What To Post

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By Max Woerner Chase

A key motivation behind my starting this blog was to try to "be less of a coward". For over a decade now, my online presence has been mediated through the desire to gate my interests. The basic chilling effect on myself is that I've got this boundary that I'm trying to keep track of, and avoiding discussing anything that feels like it could ever potentially cross over.

It's worth noting that I have a highly developed, quite possibly overdeveloped, sense of negative consequences of my actions. One result of this is that I have extreme difficulty lying, because I cannot contemplate a lie without visualizing the knock-on effects. To me, the lie feels equivalent in weight to the supporting lies that would be required to commit to it.

The point of all that is, because I can extrapolate great conceptual distances across the boundary, I've been engaging in a lot of self-censorship, beyond the immediately obvious division.

So, what I'm trying to figure out is, what does it look like to not have an absolute boundary? I keep up with people who manage this, even refer my coworkers to their Python posts. But I don't have a good sense of how to do it. Also, the person I have in mind has quite a different employment situation from me. Does this matter? I don't know! Should it matter? Probably not!

But I keep on feeling pulled away from honest self-expression by the siren call of pragmatism. And now that I put that sentence down, I realize I need to think about what it's pragmatism in the service of. ... Partly this is paranoia about effects on work, but I just realized I have no idea of, and little interest in, what my coworkers do in their spare time. Contemplating putting it in a web search actually makes me feel a little tired, or maybe I just need sleep.

In any case, if it's going to be associated with me, I need to figure out where it goes. Just sticking everything together would be the equivalent of my apartment, which I wouldn't show off to random strangers. I don't think I have an answer yet, but I don't want to pretend I haven't thought about this. Here goes the post.

EDIT 2018-04-05 01:44: I've got an idea. For any given piece of media I'm working on, process posts go here. In addition, stuff that wouldn't better go on a special-purpose site goes here. I do think I want to showcase some stuff here:

Most things though, will go on sites with more robust content warnings. The content warnings on here would just be, like, a bit in the summary. Like, "this story has themes of claustrophobia" or whatever.