Nova Daily - 29 May 2025: Why am I even doing this?

Hi!

One invisible but essential part of writing is reading. Not just your own work, but other people's work as well, because there's a lot that you can learn from other people. How they write. How they make their points come alive. How they reason. How they construe a point. How they link several different sections together. And some vocabulary that you'd never even think about using.

To indicate how important reading is for writing: it's the exact basis on which GPT generates its texts.

Why am I even doing this?

When you pick up a book, sometimes it starts with the author asking the question, "Why did I write this book?" This question is usually very relevant, but there's something that I want to throw out here. It'll come at the end of the text.

It's often nice to learn a little bit about the motivations of the author. This is especially true for people who are celebrities that are not necessarily famous for their expertise in the area in which they've written their book. Why did they write this book?

When I started writing my first blogs on here, I was very clear what I wanted to do, and I've been rather consistent about it throughout my blogs. There has been a hiatus at the end of last year, but I'm very happy and proud that I've been able to publish something new every day of 2025 so far.

The subjects that I use to write about are all things that interest me in a way, or that come up during the day. I write what comes up, sometimes even on the fly. There are many subjects that I know absolutely nothing about, but they still interest me. There's no reason why I shouldn't be writing about it, but I can't pretend to be an expert on it by, for example, reading just one WikiPedia page on it.

Recently I was "called out" on not knowing much about El Dorado or the indigenous people of the American continent. That's perfectly alright, and I fully admitted that El Dorado isn't my expertise. It's still greatly interesting, and I feel that using it as a metaphor to describe bogus openings is very fitting. But yeah, I don't know much about it, and I'd love to read more on the matter. So if anyone has literature on the matter (or is willing to write something about it, for that matter) then by all means, let me know.

Sometimes the question "Why did I write this?" is asked at the wrong moment. If a celebrity writes something that's very far outside their expertise and they scarcely know anything about it, the question should've been asked much later in the book. Like, on the final page. Because then I can answer the question "Why did I write this book?" with "Exactly. Why on earth did YOU write a book on THAT?"

Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating that the question "Why did I write this?" shouldn't be on page 1 in such cases. But it'd be nice if simultaneously page 1 were also the final page of the book.

Continuing the blitz grind

Normally I'd be doing rapid games on Thursday, but I'm away for the rest of the week. I still want to do my work on my opening repertoire. I have the time and energy to play some blitz games, so let's get going.

Game 1: Nimzo-Indian Defence

Game 2: English grind (but lost on time)

Game 3: English grind (this time I won)

Game 4: Some weird CK line

Game 5: What happened here?

Game 6: No idea how I survived this.

Game 7: That didn't go well...

Game 8: I swindled myself but then flagged my opponent

I played some more games after this but I decided not to include these because I got tilted. Towards the end I started playing quite well, and I regained all the rating I lost with some ridiculous games. I managed to get back above 2400 and even looted a single rating point overall.

Not exactly well done, but I'll take it.