About this site.

This website has been simmering in my mind since I began programming in 2018. One of the initial projects that I wanted to complete after my first programming course was the creation of a personal website, but there were numerous psychological barriers that stood in the way of its birth — perfectionism, lack of confidence in my programming and writing capabilities, decision paralysis with respect to organization, form, and design — all of your classic self-sabatoging mentalities. But one day, riding on the coattails of my existential crisis-fueled euphoria (or as some would say, delusion), I woke up and declared “F@$*, I’m just going to send it!”A reminder to myself to fix quotation marks that appear before another character.. And send it I did, and herein lies the product of that sending.

In the remainder of this page, I’ll describe the overarching structure of my website, its intended purpose, the philosophy and inspiration for its content and design, and the technology behind the scenes.

Structure

I’ve settled on a tripartite structure, although this may shift down the line as my needs and wants for this website change. The three components are as follows:

1. Essays — opinion-based, longer-form content, containing a more thorough analysis of chosen topics and the interweaving of various themes
2. Notes — information-based text, similar to a Wikipedia article or encyclopedia entry, or other more comprehensive notes on a specific topic
3. Journal — my personal thought/word/content vomit receptacle, containing the various brain farts and questions that pop into my head at random and the large or small moments from my day that I’d like to remember

Every page under each of these branches will be tagged, and these tags will serve as the operator to link the three together. The concepts identified in these tags can be perused in the Topics page, where you can see all of the posts pertaining to a particular topic.

I hope that these three components will serve to encourage the flow and growth of information from a seed to a flourishing plant to a whole meal. My vision is that the seeds of thought will be planted in my journal, where there is no pressure to have a coherent opinion or view on anything — just small beginnings. From the journal, I can cherry-pick interesting topics and do more in-depth research, posting the fruits of my labor as a note. Then, from the research in the notes, and other random tid-bits from my journal, I can weave it together into the grand feast of an essay. We’ll see if this strategy pans out, but I have high hopes!

Purpose

Like most things in life, a website gains far more meaning and richness when it is aware of its raison d’êtreFrench for "reason for being." I learned this phrase from Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire!. As such, I wish to endow this website with a sense of purpose and being.

I think that the main force behind its creation is the hope that it will be an extension of my limited self. For most of my life, I’ve suffered from a slight (well, maybe a sizable) feeling of lack — the universe is brimming with information and the computational power of my pea-sized brain is no match for the immensity of it all. I’ve even forgotten much of what it was like to be myself at any moment in time besides the current one! Although I’ve mostly come to terms with this fact, I realized that there are a plethora of tools at my disposal that I can use to enrich my views of the world and of myself. With that in mind, I identified a few ways in which I hope this website will extend my concept of my self and my understanding.

Deeper understanding and reflection

I’ve realized how much of my information consumption has been subsisting off of “fast food for the mind.” Whenever I had a question or thought about a random topic, the near-instantaneous nature of a Google search and the convenience of a few Reddit threads satisfed my truth-seeking itch, but did little to offer information of substance. I found myself skimming over articles, seeking shorter-form content, and relegating my information-seeking process to the inner workings of algorithms and infinite-scroll platforms. Even during my undergraduate education, the pressure and time constraints of classes led me to rely on cognitive tricks and shortcuts, rather than a more comprehensive grasp of the subject matter and its various contexts. Essentially, convenience and efficiency had supplanted my desire for deep understanding.

And like a diet consisting of Big Macs, 20-piece chicken nuggets, and super-sized Cokes, this left my mind slightly nutritionally deficient and unable to process richer, more substantive content. It was difficult for me to focus on and digest novels, and even a few days after finishing a book, I would struggle to recall small details and even overarching themes or symbolism. This struggle extended to all forms of media and data. It was a signal of my deteriorating information-processing abilities — a deterioration that pervaded all minutae of my life. I felt dumb as bricks.

I eventually grasped that what I lacked was not cognitive capabilities, but rather time and awareness. I forgot what I read not because I was stupid or my memory was failing me, but because I wasn’t dedicating time to flush the concepts out, add them to a network of connections to other ideas, and analyse how I changed as a result of this process. I was mindlessly macking down fistfuls of information and only paying attention to the stink of the shit that came out the other end, not the ways in which the information was subliminally enriching my life or challenging my normative thought patterns or opening doors for further exploration. In light of this, I awakened an internal desire to slow down and become truly aware of what I was consuming.

Thus, I hope that writing and posting to this website will encourage me to engage in slower, deeper reflection and contemplation. I don’t want a Number-2-protein-style-with-onions-and-7-UpAlthough, this is a top tier, elite In-N-Out order.. I want to make that burger from scratch, damn it! I want to savor every moment of the process, from the conception to realization. I want a time and space to build a robust network of thoughts and ideas that weave themselves together into a personal philosophy, and this website is the manifestation of these desires.

Cultivation of personal understanding

I mentioned earlier that I’ve forgotten much of what it was like to be myself. For various reasons, my sense of time and autobiographical memory is a tangled mess. Sometimes I think about my past and it feels dizzyingly foreign, like I’ve dissociated and am observing someone else’s life. Or a recurring thought or feeling is on the tip of my tongue, but it’s incredibly fuzzy and dream-like and I can’t give it a form. Or I try and fail to remember what my cognitive processes were like before a certain event. This is a phenomenon that truly bothers me. It bothers me because in the forgetting, it feels as though I’ve lost some dimension of the richness of my life. It also makes it harder to empathize with my past self, since I’ve forgotten the reasons why I acted a certain way. And although these concepts and events are outside of the realm of my explicit awareness, they are embedded in my thoughts and actions, like spectres of the past. And not being aware of these subliminal perspectives and habits makes it incredibly easy to fall victim to a perpetual cycle of thoughtless doing and makes it incredibly hard to do otherwise.

So, I want to create a memory breadcrumb trail so that I can revisit the states of mind that I held at various points in time — one that can’t be eaten by birds — and I want this website to be a personal Wikipedia of my thoughts that grows naturally over time. I hope that it will be a resource that helps me come to a better understanding of who I am.

A shout into the void; catharsis

I often have the urge to drive to the coast in midst of the night and shout at the ocean. There’s something cathartic about the idea — one’s existential angst being subsumed by the calming undulation of the waves, the hypnotic pitch and roll of the tides, and the immovable void of the sea. In general, the concept of a shout into the void is very appealing to me. I think it’s because I struggle immensely with the possibility of being a burden on others: I abhor the idea of people doing things for me simply because they feel obligated to do so. The void feels no such obligation. As such, it allows acts of unbearable lightness in the face of its totality.

The Internet is a void, just like the sea. No one is obligated to read anything that I post on this website. I can shout about all of the crazy ideas inside my head all that I wantOf course, as long as none of these ideas are harmful to anyone else. I don't think that I think in ways that are harmful to others, or if I do, I am more than willing to change, so hopefully this statement still stands., with little risk of burdening anyone else, since they are just one click away from something that they find more palatable. This is my metaphorical cry into the ocean of nothingness, and I find a strange and freeing comfort in this fact.

Other

Other purposes for this website include an exercise in creation; challenge and personal growth; writing development; a nice user interface to explore my notes; a repository or reference bookThe next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it. - Samuel Johnson for thought exploration.

Philosophy

I believe that after a raison d’être, a philosophy may the next most important idea to develop and become aware of. The former supplies the why, and the latter supplies the how — and I stand by why and how being far more critical than the who, what, where, or when. There are two separate components to the philosophy of this website, which are the philosophy of its content and the philosophy of its design.

Content

1. Resiliency
2. Transparency
3. Non-linearity

Design

Okay, the previous epigraph is a bit (well, more like a byte) crass, and in general, some of the phrases the creator of the website uses are quite problematic, but nonetheless it expounds a very important point in website design. The web is full of unnecessary bloat that, in my view, detracts from focus on the content in favor of flashy style. Content-forward and graphics-forward approaches are both valid, but in my use case, I far prefer emphasis on content over form. Thus, my principles on this website’s design are as follows:

1. Minimalism
2. Consistency
3. Clarity
4. Longevity

Inspiration

I think that the question of inspiration is always so precarious. In actuality, every website I have ever visited, and really, all of the experiences shaping my neurological pathways, cognitive functions, and general worldview are to be held accountable for the production of this website. But this is not useful information to an external audience, and some experiences are more overt sources of inspiration than the rest, so I’ll outline some of these more major influences.

My first introductions to website personalization and design were the Neopets Marketplace and TumblrIf you dare, take a look at my Tumblr blog here and be transported into my middle-school-to-early-high-school mind and aesthetic sensibilities. I never wrote posts of my own, though. I was a reblogging lurker.. I still remember searching for snippets of HTML that would let me add a sparkly trail to my cursor for my Tumblr blog, and thinking that I would never understand what those lines of text meant. Look at me now! I still don’t really understand, but I’m far closer now than I was back then! Through Tumblr, I found myself gravitating towards more simplistic and minimal layouts.

• Wikipedia
• LaTeX
• Obsidian
• Digital gardening
• gwern.net

Implementation

To-dos

There are many features that I’d like to add to this website, such as:

• Support bi-directional links, à la digital gardens
• Implement a knowledge graph visualisation
• Switch from .md to .mdx
• Change the footnote symbol on narrower screens from a tiny number to something more noticeable
• Automatically generate and display a table of contents
• Support multi-paragraph text in sidenotes
• Change checkbox lists to not display a bullet point
• Add a scroll-to-the-top button
• Add more fine-grained organization of the Topics page, like topic organization by letter
• Add search functionality