At the moment I’m considering cleaning up all the bookmarks from my Chrome browser. I have a folder with all the old bookmarks I have been accumulating over the years. It might be easier to simply delete the folder given that none of those bookmarks are probably necessary to keep. Well that happened. I was seriously sitting around looking at the bookmarks I had dragged to a folder on my Chrome browser. It was a true act of unproductive nonsense. 

Writing should have been a primary task yesterday. Instead cleaning things up took priority for some reason. I could have spent the whole day just typing away in my office, but instead of using that time wisely I cleaned out the main draw on my Alava credenza. It really did get cleaned out. Everything that had been shoved in the drawer was carefully taken out and set gently on the floor and things were sorted, thrown away, and a few cords were sent to the basement to reside in the cord box. Several other cleaning projects occurred throughout the and my grand plans for writing simply fell by the wayside. 

Today however will be different. I’m already beyond the paltry number of words produced yesterday. It is entirely possible that I’ll be able to really dig into a few things today and tomorrow making solid use of the time off. I did take a look at the folder called novels in my publication collection. It has roughly 20 false starts in the form of formatted and stored novels. Most of them are not very long and that is what stopped them from being shared with the world. They are previous works that are between short story or novella length. Most of them were started about ten years ago and getting back into the right headspace to complete them is going to be interesting. 

Instead of focusing on writing some of the academic articles that I have outlined for future publication my interests seem to be drifting from non-fiction in the realm of fiction. It has been some time since I would sit down and hammer out the better part of a novel in a few days or maybe even a night. That type of prolific writing was something that happened from time to time. I would simply lay down with a laptop or sit at a desk and do nothing but create prose. Getting back to that level of productivity is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about from time to time. It is something that I fondly remember and that spark does arrive sometimes. You have to respect the spark of creativity and seize the day when it shows up. 

I may end up releasing all the content from my weblog back into a public status. Back on February 19, 2021 I moved a ton of content to a private status. It looks like right now 253 posts are being held back in draft status and 2,130 are set to private. That means people who are members of the weblog would be able to see them, but given that the weblog does not have any members outside of the administrative accounts for posting that effectively renders the private content invisible. I’m now back up to 56 posts that are in a published status and it probably will make sense to take the content later today and just release it back into the wild. On GitHub it is possible for somebody to grab my writing corpus and train a GPT-2 model that literally writes in my style of prose creation. Given that synthetic prose creation will soon outpace actual prose creation, having the content as private seems unnecessary.  

I have spent a ton of time thinking about what happens to content over time and the nature of permanence within a weblog space. For the most part the internet does get some archiving, but for the most part most work is ephemeral. It has a place and time and fades either into the pile of content that is amassed over time or in very rare examples it ends up being curated as part of the collective academy of human thought. Only a very small sliver of the collective works of humanity reach that status. I’d have to really focus on writing something profound to hope to get a few missives into that pile of remembered history.

I used the export feature in WordPress to create an XMl file of all my content before releasing the private content back to the wild. Hitting the double chevron from the posts screen took me to the oldest posts contained in the 2,130 private collection. They were from back in 2004 it looks like the earlier content is not even loaded to this weblog anyway. Instead of releasing all the content I moved one of the 9 pages of the archive from private to public. That moved the total of published posts to 307 and effectively released all the posts back until the end of 2019.

That exercise turned out poorly. It looks like the Twitter integration got excited about the content moving to a published status and sent out hundreds of tweets in a matter of minutes. It took me a lot longer to delete all the duplicative tweets than it did to make the error in the first place.