Bruce Sterling is
ending a blog that he maintained for decades. I don't know who he is, and I've never read his blog before, but he does have interesting things to say about what's good about blogging.
On what people pay for vs. what they care about:
People often paid me to write, and to speak, too, but the pay was never commensurate with the impact of the work. What people cheerfully paid for, and what they actually cared about, were different things.
…
That pay wasn’t even commensurate with my fame, because although I was a successful novelist, I was always more famous for writing texts that had paid me nothing.
So I came to understand that creative work that pleased the markets did not much affect people personally.
This reminds me of absolutely loving a $5 mobile game with programmer art vs. dropping $50 on an acclaimed game that you end up playing one time for an hour.
Even if I couldn’t package the things I knew in any way that any publisher would ever find viable, I simply knew things most people didn’t know. That feat was good in itself. “Real artists ship,” and yes, they do have to ship something, or else they’re not artists. But they don’t have to ship everything they know. That’s because they’re artists, and they’re not a shipping service.
This is a lot of why I do things.
He also talks about his sympathy for cops, which he partially explains. It's kind of interesting. I wonder what someone that has immersed themselves in cops solving real crimes think of cops that just go shooting Black people in order to preserve a racial hierarchy.
