Whenever I think of writing something for this blog, I begin by spending all my mental energy trying to come up with a clever title for the article before I've even determined that the article subject or my thoughts on it is in any way worthy of publishing. I blame this on Twitter.
I had an active Twitter account for years, opening an account at 17 on November 1, 2008 and using it practically every day between then and December 31, 2020, when I decided to stop using the site. At the end, I posted something along the lines of "If the room you're in is filling up with Nazis, you better find another room before people think you're a Nazi too". (115 characters! Now I wish I'd posted that instead of the multi-tweet diatribe I'm sure I actually tweeted). That certainly wasn't the only reason I quit Twitter, but even pre-pandemic and pre-LLM, the rot of online discourse had really become clear, especially on Twitter. Why expose my malleable, innocent, naive inner mind to the harshness of those with agendas, bad faith, or just plain bad ideas? Why should I open myself up to that, and gain so little in return?
Of course, I did gain something from my Twitter account, meagre though it was in terms of followers and quality and overflowing though it was in terms of bad takes and desperation. I gained the eternal curse of being unable to think outside of 140 characters - of pithiness to the utmost. It's certainly visible in any text I produce, every thought compressed into two or three sentences and a general air of arch-ness and grim in-jokes, I suppose hoping to make imaginary followers retweet me, @ me, respect me, love me.
I've been vaguely trying for the last 5 years to free myself of the curse, and this blog is part of that journey. But blog posts have titles, and titles and tweets are first cousins. And so every post I even vaguely dream about writing, I think first about what title will be the cleverest, the shortest, the most bon of mots, and the curse strikes again. My thoughts become shaped by the process of thinking of a clever title. Whatever original thought I might have had for a new article gets chucked in the bin in favour of being able to title an article about article titles "untitled". Clever.