Skep Has a Whiskey and Kind Of Rambles About His Lack of Posting Over the Last Month
Is this blog post a panic reaction upon realizing I haven’t uploaded any new content in nearly a month? Yeah, probably.
Now, it’s not entirely fair to say I haven’t written anything during this time. I wrote a thing. It was a book review for The Reading Project—The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, which you can find over here (I guess I’m going to review some Discworld books. Ideally all of them, but we’ll see how far I make it). Of course I’m very grateful to my friends over there for allowing me to grace their pages with my brand of absurdity, but the fact of the matter is, if I’m writing for their site, I’m not writing for mine.
Still, that’s just one thing this month. Even counting that review, I haven’t produced a lot. This isn’t to say I’m holding myself to self-imposed metrics over here, or that I feel the need to push out a constant stream of content. Except in some small way… I am and I do.
Whether it comes down to creative itch, or the relentless need for validation from the people in my computer screen, or me just wanting to tell the world “HEY, I know I give up on every other project I start but I swear I’m not giving up on this one”, there is a part of me that feels the urge to always be hustlin’—although instead of making money it’s writing dumb shit to post online.
Of course, even if I hadn’t touched the site at all over the past month, this would still be being too hard on myself. But I have been touching this site! In my last blog post, I talked about the change I made to my fonts; one thing I kind of glossed over is that I added OpenDyslexic as a site option for those that prefer that typeface. That inspired me to review some other aspects of my site that negatively impacted accessibility, and I spent some time refactoring the HTML to include more semantic tags, I learned how ARIA labels work, I updated some alt text for images that I was pretty lazy about in the site’s early days. On top of this, I did some CSS reworking and tweaking of my Eleventy build, and today I revisited how I was generating my RSS feed (so in theory you should be able to read the entirety of this post in your feed reader if you’d like). Lots of small things, little of which most people will ever see.
Do I have to do any of these things? No, not really. But paradoxically, although most of the stuff I write about is incredibly inconsequential, I really pride myself on providing a polished experience. This is why I get hung up on things like whether quotation marks are curly or not. Yeah, this website is an inane ego trip, but it’s an inane ego trip I put a lot of thought and care into because if you’re willing to read this mess then you deserve that level of attention. You deserve the best I can possibly give you.
Same deal if you were coming over to my house. I’ll clean the place, break out my best recipes, put on a nice shirt. I want you to feel like I’m worth your time, no doubt. But more than that, I want to feel like I’m worth your time.
There is a common sentiment that I’ve never fully understood: “I don’t care what anybody thinks of me.” While this is a powerful statement, it’s also one you have to brandish with a certain amount of self-awareness. We admire people who block out the haters and push on to be the truest version of themselves. Justifiably so, I might add. It’s hard to persevere in the face of overwhelming adversity. If this is you, then yeah. Fuck those guys.
But I am very distrustful of somebody who avows “I don’t care what anybody thinks of me”, as this is often not defiance in the face of adversity; instead, this is little more than an unwillingness to engage in any amount of self-reflection. Because doing so could lead this individual to realize they are flawed. And this would be uncomfortable. No, easier to say “It’s their problem, not mine” and carry on without any further thought. That way, we don’t have to come to terms with the fact that we just might be a bad person.
So that is to say, yeah! I very much care what people think of me! Probably to too extreme of a degree! But if the end result of that is a better experience for my visitors, I’m happy to do it. I want to have fun here, and I want you to be able to have fun here, too.
…Damn this entry really got away from me.