by Leora Jasper
“What fresh hell is this?” I cried as I opened the most recent offering by this site’s resident Deity and foremost expert on intellectual piracy.
After The Deity’s first post, I enumerated its failings in an unapologetic critique. I thought perhaps they would reconsider another submission to this site after comprehending their stark inferiority to the other creators. I was shortsighted in this thinking. Of course The Deity views themselves with too much regard. They are an exquisite egoist who wrenches away the ideas of others and gaslights the audience into believing it was all a “great minds think alike” thing. I will not stand for it.
The reader may wonder, “I clicked on that post. It was just, like, about playing violin. I thought it was nice. What’s the big deal?”
When the idea for The Gadfly Symposium first gestated in my brain, I imagined a space where people took on knotty questions or subverted conventional thinking. I imagined pieces from the political fringes to the artistically abstract. But this Eat, Pray, Love drivel about being whole? About finding the joy in amateurism? Come on. The Gadfly Symposium isn’t my Aunt’s blog about discovering herself – it’s a project. And a serious one at that.
Every “How To Start A Blog” article tells its students to find a niche, a particular subject and take that will make the blog a useful resource to a subset of people and optimizable on a search engine. But why do I care if I write something and it shows up on google? Why is the act of creation not enough to satisfy the creator? Stats, comments, likes are quantitative markers of the value to the audience, but they are not indicators of value to me.
The Gadfly Symposium is not blessed with a resident deity. We’re cursed with a resident idiot.
The Gadfly Symposium 