I started this blog for a number of reasons, but a big one was that I wanted to be forced to show off my work, to open myself up to criticism. Honestly, I know my writing (and thinking) is far from perfect and I hoped that by playing up to an audience I would improve. Sadly thus far it doesn't appear as though I have much of an audience. Where I'd envisaged a heady back and forth of ideas and discussions, instead there is a vast emptiness.
Obviously this was wishful thinking on my part. There are enough actually famous people with blogs not getting read that there isn't any reason why mine should be among them. Still, I haven't exactly been active in promoting myself. With that thought in mind, here is a summary post, a place where you can browse through what I've written so far and decide if any of it is likely to interest you at all.
Here then is a run down of the blogs thus far:
- Why Blog?: My first entry, this probably isn't worth reading, really it existed as a way for me to justify to me the fact that I was choosing to blog.
- Does the tiger dream of the jungle it's never seen? And where does our jungle lie?: A particular look at one of my favourite topics, how humans are incredibly geared towards being social and why that's amazing.
- How the world is a little bit magical: A description of the ways I like to re-imagine the day to day world around me to make it just a little bit more interesting.
- Space and why I could never be a speechwriter: In this entry I talk a bit about writing speeches, but mostly I get all lyrical about why space exploration is so important.
- Why you should have a religion and what mine is: The beginning of my four part series all about religion and atheism, this is my attempt to justify being religious in an entirely rational manner as well as the rather muddled facts of my own beliefs.
- Why I think all religion is personal: This is really an attack on both atheism and organised religion, to the tune of get your opinions out of my head.
- What, as I see it, is wrong with Atheism: I talk about why the modern atheist movement (with all it's bombastic 'religion is ignorance'-isms) could do with backing up and checking itself.
- What, as I see it, is wrong with Religion: I talk about why religions really need to get out of their believers business and leave them to their believing.
- Turning 30 or My fear and me: A very personal entry, where I talk about how scary the world used to be to me and how turning that around has been life changing.
- Symbolism in fiction: I talk about how and why my approach to symbolism has shifted in the past year or so, and why I convinced myself to back off it just a little bit.
So, hopefully you found something to interest you in there. I think I've ended up with a far broader set of topics than I originally intended (such that I don't think any one person would ever care about all of them), but in a way that's nice, I'm finding my footing as it were. I thought I would end by giving some teasers for future blogs.
I have an entire file packed with ideas I'd like to get to some day, but there are certain ones which I'm particularly keen to get to. For instance there are some ideas I'd like to share that I came across while arguing about whether a computer could ever write poetry, about how art and science are distinct and what that has to do with the shape of our brains. I've also been meaning for a while to write a diatribe against the expression “you're over thinking it”. Finally I'm planning a series of entries, like the religion/atheism ones, where I'll talk about actual Magik, probably passing through Tolkien, Robert Anton Wilson and willpower on the way.
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