Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

The forefront of my considerations

During the course of Saturday mornings I’m investing in the production of, “The Lindahl Letter,” series of weekly newsletters over on the Substack platform. Generally, that has been going well enough. The first 20 weeks of posts have been written and content has been planned out for 37 issues. My big plan is to work on that endeavor for 52 weeks. I’m not even halfway to the end of that goal at this point and I’m already thinking about the conclusion. Part of the goal of this effort was to help sharpen my thoughts on the topics of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Maybe the more important part was to allow me to consider directionally where I wanted to take my efforts and focus. Writing a few paragraphs for a newsletter each week is not a huge commitment of my time and it should serve as an anchor to help me focus on what really comes to the forefront of my considerations. 

Spending some time wrestling with the trajectory of my future writings is probably worthwhile. It would be easy enough to get out a blank sheet of paper and start in the middle with a bubble of what I most want to write about and then just sort of fill up the paper with ideas until something is compelling enough to spark the commitment of words to the page. For the most part the main method of my prose creation is sitting in front of a word processing document prompt at the specified hour in the early hours of the morning and beginning to type. That is the opposite of planful and for the most part the writing it produces could go anywhere. My writing trajectory from stream of consciousness style writing does not necessarily move forward toward something. It really just builds from the moment into the next like waves hitting the shore. It’s reliable and it happens every day, but it is the same sort of routine unless a storm approaches. In my case I’m typically waiting for that writing storm to show up based on a spark of creativity.

This post will go out via my Twitter link automation that is deployed in WordPress. It did sort of entertain me when I used that automation to send out entire posts as Tweet storms. I’m not entirely sure why that was such an amusing event to create, but for some reason it really did bring some joy to the process. After this post is submitted and published out to the internet I’m going to capture an extra backup of the whole thing just for fun. A daily backup occurs, but for some reason I like to capture my own off cycle backups from time to time. It is probably akin to the same reason that I still buy Blu-ray movies in their physical form. Streaming from the cloud is probably more popular, but the act of collecting the Blu-ray movie discs and storing them in the living room still has some value to me and probably a few other people. The number of people who get volume from it is shrinking. That is obvious from the diminishing sales numbers.


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