I'm thinking about moving this blog...
...to another platform.
Hi, it's been a while. I haven't written anything this year. My last post was December 31, 2022.
The main reason is that I've had to deal with more loss and grief in my life. Someone close to me was diagnosed with cancer, endured months of radiation and chemotherapy, and died anyway.1 I've also had some deflating garbage to wade through at work. My enthusiasm for doing anything has been rather low.
Besides all that, Blogger is a terrible platform for blogging. The interface changed a while a back and ever since then, composing in the little box has been unpleasant. It takes forever to get the formatting and spacing right. I could modernize the look from a “classic” theme 2 to one that has a “Layout” view...
...but that doesn't improve the writing experience.
So. I already have a WordPress blog. I may start posting there. The old neurocritic.blogspot.com site would become an archive of posts from 2006 – 2022.
The bigger question is whether I have anything relevant to say any more.
Footnotes
1 ...less than three months later. If you ask me, the cause of death WAS the treatment (and its side effects).
2 “Hey there, 2004 wants their Rounders template back.” An SEO Guy even blogged about 11 Huge Reasons to AVOID Blogspot in 2023.
3 There are other platforms, sure. In a hilarious meta-example, a post on Medium provided a tutorial on Substack, which started as a platform for e-mail newsletters (whether monetized or not). But it also has a very blog-like look — here's Margaret Atwood's, for example. Now they have Substack Notes, which is in the running as yet another Twitter replacement. Here's a thread on dumplings.
posted by The Neurocritic @ 2:51 AM
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10 Comments:
I've been enjoying your blog for years. dunno if you have anything you still want to write but I just wanted to chime in to say that.
<3
You might want to consider including comments about AI, which is very closely connected to neuroscience and is getting a lot of unwarranted hype right now.
Whenever you do have something to write, I will read it.
What Leli said.
Sorry for your loss. As a male computer nerd, women friends were in short supply in my youth, but that didn't stop me from losing two to cancer. And both my brothers in-law's spouses died of cancer.
The cancer blokes saved our butts on Covid (the mRNA vaccine trick was developed to do personalized cancer vaccines). They need to get back to work on cancer. Please.
By the way, for some nasty AI snark see my (as DJL) recent comment (unless the blogger deletes it) at:
http://montclairsoci.blogspot.com/2023/05/your-gp-or-chatgpt.html
When you press pause on human we start. There is an amazing book on that: Do Pause. You are not a To Do list. So perhaps you just must pause to restart.
Anyway, the content can be moved to WP as well (export Blogger feed, import to WP). Just add the "archive" tag and leave it there.
And if you need help, Blogger can as well be moderated to a large extent (front-end), I've done that several times. But indeed that will not solve the editor itself.
But technical solutions will not solve the motivational issue.
Thank you all for your comments (sorry for the delay in approving the most recent ones). I appreciate your encouragement and suggestions.
It‘s definitely understandable that people want to cheer you up by telling you how great this is (and that you‘re needed). My first impulse was to do the same. Because it’s true: you‘re great, this is great, your voice will be missed.
BUT you have done an amazing job. You have been putting a lot of energy into this blog without monetizing it like others did. Or to create a public brand out of it that could be commercialized.
If you feel that it’s time for something new (something completely different): It is/was a great gift - it‘s not your duty.
You can give us a chance to find you somewhere new if you feel like it some day.
Thanks for everything.
I wish there was a better post to leave this comment on, but I want to add to other commenters in saying that your writing over the past decade has been genuinely inspiring. As a grad student in the early 2010s, you and Neuroskeptic were two of the only people I found who were making clear and rational arguments. Reading your blog after wading through bamboozling academic literature was like coming up for air.
Whether you keep blogging or not, your ideas will live on. I am writing an undergraduate biological psychology textbook for a good publisher and your ideas are part of how and why I’m doing this. I have no doubt that there are other people in similar situations.
Thank you.
Livia here. I’ll host it for you.
Thanks for the offer!
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