About Me — Kurt Shiba Inu
No, I am not really a cat
My real name is…um…Kurt Shiba Inu, and my profile picture is of an exceptionally friendly cat I once encountered. I was debating whether to use a real picture for this, or a picture of a cat, but I figured that since my real picture is just a screenshot, no one would be able to use the metadata to find me.
Wait…that’s not how it works? Maybe I should learn more about technology.
Speaking of technology, I have two more tech-focused blogs but made this account to try out Medium Membership. Though I am well aware there are ways to find people, I wanted to use “Kurt Shiba Inu” to create just a little bit of space between my real identity and the blog. Now, I know what you’re thinking:
Kurt, I don’t care! Why did you make this?
An editor reached out to me. That was their mistake.
Writing is awesome. I want everyone to know, particularly newcomers, that writing is a great thing, it provides excellent release, and I may even say that it makes your life more interesting. But blogging?
Medium blogging is very, very easy to make fun of. Had it not been for one Medium blog I encountered, I may have continued this cynical path of simply parodying every ultra-popular Medium account I encountered. Medium is a way to make money, everyone loves money, and we can write infinite articles about money. We can also write about waking up at 5AM, or how we don’t know how to code but wanted to write a Medium article about it because everyone is making so much money on tech content.
I don’t want anyone who uses Medium to lose sight of writing. Writing is the core from which Medium is built. Then comes the 100 followers posts, and the follow-for-follow posts. Again, money…I get it. I was right there with you. Once we pass that point and start earning, what then?
You can write about anything. You can write about the woman you just started dating and how it makes you feel (you probably shouldn’t, but you can). You can write about not using console.log and why it makes you superior. You can write about a book you read on the toilet last month.
More About Me
I’m 28 and that is, unfortunately, a mutable value.
I graduated from the University of California, Davis with a BS in computer science and a minor in BS. While there, I also took a fair number of English classes while the computer science mainly served as a front. I had the opportunity to take a writing workshop under Yiyun Li in a class of about 20.
She said to please not be discouraged by the roasting she gave my second workshop story.
I mostly write to try to improve at coding, and to hopefully teach others along the way. This blog? It was supposed to be for movies and books and stuff. It is still having a bit of an identity crisis.
Closing Thoughts
The world, and life itself, is messy. I know — not particularly poetic of me to point it out in that way.
While I generally like to think I do not like to use blogging as a personal diary (and that this generally should be avoided), I do think writing is a way for us to render the crazy world into a shape we can grapple with. We can write characters whose thoughts we know. We can work towards resolutions, and grapple with some of the questions that the real versions of ourselves never really get the answers to. We can deal with incomplete information, in stories, and in fiction we get to see things play out instead of just writing self-help content offering advice that does not necessarily work in every case.
If you want to write, please write. Don’t let anyone discourage you from writing.
