Get in loser, we’re doing blogs now.
I’ll keep this quick.
Why a blog? Because blogs are good, and I love reading them. It’s good to read people in medium- and long-form. A good thing about the internet is just letting nerds cook.
Plus, writing is thinking, and it only seems to get harder for me these days. From where I sit, it seems like the only alternative to doing real work right now1 is posting on social media and, well, no thanks. Further, while I like the idea of other people finding and reading my work, this blog is mostly for me.
Historically, if I have wanted to figure something out, I have tried to write about it. Blogs are uniquely suited to the “X, what’s up with that?” type questions that have always been most interesting to me. “What’s up with that?” isn’t really a question of interest to my professional field, so I don’t do much writing of this kind now that I’ve left graduate school. Although I make no claims to any particular talent, I am very persistent, and I do sometimes make some progress in understanding something that is happening now, or that happened 50 years ago, or that might happen in the future. However, I rarely do anything with that stuff other than dump it into an Obsidian note. That seems like a waste. I could be making the internet weirder and more fun by putting them online.
In that spirit, my first hope is that I’ll stick with this “noodling” for my own sake. In the spirit of noodling, things might be a bit half-baked. Many things won’t make it beyond a blog-post. But hopefully what I produce will still be more fun and more productive than what I currently do with my spare time (read: doom-scrolling).
Since I sometimes learn something that is worth explaining to someone other than myself, I also hope to write things those things here too. For now, I’ll aim to post something about why I think the study of bureaucracy is interesting and important, and then by producing a little digest of what I’ve been reading as I work.
Footnotes
I could get a real hobby, I guess, but I have come this far without one…↩︎