social.noyu.me

with a twitter-style thread, although you won't normally consciously notice this, there's a certain “rhythm” or “pacing” to it, and the writer's mood or train of thought or even their opinions can shift during writing, especially after a pause, especially if it's a day later

the very few times i've turned a thread into a blogpost successfully, it was where i already had basically cooked a coherent message in my head and then i blasted it all out onto twitter/whatever in one go, and in that way the thread was already a blogpost in spirit

i think i've had some other attempts at blogpostifying threads, but never published them? that's my gut feeling. once removed from the original context, the clear rhythm is lost and the shifts in mood no longer work properly, you'd need to add extra text to glue things together

my magnum opus currently when it comes to “writing stuff” is that “the algorithm is killing twitter and it's driving me insane” post. that was very special because i somehow spent like half of an entire waking day in some anger-fuelled flow state, and that was a miracle

that was magic because

• i approached it like writing a thread, but realised it would be way too long to make an actual thread, and somehow channeled the same voice into a blogpost
• my thoughts were surprisingly baked already
• i maintained a coherent vision
• no interruptions

picking up where you left off is difficult for stuff with an emotional thrust, and that's the only stuff i actually want to write about in my free time. i save Serious Writing for my job, you know. i have no idea how “real” writers do it. do they have a writer tulpa? (not joking)

oh so that's one of the reasons why i struggle with long-form writing of the kind that i would put on my blog, huh. i only write about things with an emotional through-line and maintaining that emotional continuity between writing sessions is very, very hard

i do have some other, pretty bad problems with long-form writing, though i'm starting to notice i may be having them less lately, which is nice. but if i assume those problems don't affect me so much: i could definitely write a long, very boring article. but that's no fun

this is something so obvious and such a frequent theme at this point that it must be cliché, but basically, i only want to write blogposts about “dreams”. if a blogpost does not sell you on a certain “dream” then it's not suitable for my personal blog. that's how i am

and you know, a “dream” is a very emotional thing. a very romantic thing. i am a romantic person. i hope you have noticed!

since i think it's cute when something is an example of itself: this thread is, of course, such an example that might not work as a blogpost! you can see how i drifted from blogification as a topic to blogposts as a topic. that kind of drift can work but it's difficult.

@hikari In a very literal sense you are responding to yourself. Even though it's just you, it does have characteristics that are more dialogue than monologue.

@Catriona that's true! especially with the time and feeling dimension, we can say that the selves talking to eachother may not be the same one

@saagar i used to but my French and Spanish are extremely bad these days

@hikari qntm went for the option of just embedding every single tweet: https://qntm.org/person

@hikari just an idea, what if you used (*gasp*) javascript (maybe pure-CSS is possible? our frontend skills are meh) to present it in the format of an adventure game / visual novel dialog box, thus forcing thread-like pacing while allowing you to add additional elements?

@r heh, that's a cute idea. i probably wouldn't do it but it would be fun

@saagar @sounddrill i must disagree C is a very romantic language every C programmer has a terribly romantic relationship with it and refuses to give that up