What Is This?

To be quite honest, I’m not really sure yet. I have had the itch to start some kind of creative endeavor for some time, and writing is by far the lowest cost of startup thing. I really enjoy writing notes in Obsidian, so it seemed somewhat natural to try to build a blogging platform off of that. Coupled with that, there a few good guides out there for doing just that with a digital garden approach.

Digital Gardens

I like the notion of a digital garden, a place where I can maintain posts that can grow over time as I think and rethink things. I don’t love it as an effective way to communicate a message though, since the relative intransigence of posts may make it seem non-committal. That said, no idea is good enough that it can’t be supplanted by another, so to some extent that may be a good thing.

Another thing that is interesting, if not obviously good, about digital gardens, is that they allow me to tie together posts relatively seamlessly. Intertextuality is one of my favorite things, so the idea that posts here can be natively self-referential is great (well I guess that’s technically intratextuality but you get my meaning). That this is markdown also means I’m afforded all manner of convenient ways to embed or reference external things, which I anticipate doing a lot of (I always have done this in my writing, though to varied effect depending on the medium).

It is possible that the affordances of a platform like this will let me (or someone more creative than me) do novel things with written expression. I’m not really sure what that looks like right now, but I’m hoping that a commitment to consistently putting stuff in this format will make it reveal itself in time. If nothing else, maybe it gives this site a relatively unique quality that readers can’t find elsewhere.

What is coming

For now, expect a lot of fragments. I’ve already started lobbing ideas here, which you can see by looking at the Against Method and A Treatise on Treatises pages. At some point, I will likely use this place for more careful or intentional writing, but I’m not letting the pressure of doing that some day prevent me from doing something today. I’d like to write about things that I’m interested. I’d like to try to put down some meaningful philosophy of who I am and what I do, and why. But it’s going to be a little while before I get to that place.