Easter Eggs

If you write a blogpost full of subtle references, and nobody seems to notice, did you just waste your effort?

Last week I wrote this work blogpost. In fact, it took a week to cook - which is much much longer than a blogpost typically takes. I typically dish out a blogpost in one session, in 20-30 minutes.

The "industrial revolution" of data insights

Now, look at this post, and look at all the subheadings in it. Do you see a pattern? The post had got delayed by a full day because I had last minute determined to alter the pattern thanks to recent events.

It all started with the first draft, which I started writing some two weeks ago. I had to write about a minor episode of (work related) panic attack I suffered two Mondays ago, and I wrote the heading “Panic Attack”. Immediately, I figured that’s the name of a Dream Theater song. And then suddenly I got the idea that I could write the entire blogpost with subheadings made out of Dream Theater song titles.

When you get these ideas, the first thing that fails you is your memory. You might know hundreds of Dream Theater songs, but at a time when you need to find some that fit your blogpost, you forget them all. I even opened a playlist of top Dream Theater songs so I could choose the appropriate ones. I remember writing a draft with “Pull Me Under”, “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence”, “The Spirit Carries On” and stuff. And no - I couldn’t find a way to fit “Octavarium” in.

This - trying to find appropriate subheadings that fitted the theme - clearly slowed me down. I couldn’t write as fluently as I usually do. I wrote a bad blogpost and since this was work related, I filed it away “to edit and send” rather than just send the bad first draft.

And then during one of my edits, I was listening to some Judas Priest. And I immediately realized that they too have a song called Panic Attack now. This immediately put me in two minds - in terms of bands, I definitely prefer Judas Priest to Dream Theater. However, in terms of songs, I definitely prefer the song called “Panic Attack” by Dream Theater (the Judas Priest song is great, except for the main chorus; Anyway, here it is):

I spent some half an hour debating which band’s songs to use. I checked with a metalhead friend, who said “Priest is definitely the better band”. I wasn’t convinced. So I decided to go with whichever band has more mainstream songs that fit the themes of the blogpost.

Judas Priest won. It helped that I’d listened to their full discography many more times than I had done of Dream Theater.

It being a post about a startup, “Painkiller” had to have an entry.

There was a section where I wrote about how despite significant demand, analytics is one area where AI investments have lagged. I cheekily put in “Some heads are gonna roll” to title that.

A random analogy I made (I edited this set of paragraphs multiple times, I must say) was “All Guns Blazing”.

And when I had to say that this is our one chance of “being part of the industrial revolution in data insights”, it was very obvious to title it “One Shot At Glory”.

And finally, for the epilogue, which in the Dream Theater version I had named “The Spirit Carries On”, I called “Beyond The Realms of Death”. One power ballad replaced by another. So there was justice in the world.

But there was no justice in the response. Nobody seemed to notice. Even if they did, nobody told me. All this effort at doing something seemingly cool just flew under the radar.

Looks like people don’t appreciate culture that much nowadays.