On content, writing, and art
https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-content-writing-and-art
Category: bloggers
The day is August 16th, the time is 6:42 am, and the temperature is a very enjoyable 16M-BM-0C. The sun is about to rise over the mountains, and I can see it appearing behind the car I just parked at the same parking spot where we ended our walk back in June. It's been a long summer so far, and not a great one when it comes to hiking. It's been hot. Probably too much. We hit a few records here and there, hitting 40M-BM-0C more than once and hiking when it's more than 35M-BM-0C and with more than 50% humidity is a miserable experience. But I wanted to go hike, I felt the need to be out there moving through nature, putting some steps in. And that's what I did. This is going to be a strange hike since it's part of the 44 churches loop I'm walking, but it's not going to be a point A to point B hike, and I'm also hitting all the churches of the sixth segment of the loop plus an
Yesterday I was emailing with the always lovely Robin Harford, who has a wonderful website over at eatweeds.co.uk. We were discussing the sad state of the web, and wondering what can be done to prevent Google and the others from abusing our content. And within that discussion, he mentioned his hate for the word "content". He's not the only one who feel that way; I've seen quite a few people mentioning this issue of the use of the word "content" to describe the product of someone's creativity. As I said to him via email, I don't have the same issue with the word, but that's maybe because I'm not a native speaker and to me "content" doesn't carry a connotation of any kind. If you say "content creator", though, that's a different story. He used the word "art" to describe the product of his work, and I have no issue with that. He's a writer after all, and writing is an art form. My 5 years of high school were spent at an art school, studying traditional goldsmithing, as well as art in general. And maybe this is how my brain is wired, but to me the word "art" usually
I just went through the queue of submissions to blogroll.org and probably deleted 95% of what was in there. This is not unusual, and has become more and more common lately. A big reason for this is clearly AI. The amount of slop submissions I'm getting is trending upwards, unfortunately. The other big reason is people attempting to use the blogroll as a way to get traffic for their shitty marketing sites, which is obviously annoying and a waste of my time. There's people who have submitted their stupid marketing sites multiple times, and I'm starting to contemplate the possibility of blacklisting domains because some people out there clearly don't know how to behave. But all this is making me question the value of big lists in an age where content is becoming more and more abundant. There are people out there--idiots, if you ask me--who think that coding has become a commodity, that everyone can make a site with just a few prompts, and that producing content worth consuming has become so incredibly cheap and easy. If you believe in all that, what even is the point of having a big list of sites worth consuming since cont
About two months ago, I discussed my fitness challenge where the goal was to get below 85.3kg, the oldest measurement I have on record on the scale's app, starting from 89.6kg. We're halfway through this challenge, and things got a bit out of hand because, as it's often the case, I tend to go a bit extreme when I set this type of goal. I hopped on the scale this morning and logged an 81.1kg, which is the lowest weight I have on record since I bought the scale 10 years ago. I'm feeling incredibly well, at least physically, if we ignore the heatwave with its endless series of days at 39M-BM-0C. The mental side of things, well, that's a different story, but I can assure you it's not related to the loss of weight. That's helping a lot ...
