take some questions from the audience...

Don't Believe a Word

mirrors_2, ze1, 2003

I've always taken exception to the idea that you should do something you enjoy professionally. If I was to work as a freelance writer, for instance, I would have starved to death long ago even if I set my own deadlines. I could invoke that old Douglas Adams' quote again, but I wouldn't want to look like I'm trying to boost the word count - even though I just have without quoting it. I specifically put a 'Scheduled Posts' gadget on the blog to try and hold myself to my own weak promises and perhaps, I hoped, the Russian web crawlers that read this blog so often might demand that the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post I've been putting off and on for four years now actually turn up in January 2012 like I said on the 31st of last month. Surely that's why they keep viewing that post fifteen times a day, to communicate in the only way they can? I can't imagine it's because they like what I wrote - it's a bloody list of songs I liked last year.

All Important Rubbish Made to Publish Made to Last

It's that time of year again I allow myself to write the worst easiest kind of blog post.

Into The Nineties and Beyond

Around this time eight years ago I was sitting my Higher English exam (first of two tries). For the writing segment you're given a booklet with roughly a dozen topic sentences to pick from. I can't remember what topic led me to write an embarrassing China Syndrome knock-off - in fact I'd like to forget it entirely. I disliked it enough that I put an apology at the end. However, in the preliminary exam a few months before, I wrote an A+ story I really wish I had gotten photocopied - it was probably one of the best things I had then written. The topic I chose in that exam was "Write about a time you went to hospital". When I saw it I immediately thought of the time I broke my arm in primary school, but I realised that the topic did not necessarily mean 'write about a time you were admitted to hospital' allowing me some room for genuine on-the-spot creative writing. Soon after I intended to rewrite it from memory (it was a single page at most) for my old website, but I never got round to it and the following is therefore an extremely loose reconstruction. I also can't remember how it ends.

Listen Carefully While I Sing My Comeback Song

Mirrors, Olly Wright, 2006

When all else fails resort to a post about blogging...

When last January rolled around this blog was stagnating. For whatever reason I couldn't write - whether that be writer's block or the limitations of the interface - and resolved to at least post once a month. From all the drafts and notes I decided to work on one of several delayed (seven years) editions for my old website from school. Having spontaneously returned to form, I quickly found myself facing a self-imposed minimum of four posts a month. By June I had completely exhausted the long-standing pool of draft posts and was either resurrecting abandoned posts, republishing old essays, or simply hoping something would come along and inspire me.

Intermission

Ochre, Prij, 09/02/06

I must be at the other end of a Weltanschauung-cycle. I'm very tired, lethargic even. Tired during the day, wide-awake at night. I've got 20 draft posts waiting to be completed and published. I wonder if I can blame it on my third-in-three-years Venus Fly-Trap dying?

I started a few projects this year to keep myself occupied. Since February I've been working on encoding as much data into a single pixel as possible (close to 9 characters per pixel), as an attempt to express as much about my NationStates and CyberNations nations in forum signatures. It's a good way to stay on top of mathematics - preventing you from forgetting everything you know, and introducing you to some advanced concepts. However, it frequently gets bogged down in excessive lossyness problems for weeks at a time until I think of something just as I'm about to fall asleep at night. Plus, there's always my alternative history project, Enyo, which I had planned to release last New Year, but can't settle on the layout.