filler post please ignore

Some of the people I know, consider their blog to be a portfolio - a curated collection of their interesting takes on things. This sort of perspective leads blog writers to delete posts that they do not like, for a variety of reasons ranging from “I don’t agree with the post anymore” to “I don’t like how the writing turned out”.

I’m not going to agree or disagree with this personally - this sort of framing seems to work for these people. I will say, though, that my view of my own blog is different.

In the past few months, I have discovered a lot about the optimal environment for me to create things. Specifically, I create best when I am in an environment that encourages failure.

For drawing, this means to keep a sketchbook where I do terrible low-effort doodles the majority of the time. They may not be good to look at, but they put my mind at ease to know that if a drawing I make does not turn out well, it isn’t going to stand out as the only terrible drawing on the page.

As a result, at the end of the day, looking back at my sketchbook, I’m not gonna see a portfolio representative of my best work. I’m going to see a stream of consciousness of whatever I decided to want to doodle that day, complete with mistakes and various funny comments written on the side.

For this blog, I want to replicate the sketchbook environment. I’m not going to delete posts unless I really have to, and it’s kind of pointless anyway. A lot of my posts will be less polished than I would like, which I find helps me be more comfortable just getting the initial words down when writing a new post.

So, here’s a filler post. Welcome to my essay “sketchbook”, full of unpolished doodles for general vague concepts I want to convey.

(p.s. Chris (the writer of the post I link to) is a nice person, one night he made me a huge steak and it’s hard to describe how happy I was when he showed it to me)