Hello!

You are probably here, slightly confused as to why someone would buy the domain name picklerick.co.uk and use it for a blog that actually wants to be taken seriously. Well, I like its whimsicality, it matches my name, and I don’t really want to be taken too seriously. This blog really is just a multi-faceted experiment where I try to learn basic web development, website management, version control (trying to get this post up through Git was a nightmare), and most importantly, How To Actually Write, all in one go without really any guidance or experience with long-form writing in the Real World (yes I did write a long dissertation for a high school project, but that doesn’t really count).

The first question is: what is this blog really about? The answer right now is “I don’t really know”. I think this is the best approach when starting out because the emphasis in the beginning is just to get content out in a regular fashion, and for me, this is most achievable when I don’t limit myself to any particular topic. Also, varying topics are probably the best way of maintaining some vestige of quality, at least in the early days.

Speaking of quality, I will go ahead and say that you should not expect anything of my writing. I will probably reason fallaciously in subtle ways and I don’t propose that a nineteen year old NEET-soon-to-be-university-student have any unique insights into the world. If anything, expect a certain verbosity and don’t expect a completely coherent train of thought within the posts.

I guess the above can be summed up as “Be patient”. I am new to this, and there will be teething problems (I have already mentioned Git). I have many things I would like to change in the medium term (like changing the link colour from red to green, changing the font to some Palatino derivative, maybe enabling Disqus comments although that is a double edged sword when it comes to privacy, etc, etc). There will be times when the blog is down because of my stupidity or some unforeseen technical issue, and if so, then I will be posting updates on my twitter.

To finish, I should probably explain the name. I chose ‘Pickled Thoughts’ because it fits the self-referentiality found elsewhere in the blog, and also because pickling is itself an act of ‘refinement’, where through the act of fermentation, a foodstuff develops a more mature flavour. I envisage this blog acting similarly, both as a conduit for refined thoughts and as a means of refining my thinking and worldview.

My name is Richard De Benedetti, and welcome to Pickled Thoughts.