Nova Daily - 15 March 2025

Hi!

Earlier today I entered a conversation with a fellow blogger. This user (I won't share their handle here) asked whether people would want to read their blogs.

Reading a line like this gives me a fair few mixed emotions.

The telemarketer call

I'll begin with the most negative emotions, just to get it over with. A question like "Can you read my blogs please?" is plain annoying to read. Because what you signal to the people who read a message like that is "I need attention" at best and "I'm going to show off with the attention that I get" at worst. It's not as bad as "Can you leave me a good review?" but it's certainly a step in that direction.

You can compare it to telemarketers. It's not just begging for attention, it's an aggressive way of selling their stuff and using you to achieve their goals. I have a thorough dislike if people come up to me and ask me to leave a positive review. If that's you, don't bother to ask me for it because I won't. I'll categorically refuse to give prefabricated opinions on demand. The nicest thing I could do is ignore your message.

The two Why's

As someone who keeps an open daily journal, in a way I'm a content creator. I know the feeling too well: whenever I create something I really like and hit the "Publish" button, a part of me wants my texts to be read, liked, appreciated, or who knows what kind of positive effect it might have. I know the feeling of pride in creating something, I know the desire to receive praise for my labour. I feel that person's pain. I put in a lot of effort to create my work, I want to share my work with the world, and it can be disappointing when no-one seems to want to read my text. It'll be the same for that person.

In order to deal with this, I've had to ask myself two questions: Why do I write?, and Why do I write? What is the reason that prompted me to write, and what is the goal that I'm trying to reach by my writing? Those are two related but different questions.

I needed to take an honest look inside to clear up these two Why-questions for myself. My reason for writing is to keep track of my thoughts and use it as a way to exert external peer pressure on myself to force me to keep going. My goals with writing my blog are several, but the main one is to improve my chess through the process of analysing my own moves and thoughts, and to literally keep a log of my work. There are several side goals and pursuits that I have when writing my texts, but none of them involves winning prizes. The main thing I care about is mastering what I do.

At times, though, I have to remind myself of this. Because no matter how much I like to lie to myself that it doesn't affect me if my blog gets no response, it does gnaw sometimes. I really have to zoom out and consciously tell myself that I'm not writing to gain and please an audience.

My response

I normally advocate for a general approach of kindness: shooting someone a message that you like their work is 10 seconds of work, costs nothing, and makes one person's day a little bit better. But I'm not tossing out friendly messages just for the sake of it, because it'd lose its meaning. I won't flay you, and never in public, but if you want to have a good review that actually means something, you will need to earn it. And this is the spirit in which I sent a DM to this person. Learn your craft. Improve your writing. Stop obsessing over the attention you think you need to receive and get to work.

The game

I obtained a good position out of the opening, but I found it remarkably hard to convert it into something concrete. I was a bit taken aback by the Qa5-b4 idea to exert pressure on my pawn on b3. I tossed my e-pawn into the mix which had no positive effect whatsoever. My opponent won one pawn, two pawns, had chances to win even three pawns. And there was the threat of trapping my knight with a little bishop manoeuvre. But he surprisingly missed the opportunity. I managed to get counterchances, I won my material back, and in the endgame I was able to create a few passed pawns. I had to sacrifice my knight for the opponent's passed pawn, but in the resulting position my own pawns could no longer be stopped. If it were not for the time trouble that my opponent landed himself in, it would've been a completely undeserved win.

For now it'll just be the game. I might add my thoughts tomorrow, but I'll be off for the majority of the day.