A Tiny Cause For Celebration

A little over a month has passed since my first post about how my blog is going to be "THE SHIT". Up until two weeks ago, I have also kept up with my own goal of writing at least once per week. The reasoning behind the effort to maintain this endeavor is simply so that you have a place to regularly visit (even if it's once a week) for a worthwhile read. And why do I bother with all this?

Back in high school, shortly before starting my senior year, I was directed to this article on The Best Page In The Universe by a friend. At the time, it was the funniest thing I ever read. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I stayed up the rest of the night reading all the articles on the site, unfortunately waking my parents in the process due to uncontrollable laughter. Even the posts that I disagreed with were still worth reading because they were well composed and hilarious regardless. This singular event is what sparked my desire to write.

But writing isn't something you do in 5 minutes. At least, not for me anyway. Before I even start typing, I simmer on a few topics for several days or even a few weeks. By the time I start constructing sentences, a majority of what I want to say is already in my head. When the actual post is completed, I proceed to revising the shit out of it. Is this the best vocabulary? Am I punctuating correctly? Does the sentence even belong here? This process is a never-ending one. Sometimes, I even find myself reading over posts that are few years old and still find ways to improve them. And aside from the one Writing Composition class I took in college, most of what I know is self taught.

I love writing. Even when the process can be a pain in the ass at times, I've been doing it on and off since the day I discovered Maddox's site. When I started consistently blogging again on Facebook (which has a convenient Notes feature that almost no one uses) back in September of 2009, I did it mainly for myself; to see how well I can arrange my thoughts in a unique and/or humorous manner. In a similar fashion, I draw as a hobby primarily to see what kind of imagery can be cooked up with my imagination. None of this was really to garner attention but I left that option open for anyone curious about my rants.

Interestingly enough, however, I learned that the people enjoying my posts on Facebook weren't just my friends, but also friends of my friends who I barely know or don't know at all. Then I started thinking that maybe I should create my own blog apart from Facebook, to promulgate my writing not just to Facebook junkies but to internet junkies everywhere. I chose to go with Blogger because Google will probably own everything in the future but feel free to share any blogging tool that you think is better.

Maddox did a AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit a few years back and I found a lot of what he said in terms of publishing content to be compelling. I say "compelling" because his points appear to be such obvious standard practice yet the reasoning behind them seem to be understood by so few and eluded by too many.

"I self-edit because I respect my readers. I have written or started to write 13 articles last year, and only published 1. That's because I don't think everything I write is worth posting, and I wish more web authors followed suit. There's way too much bullshit out there; too many half-assed assertions, uninteresting observations, long, tedious fiction tomes and an endless supply of shitty photo blogs. Being able to point a camera at something and snapping a photo doesn't automatically make you an artist, and no nobody cares about your stupid link dump with a clever name. If it took you 5 minutes to make, it'll probably take me half as long times zero seconds to lose interest. If half these dick holes stopped flooding the Internet with so much shitty content, it wouldn't be so hard for genuinely talented up-and-commers to get noticed. Then again, if your goal is fame, you're in it for the wrong reason to begin with. Nobody cares about the quantity of articles, it's the quality that counts. If you post a thousand shitty articles and one good one, you think anyone will remember the shitty ones and say "hey, that one article is really good, but the reason I go back is for the shitty daily updates!" No, you cocks. Nobody remembers the shitty ones. All they care about are the good ones."

- Maddox

As for the cause for celebration, I just wanted to share that as of this writing, Droll Logic has received 189 visits from United States and 97 from other countries since its inception a little over a month ago. Now, I know for a fact that these visits are not unique and that there's a good chance more than 50% of the hits from United States are probably from myself. That's okay because there's about 100 hits from outside the US that can't possibly be from me! I know these are very small numbers but as someone who started this blog with the goal of sharing his thoughts with a broader audience, it's pretty exciting.

For anyone who's following closely, thanks for sticking around. I promise there's plenty of stupid awesome things to look forward to in the near future. And if anything, you could just watch me fail! Watching people fail is usually pretty funny.

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