malvasia bianca

I used to play go a lot, and I collected a lot of go books. In fact, by the time I was in grad school, I had copies of all but 10 or 15 or so of all the go books that had ever been published in English. (Just under 100 at the time.) The web was relatively young; I decided to start a web site devoted to go books. It was a lot of fun; my first real foray into writing on the web.

When I was a postdoc at Stanford, I didn’t have nearly as much time to play go: sometimes I would try to go to the local club every other week, but much more frequently I wouldn’t show up for months at a time. (My hands don’t allow me to play go online: I can type fine, but mouse usage kills me.) The go bibliography started to slip a bit: whereas before I got and reviewed each new book within a couple of months of publication, my goal was now to not fall more than a year behind. Which I was more or less able to do: I took the bus to and from work each day, and I often read go books on the bus rides.

I also found other things that I wanted to write about. For a little while, I had some pages on teaching; when I got this computer, I put up some pages about the process of getting it set up. I never found the time to keep them up, though; in fact, sometimes they never got far enough for me to publish them to the world at all (e.g. some pages on video games).

When I started work at Kealia, though, I stopped taking the bus to work (since there wasn’t a convenient route), which ate into my book reading time: and go books certainly aren’t my highest reading priority. And, after thinking about it for a while, I decided that while I did miss having an excuse to occasionally write something for public consumption, I didn’t really miss writing about go books. As my other abortive efforts made clear, though, I probably shouldn’t plan on writing about any other specific theme: anything too formal would pose a high enough barrier that I wouldn’t update it regularly, and my interests change frequently enough that a single-topic site would die pretty quickly.

But with blogs mentioned in newspapers almost daily, it was pretty obvious what I should do. So here I am. It’s sad to think that I may never add another review to the go book site, but such is life. (I’ve asked other people to contribute reviews: I don’t mind doing a bit of work on the site, if other people can help.) To be sure, I don’t really have an idea how long I’ll keep up this blog, but it’s lasted for half a year by now, I’m not getting bored yet, and I still have a backlog of things that I’d like to write about. I certainly feel better writing regularly: it gives me an excuse to think a bit more about certain things, which is always welcome.