Wander the garden
Recent additions: The human project and A pathology of striving. See the index for more.
An introduction.
This site exists for the both of us. It is a node embedded in the hypertext edifice; my own little digital simulacrum; a studio; a long and complex search query designed to find people who are curious and care about making the world better. This site is more a backyard garden than a self-portrait, though, and I'm still working on carving the gates and pruning the plants and such.
If you don't know me, I'd recommend the about page. That's where you can find my contact information as well. I have a couple pages dedicated to things I love: Aesthetics is the original and probably the least logically coherent at first glance, so there's also a "What is the Aesthetics page?" page. I have additional pages for passages of poetry and prose I've collected that are meaningful to me, as well as music that I enjoy. You can think of these as, roughly, external devices through which you can see a part of myself. I have an assorted links page, much of which is stuff I wish I could have shown to my younger self; sorry if that isn't you, lol, but you might find it interesting anyway.
I also have an inherently incomplete list of things I'd like to talk to you about which will always be out of date, but which is better than nothing. (Seriously, I'd love to talk to you. It doesn't have to be about any of those things either. Send me a DM at lgngrvs on almost any platform, preferably Discord.)
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.
I have a small blog called "the basics" where I post my notes from semi-casually exploring technical subjects, like information theory, theoretical computer science, set theory, machine learning, and other things.
I enjoy writing, though I'm conflicted about my relationship with it. Not all the pieces on this site are well-edited (or edited at all) but all of them are things I think are worth sharing. My favorite piece I've written is about American identity. I wrote a less beautiful, more functional essay about "social infrastructure" which I think is interesting though it's long. My design philosophy is in part based on Dieter Rams' idea that "good design is as little design as possible", which I thought I came up with on my own but, as usual, was beaten to it by someone in the 20th century. I expanded it into a blog post nonetheless. I also like to write about things I've learned: how to be happy, following your values is fine maybe are two good examples, things I've learned about relationships, and how to read the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. I tried to put some really personally important ideas into words in the How to Be Happy piece especially.
You can see a mostly-systematic list at the index, but that kind of defeats the point of the site's nonlinear organization. :(
Literally me
A note on URLs: I'll try to avoid changing the links to my blog posts, but any page with a faded-gray title 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 in which you want to keep it.