I hadn't been over at G'Day Mate for what seems like forever, and what did I find right at the top? A link to this Steven den Beste post where he says he is packin' up his boxin' gloves 'cause he is tired of the scrappin'. I have to admit that I did not drop by USS Clueless very often, usually not unless one of my regular reads linked to somethin' to be found there that seemed to be involvin' subject matter in which I might have some interest. I 'spose what was intriguin' to me was the reasonin' given for his haven laid down the quill:
For the last few months, each time I published a post, I mentally cringed a bit, thinking about all the kinds of letters I knew I'd get, things I could predict. You've sometimes seen me try to preempt those with DWL's.I 'spose I have got to be sorry to see him go, 'cause from what I saw from his writin', he always seemed to have a clear, concise and rational opinion about thin's. Still, I guess the vacuum he leaves could easily be filled by a snarky inaniac, right? Posted by Tiger at August 28, 2004 01:27 PMSeveral times in the last three weeks I thought of something which would make a good post, and then I stopped, and said to myself, "Better not."
I've learned something interesting: if you give away ice cream, eventually a lot of people will complain about the flavors, and others will complain that you aren't also giving away syrup and whipped cream and nuts. I put together this page which contains two days worth of my email, just so you could get some idea of what it looks like. It isn't all bad; it isn't all unwelcome. Very little of it is abusive. But the majority of it is burdensome.
To slice the email a different way, here's a collection of email regarding my last article about terrorism. Again, it wasn't all unwelcome, but much of it was more burden than pleasure.
Far too much of it was from people who knew better than me what I should have written, and wanted to tell me how to rewrite it. Those are the people who have made me cease getting pleasure out of my writing.