On Blogposts

   It's great how I've got pools of ideas I've already got ready for me, like a handy pair of pants suspended from the ceiling ready for you to jump into when you get out of bed in the morning. (the continued 14 now down to ten? sure, here:

• Writing Times (English 1/5)
• Writing Styles and Twist Endings (English 2/5)
• Buridan's Ass 1/2 (English 3/5)
• Buridan's Ass 2/2 (English 4/5)
• Change Slash Consequence (which also started out as an English assignment, so it is English 5/5, but I started elaboration on its points that paragraph halfway through when I started listing specific "masculine/feminine" species examples...)

and now that ten is down to five.)

   Useful, yes. (Anyway.) But there are sort of longer bigger projects which would take a while and then there are these fun backlog ones one can just phone in. Yesterday, it was phoned in. Today's post had also been going to be phoned in, and in fact I had originally been going to post it a few days ago specifically as a phoned-in post built mostly off of some post I started a couple of years ago but didn't get around to posting up. But then I had to inject more life into it, and it got out of hand, and here we are, and this post isn't phone in. Those with subscriptions to the IRS feed or whatever will have noticed this post going up prematurely a few days ago, accidentally, till I took it back down.

   I haven't even gotten to the body of the post I'd been going to phone in, but the theme of that original seed is still very, very apropos. It has to do with precisely what we're talking about, phoning it in or not, the length and intent that posts should be. The original idea, the original question, was this:

   Should I do longer rambly posts such as this one, or should I use shorter, more restricted essays on one subject only-- then call back to them whenever I need specific examples when I'm arguing specific points as part of a larger set piece? I do something like that "callback" already, whenever I bring up a subject and then bring it up again later, sometimes even linking to the original post where I'd brought it up. Still, it all interacts in slightly different ways, the same example still needing different facets exposed for different effects of the cause. So, I suppose I could do both? I suppose I do do both?

   One of the prime psychological drives I think I may have mentioned once (and which I would link to here were I able to find the specific reference, see how this works?) is that, the dead are dead, and we can only guess at their motivations or what they would think about this that yon or the other particular thing- would George Washington appreciate the cinematic stylings of Wes Anderson or the Cohen Brothers? We don't know, and can never say. But I figure if I build up enough "pool" for myself of what I'm getting at and where I'm coming from, then maybe you'd be able to sort of reverse engineer my entire mental profile. Lofty and rather naive, yeah. But still cool.

   And so, as long as I build that up, I guess it doesn't matter how. It would certainly be easier to do shorter more focused posts... but then I'd want to go into more and more arbitrary and bizarrely specific levels of detail... Bonini's Paradox, I brought up a couple of weeks ago- the only truly accurate comprehensive model ceases to be a model; the more detailed a representation is the less comprehensible it is...

   Well, however it comes, I suppose. Reality kind of makes itself difficult to represent- we'll never stop trying, and we'll never stop failing, but we'll come breathtakingly close enough times to make the whole endeavor worth it.