Wander the garden
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
In a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.
Introduction
The world is a big place. Everyone we will ever know, could ever know, is in it. The paths in front of us are perpetually infinite, but our time here is not.
The world is a big place, and most of it is on the internet. Embedded in the hypertext edifice are more people than we could ever meet, more knowledge than we could contain, more opportunity than we could take advantage of. The better we are at connecting into and traversing this network, the easier it is to grasp the best versions of our futures and pull them closer.
We can also create new nodes in the network for others to find — we can place parts of ourselves onto the internet, create our own digital simulacra that act as long and complex search queries for people in some aspect like us. (That's the main goal of this place, anyway.)
As far as personal simulacra go, this one is, like, okay, since it's not exclusively for self-representation. It's more like a garden than it is a portrait. I plant the seeds, then cultivate, prune, nurture the plants; I design the paths in from and out to the dense forest surroundings, leave some hidden amusements for the observant, refine and change the garden as I myself grow. I luxuriate here on foggy afternoons and bring what I'm reading with me.
Literally me (or you, actually, that's fine too)
But though I am its architect, I am not meant to be the only person who plods around in here. Others who roam the garden have their own relationship to it, their own thoughts and responses to it — that's how I hope you'll treat this place. If you'd like, pluck a couple of flowers and take them with you, or take some stems for a garden of your own.
Selected Contents
| Title | Page |
|---|---|
| 1. Self | |
| 1.1 About me | About |
| 1.2 What I'm doing | Now |
| 1.3a Aesthetics; or, things I love | Aesthetics |
| 1.3b Music I like | Music |
| 1.4 Things I like to talk about | Conversation Topics |
| 2. Writing | |
| 2.1 How to think about values | Values |
| 2.2 Connecting people | Social infrastructure |
| 2.3 On infinite regress problems | Regress |
| 2.4 Some thoughts on design | Less design |
| 2.5 Think a little less | Complex from simple |
| Stuff tagged notes | #notes |
A more systematic list is available at the index.
Note: Your URLs are not safe! I'll try to avoid changing the links to my blog posts, but any page in the garden (i.e. any page without the word count indicated) may be subsumed back into the aetherial churn, returned once again from its sparkling identity to the primordial unity.
If you want to archive something on this website, copy-pasting the text or printing to pdf are good options, or you can link to the file in the github history under a commit where it's in the state you want to keep it in.