Stuff Not Blogged

2022-08-13 00:02:35 PDT (last update 2022-08-13 00:03:38 PDT)

A future blog post here will cover — as thoroughly as I can manage — my old and dormant blogs. I have had a bunch.

I'm too tired to do a post that detailed and careful tonight. Instead, I want to talk about a weird side thing I've been doing.

One thing I learned long ago is to carefully read anything I am about to post on the Interwebs to make sure it actually belongs there. I think think twice and then often cut once. Since 2006, I have saved some 440 files, 109,000 words of text that I wrote and then "threw away". Most anything complex is there.

109,000 words is a lot. I have no idea how it piled up like that.

• The longest single piece, an Ingress leveling guide written in HTML in 2013, is only about 3800 words, even using an inflated notion of word length.

• Nearly the same size is the second-place piece: a transcript of a conversation on Hangouts with my friend Sergey in September 2014 while his hometown of Mariupol, Ukraine was being shelled by Russians. Dammit. I hope Sergey is OK in the current conflict. I know he got out of Mariupol years ago, but last I heard his parents were still there. So scary; so sad.

• The third-place piece is a PDF draft, of all things, in which I rant in 2008 about why I am quitting the GPL. Spoiler alert: I calmed down a bit and didn't actually quite quit using the GPL. That said, I still stand by most of my unpublished writing.

• At the other end of the spectrum, a lot of these pieces are just little snippets like this from August 2016:

  I know, right? It's been a good seven years since the SLC Police charged a gay couple with public kissing.

  Anyway, that could have happened anywhere in the US in 2009. Right?

  ...Right?

  I have no recollection what prompted me to write that. It was probably in response to some Reddit thing. Anyhow, I clipped it instead of posting it, and there it is.

I keep all of this in a directory called blog. The intent is that I go back and mine it for future blog posts.

Someday I'll do that. For today, just thought I'd point out what might be a bit of a novel approach.