Standing at the precipice of societal, economic, environmental and emotional collapse, it has become abundantly clear to me that what the world *really* needs is yet another blog from yet another internet rando. Who’s with me?

There’s a wealth of self-help type sites littering the internet that promote the therapeutic benefits of taking your negative thoughts and energy, putting them to paper, and then physically destroying them to free yourself of the demons contained therein. I have, in the past, used Twitter more or less to this end, though it would be disingenuous to deny the endorphin seeking behavior that the platform, and social media in general, trigger. Principally, Twitter was a place for me to express the thoughts that flittered across my mind without having to burden the people nearest me with them. These thought expressions tended to the random, occasionally scatological, often political and from time to time consisted of Shakespearean “bitings of the thumb”.

While I did find some level of therapeutic value in Twitter, engaging it with an expectation of promoting positive societal change was at best demoralizing. I never managed to master the Twitter algorithm and continually watched the things that I put my heart and soul into vanish into the ether like a fart in the wind, but with fewer retweets than your median gaseous emission . A treatise on a comprehensive plan to steer the ship of our democracy back toward a more representative form with the hope of eliciting substantive debate or discussion, for instance, would do well to get a single comment while a Jeff Bridges stoner reaction GIF to some pol’s inanity would achieve much broader purchase.

Some of that is logical, as the 280 nee 140 character limit is really best suited to capture the equivalent of cognitive flatulence and attempting anything more substantive likely ends in a metaphorical extreme best left unexplored. But it does seem like a massive missed opportunity given the reach of the platform, especially when one considers the few historic examples where it was employed successfully to that very end.

A New Direction

Now, as Twitter stands poised to be re-dedicated as an unapologetic tool of political and social misinformation, this time deliberately so, I simply cannot see shouting into that wind any longer. If we are going to be distracted from this multi-modal Armageddon like a catnip-crazed Chartruex at an EDM concert, it should at least be half as entertaining and maybe a little bit informative. I hold no illusions that this change in approach will be met with any better uptake than my efforts of the last 14 years, but I do anticipate feeling better about what I produce, and more importantly, what I am *motivated* to produce. And while I do intend to continue to utilize Twitter for its undeniable reach, it will only be as a method to connect people with content that interests them; I’ll be trading the cacophony for some joy. After all, at the end of this journey we are all on, the joy is what will have mattered.

My desire is to produce entertaining and informative technical content in the fields of computer science, machine learning, pattern recognition, software development, engineering in general, and the technologies and ethics related to the same. I’m hopeful, too, that I will find the time and motivation to produce content in other interest areas, particularly music, language, motorcycles and the maintenance thereof, and all manner of DIY. My goal is to produce content with which I would want to engage. My hope is that this will translate into content that you will want to embrace as well.

So stick around and let’s see where this goes.

-Kip