Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste — a malicious taste, perhaps? — no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is “in a hurry.”
— Nietzsche, Daybreak
There are two ways to drive the hurried reader to despair. One is the cuttlefish method, a long-time favorite of fatuous frauds: hide your scrawny meaning within a cloud of ink. I prefer the second method — compression, not fog. I’m not trying to be opaque or verbose; I’m trying to be dense. Ideally, I want to set spring-loaded sentences, capable of snapping on careless fingers. I want to produce prose that looks like a harmless puddle and turns out to be two feet deep. I want my posts to be gobstoppers, fitting easily in the mouth, but cracking a tooth if you try to chew and bolt. The internet serves cotton candy “content” by the yard. I’m offering beef jerky—salted, tough, but ultimately more nourishing.