Writing IS thinking.
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
Every good blog from 2010 starts with a "what should I blog about?" post. I suppose this is mine.
Background
Throughout my life, I've always been a technical communicator, but only informally. I'd frequently write HOWTOs for forums or quick notes to friends, but I never chose to develop my own writing style beyond my academic publications.
Blogging for me was an exercise in distraction. From time to time, the activation energy of some exciting new platform would draw me to start a blog there with ambitions of using it forever, but each attempt was always about the novelty of the platform rather than the substance of the writing. Curiosity left me wandering through various writing initiatives, quickly abandoning each as interest waned. My first foray of this 'blogging' concept from 2013 lasted about a post and a half, and my old tumblr blog from 2013 quickly became solely devoted to the tumblr plugin for Emacs that I used to author it. Let's not even mention my Medium account (yikes), which features one transcript of a post-election conference from the NAACP and one trip report from meeting a sleep paralysis demon and precisely nothing else.
That account still uses my old name and photo.
I should log in to fix that.
The only writing that I've stuck with consistently is my org-mode journal, which I've stuck with since 2014. Every time I need a text canvas in my work, I switch over to emacs, jump to today's page, and jot it down. It's frictionless, it's simple, and there's no obligation to polish. As such, over the past twelve years, I've accrued 15 megabytes(!) of text. I put everything in there: frustrations, feelings about crushes, console commands and outputs, text-only copies of webpages that I want to save, etc. It's my scrapbook, my lab notebook, my diary, my confidant. The most frequently traveled entries feature timestamped conversations with successive versions of myself capturing slices of personality years apart. It's fascinating to see how I've changed as a person by comparing old and new entries.
But by far, most of these stories are told as a precession of staccato bullet points.
- "TODO compose email to boris re: internship."
- "CANCELED: date with [redacted]."
- "Outline for pixel cafe talk."
The structure is always extrinsic. It isn't something I impute into the work.
Why start a blog?
For two reasons.
Firstly, I'd like to return back through some of these disparate platforms and collect the thoughts I've had into a central place that's easy to share with my friends. Stories that I've read, good posts I've made on social media, etc. I'm still a young'in, but I've lived a pretty adventurous life already, and others might take some pleasure in hearing about the best parts.
But more importantly, I'd like to develop my skills of writing and technical communication. Thinking and writing are deeply linked. A couple friends recently told me that they like my highly structured communication style in person, but that's because I've lived my past ten journaling years in outlines, not prose. So I'd like to try something new.
There's another benefit too. I'd like to train the skill of paying attention to good writing. I want to notice why this works and why that doesn't, to understand the flow of words rather than the scaffolding of headings. I want to force my brain to manually make connections. Right now, writing prose still hurts. I don't notice the elements.
We make things holy by the kind of attention we give them.
Said another way, I can't brains good if I still I can't never practice don't do my is english hard enough. You have to pracice the english in the brains before you can brains good. Which is hard sometimes. But you can practice it. The attention, I mean.
Reading voraciously is a great start, but I can't learn these skills unless I attempt to put them into practice.
Format
I expect this to evolve over time. Right now, my tool of choice is Eleventy, which prefers directories of markdown files in linear collections. Later, I'd like to take some inspiration from The Zettelkasten Bros and play with roam/Obsidian/Org-roam-style interconnections, but I need to start small and see what things grow into.
I expect to post five kinds of content:
- Sketches and projects, aka. "look Mom, I made something!"
- Quotes from other people that I find interesting
- TILs and HOWTO content, inspired by Julia Evans and Simon Willison
- Blogmarks to interesting articles, perhaps local copies of great sci-fi stories, and other references; also inspired by Simon Willison
- Half-baked thoughts and diary-style content that may only be relevant to my own experience
Someday I expect to migrate this to kdb, my spiritual successor to TiddlyWiki, but that will take time.
Inspirations
- Gwern's meticulousness
- Julia Evans' earnestness
- Simon Willison's curiosity and format
- Andy Matuschak's ideals and philosophy of ravenous learning
- qntm's imagination
- Matthew Stover's prose in his 2005 novelization of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which was the last time I read prose that absolutely knocked my socks off and I'm only mildly ashamed of this
- Halimede's critical eye and highly structured thinking
How to subscribe
If you want to get my content in your inbox, that means you must really care about me or my writing (or both). I'm still quite young and unskilled at this whole 'writing' thing, so it's appropriate that my audience comprises the people who are best positioned in real life to help me nurture this skill.
So for now, there are only two ways to subscribe to my content:
- "Bookmarks," an ancient technique where you remember to occasionally visit my site and read the new content.
- Here's a video where bookmark master and critically acclaimed film director Freddie Wong explains this technique.
- RSS feed
If you use bookmarks (hi Heli!!) and want to read what I write, I deeply thank you. If you use substack (hi Olivia!!) and would like to see my posts, I also deeply thank you, and you might be able to add the RSS feed on the web reader. I'd like to explore further bluesky/email newsletter/linkedin integrations in the future as my process develops.
But be warned: this is a scrapbooking project, not a platform. The reader won’t learn who I am except parasocially, and I don’t care to appeal to whatever copy of me might live in the reader's head. This is an exercise in developing my internal appreciation and taste for things that I like.
For now, I just want to sustain the habit and develop fluency.