This is my 1,000th post on this blog! Not counting this post, that is 893,353 words written here over 38 years. Of course, this blog hasn’t been around that long but I made an effort the last few years to consolidate all of my writing in one place and date it accordingly. That means the first “post” of this blog is “WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE” – A NEW PERSPECTIVE” which is a paper I co-wrote in high school for history class in 1988. From there it picks up a year later with some objectively bad poetry and then moves into the e-zine I started in college. One might say I am loquacious.
The title of this blog comes from the fact that I have been introverted for most of my life. Sometimes it certainly doesn’t seem that way but fundamentally it is who I am. So to me there is a touch of irony in an introvert who is so outgoing in words on screen if not words in person. I know some friends and acquaintances will argue that I am not but I have my extrovert moments too. There is no-doubt perception bias at play there.
In the past I have mentioned that I also have an incredible number of drafts on this platform, tons of Google docs with notes, ideas, and drafts, and then more notes scattered around that I am working to consolidate. There are also many dozens of blogs I had started and never finished, and have since given up on. In addition to my blogs on life and Information Security, there is a rapidly growing number of short-story fiction ideas I have, over 80 in fact. Currently, I have four stories submitted to Birdy Magazine and will likely submit more stories to other places.
Beyond that I have varying degrees of notes for six books. I have no idea if I will follow through with any of them but two are likely. Publicly I have mentioned doing a book on the history of vulnerabilities after doing a presentation on the subject. Since then I have been collecting information and found a co-author, Johnny Shaieb, who is doing his PhD dissertation on the history of the CVE / NVD databases. We have expanded that to include the history of vulnerability database before CVE, which I had loosely tracked.
The other book that I have been taking notes on is a near-term (mild) dystopia book that I envision will bring elements of the cyberpunk genre to. That may be tricky since the genre was defined around predicting the technology to come as far as computers and hacking. Over thirty years later and trying to predict it is both easy and difficult. Easy because so much has been predicted, difficult in making it creative and realistic. At present, I have just short of 100,000 words which is already the average word count for many books.
As I said earlier this year, I do not use generative “AI” to write any of this. I do use the technology for image generation though, as it is one thing it can often get right. Sometimes after telling it to fix stupid errors that a real artificial intelligence wouldn’t have made in the first place. Moving forward I maintain that pledge and will continue to write because I enjoy it. No reason to shortcut it and get a half-assed product.
Thanks for reading!