I’m certain that no one finds my own wrap-up posts more interesting than I do. That’s fine. I can review old thoughts, I can condense, and with some distance I can ask myself “How could I have said this better?”
I’ve complained about this before, but I still don’t edit much before publishing. There are miles to go before I would call a given post I’ve made even presentable outside of the very tiny pocket of the internet that I inhabit. Hopefully 2015 will be a bit different. My intention is that future posts will be a little more intentional, a little clearer, and maybe even suggest effort in the writing(!(?)).
When I started writing in 2013, my approach to writing was “fire-and-forget”. There’s a time and place for that attitude, but maybe not “attached to my name and in public”. Still, I found topics that still interest me and that might warrant returning to: theories of organization, the ideas of apologetic and legitimacy, and Spengler and other downwing political writers and their concerns about the incomprehensible and the unmanageable in the world. I branched out a short-lived devblog. I don’t like talking about my business, it turns out.
In 2014, this blog became much more explicitly about other people’s ideas. Granted, “my” ideas were themselves inconsistent, warmed-over stews of stuff I was consuming anyway, but this past year I’ve written quite a few straight notes on what I was reading roughly as I read them: on anthropological game studies, speculative realism, ecological thinking, internet culture, diplomacy and political development.
Early this coming year, I ought to clean up and maybe put a better editorial foot forward. Being an adult is tedious.
I’m working on revising my prospective book list. I’d like to consume more of the corpus that the writers at Sweet Talk use. I’m interested in grounding myself more in the Speculative Realist / OOO world, too. Perhaps it would make sense to go back and try to flesh out the two-dimensional silhouettes of philosophical/political figures that have come up to me so frequently in the past year. I haven’t fully decided. Either way, I expect that I’ll write more as essay and less as notes.
So, my early attempts at New Year’s resolutions. See you on the other side.