2026-02-08 17:57:00
There’s never been a shortage of posts about quitting blogging in the blogging community. I’ve contributed a few myself over the years.
It’s been a while since I last did it, so it’s hard to remember what the explanation was. Probably something that sounded wise and understandable at the time.
But was it the right reason? Was it really true?
I don’t know, but I honestly think it wasn’t.
Even though I haven’t actually gone through with it lately, the thoughts of quitting still pop up every now and then. Instead of acting on them, I’ve started trying to understand why they show up in the first place.
It always starts with something that sounds true to me. “I want to spend less time online. I want to focus on other things. I’ve enjoyed blogging, but it’s time for a change.”
Hard to argue with that, if it’s honest. But when I stay with those thoughts instead of acting on them, a different story slowly appears.
The embarrassing truth is that underneath that shiny armor of reasoning, this is what’s really going on. “I spend all this time writing, creating, and sharing. For what? Does anyone even care? Why bother continuing?”
That’s the sad soundtrack playing in the background. That’s the need for validation hiding behind something that sounds reasonable.
It’s a lie.
Yes, I do spend time writing, creating, and sharing. But I do it because I love it, not to be recognized or to make a living from it.
And I know that at least some people care. I see it in wonderful emails, lovely guestbook comments, and links from other bloggers. Thank you.
If you ever find yourself thinking about quitting blogging, don’t reach for the delete button right away. Stay with the idea for a while. Sit with it for a day, a week, or however long it takes to find the honest answer.
Just don’t quit blogging for the wrong reasons.
2026-02-08 04:11:00
Heya!
So, If you've been keeping up with my blogposts for a bit, you probably know about the guestbook service I'm making. Well, it's out now! You can get an invite! Go email me!
Alright, now that that's out of the way, lemme tell you a bit about the current state of things. Here's a list of all the features I've got implemented already:
And here's what's on the roadmap:
That's all I've got to say for now! I'll probably make another blogpost at some point going a bit more in-depth. For now though - have fun!
Oh right, here's the github repo.
2026-02-08 01:53:00
Véronique recently wrote about Bearblog’s discovery page giving her the ick, and its excellent. It feels competitive, and like some people might be trying to find a formula to get posts to the top of the discover list. It’s really the same small handful of blogs that get to the top of the list, some of which are clearly trying to sell something, like life coaching or some bullshit. There are a handful of people with large followings on here that drive the narrative. As Véronique said, “if you don't like it, don't read it.” True, fair enough, and I don’t because it’s really boring. My issue is that it could be really fun! What if the algorithm weighed average number of votes a blog gets per post, and when a post gets above that, it starts to show up on discovery? Just something to allow smaller blogs to get into the top 20 more often. I’d love it if it actually functioned like a discovery feed, as the name would suggest, as opposed to a list of posts by the top 50 blogs in terms of subscriber count or page views.
On the other hand, who cares? Maybe I just wanted to blog about something that isn’t death related. Anyway, here’s a few recent photos.
2026-02-07 09:12:00
This post is a response to Gabby's i can't stop thinking about goodreads' top 100, which I read earlier today and enjoyed.
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On Goodreads you rate books on a star system, with 5 stars the highest rating and 1 the lowest. For me, the rating function is a way to record how much I enjoyed a particular book. That way, when I sort my books by descending rating, I can see all the books I loved or made an impression on me at the top. My friends can use this information to deduce what books I would like or recommend.
I do not use this rating as a measure of perceived quality. There are plenty of classics I have given low ratings simply because I found them boring or unpleasant. (Looking at you, The Bell Jar.) In fact, I'm not sure I can judge objective quality of a book at all, if such a thing exists. (I am not sure it does.)
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Good art often requires work to get into and fully appreciate. Even though I adore classical music, if it were not for me spending most of my formative years in music classes, I'm not sure I would listen to classical music at all. When people tell me they don't like or listen to classical music, I don't interpret this as a knock on the quality of the genre. They just don't know what to listen for.1
I think literature works similarly. Great works demand effort. People wrote and spoke differently and alluded to things we're no longer familiar with, and now the burden is on us as readers to figure this stuff out. Most people (me included, to an extent) can't or won't put in the time and effort to make their way through challenging classics, so it follows that they wouldn't fully enjoy or appreciate many of the greats. (And you know what? I think that's OK.)
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Good art is also supposed to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Because of the topics they deal with and the spotlight they're thrust under, books in the literary canon are often surrounded by controversy. You could probably get most of your assigned books for middle and high school English without even leaving the Banned Books section.
In 1939 Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath to great fanfare, winning him a Pulitzer and a perennial spot on teachers' syllabi. Even he was not immune to the controversy:
In many communities The Grapes of Wrath was banned and burned, both for its occasional obscene language and its general themes. Some viewed it as communist propaganda, and many farmers and agricultural groups were irate that it fomented anger about their labor practices—the book was “a pack of lies,” the Associated Farmers of California declared. Steinbeck received regular threats following the book’s publication, and took to carrying a gun in public, just in case. (source)
The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books. It is a vivid, compassionate look into the lives of Americans during the Great Depression. I can think of no book more American, less "communist propaganda" than The Grapes of Wrath. Yet had Goodreads existed back then, I'm sure it would have received a lot of 1-star reviews. I read somewhere a long time ago that a better way to judge a book on Goodreads is to add the number of 5-star and 1-star ratings and subtract the number of 2-, 3-, and 4- star ratings. The higher this number, the better. I don't exactly adhere to this advice strictly myself, but I think it gets at a relevant truth: things worth reading aren't always going to be the most universally popular. When it comes to great art, controversy comes with the territory.
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On a personal note (and I've written about this before), many of us are made to read these classics at a time when we are perhaps not prepared to or mentally/emotionally receptive to them. I was required to read To Kill A Mockingbird when I was eleven. It did nothing for me then, and I have never felt compelled to pick it up again. There are so many other great books in the world I'm sure I would enjoy more.
i mean surely, classics were classics for a reason? the reason being that they were...good?
This reminded me of a data visualization I came across a while back: What Do We Study from the 1990s?
For Stanford's Literary Lab, Digital Humanities scholar J.D. Porter points out a number of books that were never commercially popular, but have, over time, grown into a dominant force in the literary canon. One important example is the 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
"Before 1970, Zora Neale Hurston was the primary subject author in just 4 MLA articles, and all of her novels were out of print; none had sold more than 5,000 copies. It was famously the efforts of prestigious scholars and writers, especially Alice Walker, that recuperated her.
And it worked: Today Hurston has over 700 MLA articles, and she has more Goodreads ratings than authors ranging from the canon that predated her...No doubt much of the public familiarity with her work derives from its now-common presence in classrooms, but this is precisely the point...a boost in prestige, driven by scholars and practitioners, and mediated through the classroom, led to a boost in popularity. The arc of escape from obscurity pulled her not just up but away."
For the most part, I agree with Gabby about classics being classics because they're good. I myself try to prioritize reading classics for the quality I've found in them and count many of them among my favorites. But being "good" isn't the only criterion for a book becoming a classic. Selection into literary syllabi depends on other factors too, like "pertain[ing] to a topic that the next generation should know," many of which are not necessarily aligned with reader enjoyment. Many classics weren't even the most popular books when they were published (in ZHN's case, not popular at all), and probably would have faded into obscurity had literary critics not picked them up. It's no surprise, then, that many of us don't enjoy some of them now.
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To sum up: in the spirit of playing devil's advocate (or simply the voice of the philistines), I think the reason few classics feature on the Goodreads top 100 is because they are often challenging or controversial, forced upon many of us, and not necessarily selected for reader pleasure. I don't think it's crazy or elitist to be be perplexed by the lack of classics; I too wish there were more on there. But I also recognize some of the reasons why so few feature on there, and why these don't dim the light of the classics in any way.
I recognize that there is likely a genetic component to this: some people will be genetically predisposed to like some things and dislike others. But I think (and some studies have shown) most people like the things they like simply because they were exposed to them at the right time and/or in the right way.↩
2026-02-06 23:45:00
by goodreads' top 100, i'm specifically talking about the top 100 list dictated by user ratings. why it has failed to leave my mind is its fascinating modernity, especially in comparison to other user-rated best of all time lists.
a few months ago, i saw a tweet about how today's readers were "cooked" because moby dick was sitting at an average rating of 3.6 while catching fire was rated a much higher 4.3. someone in the replies went on to complain about the concerning lack of appreciation for classic novels today, moby dick or otherwise, and to look at how ridiculous goodreads' top 100 was as proof for their claim. curious, i examined the list myself and promptly saw that this complaint actually had some backing. on this list is no more than ten books published before the year 2000, with the oldest books having been published sometime in the 1950s. i don't think a lower rating on classic novels is bad on an individual level — but as a general consensus surprised me! it truly made my head spin as i began to ponder the lack of classics on the list.
i mean surely, classics were classics for a reason? the reason being that they were...good?
in a sort of mesmerized daze, i opened up the letterboxd top 250, imdb top 250, rym highest rated, and aoty highest rated just to compare.
i wanted to talk a little bit about letterboxd and imdb first because i feel more familiar with film than i do literature or music. these websites' highest rated movies have substantial overlap, even if their exact rankings are different. both lists feature multiple classics from old hollywood (12 angry men, casablanca), new hollywood (the godfather, apocalypse now), asian directors (akira kurosawa, masaki kobayashi), and european directors (andrei tarkovsky, vittorio de sica), which i consider to be a very healthy variety. these lists did not surprise me one bit because it had all the kinds of movies i expected to find in a top 250 list.
i considered that accessibility played a major role in shaping such a thing, as film is still a very new medium, relatively speaking of course, being a little over one hundred years old — whereas literature is so old we have no small amount of penguin classics that were published in the 1400s. i assumed it is probably far easier for the modern 2020s human to sit back and enjoy a movie from the 1940s than it might be to read something from medieval times.
even so, there are still plenty of modern classics published from the 1900s onwards that are nowhere to be found. something like to kill a mockingbird or 1984. i figured that if i am able to understand the english used in an early 20th century movie, i should have no trouble reading a novel of the same time period, difference in spoken and written word considered. to really test this, i picked up the 1938 novel rebecca and have found myself understanding its prose without issue. i know this is just one book, so maybe a reader who has read other novels from this time period would like to inform me if other books might be a bit harder to parse. i think the only popular classic i've read was crime and punishment, which to be honest, was not that hard to understand either.
additionally, i thought it was interesting that a few of the films listed are based on classic books. dune is an example, but one i considered to be more interesting is tolstoy's war and peace. somehow, a four-part film series that totals 413 minutes (a movie i think would not be very accessible for general, not just modern audiences) has landed itself at 82nd place with a score of 4.4 on letterboxd while its book counterpart is missing roughly 0.3 points before qualifying for top 100 status on goodreads.
as for rym and aoty: they are quite similar to their film counterparts the way they too have a significant overlap between artists. i'm aware that both websites are primarily used to rate modern music (is there a music website having fan wars over beethoven?) so "classics" in this sense would likely refer to something like the beatles, who to literally no one's surprise, has abbey road on both lists of highest rated albums. i hope you'll agree with me, but because different music genres emerged at different times the exact years an artist would be considered a "classic" varies. bearing that in mind, i'd consider both wu-tang clan (formed in the 1990s) and john coltrane (active 1960s) classics for their respective genres. and yes, both of these artists are on the two lists of highest rated albums.
again, i figured that because both websites focus on modern music, listening to a 1960s album is about as easy as watching a 1960s film. which is to say, very.
so, coming back to goodreads, i really hope you don't think i'm crazy over being perplexed by the lack of classics. i don't want to come off as elitist or anything, but i'm not a hundred percent sure i can get behind literal harry potter fanfiction being in 62nd place over the count of monte cristo. i know the hurdle for getting into classic literature can be quite a high one (why, i myself failed to finish pride and prejudice in my teen years) but is this a hurdle nobody is trying to jump over anymore? are majority of the ratings on classics from kids who were annoyed they had to read the book for school? are the users holding classics to a higher standard and being more critical because they are classics? are the users judging classics using contemporary standards? i don't know. i feel like you could apply these thoughts to other art mediums but those user-rated lists still turned out very different.
of course, i could also just be deeply misunderstanding why the goodreads top 100 list would look like that. if you have any thoughts about it, please write me. i feel like i'm being haunted.
so it turns out that a handful of other bear users feel quite passionately about the lack of classics on the goodreads top 100 as well! i've received a lot of lovely emails with different insights that i thought i might compile down below. a general thank you to everyone who wrote me — seriously — it's been fun talking to you!
i've also received replies in the form of blog posts! please go check out misu's and ulik's responses for some longform insights :) they have some interesting things to say that i didn't include in the bullet points.
