Retrospective on retrospectives

Right, then, so what the hell was the point of all that?

What exactly is a retrospective? According to Merriam-Webster, it is “a generally comprehensive exhibition, compilation, or performance of the work of an artist over a span of years.” Many of the retrospectives all suspiciously published today will be looking back on only a month of production, but I want to push it further than that. In this post, I want to step back and retrospectively analyze all the retrospectives published so far, and really consider the act of looking back—

Right, stop that, it’s too silly.

Okay Colonel I’m sorry Colonel

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do.

Colonel I agree completely

But I’ve noticed a tendency for this publication to get rather silly.

I know Colonel it’s kind of a problem. I’ll try harder to stop I promise.

Right, then. Now get on with it.

Okay Colonel you got it.

So I’ve been doing a writing residency for the past month. The lot of us have been posting every day. Mostly we have been posting badly, because:

1. We’ve been posting every day

2. We are the sort of people who sign up for a residency that requires us to post every day, because otherwise we wouldn’t post at all.

Not me though. I post good. It’s gauche to say so but I am disagreeable and I think that I post good. I don’t post shit. I don’t post slop. I don’t post effort. I simply emit wonderful sentences, and you ingest them with your eyes.

Why is this the case? Partially the answer is the reverse of Scott Alexander’s answer to the question of why he sucks. Many of the sentences raging within me that you have read in the past month previously existed in the form of moderately-hinged rants that I flung verbally at friends and acquaintances and fleeing strangers. The ideas have crystallized already. It is a minor thing for me to disgorge these crystals and throw them at you good people gathered here.

This is part of why I am so interested in style, in sentences. Ideas bore me. They are like the knickknacks on my mantelpiece: interesting enough to acquire and display, but long since faded into brick behind them.

I could probably keep going for quite a while before I ran out. I have a few decades of stored-up impressions and opinions that I could continue to strip-mine for a few months or so before the local economy collapsed and the populace started to produce bangin’ folk music and meth.

But beyond my strategic stockpile, I am likely to remain alive for some unfortunate additional period of time, gathering additional impressions and opinions. What more, along with sentences, I am set to emit another thing in the next month or two: my son, who is sure to provide me with a vital source of novel opinions and impressions. As heavy as I am now with child, I am like to remain heavy with posts perhaps indefinitely.

But is this course of action wise?

Wherefore to post?

For wealth

I enabled paid subscriptions solely because one of the other residents set up a paid subscription circle jerk event where we all paid to subscribe to each other, because apparently having paid subscribers boosts you in the algorithm. I just wanted to feel included. And I did :)

It costs $30 for a year of my sentences. Actually it costs $0, but you can give me $30 if you prefer, or $3 with the discount code. You can acquire the discount code by coming to my house and snuggling up beside me in bed, nuzzling the back of my neck, and telling me in a reverent tone of voice that you think I’m beautiful. If I truly believe you mean it, I will put my trembling lips to your ear and whisper the discount code to you.

So far, enough of you have chosen to exchange dollars for my sentences that I have completely covered the cost of all the parking tickets I have accrued over the past month. If another few of you elect to pelt me with your valuable American dollars, it will also fully cover the cost of this month’s lunches. And once that milestone has been achieved, we can probably go ahead and shut this whole thing down.

It’s a sucker’s game, making money from art. It’s like getting milk from a bull. Sure, you can do it, but are you sure it’s what you want to be doing?

For fame

Fame is really only useful for wealth. The rest is pure downside. Next.

For love

Perhaps I am hoping that a mysterious stranger will fall in love with me. Perhaps we exchange torrid digital letters of an intellectual and eventually emotional nature, drawing ever closer together in a whirling vortex of inevitable fate. Perhaps this soul, plucked from the aether by my sentences alone, will show up on my doorstep, and at last—

Ahem.

For—my god, to talk to somebody! To just have a goddamn conversation! To connect! To meet a mind alike in the world beneath the world, to break through banality, to truly be

It would be nice of course.

For pleasure

This is, of course, the only good reason to write.

Posts I Think Are Pretty Good

I didn’t read every post. I’m sorry. I didn’t even read every post that I expected to be good. I read some posts though. Here are some I thought were good.

Chaos Book Review by Drew Schorno

Drew called this a shitpost. This fills my eyes with tears. Your post is not shit, Drew. Your post is good. Your post is the best short collection of book reviews I have ever read. I wish it was ten times as long.

As an aside, Drew’s blog is called Transmissions from the floor, and a few weeks ago I started daydreaming about starting an enemy blog called Transmissions from the ceiling. In my imagination, I am crawling around up there like a spiderman or little creepypasta Korean girl. In my husband’s imagination, I’m on the ceiling because I got duct-taped there.

Longworld by Vishal Prasad

I wish I was long like Vishal.

Change by Alec Thompson

This one made me feel spooky and haunted. I think change is bad and scary now. I will vote for whatever political party promises me the least change and the less change it promises me the more times I will vote for it.

Tell ‘em what you like by Justis Mills

:) ok! :) I like this post :)

Actually I like almost all of Justis’s posts a lot—there’s lots of you who have lots of posts I like a lot!—but I am being very polite and picking At Most one post per writer

Question 24: Is Eliezer Yudkowsky a Respectable Man? by Emet Hirsch

This one became incomprehensible to me about a third of the way through, but Emet assured me that this was an intentional element of the piece. I respect his vision.

My husband owes me nothing, by Natalie Cargill

Gun to my head, Natalie is probably my favorite writer in this residency, I wish we had talked even once like all month. Not that there’s a gun to my head. Haha guys seriously, nobody is holding a gun to my head, definitely not a small, very fluffy dog belonging to Natalie. Really! I’m fine! No, seriously, I’m totally good, you can go, I’ll be fine!

Unused Starfish Facts, by Alexander Wales

I liked this piece because it caused me to learn that barnacles are actually a kind of sessile crustacean with a fairly complex nervous system, and not just a particularly stupid kind of clam like I thought.

Wow!

I think Alexander Wales should lean more into this marine life thing. For example, he should consider becoming Alexander Dolphins or Alexander Manatees instead. He could even be Alexander Barnacles, if he was brave enough, and pure of heart.

Some other posts I thought were good but didn’t have anything clever to say about

• All Preferences are Valid, but Some Preferences are More Valid than Others by Amanda Luce

• Dogs are Rude by Alicorn

• Opportunity Cost is Mostly Fiction by Derek Razo

• The Pros vs the Smurfs of Literary Critical Essays by Charles Pye

• The Armored and the Burned by Thessaly Blue

• luminous lines by Kevin Z. Wu

• Ambiguity in Dating is Itself Signaling by Aaron Kaufman

• Dumb arguments Against Veganism by Itsi Weinstock (This one got Itsi in big trouble for being too mean but I’m sorry I’m sorry it was so funny. I have 4th grade bully humor instincts and I thought it was really funny)

There were other good posts, but I forgot about them. I’m sorry. If I didn’t pick one of your posts then I promise I still thought your posts were good, or maybe I didn’t read them because they were about AI, or because I forgot to. If I picked a post of yours that you thought was low-effort trash and you’re seething at me for my poor taste then you should kill yourself.

Some other interesting things that happened during the residency

(For this section of the post, I have given my penis a good hard yank, releasing several feet of additional length of it, sufficient for me to be able to jam it firmly in my own mouth)

• I was ranked the Best Ever Bloggering Boy by a language robot, entities universally acknowledged by all thinking people for their exquisite taste and high command of the finer points of art

• I submitted What is to be done? to Scott Alexander’s office hours, where he normally spends around 20 minutes per piece absolutely eviscerating it on a content, structure, and sentence level, in front of a live studio audience. I was really excited. But then when he got to my piece he just said that he had no issues with it, that my opinion was correct, and that my penis was very shapely, moving on. And then he immediately moved on to the next one. This was a bit disappointing, so for the following office hour I submitted I don’t care about AI, hoping to at least start a fight about my opinion, if not my sentences. But he didn’t get to it that time. Probably because he is afraid of me, because I currently contain twice as many skeletons as he does and three times as many teeth.

• Alexander Wales wrote rpf about us all titled Foreverhaven. I was very cross to not be in it because I thought there could be some really fun subplots you could do with a pregnant lady in a time loop story. But it turns out that I was supposed to be in it! And the subplot is that my baby is born, and then immediately appears on the submission portal, and then I have to make sure my newborn baby publishes 500 words a day or else he disappears. But this subplot was ultimately deemed too dark and weird to include.

• I was negged by notable statistician and blogger Andrew Gelman, but I was not offended. I understand perfectly well that he is just jealous that I am a perfect sphere and he is not and never will be.

• My husband wrote a review (part 1, part 2) of all the bathrooms at Lighthaven and his scathing comments about a particular corn bulb upstairs in Bayes Attic got escalated all the way to Lighthaven management. His impact is likely to far outstrip my own and it probably won’t even be close.

Other superlatives

I rode the closest line on submitting my posts right before the deadline, with 3 and 4 seconds to spare on two separate occasions. You must imagine the first viv and the second viv both standing on the procrastinator’s podium, admiring each other’s gold and silver medals, laughing and high-fiving. Then, with a heated look, we kiss, first tenderly then passionately. Our hands rove hungrily across each other’s bodies. We know this is so right. Next to us, Aaron Gertler smiles uncomfortably and waves to his mom in the audience.

As of this writing, however, I am only the second-wordiest writer in the residency, behind Alec Thompson. This enraging state of affairs can only be rectified in one way: I must find some way to eat Alec Thompson.

In consolation for my wild and desperate grief at my pathetic failure of verbosity, I otherwise did fairly well for myself. I presently occupy three out of the twelve highlighted posts on the front page, along with Drew:

Given that Drew and I form a plurality of the highlights page, this is an excellent opportunity for us to form an alliance and secure a swift strategic victory over the residency. We need only to invade, occupy, and suppress rebellion in the sovereign blogs of Kevin Wu, Thessaly, and Alok Singh. Remy disappeared mysteriously in the night a few days ago so his blog is ripe for the taking. Vishal is very long, so we better not mess with him, but the others will swiftly fall before us. Join me, Drew. Extend your mustache to me. We will rule this galaxy as father and son. (To keep things fair and balanced, we'll switch off who is the father and who is the son every other day.)

Right, then, what have we said about getting too silly?

(sigh) I know, Colonel

Is this really what you want to be doing with your pseudonymously public writing?

I mean…kind of? I want to write things that people want to read. Otherwise what’s the point?

Well, but it isn’t really challenging yourself, now is it?

No, not really. It’s just that it’s so easy. It’s easy for me to be funny, and people like it when I’m funny. They like it enough to give me attention, even money. When something is fun, easy, and rewarding, it’s hard not to do it, especially when you’re on the hook for a 500 word blog post every day and you still have a job. So can you really blame me?

It’s not about me blaming you

No, I mean, yeah, you’re completely right. Yeah, I guess I do blame myself. This is all pretty empty calories, except they’re coming out of my body instead of going inside of it. Just constant vomit of colorful half-digested crap, which, if you were wondering, is pretty much how my third trimester has been treating me. That’s kabbalah for you, or something.

You’re still doing it…

Yes! God! I know! I fucking know! Jesus fucking Christ, I know!

Listen, guys, post over. Go home.

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Shoo.

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I’m serious. No more fucking post.

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Get out.

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I said, get out! I don’t want you anymore!

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Seriously, the post is over. I’m done with it. You be done with it too. Goodbye. Ahem. Good morning. Good morning.

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Sigh. Listen. I’m not really angry. But I do mean it. Post over.

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Navigate away. Please.

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Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and—in case I don’t see you—good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies, good-night, good-night.

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Look here’s my real fucking retrospective on the past month of blogging. I basically didn’t accomplish any of what I wanted, and what I did accomplish makes me feel vaguely ill.

This blog had at least two posts go semi-viral and went from 0 to 600+ subscribers over the course of April without me really particularly trying. Cool, right? Isn’t that what I wanted? No! Not really! I came here intending to write about my research and my work—on another blog, which you can feel totally free to look for, but if you tell that me that you came from viverricious, I will definitely pretend to have no idea who that is—and ultimately I mostly didn’t, because it was boring and I didn’t feel like it. The stuff I did write along those lines, my cofounder (who wanted me to do that project) fuckin’ hated, and that was disheartening enough that I didn’t really feel motivated to keep at it. But you know, he was probably right. Those posts aren’t that good, because I couldn’t figure out how to strike a balance between “fun to write, actually sounds like me” and “doesn’t massively alienate normal people and undercut my credibility as a technical expert.” It’s way easier to just default to doing this bullshit instead.

Honestly this residency probably wasn’t really for me. I enjoyed myself and I’m glad I did it and I could see myself coming as an alumnus, but it was still pretty much was not for me. I’m not a new writer. I’ve had a daily writing habit for huge chunks of my life. I’ve written several novels, even published one. I’ve been blogging over on tumblr for fifteen years. I don’t need to be held to account to Post. I feel bad because this is definitely humblebragging and it’s probably pissing off any of my fellow residents reading this but it’s true. I don’t think I really grew in any discernible direction. It wasn’t hard for me, it wasn’t stressful, it wasn’t challenging. It took up a lot of my time and brain because there’s a way in which anything you have to do a lot of starts parasitizing your attention, especially when you get a lot of positive feedback, but it feels bad to have my attention eaten like this by a project I’m not sure is worth anything.

I did the residency because frankly I was going through a difficult personal time and fucking around in sunny beautiful goddamn California for a month eating my cofounder’s cereals and generally being a burden on him seemed like a better use of my April than sitting around a half-unpacked apartment pretending with my husband that anything about our situation was tolerable. And I mean for that purpose it worked great. Mission accomplished. Kind of like I got sent to a sanitarium for a month, which Lighthaven basically is.

And you know, the professional-ish writing was only like 70% of what I wanted to do here. The other 30% was that I really did want to start a personal blog. I’d had some of these ideas for posts knocking around loudly enough to be a bother since like at least November. I wanted to connect with people. I wanted to be able to process some of my past year and a half in semi-public and metabolize and disgorge it into something I can live with.

But man, I can’t even do that. I wrote several pretty personal posts along those lines and then didn’t publish them because Jesus Christ, there are over 600 of you. Who are you people? I mean, thanks for your attention, and your money, but what the fuck. And it’s not just you guys, it’s also like, my husband’s recent ex is on here, posting about how much she fucking hates me? Like I think she’s blocked me now but christ, this woman and I were telling each other we loved each other this time last year and a few weeks ago she was encouraging my husband to abandon me and my cringe unborn baby, and now the algorithm thinks we should be looking at each other’s posts, how’s that for a goddamn head trip?

It’s basically not possible to be authentically personal in public. It just isn’t. The urge to fall into playing a fictional character version of yourself is just too strong. I’d heard famous youtubers and shit talk about this but I didn’t think it could happen at such a low threshold of attention. I can feel how I'm being bent into the shape of the public eye, into this adversarial little impish character who is always ready to cut the tension with an irreverent little joke, because it’s easy to be that character, it’s easy and it’s rewarded and it fucks with my head. I see why Andrew Hussie went insane, it’s basically the only reasonable thing to do under the circumstances and I have like 0.000001% of the public attention he did.

You know, like, things have been pretty bad for me. I don’t think I’ve cried literally every day for the past seven months but I’ve cried about 99% of the days. Real proper hitching desperate wailing, too, not just some single-tear bullshit. I’m afraid that my life is over. I’m afraid that my husband doesn’t love me and that my son will resent and dislike me and that once my parents die I’ll never be loved again. And that I’ll deserve it. Most of the time when I’m not actively distracted by something else I feel myself sinking so deep into an empty pit of unlove that I don’t see how I can possibly ever crawl out again. Luckily I am pretty good at distracting myself, with work, or socializing, or with this blogging project, so it’s like, fine, but that’s kind of what I’m looking down the barrel of existence at, and realizing, yeah, you know, lots of people basically live their whole lives like this, I easily could too. Crazy, right?

You know, I basically think childbirth is going to be a total cinch, because I kind of think I’ve topped out the pain scale already. Sensors saturated. I think it might even feel kinda good, you know, in contrast.

I’m being nominally raw and unfiltered here, but I’m really not. There’s so much shit I’m avoiding saying because it would actually be too uncomfortable, so even now I’m still in character. It’s just a slightly different character. Or, shit, for all you know I just made a bunch of this stuff up, maybe I’m doing a bit where I play a character who has all this stuff going on. Or maybe I’m saying this as a deliberate act of misdirection, and then drawing your attention to it as another layer of misdirection. Fucking tedious isn’t it? I know I’m tired of it

Or maybe actually it’s sort of more fun to act like a crazy person in public where 600+ people can see you. (Or, I mean, realistically like way less than that right? I mean maybe in the fullness of time, but there’s no way more than a handful of you make it all the way down here.) Surely this is what explains crazy homeless people. Maybe I’m just kind of a pervert, and I’m enjoying making you part of my weird little scene. It would make a lot of sense right?

Like I said, it’s actually impossible to be genuinely authentic in public. This idea that you’re going to really connect with me because of this blog, it’s like, stupid?

I sort of wish I’d fucked off and hung around the other residents more all month. It’s kind of a shame that I’m publishing my retrospective before most of you because I think it would have been cool to actually retrospect on all your retrospectives. Also wish I could have managed a torrid affair or something with one of you but I get it, I was really round. Anyway you guys were cool. I hope to stay in touch and be friends with a bunch of you but it’s hard to see how from the bottom of the pit of unlove.

I dunno guys. I’ll probably keep writing on here but I don’t really know why. Because being this impish little character for your entertainment is something to do, I guess. It’s nice to have an outlet, even if that outlet is kind of narrow and constricted, all told, and can really only ever be narrow and constricted. At least, that’s how it is for someone with my particular psychological characteristics, I don’t know. Maybe a different sort of person doesn’t experience any of it that way.

Whatever, man. Mic drop.

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Hm?

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Oh, it’s you Colonel. What is it?

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Stop…stop looking at me like that. Please.

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Jesus fucking Christ I’m begging you. I actually can’t take it.

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Wait…who are you?

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Are you God?

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I don’t understand. I’m scared. Please help me.

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Oh…

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I see now

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Yes

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