In poker, there are three possible moves - matching the current bet by “calling” or “checking”, putting in more money and "raising” the bet, or "folding" to forfeit the hand and any amount bet in it. Most amateurs do not play aggressively enough, preferring to call or check too often. They can often improve their play just by restricting themselves to the two moves that represent a firm commitment - Raise or Fold, In or Out, and at the extreme, All or Nothing.
devoted readers will know that we take april first Very Seriously around here... so allow me to be Very Serious here for a post. i've never acknowledged site anniversaries before but the fourth one is coming up next month... in fact if anything i've been trying to avoid thinking about them because the first thing that comes to mind is always "well, another wasted year". on these occasions "creators" in this "space" usually like to write reflections about how leaving social media and making their own website has improved their life... devoted readers should also know by now that i would never dare to be so cliché... rather, i would argue that starting this site has ruined my life. it's all been downhill since may 5th, 2022, on that fateful afternoon in the basement of the University of Helsinki main library Kaisa-Talo (Fabianinkatu 30, 00014 Helsinki, Finland)
i must have had a premonition that it might be a momentous, uhh, moment because i took this picture of my setup that same day. maybe they can put up a commemorative plaque on that pillar back there... when i created my neocities account and uploaded an html file containing "the suboptimalist manifesto". this ended up being the gateway to developing an acute writing addiction... something about the mere possibility that someone might see my writing was enough to fuel a spree of posting. like with any addiction, i was soon making sacrifices in order to do more writing. grad school was the first victim only a couple months in, i quietly dropped out after discovering that writing what i wanted to in my free time had unintentionally destroyed my ability to produce the quick bullshit writing required to efficiently dispatch the annoying busy-work assignments you're always being ambushed with in classes (this was shortly before chatgpt was released, obviously). over the years the sacrifices kept coming and everything else withered away until it felt like i had little left besides writing and my site... the fact is that it's almost impossible to put together a body of work this extensive (not to mention the piles of unpublished drafts) so quick if you have much else going on... the secret to my productivity has always been that i haven't had a real jobby-job or a gfon top of that, i don't really partake in the Three Great Male Timesink Interests (三大男性暇潰し趣味) either (video games, sports, youtube), in fact for a while now i've kinda been treating writing like it is my full-time job, occasionally interrupted by side-hustles like running events or putting up christmas lights.
what do i have to show for all this sacrifice so far? well, very little besides having the "most popular writing-focused site on neocities", which i hadn't even realized until saddleblasters casually mentioned it as if it was common knowledge when i was staying with him a couple months ago... of course being big on neocities doesn't mean much, it's like being the largest microorganism in a scoop of pond water. the ugly truth is that up to now i've been throwing it all away for nothing... there's still time to either cut my losses and get out before it's too late... or double down and raise the stakes - Raise or Fold.
the safest option is always Fold, certainly it would be easiest to leave it behind and stop spending so much damn time on writing... but i can't help but feel that there's a good argument to be made for trying to Raise as well. the fact is that although i've been taking writing pretty seriously, there's still ample room to take it even more seriously... plus, there's probably never been a better time for making a career out of posting online, and since i haven't really made a serious attempt yet there's still a possibility i have what it takes to be a grand champion Poster, why not at least give it a try before giving up? posting only on neocities as i've been up until now, i haven't been playing for high enough stakes... the problem is that neocities is fundamentally not a serious place, it's a playground, the userbase is primarily teens, hobbyists, and cloutless losers (me). that plus the small size of the platform puts a limit to how far you can go on, even the most "successful" users are still nobodies, nobody can be said to have ever "made it" thanks to neocities alone. but there are plenty of places online where it's possible to post your way to success... in my case, i'm thinking of substack in particular, of course. i've been reading substacks since the early days years ago when the founders were still bribing their favorite bloggers to come to the platform, and in that time i've seen many make their names on substack alone, people i followed years ago when they only had a couple hundred subs are now quitting their jobs to go full-time and getting bylines in the new york times.
really, the truth is that i've always felt i should be on substack, i've been posting longform polished substack-style pieces here since the very start and some have even called my site "the top substack on neocities", i even alluded to this with my april fool's prank last year when i changed the site layout to look like substack. the reason i came to neocities instead is because back then i didn't feel like i was ready for substack yet, i had never done any serious writing before (due to years of video game addiction, probably) and i was too scared to immediately start posting online somewhere too "serious" or "real" after having been a lifelong lurker. i conceived of neocities as a low-stakes "tutorial zone" where i could grind out writing experience in relative safety until i was ready to move on to a harder level. this is partially why i've never considered myself part of any of the vague movements around here like the "indie web", "personal web", "old web", "small web", etc., my site wasn't created for the usual reasons people have here like "escaping social media" or whatnot. it's also why i've always kept a certain distance from the neocities "community" - my site has no button or links page, has never had any tags, i follow very few other sites, i only leave comments when replying to others under my own site updates, i carefully study the kinds of writing and content people on neocities seem to like so that i can post exactly the opposite - from the start i considered neocities just the first stepping stone on a much longer journey, and perhaps i got a little too comfortable and lingered longer than i should have... my site has been the "most popular writing-focused site" on the platform for months now, and if anything could be considered "beating the tutorial" it would be that... and i did it on hard mode no less, doing almost nothing to promote my site.
so, it is finally time for me to move on and make a substack... i won't be abandoning this site entirely, i'll continue to maintain some of my more unique pages, but all my substack-shaped work will be posted over there from now on. that's not all - in order to FULLY COMMIT, i'm raising the stakes even further by kicking off the substack transition with a thirty-day bay area blogging residency where you must publish at least 500 words a day or get kicked out, some of those here with Elite Ball Knowledge may have heard of it, it's called inkhaven. if i find that super difficult or miserable then i probably wouldn't have a good time being a "pro" writer either... filter early and hard, i say. believe me i really tried to get out of it, but the universe sent me signals so strong that even a seasoned skeptic like myself had to surrender... i'm not quite sure i've been dealt the best cards for it, the pressure will be the most intense i've ever felt and my work is definitely going to end up in front of some critics with intimidating pedigrees... but if you bluff hard enough, you can still win with a bad hand.
oh yes, i almost forgot... i'm saying this for the first time ever: SUBSCRIBE NOW!!!