Streak, State of the Blog

Elsewhere on the Internet. Stories from another culture highlight the tropes in our own stories. Strange Horizons: The Ghost Did What?! Translation Exposing Providentialist Thinking. Palmer. Issue 27, November 2023.

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This is blog post #4270. More relevant for the purposes of this discussion, this is post #2017 in a row. Wednesday 15 November 2023, I reached 2000 posts in an unbroken series since 26 May 2018. [Bright-Eyed, Bushy-Tailed, & Back to Blogging]

Reasons

It keeps me amused. As I’ve said before, “My blog has a purpose – to keep me from going batshit crazy.” [I’m Baaaaaack]

It provides a sense of deadline. I have rarely (almost never?) written or taken photos as an artistic pursuit, for sheer joy of it, for myself. Call it what you will, if I don’t have a reason, it doesn’t happen. In the past, that reason has been either that someone paid me or that I had a class assignment. (To be completely accurate, I would have to include vacation journals, but only big vacations, and holiday snaps. But I digress.) Somehow, the blog satisfies my sense of purpose. [Photo Safari The First, Beeswax Creek Park]

Related to the above, I enjoy the puzzle of figuring out what to put up each day.

Yeah, but why daily?

“I thought about going to weekdays only, but didn’t. Among other reasons, ‘The idea of breaking my streak bothered me even more than I thought it would.’ ” [Blog Milestone] quoting [State of the Blog, Weekends NOT off]

Plus, I have the sense that if I didn’t do this daily, I wouldn’t do it at all. I’m not being absolutist. Okay, I’m not *just* being absolutist. I know this phenomenon. I have lived this phenomenon. I would have good intentions. It would live on my To Do list. I would not get around to it. Days, weeks, months would slide by.

Some days, the discipline of daily blogging is the only thing that keeps me motivated.

Visual reposted from post #2000 on 9 July 2017. [Letter Art: MM]

Onwards!
Katherine