Thursday 24 January 2013

Nothing To See Here.

I have been keeping this blog for almost a year now. To this date there has been little over 1300 views of the blog page. Of all of the viewers, less than 0.01% of them have interacted with the blog in any way. None have commented on any of the posts, most of the interaction has been been sharing of various posts on other websites such as Google+ or Facebook. Maybe the things that I'm writing about are just not that interesting to anybody and that is why nobody deems it worthy of comment. Maybe my writing style isn't very pleasing and most readers don't make it to the end of my posts. There is one post here that has not had a single view at all. It's the one about Street Fighter IV. It's only going to be interesting to somebody who has an interest in Street Fighter or video games anyway. I had previously posted that very same piece on a gaming website before it was posted here and it exploded with reader comments but here nobody is interested. I still keep writing stuff and posting it here though. My Mother once told me that there is little point in writing if nobody is going to read it. That writing is a form of expression with which to open up debate which in turn grants access to opinions of others that may be different from your own given that they are formed from a different perspective and therefore allowing you to see the same thing from a perspective that you may not have been able to consider before. It is a learning experience. So, given the lack of discourse; why do I continue to write this stuff?





There are a few reasons why I continue to keep the blog. The first of which is the reason detailed before the jump just then; It is a learning experience. It is not only from a lively discourse and exchange of opinion and perspective that learning can be attained. The very process of putting thoughts and opinions into writing can potentially clarify things in a way not possible before. The debate; if you will, can be had with oneself. Or maybe that's just me and the onset of psychosis. Further to that, you may be familiar with the popular trope of "only write what you know". This is something I agree with somewhat.
"But how can that be?" you may exclaim. "How can you possibly learn something from writing about things that you already know about?" and that's a good point but if we applied that to good old Billy Shakespeare he may not have been quite so popular what with suicide being so prevalent among many of his characters. But, allow me to continue.
 If you are writing something that you intend to make available for others to read, you should ensure that you know what you are on about and touching on a topic or matter that you may not know much or even anything about should lead to research in order to check facts or in some cases learn about it from the very beginning. It is therefore a learning experience. I, for example, learned much more about NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover and the Hiroshima atomic bomb after writing the bit about scientific progress a few months ago. That was because I wanted to check facts and in the process of doing so discovered new information.
The discovery of new information leads to further questions which leads to investigation and research which leads to answers which leads to new information and so on.

Another reason why I keep this blog is to assess myself. To see how much I know about something, to find out how I feel about things, to clarify my own thoughts or opinions about my existence. Sometimes it takes me days to put something together that I'm reasonably satisfied with and sometimes I write something on the bus that I'm really happy about. There are a number of posts here that are as yet unfinished and unpublished because I'm not happy with the outcome or I have gone off rambling about something and completely missed the original point I was trying to make. A lot of the posts have just been deleted as nonsense for these reasons but none of the ideas have been scrapped because during the process of writing about whatever it was supposed to be, it evolved. A thought became a question, a question became an idea, an idea became a concept which led to analysis and exploration and before you know it a voyage of self discovery has begun whilst sat in front of a keyboard. Where the voyage will lead may not be known. It may seem daunting but it is a voyage I would encourage everybody to take as what may certainly be discovered is just how much you did already know in the first place.

 Another reason? As if another one is needed at this point. I enjoy it. I enjoy putting words together to form sentences that make some sort of sense or sometimes sentences that make little sense at all. I enjoy the journey, being able to demonstrate how I think that my opinion is correct even if it isn't (but it is). I'm not a particularly sociable person and I am certainly not seeking approval from my peers. Especially since peers are something I have few of but I do value the opinions of others however absurd they may be. Even the opinions of people on the internet. If someone were to comment "First!" on this very post I would in fact "Lol". The internet people however, are not coming here. Not even the trolls. Maybe I need to post some more controversial opinions or just controversial titles of posts with pictures of women. Perhaps I will do an experiment where I tag the word "pornography" in a post about cardboard boxes and see how many hits it gets. I probably just need to post some top 10 lists or something. Whatever the case may be, people read it, people don't read it. I'll still continue to write stuff and post it here. I don't know if there are any regular readers of this blog other than the people I know IRL but if you are one of them or even if you're here for the first time because I tagged the word "pornography"; Thanks for reading. Have a read of some of the other posts and check back here on a regular basis, there might be some top 10 lists to read soon.


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