So I will start off by stating that I am discontinuing the premise of Weekly posts. The following contains my thoughts (and rambles) on why. I may continue to post retrospectives on projects that I wish to make public on this site, and also post some articles in an unlisted format, but I think it is time to retire Weekly.
Skip to the conclusion if you want to avoid a 2500+ ramble about privacy of creativity or something (I didn’t edit it I just wanted to get this post out of the way to be honest). In short, I am discontinuing Weekly posts or having a schedule for public posts as it hasn’t been working out for me. I rather reinvest that time and energy to make proper and full articles that have better value to the hypothetical reader.
The Rambling
Firstly, I do think that Weekly posts is actually a really good format for a more public type of personality, at least online. They are an excellent way to reflect on oneself, share one’s thoughts and learning with other members of a community, and hence get valuable feedback. It is a great way to keep projects and learning objectives alive, as well as be held accountable for goals.
I am, however, not that kind of personality. I am a creative introvert at heart, who prefers to get feedback from my actual users, target demographics and project teammates rather than spectators. I find that even the thought of sharing my progress publicly on something before its finished slows down my productivity greatly, introducing self-doubt and stress that could be better spent on doing actual work, even if I get no responses. This progress even includes learning objectives, rather than just projects.
These weekly posts have hence become a bit tough to write. The matter isn’t so much on whether I have content to write about, or things to reflect on, but rather I just been feeling a lot more private lately. Even though I don’t feel many people read this blog, there’s still a sense of vulnerability posting opinions, thoughts and reflections online.
There is some aspect of having the ability to be private with reflections that I do lose out on by having everything here. Part of me feels it would be a good idea to continue to write for this blog by writing private drafts, and only deciding to publish the ones that I feel comfortable with. I think that makes sense, since being able to reflect on my progress, plans, mistakes, ambitions and goals is a valuable and important skill for progression.
Whether to post it publicly though? I am not so sure. I initially operated on the mindset that I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by just writing and publishing content, even if I think it’s not good enough. I used to think that worst that can happen is I get negative criticism but feedback, and that I can use that to improve and grow. Sure I might make naive mistakes, revealing incompetence and all that, but at least having that pointed out by someone could help me improve and grow my skills.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize that that itself is an optimistic ideal. The idea that posting whatever I have online, not being embarrassed or having any shame, would either lead to demonstrating my skills or being corrected on my lack of them, is still a false dichotomy.
Indifference
In reality, the worst outcome is actually indifference. At first, it can be easy to think of indifference as a natural and neutral state. Sure it means that nobody is praising you, but nobody is scolding you either, right? It seems neutral on the surface and nothing to fear, the idea of nothing happening.
But in practice it has its own challenging effects, much like how being overly praised and held on a pedestal or being mocked and judged constantly has its effects. That is why it is important to learn how to manage it effectively, or deciding when to even tackle it at all.
The main negative impact of indifference on someone’s flow and work state is that it diminishes all the work that someone has done into nothingness, creating a sense of unnecessary doubt that anything we do even has any meaning at all. It is, in some ways, invites an unhealthy nihilism.
Some may say that a lack of interest is itself a form of criticism, but if that is the case then it is the harshest and most honest form of it. Negativity, at least, means that someone cared enough to even have an opinion at all, in addition to being potentially useful advice for growth.
Indifference, however, tells you nothing (quite literally), gives you nothing, and yet takes everything you got. Indifference is a theft who leaves no trace, making you question if you had anything at all. And often, indifference breaks in because we leave our front doors open, unafraid of the world, hoping to invite anyone.
Of course, one could take indifference itself as a form of universal collective criticism, simply stating bluntly ‘why not just make stuff people care about? Either make something either good enough to have value, or bad enough to make people to wish it had value.’
I think there is a lot of truth in that. That indifference represents a failure of marketing. This makes sense for any product that is made with the intention of reaching an audience. What is the point of wasting time, energy and resources making something nobody wants or needs, right?
But then we loop back into our original thought… what is the point of wasting time, energy and resources making anything for this blog publicly?
Even if its goal is is to serve as a public accountability of my progress, my mistakes and my growth… who is it meant to be accountable for? I am still too early into my professional development to have valuable insights and wisdom to share with others.
Nobody really has to care about my ability to do amateur stuff, or that I have the literacy and basic competent to learn a new tech stack or concept or something. It would make more sense to display that capability through reflection on the actual completion of a valuable project… and if the project isn’t valuable than what is there to really say?
Well, that isn’t actually true. There is one person who does care, and what person who must care: myself. If I don’t care about even the most boring moments of progress, then how can I expect to get better? And what better way to care than to write about it.
Of course, over time if I accidentally become a public figure of success for whatever reason, people would ‘care’ about my smaller accomplishments and growth in the early stages of my career in retrospect.
Self-Centered Interest
But I know that deep down that it’s an ultimately self-centered type of interest, rather than a genuine one. At least, I assume it is the case due to a personal sense of projection since I do it. I have read the autobiographies of John Romero and John Carmack through famous books such as Masters of Doom. I eagerly watched every frame of a documentaries covering the background of RollerCoaster Tycoon creator Chris Sawyer. Internet communities dedicate hard work to document and hunt down even the most amateur of Scott Cawthon’s projects.
There is a fascination learning about the early projects of these creators, and how they have grown since then… but I think the honest truth is that fascination only exists because these developers are extremely successful. They are people we admire, and so we wish to study their progression as a reference to adapt for our own ‘route to success.’ Nobody really cares about public figures like these intrinsically. Everything they made that nobody cares about only matters because of the context of the things they made that everybody cares about.
Nothing to hide… nothing to fear?
So what does that tangent have to do with writing about learning some cool maze generation algorithm or ‘oh I understand better how asyncio works in Python making my own multiplayer game engine from scratch’ or whatever?
Well, when we consider the earlier argument about the fact that making products for nobody is a waste of time, energy and resources, the argument becomes clearer. Why waste the time publishing public opinions and thoughts about things that have no external value? We could make the argument that it is no different writing and publishing it publicly than archiving it privately, and to just use the Internet as a transparent journal, dumping even more content in an endless landfill of even more content.
I do think that is a genuinely valid argument to a certain extent. There is a type of personality someone could have where they couldn’t care less if anyone actually sees their stuff or if nobody does. There are blog posts about why you should post publicly anyways even if you don’t care to market them. Here is another one
But I personally do care a little bit, and not because of a fear of criticism or even a fear of indifference. I care because I know that writing my thoughts and publishing online requires an extra energy filtering my thoughts. This could mean editing the writing to be more coherent, or having a flow, or it could mean trying to present some kind of ‘value’ to a post where I might be thinking in the back of my mind ‘how could this content help the reader in some way?’ The thesis of a post.
But yet I noticed that, for myself, the journal entries I write about my projects are both far easier to write and far more useful for me. Unfiltered thoughts, speaking to me directly. In a way, my private writing actually has a target demographic of myself, while the stuff I publish is made with no marketing in mind, and for nobody.
Sure, I could write a stream of consciousness unfiltered post about myself, like this post alll the time. But I simply don’t want to. I like having a separation between the professional self and the personal self. Call it ‘work-life balance’, but I just consider it a form of healthy boundaries for both myself and for the people I interact with professionally and personally.
This post is a major exception to that, because I do need to explain why I don’t want to write public Weekly posts, even if its just so I could rest easily tonight with less stress. I mean even if nobody cares that I stopped writing weekly posts, I rather anyone who clicks onto this page and wonder why the Weekly posts dry up step away with the impression that I am a bit of an introverted and private person, rather than them thinking I lacked the commitment and discipline to stick to even my own personal blog.
That’s another thing, I do care what people think of my more public persona. Our public personas are inherently a product that we market, and it doesn’t just represent ourselves as individuals but also our institutions. As an undergrad, my thoughts does represent the student body of my university. Eventually as an employee, my public professionalism reflects and represents the organization I serve. Even in daily interactions at social gatherings, I represent my family. We cannot deny this responsibility of representation. Even if I don’t care what people think of the personal me, it is only fair to consider the images of those I represent as well.
Even writing about these thoughts in such informal language and loose feels like a professional risk, but I am gambling on the fact that this blog is niche enough that it would be a non-factor, or that the content itself is fair. Part of me thinks I should reflect and rewrite everything here to be in more structured and formal language, but I feel for such a personal-ish topic I would lose a bit in that process and put a lot of effort into a post that nobody is likely to read.
“Just post everything online”
This section could be a post of its own, but I am going to staple it onto this one because of its relevance.
I also personally now disagree from experience with the notion that everything we made should be immediately shared and published all the time, even if its junk. There is a culture in creative and tech communities of ‘failing faster’, and that includes just making and finishing a lot of stuff, publishing it and moving on. I fully agree with the notion that having a lot of projects, short-term goals, deadlines and so on is a very productive way to improve at a skill or get creative inspiration. But what I disagree with now is the idea that everything we make has to be published and uploaded online.
I, however, think that it is bad practice because it encourages a bad mindset and habit that everything we share is disposable garbage, and to treat the creation of our work as a numbers game. This means that we fail to utilize the skill of market research, and understanding whether our hard work, time and resources is being spent on endeavors that will have a positive return on investment. By having a sense of personal curation to what we choose to keep private and what we choose to share, and questioning why we share it, we train this skill of identifying the value of what we are working hard on.
If something is a project solely for our own learning or creative experimentation, it inherently has no value to anyone outside of ourselves. Sharing work like that implies either a lack of self-awareness that the work has no target demographic, or a lack of consideration to whether that should matter.
Of course, creating an entry for a competition like a game jam that doesn’t garner attention is a different context. In that instance, a lack of reception is just a reasonable and acceptable failure due to a lack of skill in market research (even if its just to gauge whether the audience of a competition would be receptive to a project that could be completed within the deadline with the skills the creators have). So I am not referring to failed and unremarkable competition entries or failed crowdfunding pitches or whatever. We shouldn’t fear failure like that. The judgement of Indifference has utility in these circumstances, as actually constructive ‘advice’ of the fact that a project failed due to a lack of an audience.
What I do think we should fear, is the inability to recognize that lack of reception is a form of failure at all. This is because anything that is publicly shared will be be shared with the intention of a demographic, whether consciously or not.
Repressing this aspect of creativity or any skill development could hinder our growth or harm our health, as we deny ourselves the privacy to meditate and reflect on our own work in private or in controlled settings. I believe that it is impossible for a healthy individual to be completely inconsiderate and willingly oblivious over how they come off in public, and the same goes for what we share creatively online too as online is a public space. This is not out of a fear of judgement or out of a need to protect oneself, but I believe out of empathy for others. This consideration, subconscious or otherwise, filters our creativity. By being private, we can truly experiment.
We would also fail to cultivate our skill of identifying the audience of what we make, when we train ourselves to not consider it relevant. This forces everything we make, posted publicly, to suffer the judgement of Indifference, and unlike harsh criticism and blunt honest truths, Indifference teaches us nothing except that nothing cares.
This doesn’t mean that we should only make things worthy of public consumption. If anything, this calls for the opposite. We should make a lot of things, so many things, in private without having to consider their purpose for some audience. This allows us to truly focus on learning, self-discovery and growth in an unfiltered lens, on our own terms.
This also means that when we design and create something to be posted publicly, we do so fully conscious of the demographic, of whether it has value to a market. This would allow us to fully utilize Indifference to have relevance to our goals.
If we make something designed with a target demographic in mind, and we show it to that demographic in something where it is guaranteed visibility such as in a competition, and it receives Indifference, that is actually useful information.
So what I am arguing for isn’t to never post stuff online. It is that when we post things publicly, we should do it by treating our target audience with respect, and creating something that provides value. That way, we can see an indifference and lack of attention as a valid form of useful criticism, rather than just a fact of life. We should never settle for indifference, and should always strive to create value with our public products. If we wish to make things that people don’t have to care about, we should fully commit to that notion and make things privately, unfiltered from our subconscious expectations of public perception.
Conclusion
What was the point of the last 2500+ words rambling on about artistic privacy or whether to post stuff online or not?
To be honest it was just a long-winded rant to state that I didn’t find posting weekly public blog posts to be all that useful for myself and have been just an unnecessary commitment and burden. I also am self-aware enough to recognize that posting for the sake of posting isn’t very useful for other people either.
So why do it? Well, it doesn’t fit my personality style so I am stopping the Weekly post concept.
Despite that, I still think it will be a good idea to post articles, project pages and reflections that I believe actually have value, even if it’s simply to discuss during job interviews or social events. I am proud of talking about the Blog Scripting Tool in a past weekly post, having project pages for my VR internship project or discussing alternate means of level creation for video game engines.
I think those pages have value because they were written in a bit of an audience and goal in mind, even if I didn’t actively market those posts to reach those audience. Because they were written with intention rather than obligation, being able to bring them up when relevant provides value to people. I have been able to share the blog post on level creation as a way to provide context to advice I give to juniors at my university to focus on how they can better use their tools productively for their student projects.
But my weekly posts otherwise have just kind of been not as useful, because they were rushed to meet a deadline… or to miss one. They lack a good cohesion, and were like skimmed down versions of content that could have more potential.
Articles and project pages like that take time, and should be properly edited, planned and structured in order to provide that value for an audience. I think even rushing similar articles in a tight deadline privately might be good practice to just get first few drafts, but actually publishing them… well… I shouldn’t rush it. It’s not like I have a monthly magazine where there can be a reasonable a compromise of quality to meet a deadline in return for consistency in a subscription for my interested readers or anything.
There is no reason my hypothetical readers deserve a lesser quality product just because I want to meet an imaginary deadline. Even if those readers to the articles are hypothetical and imaginary, it is still a valuable skill have the mindset of creating value with every work I publish. Otherwise, how can I ever expect to make things that have value to begin with?
This also means that every article and post I make from now on should have a specific target audience in mind, and I should actively seek out feedback from that audience. For example, if it is a computer graphics related post, I should post it into a computer graphics chatroom or forum and allow it to be the subject of feedback, no matter how harsh.
If it is a post about something I learned about VR or Android, I should share it the relevant communities as well to get feedback. If I don’t wish to seek feedback for it, then I shouldn’t bother writing a public post to begin with.
If it is a post about a project that I wish to archive and document, I should ask myself what value that project has as a demonstration of my skills or capabilities? Sharing my internship project with VR demonstrates that I am comfortable working in UnityVR in a professional setting. Sharing my experiences in my junior year student project demonstrates my ability to meet specifications in a collaborative setting on a deadline and to a sufficient quality, with creative problem solving.
There are also skills that aren’t that noteworthy to share or have relevance in hindsight. The Game A Week posts didn’t really serve anything useful for a reader. It was a failure in some ways that Game-A-Week 2: Isometric Ball Game was rushed to be a reflection on some personal weekly game project concept, rather than be restructured and expanded upon to be a comprehensive tutorial for how to render isometric graphics. A comprehensive tutorial on rendering isometric graphics would have value for a reader, especially if it covers ground that other popular tutorials might not have.. For example, common tutorials on the subject do not cover the implications of the fact that isometric coordinates and projections can be used as a way to render fully 3D simulations using 2D assets, as they focus solely on the projection and rendering. If I had expanded on that project’s scope and post, I could have covered this topic in detail and written a blog post (or even forum post) that would have added value… not too late to return to that idea if I have the time or interest.
Also I accidentally wrote a conclusion that is just as long as the main content and with its own tangent. Usually in editing we could catch this, restructure the post and edit more drafts to have a better flow… but I don’t care tonight and I don’t even know if anyone would read this, so I am just going to upload this post as it is and continue onto the rest of my evening.
In a way, it is nice that from today onwards, I allow myself to no longer have the attitude of ‘it doesn’t matter I don’t care and nobody would read it’ anymore for my future posts. I am basically having more of a commitment to write posts more purposefully, with an audience in mind, and actually market them to that audience to give them value. Now that’s a good attitude to have.
Also if you did read this post and this far, comment that you did so that I can be actually shocked. Tell me what your favorite part was. I personally don’t expect a single comment but who knows, this site could be up for years and someone out there might have been bored enough to find this post. Maybe you’re some internet archivist in 2078 with a strange interest for Github static site pages from the 2020s… in which case, hi.
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