I love penguins. They're hilarious, clumsy, and cute. YOU are now officially my favourite penguin. Mind you, not for the three reasons I just listed. Well, maybe for being hilarious at times. But mainly for being the most and likely the first-ever nail on the head, ballsy, honest, witty penguin with a knack for human words to ever walk the face of the southern hemisphere.

This article was bang-on!

I don't fancy myself a great writer; I'm a developing one with good potential. But I do have some shit to say. The problem is that no one wants to read it. As you pointed out, I'm far from alone in this. I understand that you have to put in the work (be consistent, sharpen your formatting, voice, style, length etc). But with a 50% curation rate (initially 75% but my essay about racism was mysteriously removed from the distribution), I'm getting increasingly worried that I will have to jeopardise my integrity as a writer and meet the mindless requirements you listed to get some eyeballs. And that, my dear penguin, is quite frankly something I refuse to do!

I've seen some badly written pieces on Medium, designed to feed the hungry social justice nutters, having great success. Many of those pieces are essentially long-form, glorified tweets in which someone ejaculates all over their readers and can't be bothered to clean it up before posting it. I find that rather disheartening. Surely the message and the delivery should be of equal importance on a writing website for writers?

So maybe I'm destined to dwell at the bottom of the pile, lost beneath the virtue-signalling box-tickers. If that's what honesty and integrity gets you... I guess I'll forever be a fucking Sole then.

Keep up the good work you weird, mysterious, antarctic creature of opinions. Please never get eaten by a sea lion.