This may be of more interest to me than to you, but I enjoyed reading Shawn Blanc’s interview of John Gruber, the writer of Daring Fireball. They talk a lot about writing on blogs, the evolution of Daring Fireball and Mr. Gruber’s writing style, etc. I found this interesting as a blogger, less so as a game developer.
(Via Brent Simmons.)
Five years ago, I wrote the first post on this blog. (And although it doesn’t mean much: To the best of my knowledge, this is the oldest blog by a practicing game developer.) There are now 916 posts here, about one for every two days.
Looking back is weird. I used to make bad puns in entry titles. I used to put links at the bottom of the blog entry. There are entries I don’t even remember writing, which is a bit scary. But nothing really embarassing, which is a good thing.
My plans for the future: make a spiffy new design, and write some meatier blog entries. Maybe between Christmas and New Year…
What would you like to see on Intelligent Artifice?
John Scalzi has an amusing (and profanity-laced) post about how not to increase traffic to your blog. It is a response to some blog post with ‘5 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Blog’ or some ridiculous title like that.
I find this interesting for two reasons. One has to do with this quote:
I go to conventions and writers’ events, as most of you know. And invariably the most annoying person there is the aspiring writer or neo-pro who is simply there to network, and does so in a graspingly obvious fashion: the guy who goes from group to group, looking for the right people who will eventually let him trade up to standing in a conversational circle with, oh, let’s say, Neil Gaiman, so he can ever-so-casually drop the name of his latest book/story/whatever into Gaiman’s ear.
I know people like this, and although they are annoying, I do find it fascinating that there is such a strong disconnect between how these people perceive themselves, and how others perceive them. Because as Scalzi says:
There’s nothing wrong with networking; there’s nothing wrong with talking about your book with Neil Gaiman (or whomever) either, should you get a chance. But it’s all in how it’s done. To repeat: People aren’t stupid. They know the difference between someone who is engaged in a conversation for the pleasure of the conversation itself, and someone who is marking time in the conversation until they can once again open their mouths and talk about them.
(Boy, he has it easy if he only meets people that wait for others to stop talking.)
I can’t think of anything that demonstrates as clearly and quickly that civilized society is based on unspoken rules than someone completely and blithely ignoring those rules. You end up in this confusing situation where your strategies for dealing with life stop working. Having to explain that one cannot do X or Y (obviously) is simply too embarassing, and might offend. What do you do? (When you figure it out, go hang out with Borat and spoil his jokes.)
(more…)
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