We Begin

I begin

I’ll write a quick first post before I close the tab and decide in two days time that this is not really worth it. I might delete this post later, but here’s something to start us off.

Today I’ve been thinking about my relationship with casual writing (as opposed to heavy writing, whatever that means). I had my first blog when I was fourteen or fifteen. It was more out of my love for PHP back then than my love for writing. WordPress was more for developers than for casual users, and I found some free webhosting services, found a WP theme I liked, found a free (5 or 10MB) database hosting service and had the blog up. I don’t remember writing anything on it, though.

A year later I was less into computers and more into literature and I created another blog (on WP the site this time) and posted juvenilia in the form of the kind of poems and essays and stories a kid writes. Without really knowing what personal branding was, I created a page on Facebook for the blog and linked the blog with the page and did what not. I still don’t know much about branding, and am caught unawares by just how big a part of the internet it is right now. But eventually I grew out of the blog, the page and all of it.

Then I had another blog one more year later. By this time I was already jaded with a few things in life. I was no longer interested in putting a lot of myself out there, so there wasn’t a Facebook page this time, the blog got less-to-no promotion from my end and it languished because publishing (not writing) without readers gets boring real quick. I was reminded of the blog once every seven months or so and I’d make a post and be gone for the next seven. The blog is still up, and I did quite a bit of writing summer last year, but it’s again back to dormancy.

So why this new attempt?

Because when all is said and done what I feel the most passionately for is reading and writing. I’m also painfully aware of the years passing me by, so if not now never. I’m always wary of saying too much because for some reason the world around me and I myself have inhibited me more than a fair amount. (For some reason I just imagined what ${a great writer} would think about such a rationale.) (You get the idea.)

Additionally I realized today that maybe the writing platforms I’ve used in the past have some artifacts (legacy, technological) that make it difficult to keep oneself inspired.

Inherent in content creation I’m sure is the possibility of the attempt dying out rather easily. But let me not care about it this time around (like the fourth time, already).

What I’ll talk about

I want to talk about things I know well. I consider myself quite the generalist and I feel all warm imagining someone benefiting from a few things I know and understand and work with.

I’m currently looking at natural language processing research, reading papers here and there, wondering why I started working in the industry when it should have been the last thing on my list, carefully looking at how an education in Nepal has the potential to severely stymie one’s access to meaningful further education (in Computer Science) and attempting a correction course three years too late. I imagine some writing immediately after this post will be about these things.

I will definitely talk about books and films and music. There was a short story series I started on the blog that’s still alive. Maybe I’ll port that over.

I’ve never been much for taking or giving advice, but maybe in my discussing things someone would be able to learn from my mistakes. (And that’s how you know you’re getting old.)

So, it’s going to be pretty mixed-bag. This will hopefully be a process of discovery for this substack itself. I’ll hopefully know what it is that I want to talk about (here, and elsewhere).