Hello World.

What am I even doing.

This is nerve-wracking.

The fact that it’s been over a decade since I last wrote long-format prose unrelated to work aside, I’ve always hated how I sound in my writing. I picked up a nasty habit in high school of trying to mimic academic papers, with all their garbage pretentious verbiage, and while that in of itself would maybe be alright, I wasn’t any damn good at it and sounded like a gigantic try-hard dweeb. Reading my old essays is like watching an old VHS recording of myself in my teenage blunder years, voice cracks and all, and really sours any ambitions for putting pen to paper.

And good god – I can’t even physically sit still to write this. Just a moment ago, I was briskly pacing around my office, drawing little figure eights on the floor with my footsteps – titter tatter titter tatter – ostensibly to workshop a sentence in my head during a brief moment of writer’s block, but really just to kill time and distract my bored ADD self.

So, I realize this is going to be hard for me.

To be fair, when I first introduced the “PeePeePooPoo” persona four years ago and began posting on the PredictIt comments section, and then subsequently Twitter, I didn’t expect the traction and enjoyment my short-form writing gave me either. It took some time and patience to find my voice, but the character-limited format coerced Hemingwayesque curtness into my writing, on top of which I could slather some dry, witty cynicism that I probably picked up from my father. My banter feels a lot punchier and fluid these days as compared to the more forced approach I took when I was a lowbie.

So why give all that hard work up?

Well, for starters, I’m bored. There is still immediate gratification in being able to come up with a witty retort or “seeing numbers go up”, but the days have certainly started to blend together and tweeting feels far more “comfortable” than interesting at this point. Percus here does an excellent job of putting the feeling into words:

In contrast, long-form writing will be a challenge. Hell, even redeveloping the perquisite attention span will be a challenge.

Incidentally, there are some parallels here to how I feel about living in Chicago. Chicago is an excellent city and I’ve spent the last 3 years trying to explore as much of it as possible, travelling through all the different neighborhoods and discovering all the cool hidden little spots. I’ve made some great friends here. But nevertheless, I can feel myself slipping into a routine, going for the old and familiar rather than the exciting and new. So hence one reason for the Boston move (not the biggest one to be clear – maybe I’ll write more about it some other time.)

The primary reason that I intend to leave Twitter is that it’s become a wretched hellsite where racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, and general antisocial tendencies are not only normalized, but act as progenitors for the general Overton window shift we see in society lately. If you don’t believe me, look at the sort of people the United States vice president is following on Twitter:

I’ve made no secret of my distaste for the direction that Elon Musk has taken and continues to take Twitter on, and have proudly eschewed a blue check despite this handicapping my reach and preventing me from collecting a somewhat significant revenue share. But even the symbolic protest isn’t worth it now that the daily experience has succumbed to drudgery. I can only keep my blood pressure down for so long while I’m mired in the bog of groyperism and alt-right reactionary apologia. These past two weeks in particular have gotten markedly worse, likely due to changes in both the “For You” algorithm and Grok. Between getting brigaded several times on my posts by people with exhaustingly heinous views and this shit, I’m done.

Maybe switching to long-form writing is the ultimate protest to all of this. After all, knee-jerk reactions and short attention spans are emblematic of the twitter experience, and though at first fun and addictive, taken to the extreme lead to self-mental (and subsequently moral) degradation a la Musk. In contrast longer-form writing is necessarily more contemplative by nature. Whether or not you choose to eventually put it into words, you at least have a lot more time to stew on an idea.

Stewing on this has made me come to terms with the fact that

Lately, Twitter hasn’t been making me happy, and there’s no indication that this will change any time soon in the future.

So yeah. That’s it. I don’t regret my time spent on Twitter and I’ve met a lot of cool people and shared a lot of laughs over the last couple of years. But it’s time to move on.

I’ve got some time before I hit my stride and find my long-form voice, but for now, hope you enjoy reading this substack by a sensitive 31 year old young man™.