About these notes

This is a garden, not a stream. The notes here are things I'm thinking about, gathered and tended over time. Most of them start as a pile of quotes and a question, and some of them grow into something more. A few never will, and that's fine too.

I'm more interested in questions than answers. The goal is to follow curiosity, connect sources to each other, question assumptions (mine included), and leave room for other ways of seeing things. If a note ends with a Questions section, some of those are mine to answer and some are yours.

How to read a note

Every note carries a stage that says how done it is:

• Found: a seedling. Links and quotes I've gathered, with the beginnings of a thread.
• Draft: a thought is forming. The ideas may be starting to cohere, but the note is still changing.
• In bloom: the thought is as formed as it's going to get (for now).

Some notes also carry an epistemic status: a short, honest line about how confident I am, borrowed from Gwern and Devon Zuegel.

Notes show the date they were planted and the date they were last tended. They change over time, and the feed will tell you when one is planted and when one moves up a stage.

A few rules I'm writing by

• Quote directly, and say where things came from. When I find something via someone else, I'll say so.
• Link notes to each other. The connections between ideas are often more interesting than the ideas themselves.
• No promises about how often I'll post.
• No offloading onto the reader. You won't find posts about how hard writing is.

As Matt Webb puts it:

I wouldn’t be able to blog at all if I weren’t writing down ideas.

Where this comes from

This garden owes a lot to people who've been doing it better and longer: Maggie Appleton, Robin Sloan, Matt Webb, Jason Kottke, John Gruber, and Tom Scott. See also Digital Gardens.

How it looks, and where that came from

The design is meant to read like riso-printed pages on a gridded table, with small drawings tucked into the margins. I borrowed freely, so here's where it all came from:

• Layout: Rest of World's Digital Divinity series (and how they made it) for the arched window, the table of contents with dotted leaders, and the stacked page edges.
• Labels: Knowing Machines for the plain, brutalist labels.
• Book typography: Matthew Butterick's Typography for Lawyers for the margin rail and sidenotes.
• Depth: Michael Flarup's The Future is Colourful and Dimensional, and his name for it, "Diamorph".
• Frame: Melina K's Brothertiger Fall Tour 2022 poster, for the window, the hairline frame and the red ledger.
• Colour: two Riso inks, Hunter Green and Sunflower, overprinting to olive, with Bright Red for stamps. The names come from the Riso ink list.
• Stages: the seed, sprout and bloom stages follow Maggie Appleton's growth stages.
• Questions: the soil plot that holds a note's Questions owes something to Christopher Silas Neal's illustrations for Kate Messner's Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt. Its sprouts and sleeping rabbit were drawn in code, as placeholders.
• Plat map: the lots on the neighbors page follow Carlos Vanegas and colleagues' Procedural Generation of Parcels in Urban Modeling (Eurographics 2012), which I found through jamessimo's Making my dream city builder: Part 1 - Parcels.
• Type: DM Serif Text for headings, Crimson Pro for text, DINish (an open revival of the DIN 1451 road-sign lettering) for labels, Gutenberg Labo's GL-Nummernschild (an open revival of the FE-Schrift on German number plates) for note numbers and stamps, and the Braille Institute's Atkinson Hyperlegible for buttons and controls.

Colophon

How this garden is built, and the code it runs on, is in the Tool shed.

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The people whose writing I keep going back to are my neighbors.