Misc. Mental Musings
1 Million Words
S. G. Lacey
Somewhere in this post, depending on how the various headers and body text are counted, I’m crossing the 1-million-word mark on the Societal Satire in Shorts web portal.
This entire project was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, which took hold in America during March of 2020, for those who have understandably stricken this event from their memory. The forced shutdown across the country, and world, was truly an interesting period, with many folks working from home, or not employed at all. Motivated individuals had the opportunity to take up new hobbies, like baking bread, lifting weights, or quilting blankets.
My own early contagion closure journey went through a predictable progression like many, first lifestyle confusion, followed by abject boredom, then eventually renewed motivation. I had been writing sporadically for several years prior, but afforded more time, I was able to focus tangibly on story completion and thorough editing. Plus, website creation, a brand-new skill, aided by modern software, thus not requiring complicated HTML programming.
The first pages went live in the middle of September 2020, with a quintet of initial posts, over the course of a week. This preliminary burst established the format for the website, with 5 diversified topic categories: Societal Satire in Short (SSiS), Definitions Deconstructed (D2), 6 Degrees of Separation (6DoS), Technology Morphology (TM), and Miscellaneous Mental Musings (M3). Yep, repetition and rhyming were prevalent themes from the very beginning.
As regular consumers of my content know, I have a penchant for puns, and use an absurd amount of alliteration. While I try to explore new and novel material with each biweekly offering, during the course of over 1 million written words, there’s bound to be a few repeated terms, phrases, and jokes.
My shortest entry, at just 424 words, is a single page PDF drafted in the early days of the pandemic, self-explanatorily titled “Quarantine Routine During COVID-19”. While society is slowly returning to normalcy, these suggestions for functional life balance remain relevant to this day.
On the opposite side of the ledger, the longest diatribe is a prodigious piece, clocking in at over 50k words, akin to a short novel. This 6DoS work, simply titled “Moonshots”, explores linkages in the evolution of aviation, all the way from the Wright Brothers initial flight attempts on the beaches of North Carolina, to the ongoing global space race for the Moon and beyond.
Since launching the blog, I’ve worked on it an average of 3 hours per day, equating to 20 hours weekly, or approximately 85 hours per month, for a total of nearly 1,000 hours annually. Getting the initial words down on paper is only part of the pursuit, with preliminary research and subsequent refinement also requiring large chunks of time. This blog has essentially been a second job, executed primarily on nights and weekends, without any monetary reward.
This arduous endeavor, started on a whim while seeking structure in times of tumult during a nationwide house-arrest lockdown, soon evolved into a true passion project and labor of love. An effort for which I’m exceedingly proud and grateful to have pursued.
There are various research studies that quantify the commitment required to achieve mastery in a specific field. The most well-known treatise is presented by Malcolm Gladwell, who pioneered the concept of 10,000 hours of dedicated practice, in his 2008 book “Outliers: The Story of Success”. [REF]
In this book, Gladwell simply states that “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness”. For context, an average laborer, who logs 40 hours a week, over 8 hours each weekday, tallies approximately 2,000 hours per year. Thus, 5 years of full-time toiling at a trade is required to become a true professional.
This seemingly basic concept is often misconstrued, focusing on the sheer quantity of rote practice, as opposed to dedicated quality study. Mr. Gladwell suggests his immense value cited references not the time required simply to get proficient at a subject, but the commitment necessary to rise into the elite rankings of a chosen field.
However, the line between mastery and mediocrity is not distinct, but dim. Such outlay of time is not a guarantee of vocational success, simple a prerequisite for potential achievement. It’s important to commit to the curated act of learning, rather than simply putting in the hours indiscriminately.
Also, this principle only applies in professions that are stable and unchanging. In fields of rapid innovation or adaption, brain power should be spent on staying current regarding recent technological advancements, as opposed to rote memorization of background details. [REF]
Even in the education phase, it’s important to stay adaptive and attentive to new industry developments of relevance. Obviously, learning from experts of the past only gets you so far. True savants are able to make unique and novel contributions, which is when the diligent dedication to study reaps actual rewards. Mathematical proofs. Piano symphonies. Chemical formulations. Athletic records.
Just over half way to Malcolm’s magic number, I’ve learned a lot, but still have lots to learn, regarding the craft of creative writing. I’m by no means a professional author at this point, and likely will never be one. However, I now feel supremely more capable with regards to researching, writing, editing, and publishing online content than in those early days, and am increasingly able to leverage all the tools available to a modern literary practitioner.
5 years into this project, it’s been interesting to take a deep dive into the web traffic metrics, something I’ve never really spent much time reviewing in the past.
I’ve used the WIX website design platform since the beginning, due to ease of use, low hosting cost, and breadth of functionality offered. As it turns out, graphs for site visit metrics are recorded in perpetuity, and can be analyzed in various ways.
A lot has changed in the online search realm since the introduction of ChatGPT from OpenAI in November of 2022, and subsequent release of similar AI products from most of the major players in the information technology sector.
Traditional techniques like search engine optimization, or SEO, which were previously critical to driving online traffic, have become much less relevant. Large language machine learning algorithms have essentially scraped the entire internet, including every Societal Satire in Shorts written piece, as part of their training set. I’ll all for having my writing dissected and repurposed; that’s exactly why I produce and publish this content for public consumption.
Below is a plot showing overall site traffic by week, with 2025 in blue, and 2024 in grey. The wavy pattern observed is due to the bi-weekly cadence of new posts, associated with distribution of each new story to an amasses email list of roughly 100 people. The substantial spikes in April, July, and August this year are a result of having SSiS story links published on 3rd party sites, which proves that driving web traffic through clicks still works as a customer sourcing model.
As denoted in the summary table, overall sessions have exhibited a 4-fold increase the during the most recent 12 months. While the total # of unique annual visitors is 8X higher, but the average duration is only a quarter of the time from the prior year. This combination of factors suggests a broader set of users, with less interest in consuming the full content, instead focused on executing targeted, topical research. Clearly, AI summaries are the new mode of web search.
Another interesting piece of analysis is the location of the website traffic. As displayed in the map to follow, predictably, the vast majority of readers are located in the United States. The subsequent most common countries, checking in at a mere 5% each, are a smorgasbord on nations covering 3 different continents: India, Singapore, Germany, and Canada.
It would be interesting to see how many of these sessions international are actually me logging into the SSiS platform while traveling abroad, to check web page functionality or upload the latest post.
By far the most viewed post on the site to date is “15 Uncorrelated Assets”, a relatively niche research piece about billionaire hedge fund investors Ray Dalio’s attempt to create a portfolio which performs well in all economic regimes. This work gained traction within the personal finance community, as a result of host Frank Vasquez reposting a link on his Risk Parity Radio website, which has a much larger audience and higher traffic than Societal Satire in Shorts. [REF]
While I tried to keep a regular cadence of bi-weekly posting on alternating Monday evenings, right from the start I gave myself freedom to write about anything top of mind, with the only rule being not repeating a category in back-to-back stories. After burning through an initial backlog of material over the first 6 months, plotlines progressed to relevant topics of interest.
Each type of post is tied to different sources of experiential inspiration: SSiS = Dreams & Observations, D2 = Reading & Websites, 6DoS = History & Documentaries, TM = Podcasts & Movies, M3 = News & Life.
In terms of distribution, not surprisingly, the ranking of posts by category inversely mirrors the typical length, and thus time commitment, required to execute. The final count breakdown is as follows: SSiS = 43, D2 = 47, 6DoS = 15, TM = 8, M3 = 35.
Picking one’s favorite story is like picking a favorite child. Fortunately, I don’t have any kids, and our beloved cat Maverick unfortunately passed away during this writing journey, an event which led to an emotional post entitled “Pet Perspective”, so I’m happy to draw judgment on my perceived best work in each category.
Tellingly, one of my original posts remains one of my favorites. “A Case of the Mondays”, a sardonic SSiS story that everyone can relate to on some level, despite the odd sensory experiences. Some of the earlier writings had been stewing in my mind for years, so just required putting fingers to keyboard, so to speak, in this era of digital distribution.
In terms of definitions, I frequently reference “Rap Rhymn’”, an article combining clever musical lyrics and obscure poetry terminology. Drawing from the best lines of elite rappers across multiple decades, this post provides the opportunity to get legit learned.
The most enlightening story to research, which lead me down many dark rabbit holes and hedge maze dead ends, was the 6DoS “Assassins’ Credo” offering, which actually combines a pair of lengthy works. I’ve always been interested in United States presidential history, specifically J.F.K., and his untimely public death. From this initial kernel of inspiration, the collection follows a meandering trajectory of political assassinations, some well-known, others quite obscure, over multiple centuries, with surprising linkages revealed.
Many of the Technology Morphology posts have focused on an anticipatory future state of the world, leveraging recent innovations to make bold predictions. However, “Make Me a Bicycle, Clown!”, is an earlier dialogue centered around my own experiences as a manufacturing engineer; much of this content was experientially documented before the SSiS website became a reality.
Of all the categories, the M3 archive is the most diverse, predictably, as “miscellaneous” is one of the category descriptors. Many of these contemporary works are timely as opposed to evergreen, but the “Purdu Purview” piece touches on commercial chicken farming, federal political grift, student loan debt, Afghanistan conflict withdrawal, and the opioid overdose epidemic, all topics which remain very relevant in American society.
Another M3 work, the “COVID-19: Unintended Consequences” dialogue, is worth a quick review, to determine how the stated predictions from 5 years ago have held up with the passage of time.
I was directionally correct regarding experienced consumer goods inflation in 2021, and expansion of take-out food ordering for regular meals by 2022. My 2023 call regarding college athletes getting paid aligned almost perfectly with proliferation of NIL remunerations. However, the prediction of higher gas prices at the pump in 2024 was clearly wrong. Also, despite nailing the U.S. Mint’s discontinuation of the penny in 2025, a full cashless transaction system has proven slow to take off in America relative to global peers.
A mixed bag of prophetic pandemic predictions thus far, but I’ve got the back half of the 2020’s for the remaining forecasts to play out. Most of these longer-term ideas rely on governmental functionality, which seems impossible, and divisive voter polarization, which seems inevitable. Only time will tell, but putting these thoughts on paper back in 2020 was a way to hold myself accountable.
For dedicated SSiS readers, who are craving more content, there is one piece, amusingly titled “Trireme, Two Cockswains, and Another Motorboat”, which was never formally distributed to the general public, instead posted secretly for diligent website navigators to find. This classy story, with all sorts of boat-themed pornographic punnage, definitely covers adult-only themes. Read and disseminate at your own risk.
Based on the 1 million written words amassed, assuming a typical reading rate of 375 words per minute, there’s 45 hours of material available for online consumption. I doubt anyone aside from me has read all this literary content. Thanks for the diligent effort dad.
Writing is very cathartic, and also provides a fun avenue for learning. Sure, over the past half decade, I could have spent more time doom-scrolling social media, or binge-watching streaming shows. However, the responsibility to complete the next post, and the desire to research the next topic, has kept me motivated and engaged throughout this journey.
Last this is the last SSiS post for a while, but website will remain up. This is a living reference document for everyone, most importantly its author.
Methods for tying knots. Electoral college knowledge. Robots leveraging artificial intelligence. Complied cards games. Cooking commentary. Trivia about the Jeopardy! show. Professional sports inspired hilarity. All manner of idiom descriptions. Now curated and easily accessed at a single internet location.
Taking this break from satirical publishing isn’t for lack of ideas. I have a running inspirational word document with hundreds of story concepts, which I’ll continue to add to as life experiences and dream visions materialize. So many tales, so little time.
There are no imminent plans to professionally publish any of the written web works, but there’s potential for a SSiS short story book in the future. For those who haven’t burned through all 7 digits of wordy content, which is hopefully every rational human, don’t worry. The entire library isn’t going anywhere, as much of the content is evergreen.
In the future, the goal is to create a searchable post page, to help navigate the 148 published stories. The conceived scheme is to program in 3 sliders, with ranking digits from #1 to #5 for each discrete toggle: era, framework, and duration.
Sounds like I have another WIX web portal programming skill to learn. And another project to keep me occupied at home in the evenings. Thanks for all the support and feedback on this literary adventure.