Adam's House o' Fun

I read recently some very basic tips for maintaining a blog and how to maintain a good readership. The simplest, and most important item was: update regularly. I suck.

Realistically I'm not sure where this blog lies. I had good intentions to update it a while back, in the hopes that it would rejuvenate my interest in sitting down and writing in it. Initially when I started out, this was an outlet for comedy and rants while I sat at my desk in a really boring job that didn't have much for me to do. Then it became an outlet for me to write about squash, poker, and other things I was actively pursuing. I still pursue those, but I just haven't had a lot of desire to write about them, and even more so, I don't feel like there's any audience for them (which is ridiculous in itself, because based on how often I update, I have a reader-base of zero).

The things that interest me now are the same, and much more. As stupid as it sounds, I love playing Virtua Fighter 5 on my XBox360 (now supporting online play, previously the biggest hurdle to owning a good fighting game on a home console), and I really believe that the depth of that game is on par with my other hobbies. I spend a decent amount of time practicing, seeking out advice, and sparring with friends in order to continue improving. I like to write in order to learn, and that is no exception, but this blog is hardly the place to write long detailed articles about strategy and frame advantages in a nitaku situation. That's a pretty small niche I'm writing for. So, I made another blog, and write about it there. That's good, but now I'm cutting down on the time I have available to write here.

What else is there? There's day to day things I can write about. Small updates about volunteering for the beer festival, or hanging out with friends, and things like that. I don't know why, but I've never enjoyed doing that. I hate it in fact. I can write three paragraphs at most before I lose interest and walk away from the entry. Maybe that's better suited to Twitter, or Facebook status updates. Working on the management team for VEMF this year was one of the more significant things I did in this half of the year, but you don't see any blog posts on that one. How come? There's half an entry written, but I can already tell you it's not going to get filled out any further.

I love skepticism and critical thinking. If there's one hobby that I apply on an hourly basis to my life, it's this one. Is this appropriate to write about? I think it is, and maybe that's the next direction that this blog goes in. I've always aimed to make this a tool that helped me learn, and in concert with that goal, provided other people a way to learn along with me, and avoid the mistakes that I've made.

The other piece of advice that I took away from the article on blogging was that you shouldn't restrict yourself to any one particular area. Be willing to blog about many different subjects, and let your audience choose whether or not they want to read about it. I guess this is the best approach, and maybe I just need to loosen up. Maybe some of the people that tumble past this website would be interested in reading about strategies in Virtua Fighter 5. It can't really be that much more obscure.

In this vein, I guess today's topic can be skepticism, and the theory is that I start improving my own ability to update. I sure wish it didn't take me so long to write out these soliloquies.

There are millions of different pieces of fudgy information that we're bombarded with on a daily basis. It can get pretty overwhelming without some kind of method to weed these things out. I find skepticism interesting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, authority doesn't generally like it. Anytime authority has a reason to look at something with a critical eye, I think it's worth trying to figure out why. Skepticism causes us to question what we are told is true. As a method, it asks only that we question what we are being told, and ask for evidence to support that. Good evidence. Can you think of a reason why we shouldn't make an effort to follow a method like this in our daily lives? I can't..

I love how empowering skepticism is. With this tool at your side, you can approach any claim pushed towards you, and you can determine for yourself how likely it really is. You can consider something that a politician has said, and really dig down and determine how likely that is to be true. Simply put, it's fun to figure stuff out. Everyone likes to understand how a magician is accomplishing their trickillusion.

"This is stupid, I'm skeptical!", you say. I agree, you probably are. A lot of people are skeptical, to some degree, in their everyday lives. But many of us reserve a special place in our head for our pet ideas and notions. For many of us, that's religion. For some of us, it's ideas that we think are neat and fun to believe in, like UFOs visiting earth. Sometimes its a belief in things that we've been raised to believe. We often don't even think to question something that we've held to be true since we were kids.

The best thing that skepticism and critical thinking can do for you, above all, is help you feel solid and concrete in your own beliefs and daily values. If you are able to go through your own beliefs with a skeptical eye, and question why you believe in them, what about the evidence you find compelling, and whether or not those beliefs are rational, you'll come out on the other side with the confidence and consistency that can only be acquired by turning a skeptical eye inwards. This is the type of confidence that allows you to discuss your own beliefs and opinions without getting upset, and without feeling insecure, rather than the type of confidence that is fabricated by buying lots of bumper stickers (support our troops!) and being fervently homophobic, etc.

Let's end with a simple piece of critical thinking advice for the day: The people that are the loudest often have the least to say, and are the least confident in what they're telling you. Maintain your cool (and drink milk).