15 thoughts on “A Milestone Poll”

  2. Psychological insights! And please tag them as such. You won’t believe how often I want to refer back to an old post of yours but I’m unable to find it because I can’t remember the right keyword to search for it.

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  3. I LOVE the book reviews. It’s so hard to find reliable book recommendations.

    But I also really appreciate other types of posts: this is my main source for having any idea at all what’s going on with the UKR war, I really enjoy the productivity advice and occasional psych commentary. It’s all good. I still read this blog because it has a pretty high signal/noise ratio, and that includes all of those types of posts.

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  4. So I actually stuck around after some food posts. 🙂

    But here’s a cautionary tale about giving your audience too much …

    Once upon a time, there was an Australian sci-fi writer who decided to let the people in his fan base, specifically those on one of his forums, drive the development of his next novel.

    So he got that going, and he’d respond to his more ardent fans by giving them more of what they wanted.

    The problem was that his fans had no real insights into what made good stories as they were good consumers of stories rather than good producers.

    Inevitably this led to the kind of book that goes exactly where you suspect it’s going to go, and it does that.

    Now this writer wasn’t starting out, mind you, but had one solid breakout novel and a later novel that was also excellent.

    But he listened to his fans, gave them what they wanted, and it was a bit shit.

    That didn’t stop Hollyweird from optioning the novel, but it’s over a decade later and a movie version would flatline even harder on delivery.

    He didn’t make that same mistake with his “dictionary-esque” novel that followed, and people chose to regard the “mechanical” novel as an experiment, one that gladly would not be repeated.

    Hardly anyone ever mentions that novel, least of all the writer, and why would you if you might need to fess up to how easy it is to be remote controlled into a disaster by a fan base that does not really know what it wants.

    So in addition to being “a decoration and a warning” on the edge of a literary coin, this is also a little Crazy Days and Nights (CDAN) styled puzzle for you to solve.

    I didn’t make it all that hard, and should the writer drop by, at least it was a supposedly interesting thing you won’t be tempted to do again.

    BTW, there are worse things to happen to a writer than getting remote controlled by a fan base, but the list isn’t very long.

    Don’t let it happen to you.

    Besides, I wound up here because of talk about food, so the tick box for “Other” with commentary, that’s sorted. 🙂

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      1. “interpret the results of the poll as people demanding more polls”

        Or you could go woke and declare that polls are rooted in white supremacy and those who take part in them need to do better and educate themselves and then do a bunch of posts on how progressive and genderfluid the Aztecs were until the evil Catholics convinced them there are only two sexes and made them practice slavery and replaced the wholesome blood they used in their intensely ecological spiritual tradition with an evil European narcotic….

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      2. Yes, but as the polls increasingly become a Constructivist narrative in which the writer instructs the fan base on how to drive the writer better with remote control …

        It’s truly the Devil’s work: oh, but you wanted too much of a “good thing”, did you?

        Observe the horror of the tempting of fate and its subsequent arrival! 🙂

        You see, Cliff likes imagining dystopian scenarios most people would be happy to avoid.

        But I’m an architect.

        I can see how very easy it would be to design a system of self-medication via a blog, where the writer gets supply by getting the fan base to provide cues for that supply so everyone can enjoy their symptom (and thanks for that vision, Slavoj Zizek).

        And so the true dystopia, for the sci-fi people at least: the polls feed a gigantic Attention Monster that has come about as a result of autopoietic mechanisms smashing up on the shores of Big Data.

        You will all be entertained.

        Your entertainment will be mandatory.

        You will resist the Attention Monster only to be consumed by its comforting ease …

        … and I think I just imagined Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” crossed with George Orwell’s “1984” with perhaps more than a little bit of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and way too much HP Lovecraft …

        Now I need a really stiff drink. 🙂

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  5. Seconding the votes for book reviews. I’ve discovered a number of authors through this blog, including Bauman, Clive James, and Byung-Chul Han. I’m about to begin The Guest (I waited for it to come out in paperback).

    (commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)

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  6. The reasons that keep me coming to this blog are that it is very intellectual without being presumptuous about it, it keeps me informed about what is going on in Ukraine, and last, not least, it refers me to some wonderful writers that I might not have encountered otherwise.

    The cherry on the top: there are very few, if any, obnoxious trolls.

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  7. “scaring me a bit right now with the completely natural delivery of this peroration”

    A useful talent is being able to debate both sides of an issue…. you don’t want to get me started on topics like capital punishment or decriminalization of drugs or separation of church and state…

    Being able to articulate something from a side you don’t agree with (including knowing what emotional buttons to try to hit…..) like I said…. useful.

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