Running a website is like having a peach. You hold the peach, make a little room for the ant to hide, squeeze the peach and dream about you… woman.
More specifically, you become the ant. You make a little virtual space on the good ol’ net, crawl inside and get cozy. You end up with the splendid experience of living in a peach, but few others can relate to it because they do not live in peaches. They live in houses or churches or under couches. They do not really care about peach-based living, beyond the novelty of the idea. The technicalities are a bit boring… what to do about the juice flowing down the walls, how to appropriately spackle to curb fruit rot, whether track-lighting is the best choice for illuminating the chambers… it asks too much of the audience that they be interested in every aspect of living in a peach.
So the author is presented with quite a dilemma. Does he write extensively about peaches, given his vast knowledge and experience of peaches? Or does he write about things that may be more appealing to his audience?
People like curios. People like to read about curios. Living in a peach is a curio. Sleeping in a toaster is a curio. Having liquid fire on tap in the bathroom is a curio. A vivid description on how one has completely lost his sense of time is a curio. A well-written exposition on the extended senses (sense of time, sense of rhyme, sense of rhythm, sense of the sexes, sense of love, making/not-making sense, confusion between sense and scents) would be a nice curio.
When the writer starts going into much more detail than the reader cares to know, the curio ceases to be a curio. It becomes tedious and uninteresting. …so then, does the writer serve his own desires and write about all the tedious details of living in a peach because he finds them interesting, or does he have a responsibility to serve the reader and find a more accessible topic?
In two words: Yes.
The Existential Complications of Cromlechism(.)(!)(?)(…)
Immediate conclusion: His (or her, but our language is so crippled by the lack of a non-gender possessive adjective… unfortunately using either word in substitute for the other can be a loaded statement, but using both with / is just plain ugly and such abusers of the language should be sent to the Hell of Asymmetrical Terminological Constructs) purpose
RESET. Immediate conclusion: His purpose is to write. Audience be damned. They’re along for the ride, whether they wanna be or not. To not allow the author to write would defy the teleology murmuring in his ear. The author may be crippled in trying to appeal to his audience (which, really, is a noble thing for him to do. He sacrifices a part of himself to communicate ideas to others in a way that is entertaining and sensical. It pulls him out of self-indulgent writing, which arguably serves no purpose but that of the actual writer, and grinds the thoughts on a millstone until they can be interpreted and loved by others) and
RESET: Immediate conclusion. His purpose is to write. Audience be damned. They’re along for the ride, whether they wanna be or not. To not allow the author to write would defy the teleology murmuring in his ear. The author may be crippled in trying to appeal to his audience, and while there are definite benefits in imposing that restriction, sometimes the damages can outweigh the benefits. (But who can be the authority in deciding whether “the damages outweigh the benefits” is true? We have no Judge Dredds of the writing community darting around on flying motorcycles, deciding absolute Truths when the question arises.
Do the damages really outweigh the benefits? Are my impressions accurate? If they aren’t completely accurate, are they accurate enough to generally decide the best path?
We will never know until we create a perfect copy of the universe, parallel to our own, and try out our hypotheses there. What would have happened if I went left? If I wrote about HTTP statistics instead of peaches? Well, just plug your event into the Second Universe and choose the path you could have taken. Accelerate time to the present, and see where each strand ends up. Oh, but there are so many complications with this model. If you went left you would never have ended up looking at the Second Universe, wondering if you should have gone left. Also, at that fork the two futures completely diverge from one another. Left would end up with its own set of left/right choices, and right as well. Would you not want to know where each one of those branches could have led as well? It quickly sprouts into a tree of an incomprehensible number of paths. A person could be driven insane at the helm of this machine. Neitzsche would say focus on the future, instead.
)
RESET: Immediate conclusion. His purpose is to write. Audience be damned. They’re along for the ride, whether they wanna be or not. To not allow the author to write would defy the teleology murmuring in his ear. The author may be crippled in trying to appeal to his audience, and while there are definite benefits in imposing that restriction, sometimes the damages can outweigh the benefits. If he has something he wants to say, nothing should be substituted in its place.
And this conclusion is riddled with problems. It was conceived before all the above points were made during its creation. It assumes the quality of the future (damages = worse future, benefits = better future) can be accurately determined by the writer. All I really wanted to say in this entry is this:
Cromlech is picking up 30 hits a day and the number appears to be increasing slowly. The Statesman website get 40 – 60 hits a day. Keep those hits coming people! We’ll beat out that dastardly newspaper yet. My next goal is to beat out the UMD online registration site. It got nearly 700 hits on Friday. We can do it. I know we can.
Or something silly to that effect. This entire expose happened because I wasn’t sure if I should write what I want or write what readers might want. I am very, very pleased with the result, regardless. If you don’t like it you can eat a bag of hell.
Do not put sewing needle in mouth and start coughing. VERY DANGEROUS. They should put warnings on these suckers.
