J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Metablog

Metablog: New Menus

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On May 26

In Metablog

New menus -- but this blog does not yet offer salami.

New menus — but this blog does not yet offer salami.

For a while I’ve been thinking about ways to make this blog more readable and searchable. With that in mind I’ve added a new menu “Sci-Fi Scenarios” which contains a few broad index pages which in turn link to lists of posts. I’ll eventually add another menu “The Systems” which will catalog and organize some of the health/lifestyle/advice-related material (the blog title is “Systems for Living Well” — but so far there are no actual systems to be found).

What’s the purpose of this blog? Partially about self-expression and even self-promotion, but more importantly to explore how to live well, both individually and as a collectively evolving species. I’ll continue to add both structure and content in pursuit of that goal.

Thanks for dropping in and I hope you always find something useful and/or interesting here.

Penelope Trunk Makes Me Think Hard About What I’m Doing and Why

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On October 4

In Creative Work/Career, Metablog, Personal Updates

Brazen Careerist’s Penelope Trunk

I’ve been reading Penelope Trunk’s mindfuck of a blog, and learning a few things in the process.  Listening to this podcast, in which Penelope gives brutally blunt career advice to hapless blogger Steve, was sort of a wake-up call.  Penelope asks Steve some hard questions about why he is blogging, and what his goals for his blog are.  When he’s evasive, she rips him a new one.  It’s not pretty, but it’s honest, and to Steve’s credit he posts the whole thing unedited.

Penelope can be thought of as kind of an anti-Tim Ferriss.  Where Tim looks for simplicity and optimization, Penelope looks for conflict and doubt.  Tim polishes his image and generally presents his best side, while Penelope shares her angst, personal failings, and relationship problems.  Tim offers advice about how to minimize work and maximize play, while Penelope takes as a given that adults need to put in 8 hours of daily work, and focuses on the question of “Whose working life do you want?”

So, who do I want to take advice from?  A borderline-narcissistic tango-spin record holder, or a neurotic Jew with Asperger’s syndrome?  Well, both actually, but I’ll focus on Penelope’s advice in this post since I talked about Tim Ferriss last week.

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2010 Blog Recap, and Why I Blog

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On January 2

In Creative Work/Career, Metablog, Personal Updates, Writing

Zooming out on 2010.

I started this blog in December of 2009, so I’ve just completed my first full year of blogging (or, as I prefer to think of it, writing and self-publishing essays).  I prefer “essayist” over “blogger” not out of pretension, but because I think it more accurately describes what I’ve been doing; writing about specific topics that I find interesting, in a way that I hope will be interesting, entertaining, and/or useful to others.  Not much personal, day to day stuff.  No recipes.  There’s nothing wrong with that style of blog, it’s just not for me.

So far this site has had about 30,000 unique views.  That’s not a lot, but it’s much more than the “just family and friends” traffic that I expected.  It’s gratifying to know that a wide range of people have enjoyed reading at least some of my posts.  So, thank you readers!

The biggest traffic day was about 4,000 views, from a link someone posted on reddit.com.

I don’t make any money from blogging, nor do I expect to.  I pay WordPress a small amount to host the site, and small additional fees to display the URL as jdmoyer.com (without “wordpress” in the URL) and to suppress advertising (which is how WordPress makes money from the blogs it hosts).  I’m happy to pay these fees so I don’t have to deal with the technical hassles of blog hosting, comment management, etc.  The hosted WordPress tools are great.

Haven't written about this yet, but I will.

Why do I it?  Since I started this site, my mind has been overflowing with ideas for new essays and posts.  I have a spreadsheet going with ideas for about fifty entries … some of which I’ll probably never get to.  I don’t know how long this particular vein of abundant inspiration will continue, but I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts.

The world “outlet” comes to mind.  Not so much creative outlet, but rather persuasive outlet.  I can try to convince others that my opinion is worth paying attention to, without cornering them at a party and lecturing their ear off.  Readers can stop reading whenever they want, without any social awkwardness.  They (you) can freely lurk, or comment.

It’s interesting to watch the stats and see which posts people find interesting.  Some topics that interest me greatly don’t seem to interest other people much at all (or the people who might be interested haven’t yet found this site), and some posts that I wrote quickly and without much thought have been read many times.  For what it’s worth, here are the top five posts (out of about sixty) of 2010 (by number of views).

1. Sleep Experiment – A Month With No Artificial Light
(candle wax, bimodal sleep, feeling unreasonably happy)

2. How I Cured My Asthma With One Simple Lifestyle Change
(a diet change turned around my health and fixed my breathing problems)

3. Minecraft — It’s in Your Head
(a low-res videogame that took over my life for awhile)

4. A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part III — PALEO!
(3 very fit guys telling you why you’re better off without grains)

5. The Singularity Already Happened – Part I
(my thoughts on the nerd rapture)

 

Or maybe it happened thousands of years ago?

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