20/2 2008

I've been seated in front of my LCD.
All evening.

Injecting music.

Consuming the Collected works of Steve Yegge.

Not such a bad way to massage your brain I say.

Even if my reading pattern eventually and predictably became somewhat obsessive.

Then again, perhaps that goes kind of well with the writer ...

I have to say, I like his way of writing too. I mean, it's good writing. There's a lot of it, but there's an equal amount of thought behind it. If you look, you notice he writes even more than he publishes, and the things he does publish he edits. It's real writing. All content, no filler.

That's the kind of stuff I've always wanted people to put up on the web. Not necessarily the length (of course), but their own thought-through opinions on and ideas about things. Texts with meat.

I sort of found a goldmine of great reading when I stumbled on Steve's long-published essays.

All this just goes to prove one of his points; that you, too, should write online. No matter how small your readership might seem at first, if there's good stuff in there it will eventually get to good recipients.

So now I'm through the backlog, RSS feed for his current site tucked away in NetNewsWire and with a whole mountain of new ideas, books and subjects to add to my own lists.

I don't know if Steve's writings created it or if I appreciated his writings because of it, but in any case I feel a real excitement and eagerness to expand my knowledge and skills. I feel like I can learn things I used to consider difficult and/or boring, and that I can have fun doing so.

Learning on my own terms and for my own enjoyment.
Pretty sweet deal.

I wonder how long until I happen upon the next great essayist who will take my thoughts into completely new subjects ...

Perhaps one day I'll even start editing my own texts before I post them.

Now what?

So now it's pretty much my bedtime. But I've just read all this stuff, and I also just did my first eating since somewhere around 15:30 this afternoon. Feeling a little bit too revved up to fall asleep, in short.

I don't suppose bringing my Erlang book to bed is an ideal way to slow down either. But I will make some kind of attempt. Good night!