Coruscant: The Manifesto
Artist's depiction of typing; image from Unsplash
Because this is my first post, I recognize it would be both useful and informative to lay out my aims for this blog, as well as to address some housekeeping matters. Think of it as an FAQ page, except with the relative asking frequency of the questions completely determined by me.
So what is this blog?
I'm glad you asked! This blog, like many other blogs, is primarily an avenue for the author to get their thoughts down and out of their head. I'm a fan of the concept that ideas are like our fossils: that the ideas we produce are of much greater influence on the collective society in the end than what we do in our day-to-day lives. (We may have forgotten who Thomas Bayes was or what he did in his day-to-day life, but we still remember Bayes' Theorem.) To that end, one of my biggest worries is that the ideas I have won't make it out of my head for any number of reasons (including simply forgetting them).
This blog will, therefore, mostly be about the things I frequently think about. My plan is to avoid particularly controversial topics like politics and religion as best I can, although there will likely be plenty of social commentary, and hopefully some more lighthearted topics as well.
How often will you post?
No promises, but the goal is to publish a post on the first day of each month. There are two reasons for this: 1) A monthly schedule gives me more time to hone my writing, and 2) I have more room to procrastinate I have greater schedule flexibility. A weekly posting schedule has the most likelihood to end up producing rushed and half-baked work, while with a monthly post, I have more time and breathing room to tend to other pressing commitments. (In case you're wondering, I have a slight preference for a monthly schedule over a biweekly schedule for much of the same reason, with the additional advantages of being arguably more symmetrical and easily memorable to put out a post at the same date each month.) It's also, I think, more enjoyable to write when I'm not forcing myself to produce something.
This schedule could be adjusted depending on how things go, but it's my plan for now.
What does the blog's name mean?
Another great question! The title of this blog, as you probably observed, is Coruscant, modeled after one of my favorite English words, "coruscate." Verb forms don't work as titles as well as one would hope, hence the alteration into the adjective form.
While it didn't factor into my choice and I only realized it later, one of the consequences of that slight change is the extra mystique of wisdom it creates. Since it's a real word that (rightly) looks like it could be a real word, but probably isn't as common or well-known as its verb form, it makes me seem like I was extra creative in coming up with it. I suppose that could be a positive?
(I also considered combining my own name with Coruscant, but discarded the idea nearly immediately for a number of reasons [although it would provide for some apt puns].)
Well, sure, but that makes me curious: What is your name?
No comment. (I'm also guessing most of the people reading this are people who know me and, by extension, my name, so...)
Are you aware of the other blog named Coruscant?
Yes, I am. When registering for a URL, I was pretty surprised to find that my preferred link of coruscant.blogspot.com was already taken, given how proud I was to come up with what I thought was a pretty original name. This ultimately wasn't a big issue for me, though; the URL ended up becoming coruscantblog.blogspot.com, which thankfully wasn't taken.
(And if you're wondering, yes, I read the other Coruscant's blog after discovering its existence.)
But why are you starting a blog now, of all times?
Yet another excellent question! Wow, me, you're really on a roll today!
In some ways, this blog has been in the works for some time now. My more immediate push to actually make it, however, came when another student advised me to do more writing-related activities, such as (you guessed it) a blog. This made a lot of sense to me; I'm an aspiring journalist, but you certainly wouldn't know it you only looked at what I spend my time doing outside of school. That's partially due to me priding myself on being more... polymathically inclined than most other prospective journalism majors, and partially due to a discrepancy in realistic writing-related opportunities compared to a lot of other fields, but it's also a problem I've worried about for a while. As much as I despise ceding control of my life and time just to appease universities, the other student's advice was sound and practical.
The situation was also ameliorated by the fact that starting a blog was something I was already interested in/considering doing, so I wasn't completely catering to the whims of some random college admissions officer; rather, the student's advice served as more of a nudge for me.
Basically, I've been thinking of doing something like this to get my ideas down for a while, but it took a more immediate push from another student for me to go through and actually create the Coruscant blog.
Why Blogger?
I chose Blogger primarily because it's free and stunning enough of a website. The other reason was that I used Blogger a few times when I was younger (although the advantage of experience I thought I'd get didn't ultimately materialize because the interface has dramatically changed since then). So far, I'd say I've been pretty surprised by the ease of use—with the caveat that there hasn't been much to do yet layout-wise, so who knows.
Why do I read the title of this post as "The Communist Manifesto" when I glance at it too quickly?
I think that's just you.
Is there a place where I can express how amazingly awesome I think this blog is?
How do I subscribe?
Unfortunately, it appears enabling a subscription feature on Blogger is harder than on, say, YouTube. I'm still trying to work it out, but for now, it seems the most effective way to be able to immediately read new posts is to just manually check on the first day of the month. But stay tuned!
I hope this lays out a general roadmap for what I want the Coruscant blog to be about and answers some of the general questions current and future readers might have about it! I'm really excited to get this going, and I hope you are too :).
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