Tag: Self-Reflection (Page 2 of 2)

“You can’t be a writer unless you write. Otherwise, you’re just a thinker.”

I’ve wanted to have a blog for years. To have a platform to share my thoughts with the world; to build up a cool and diverse archive of posts on a variety of subjects; to follow in the footsteps of my all favorite authors who have blogs of their own, that they use to keep their fans updated on upcoming book news and whatnot. Somewhere I can post for posterity, outside of the disposable content mills that make up modern social media.

And then I finally created jessepirnat.com. I’ve had the means to start my ideal blog for almost 3 years now… So why haven’t I done it yet?

Recently, a video was released which set the long-dead Homestuck fandom aflame with drama. You don’t really need to watch it (I mean… unless you’re curious about the very troubled production of the Homestuck Kickstarter game). But to make a long story short: Andrew Hussie, the writer of Homestuck, made his first public comments on the Kickstarter game in years, and he unintentionally portrayed himself as a terrible businessperson and kind of an asshole.

This isn’t a post about that though. It’s a post about authors, how they engage with their fans, and how a bunch of stupid fandom drama made me ask myself: what kind of content creator do I want to be?

I’ve never been drunk before.

Some time in early 2011, I discovered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality—a Harry Potter fanfiction in which Harry is a child genius in math and physics and psychology and probability, and he gets his Hogwarts acceptance letter and finds out magic is real, and then he vows to use Science to learn how “magic” really works—among other ambitious goals, like wanting to reveal magic to the entire world, and end death forever by making everyone immortal.

It was unlike anything I had read before, and as a casual fan of both Harry Potter and nerdy things in general, I was hooked.