- Site: manuelmoreale.com
- By:
- Date published: 2024-02-02
- Date read: [[]]
- [Read Original](https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-ran-prieur)
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- Tags: #Interview #Writing #Ran_Prieur
- Notes:
**Note:** Below is the text from the article, with any ==highlights== done by me. None of the writing below is by me.
# Article text
This is the 22nd edition of _People and Blogs_, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Ran Prieur and his blog, [ranprieur.com](https://ranprieur.com/)
Ran's an interesting character to say the least and his site reflects that. I especially love the very old school vibe.
To follow this series [subscribe to the newsletter](https://peopleandblogs.com/). A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the [RSS feed](https://manuelmoreale.com/feed).
---
**Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?**
My name is Ran Prieur. I've lived most of my life in Washington state. I did well in school, and I was expected to be a computer engineer. But looking back, the kids who went on to do that, were actually excited about computers. For me, it was just one more tedious academic subject. In college, after cruising through the "weed-out" courses, I couldn't bring myself to take an actual engineering course, and switched to the humanities, which were somewhat interesting. I ended up getting two BAs, in English and Philosophy.
I was born to be retired. Most people are always trying to fill time, and I'm always trying to empty it. I had enough self-discipline to grind through the academic system, but any full time job exhausts me, and I spent the 90s working part time office jobs and living super-frugally. I would have probably become high-end homeless, but I did some housesitting for my family, and had some luck with money, and now I'm retired on less than they say you need to retire.
For some reason, it's easy for me to keep blogging, and I've been doing it for almost 20 years. More recently I've been writing fiction, which is harder than blogging but more rewarding. I practice improvisational piano, where my style is to see how much I can squeeze out of one chord. And when I have a lot of time, I play solo games of my favorite board game, Spirit Island, and I've designed some custom spirits that I haven't released yet.
**What's the story behind your blog?**
In the 90s I made zines: hand-written, photocopied, and mailed. When the internet came along, it was a much more efficient way to get words to an audience. Two other zine people started a website called Unknown News, and I started writing a column there every few weeks. After maybe a year, around 2003, I bought my own domain name and posted my stuff there.
I named the blog after myself, because whatever I end up writing about, the name is still accurate. I started out writing essays about contemporary politics and the critique of civilization, and now I write short posts about different things, lately psychology, metaphysics, societal collapse, and little personal tidbits. The main reason I shifted to a shorter form, is that I learned to say things in fewer words, in five paragraphs instead of five pages.
The most famous thing I've written, by far, is a 2004 essay called How To Drop Out. I haven't read it in more than ten years, because I'm sure I'll find all kinds of cringey stuff. But it continues to bring people to my website.
**What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?**
Elvis Costello said, people think being a songwriter is cool, but really it means walking around all day humming to yourself like a loony. That's basically my process. I have an idea, and I run the words through my head, often muttering them in a whisper, until I'm ready to write them down. That could take anywhere from ten minutes to a week. Sometimes I do it in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, and by morning I have a whole post laid out in my head. But when I go to type it in, there are always complications and changes.
For minor posts, I do the writing straight to the file manager. For major posts, I type them into Notepad++, and I usually keep massaging the words for a few days before posting them. I have a large text file full of posts that are half finished or not good enough. Nobody reads my stuff before I post it, but I often get reader feedback that sends me off on tangents to new posts.
Asking a writer where ideas come from, is like asking a sailor where the wind comes from. If your sails are working, the wind is just there. So in terms of the work I put into writing, getting ideas is zero percent. Ten percent is figuring out how to word it. And ninety percent is figuring out how to _order_ it. Even non-fiction has to be written like a story, where one idea flows into the next.
**Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?**
I haven't noticed any differences between physical spaces. It's all about mental space, and all I need is a block of time with no other demands on my attention, which is hard to get in this world. I often fantasize about being in solitary confinement, except with good food. I would have loved to be a medieval monk, doing a couple hours a day of simple useful tasks, and then going to my tiny room to contemplate the divine.
When I'm writing fiction or playing music, cannabis does wonders for my creativity. But when I write blog posts high, they turn out to be second-rate. I suppose weed improves my intuition but not my rational thinking.
**A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?**
My original web host was DR2, a tiny company that later got bought by Mesopia, which got bought by Netbunch, which suspiciously lost my site and all backups around 2006\. I recovered it from my own old backups and the web archive, and switched to a Hong Kong company called ICDsoft, where I've been ever since for both domain registration and hosting.
From the beginning, I've used simple hand-coded html and css. It took me a few weeks to build the site, and now it's just a matter of copying and pasting text and a few tags. I like to have my hands right on the actual stuff, and I'm trying to hold onto the golden age of web 1.0, when a non-programmer could get under the hood, and when sites had to be compact for fast loading. I try to keep my home page under 40kB, and I don't run any scripts, except one that a reader contributed to do an automatic archive, because I only archive about half my stuff.
**Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?**
In terms of technical choices, I wouldn't do anything differently. What I regret about my early writing, is that it was too exciting and inspirational, and also too negative. I was trying to slay dragons, and it felt good and got me readers, but at some point the overall vibe of reader feedback led me to dial it down, and I remain fame-phobic. Fame is when people who don't know you, build an image of you in their head for their own purposes, and if you behave differently from that image, they get mad at you.
**Financial question since the web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?**
The site costs me less than $100 a year. In the early years I had a link where people could donate, but now I don't take any money.
It's a tragedy of the modern world that we need money to not die on the streets. I'm lucky that I don't need to monetize my blog, because it's difficult to not start making decisions about what you write, based on where the money is coming from.
**Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?**
**Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?**
My latest philosophical interest is acausal metaphysics. I learned about it from a brilliant 1982 book called Physics as Metaphor, and there's an important 2003 paper called Causation as Folk Science. Physics is causal: For two things to have a legitimate connection, there has to be some chain of influence through matter directly influencing other matter -- although physics has a hint of acausality with quantum entanglement.
An example of acausality at work is astrology. In physics, there's no realistic way that remote planets can influence your life. But in acausal metaphysics, the positions of the planets, and events in your life, might be two different aspects of something deeper that we don't understand yet, so they can line up without any causality. This was what Jung was trying to get at with synchronicity, and I try to cultivate synchronicity in everyday life, by noticing and being grateful when little things line up.
---
This was the 22nd edition of _People and Blogs_. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Ran. Make sure to [follow his blog](https://ranprieur.com/index.html) ([RSS](https://ranprieur.com/feed.php)) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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