The Purpose of this Blog

I hate writing.

This is probably due to the fact that it takes me half of forever to get words on a page. This is partially due to a lack of typing skill (50-60 WPM on a good day) but more from never being satisfied with a sentence or a paragraph or a letter; I continually revisit and revise, adding or shifting comments, until I eventually tire of the mess and hit either Send or Print — leaving in some places dangling parts and participles, ill-turned phrases, and jagged fragments of thought not safe for human consumption, and in others a baroque festoonery of nested adjectival clauses, indefinitely conjoined sentences, and simple purple prose.

So, I hereby make the following promise to you, O Internet: to write at least one blog entry every single day for a full year, each about a specific topic, each containing at least one hundred twenty-eight unique words — doubling halfway through. (And you're full of scary, scary people, O Internet, so I'd better keep that promise, hadn't I?)

I'm also going to set myself the following ground rules, because if I don't I'll talk myself into letting them slide sooner or later.

• A picture is worth exactly zero words, as are embedded objects, markup, and quotations of other people.
• Unique word-count is measured by cat | tr -c '[:alpha:]' \\n | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq | wc | awk '{print \$2}' after the above are removed.
  
• No days missed except in case of illness or computer failure.
• No Internet memes.
  
• No self-reference or reflection on the fact that I'm writing and that this is a blog, except on May or November 24th, unless it's directly affected my life in a notable way —
• — and, very specifically, no complaining about how hard it is to meet these restrictions, nor about my own writing at all.
• No more than one footnote in any seven-day period (except for citation of references).

Let's see if this works, shall we*?

*And by "we" I probably mean "me".