This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

This post is num­ber 401. Over 3 years of my life doc­u­mented. Wow, I never thought I would get this far. Things sure have come a long way since post num­ber 1!

In fact, here is post num­ber 1:

One of the best authors in the world is back and blogging:

Wil­liam Gibson

Suc­cinct!

I shud­der to think how many words are in this blog in total. At least a nov­els worth. Why can I write this and yet not fin­ish my real novel? They both require the same type or con­cen­tra­tion and effort. My novel sits at 110 thou­sand words and needs another 30 thou­sand. This blog must eas­ily eclipse that. I think per­haps it is because, with a blog, I have an audi­ence. That is the attract­ive thing about blogs, you feel that you are talk­ing to oth­ers. There is noth­ing as pleas­ing as hav­ing someone come up to you and say how much they liked your writ­ing. I have had someone I never met before stop me in the street. Ser­i­ously. He was a fan, he said. I didn’t even think any­one was read­ing this stuff!

I star­ted blog­ging because I wanted to sharpen my writ­ing tools. I had read that writ­ing was a vice, and must be encour­aged like a vice or it will never be any good. The best way to become a writer is simply to write. All the time. I don’t worry too much about hit­ting a home-run every entry. I know that some will be caught and some will sail out of the park like shoot­ing stars. I just never know which will be which.

In a world full of blogs and now full of face­book, I find my writ­ing is mov­ing away from “report­ing” stuff that is hap­pen­ing on the web. I still post the “cool things” I find, but I get much more out of actu­ally say­ing some­thing to my audi­ence that they might con­nect with. I also like right­ing wrongs (as I see them) and noth­ing gets my writ­ing juices flow­ing like a poorly writ­ten or researched main­stream media article!

So, in cel­eb­ra­tion of 401 posts, here is my per­sonal top 5:

5. Men, means what? Some­thing I wrote on the way into work one day. It was essen­tially for my wife so that, per­haps, she can under­stand why I love air­soft so much and what it means to me per­son­ally. I pos­ted this on the top air­soft for­ums on the web and received so many pos­it­ive feed­back points (known as rep points; given for good top­ics) that my points count went from 10 to over 100!

4. Weakened Goul­bane Walk­through This was a write up I did for a very tough quest in Ever­quest 2. I include it here because it was my first pop­u­lar post. I have more hits on this post and more com­ments here and on the EQ2 for­ums than almost any other. This post was the defacto walk­through for that quest and, if I say so myself, quite funny to read for me even now.

3. The Story of my New PC This epic three part post recoun­ted the unmit­ig­ated night­mare that was order­ing a very expens­ive PC from a com­pletely ter­rible sup­plier. The hor­ror of those weeks haunts me even now and I think I got more gray hairs from that than any other event in the last 5 years. Writ­ing it, mak­ing it funny and laugh­ing about it with my friends was the most import­ant cath­arsis ima­gin­able. If any post made the blog worth while for me, it was this one.

2. Ask Jeeves is alive! Jeeves was a ‘semi intel­li­gent’ search engine I used to use back before Google owned the web. You could query the sys­tem using simple plain Eng­lish and the AI was sup­posedly able to dis­cern what you meant. One after­noon, I came up with the idea of simply chat­ting to it. This was the res­ult. An amaz­ing after­noon and one, that if it had happened today, would have gone to the top of Digg I have no doubt. This was the fun­ni­est post I ever wrote.

and finally

1. V for ven­detta, the eth­ics of ter­ror This is the post that means the most to me. It actu­ally came about because watch­ing V for Ven­detta pushed my mind over the limit. That film codi­fied for me how I felt about the War on Ter­ror that is even now being fought in all our names. I had suffered a ter­rible feel­ing of dread about the WOT, but wasn’t able to get a good handle on it up until this day. This is the post that has meant some­thing more. I will not for­get my Muslim friend who said that he had prin­ted it out and shown it to his friends. It is a tirade against the cur­rent think­ing, against the stu­pid­ity of our gov­ern­ments and the futil­ity of their actions; the dis­hon­our and suf­fer­ing. If any­thing, such suf­fer­ing is get­ting worse every day. The Inter­net will soon be the only place one can com­ment against what is sup­posedly a demo­cratic action and it is up to all blog­gers to keep blog­ging on whatever they damn well want. I know that rants are the easi­est things to write, but still this post is my favourite.

Oth­ers could have included my recent post on pro­cras­tin­a­tion, or my air­soft post about head­shots. All ones I think are worthy are here:

OCJ Clas­sics

What would your top 5 be?

Any­way, back to work­ing on my novel. There is much one can write about in life, many ideas that you wished you had writ­ten down. Ideas are the most import­ant thing in the entire world. Ideas are free­dom. Without ideas, one can never be free. Ideas are the found­a­tion of human­ity, the seed of us all and ideas are bul­let proof.

Here’s an idea, why don’t you write some down? You never know, you may even spark the next revolu­tion of the mind.

Basho.

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