When I launched the Max 256 Blog nearly two years ago, the purpose of the word limit was to make it easy to post regularly. All my previous blogs suffered from spiralling post lengths, to a point where, by some estimates, the length of each post, and the interval between them, increased by as much as 40% for each post. The growth was unsustainable, and drastic action had to be taken.
Judging by the number of posts since, the word limit has been a resounding success. But the success has come at a price. In order to write blog posts that are 256 words or shorter, I often have to delete some words. And they’re the most interesting ones too. Exciting adjectives are first to go. Next are repetitions, rephrasings that don’t actually add anything to what came before. And, you know, those interjections that give writing sort of a friendly and conversational character, well, they too are deleted.
Entire paragraphs never even get written in the first place, just because the message would stay the same without them. If it doesn’t serve a clear purpose, there’s no room.
As anyone who has seen Amadeus knows, true artists never delete anything. That’s how I remember it, anyway.
I do not plan to abandon word limits alltogether, because there are usually just a few deleted words I wish I could have kept. So, starting with this post, I am expanding the word limit by five words, to 261. That should be sufficient to meet my writing needs for the new decade.
That’s it! The shark has been jumped…
This is of course just a subtle April Fools joke. Not as obvious a joke as if, say, Stærk had said something critical about Islam, which would instantly be recognized as an April Fools joke since Stærk is such an Islamophile, but an obvious joke nevertheless.
(As for Ørjan, he should note that Bjørn Stærk jumped the shark years ago.)
Trolling is a art.
I strongly object to the above comment. Surely trolling is _an_ art, if it is at all.
Forget politics and grammar. 261? What an inelegant number, even for an April fools joke. 288 or 320 would have been more fitting
First commented post in two weeks. Perhaps you should take up meta-blogging full time?
It certainly inspired a higher quantity of comments, that’s true.
Now you’re just flattering me.
No, not at all, it’s true: There is a relatively high number of comments to this post.
I find it rather funny that people are still flaming Bjørn for having enough integrity to re-evaluate his own opinions when more data is available.