“I’m Not Dead!”

***WARNING: THIS POST IS EXTREMELY STUPID. READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK.***

Yes. Alright. I know. I stopped blogging for a while. I have my reasons, and I’ll get to those, but first, I’d like to tell you a little story. Please, come on in.

(There is a video in this post. There will be a naughty word in this video. If you do not like naughty words, feel free to hum loudly for the last few seconds of the video. This word is also repeated later on in the blog post. You may wish to employ tactical blinking or something.)

It is a fact that most people who start a blog don’t tend to use it for very long. They’ll throw out a couple of articles which may or may not be good, and then get bored. It’s very tempting at this stage for a blogger to just tick off ‘write a blog’ on their mental checklist of life-goals, have a self-congratulatory cup of tea, and find some other project to take a half-arsed stab at.

Occasionally, after a few weeks of inactivity, one of the more dedicated bloggers will feel guilty about having stopped writing and attempt to revive their blog. This almost always comes in the form of a post jokingly entitled “I’m not dead” or something along those lines. In this post they will apologise to their readership – at this point most likely consisting solely of their parents and one or two of their more patient friends – and promise to get back into writing, maybe even setting themselves a ludicrously unachievable goal or two.

Amusingly, most of these bloggers will then sit back, tick off ‘revive blog’ on their much-maligned mental checklist and never post again. Sometimes they’ll attempt to re-revive, but this usually has the same outcome. Through this process, those who are not dedicated, interesting or unemployed enough to keep a decent rate of blogging going will eventually give up and stop trying. I don’t know if there’s a set of statistics about how long the average WordPress page stays operational, but I’d love to take a look.

“But Ben,” I don’t hear you ask, because I’m writing this alone in my bedroom at six in the morning. “What is your point here? What does all of this mean? Why can’t you just say ‘sorry, I forgot to blog for a bit’ and be done with it?”

Shut up.

What all of this means is that I am about to make a clever analogy. This pattern of activity, silence, revival and abandonment means that the blogosphere* ends up looking rather a lot like this:

Some notes:

– Monty Python is timeless, and will always be funny.

– Bloggers of the ‘post once, drop from the face of the earth’ variety are dead on the cart.

– Occasionally, a blogger will protest the demise of their blog – these people are represented by the old man being carried by the legend that is John Cleese.

– Cleese himself represents the combined blog-destroying forces, which are too numerous to name in their entirety. Examples would be things like a lack of time, or a general dearth of interesting thoughts.

– The King represents blogs that have become established and successful

– ‘Shit’ represents drab, uninteresting writing, which nobody wants to read. If nobody reads a blog, it’s only a matter of time before the blogger stops writing altogether.

I’ll just let you take a moment here to appreciate how well thought-out that analogy was. I put a lot of time into that.

…

…

Right.

Moving on. In the Python analogy, I’m currently on Mr Cleese’s back. I’m not quite ready to give up on blogging just yet. My initial goal of writing an article every week has obviously ended in disaster, due in no small part to the fact that I now have a full-time job in a pub. Don’t get me wrong – I do enjoy my job, all of the staff are fun and friendly, and they hardly ever shout at me. However, it doesn’t leave me with nearly as much time to come up with interesting thoughts, let alone write about them at length.

Nevertheless, that’s exactly what I’m going to try to do.

I’ve got one game review half-written, with a second already forming in my head. These should both be up by the end of the month. With any luck, I’ll be able to convince more people than just my real-life friends to read my words, which will spur me into writing more. I’m also going to continue my Things That Are Wonderful series, which is just a way for me to quickly share amusing, interesting or otherwise wonderful things that I have found on the internet.

Okay. Job done, I think. I’ve managed to achieve all of my objectives for this post:

1. Announce that I’m going to get back into writing my blog

2. Complete objective 1 in such a way that I subtly force myself into actually writing a long-ish blog post

3. Forever ruin the “Bring out your dead” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail for myself by massively over-analysing it.

4. Choose a title image for the post by searching google images for ‘blogging’ and blindly inserting the first result, regardless of how appropriate it is.

5. Do a joke involving a numbered list

Finally, a little note to my regular readership: I’d like to thank both of you for your continued support, and I assure you that I will shortly be posting some actual content, not at all like the kind of self-referential twaddle you’ve just been reading.

Right. That’s it. See you next time.

*’Blogosphere’ is a silly word

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