30. 45 Days and 32,768 Words Later…

At last, the end! Despite having missed a day - Wednesday 2025-08-13 - I think I can declare victory. I managed my 2^15 words over the course of 31 posts, including this one, and didn’t go too far over; I came out with a post a day every weekday but one except the 4th of July and Bastille Day (and would have skipped today as Korean Independence Day); I expressed things I cared about decently clearly. A fair handful of people even approached me over the course of the last month to tell me they’d appreciated something I’d written about, or just that they’d read posts at all and found something worthwhile to chew on in one of them. If you’re one of those people, know that I was deeply grateful and solidly touched; I wasn’t really expecting anyone to care about my writing at all, let alone to like any of it.

Not everything went perfectly. I frequently found myself scrambling to come up with post topics, or writing about whatever came to mind. I don’t think my writing was especially polished, or that I did particularly well at addressing a readership with unknown inferential distance to and unknown background knowledge about my chosen topics. I generally went way over my intended wordcount per post, though this turned out mostly well in the end. I had major psychological difficulties writing about a few of the topics I ended up with posts about; for others, I found out that I didn’t actually have fully-formed ideas to share. A lot of interesting topics ended up buried in my “maybe not” list; who knows if I’ll ever write about those.

On that last topic, here are some of the working titles and descriptions of those varyingly dead-but-dreaming posts: “On the Reverend Bayes Cinematic Megaverse”, “My AI Safety Theory of Change”, “A Categorical Approach to Natural Latents: Part 0”, “Everyone Has Project Ideas; Here’s Five of Mine”, “My Theory of Cooking and Flavor Pairing”, “1d4 x 1d12 Rationalist Virtues: Ready, Set, Go”, “Economics By Way of Evil Mastermind Plots”, “My Least Favorite Alignment Plans That Still Maybe Sorta Work”, “On Pulling Shards of Glass Out of Your Heart, Staring Into the Sun, And Breaking Your Twisted Arm Deliberately”, “How To: Move Cross Country, Trial Therapists”, and “What It’s Like to Be a Fox of Tindalos”. Some of these I will likely get to in the future. Others I will likely not. If you want to read any of those in particular, tell me so; maybe it’ll even change my mind.


Enough self-criticism. What went well? At the absolute least, I overcame a lot of inertia built up over years and decades, and wrote things meant for public consumption. I wrote a frankly staggering number of words, in hindsight, and got a lot of practice writing in the process. More subtly, I’ve become more comfortable making things that aren’t maximally polished, thinking and working in public, and being less worried about the kind of hostile audience that I don’t actually encounter. Best of all, I committed to and finished a decent-sized project - something on par with NaNoWriMo - which at the start I was actually fairly sure I wouldn’t in fact finish. I was wrong, and I’m pleasantly surprised by that.

I even think I had a few standout posts in there: “4. Sevenish Words from my Thought-Language”, “7. For Grandma Kim, Who Has Lived Through the Singularity”, the investment casting two-parter (posts 8 and 9), “11. Why the First “High Dimension” is Six or Maybe Five”, “20. A Sketch of Helpfulness Theory with Equivocal Principals”, “22. Lorxus Favors: An Experiment in Self-Backed Giftlike Macroeconomics”, and “24. Everyone Has a Startup Idea; Here’s Four of Mine” all found their audiences, and I’m especially glad I wrote them.


I would like to say that I’m sure that this won’t be the end for my writing, but I can’t promise that; life can get in the way and the future is always mysterious. I plan to write about my thesis properly; I already have the post half-done and I managed to dig up the old thread from vulpine.club from way back in late 2021 that I’d feared lost when v.c closed. As it happens, though, I actually never quite got to explaining anything past basic geometric group theory in that thread, so I’ll have to write a lot from scratch. I plan to put up blog posts here every now and again, maybe once or twice a month, if all goes remotely according to plan - certainly at a much less frantic pace than I’ve kept up for the last month and a half.

For now, though, I’m having a very tasty mint to kick off a decent-sized break from post-writing; if you have feedback, requests, or praise, I insist on your sending that to me at https://admonymous.co/lorxus . I await it eagerly. Until then, keep on daring to know and striving for strength.


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