For the past year, I have been living off of some very occasional part-time work for MetaMed, some odd jobs, and savings from various sources. It hasn’t been the most lucrative thing in the world, but it’s left me lots of time for thinking and writing.
Tomorrow I start Real Work. It’s just training for the first couple of weeks and I may have a bit of time, but after that I have been told it is not the sort of thing that leaves much time for thinking and writing (or eating, or sleeping). I am not going to keep up blogging once per day. Maybe I will be able to blog once a week? A couple of times a month?
Because I will be working on medicine and psychiatry full time, I expect this to turn into more of a Medicine And Psychiatry Blog than it is right now. I might change the About page and the tagline and some other stuff in order to reflect that.
Since I won’t have time to write complicated logorrheic essays anymore, I’ve gotten a Twitter account for my less verbose thoughts. If the past few days are any indication, it will be made entirely of corny puns and have no redeeming intellectual value. And another warning: if you follow me I probably won’t follow you back for a while – yesterday Twitter accused me of following too many new people and said it would delete my account unless I stopped.
Finally, I need to make a transaction in bitcoins soon but don’t want to expend the time/effort to become a part of the bitcoin economy right now. If anyone has bitcoins and wants to buy me something in exchange for the equivalent amount of fiat currency over PayPal, give me your email in the comments and we’ll make a deal (I’m happy to pay you slightly extra for your time).
As a long-time lurker I feel compelled to speak up now and say that this is probably my favourite blog on the internet, and your frequent posts will be sorely missed. Good luck with the new job!
I agree. You write an excellent blog and some of the most interesting things I’ve ever read.
Hear, hear!
I’ve wasted a lot of time reading blogs about all kinds of things around the web – time spent reading this one and its predecessor on the other hand were rewarded well in humour, useful information, and mild doses of the surreal. Good luck working full time, I look forward to whatever posts are to come.
Thanks (same applies to everyone else on this thread)
I second that!
+1. But I hope you will post once in a while, and I’ll take what I can get.
I have bitcoin.
Check out http://coinbase.com, very polished abstraction layer for converting dollars to BTC and back.
The author of this blog has become one of my virtue models. Of course, meatspace will continue to be the consensus reality for the time being, so its social and economic imperatives must be respected. Best of luck!
You frequent writing will be sorely missed, thanks for the fun ride.
*Your
I don’t know for sure what my #3 favourite blog is, but it’s one of the ones you link to. (slatestarcodex and its predecessor are #1 and #2)
If I ever use Kickstarter, it will be to subsidise your work as a blogger.
I look forward to your Medicine and Psychiatry posts.
Ouch. I didn’t realize you hadn’t actually started Real Work yet, and was assuming you were just superhuman enough to keep up the same blogging pace (or perhaps that Real Doctor Work wasn’t as all-consuming as I had been led to imagine).
Needless to say, I will feel the loss.
I too, will sorely miss your so far amazingly frequent and insightful blogging. This blog and it’s previous incarnation are without a doubt my favourite on the web, and your arguments and opinions resonate with me more strongly than those of the rest of the rationalist community (or any community). I particularly appreciate your balance of precision and a casual writing style, being precise when the argument needs it, and imprecise when it isn’t important. This aids readability a shit-tonne, and is a skill other rationalist writers often lack!
However I still have years worth of your old posts that I haven’t read to go through, so it’s not all bad. Though I think your ideas and general thought process were certainly becoming more developed over time, so the older posts are not as good as the new!
I first started reading you when Julia Galef linked to a post of yours about feminism, a post which really resonated with me, as did all that followed on the topic (creepiness/superweapons etc).
If you haven’t taken anyone else up on it yet I’d be happy to help out on the bitcoin front, I have only 0.4 bitcoins right now but if that’s enough you’re welcome to them. You can pay me by paypal, and I refuse to make any profit. Since I know who you are and you don’t know who I am, I am happy to cop the risk of making the bitcoin transaction first. Email me at chrisjbillington at gmail if you want to proceed!
Good luck with the job, and I hope you’re mistaken and actually find more time to blog than you expected :p
Good luck with the new job, and of course we understand that Real Life interferes with online things.
That pun about the “Cod of the Gaps” should have you strung up by your thumbs, though 😉
“Tomorrow I start Real Work.”
Congratulations! From your writings, I gather you’ve worked long and hard to get to this day.
“I won’t have time to write complicated logorrheic essays anymore”
You have been one of the most argumentatively even-handed, original-thinking bloggers I’ve ever read. Your posts will be sorely missed.
Indeed.
This is a tragic day for literary history.
Agreed.
Thirded.
Normally trading Bitcoins for PayPal is a bad idea, but from your blog/your ideas as a rationalist I trust you sufficiently to make an exception. Plus, I love seizing opportunities to get to meet cool people 🙂 My 3 day stay in Berkeley was much, much too short.
Send me a mail at Nuntius.Marii@Gmail.com, I can do large amounts.
Noooo, don’t change the tagline, it’s too wonderful.
Nooooooooooooo.
Thanks for some brilliant blogging. Good luck with the job.
Hey, if you don’t mind, could you put a link to your Twitter in your sidebar?
You should consider optimizing your already good-writer hability toward some kind of regular-writer with a cause.