What is this website for?
- A digital garden where I get to share things I found, my own writings, etc.
- A place to build community and find others, because I have long ignored that aspect of my life and I need to remedy that.
How does this place work?
Need a front-facing part, and backend that’s still accessible but not as prominent.
1) Front-End Section
Newsletter
- Weekly
- Email/web post
Function
- Brief thoughts of the week
- Curated version of the link posts that happened in past week
- Media consumption diet, including books, shows, movies, video games, boardgames, podcasts
Form
- Sections (thoughts, links, media)
Blog Posts
- Whenever
- RSS/Web post
Function
- My own writings and musings
- It would invariably link/draw towards the deeper recesses of the vault
- This is where we’ll explore my lenses, questions, etc.
Form
- Epistemic disclosure
- tl;dr
- Body of text
Link Posts
- Whenever
- RSS/Web post
Function
- Links to interesting things I’ve recently come across online.. a sort of public bookmarks to share with anyone who visits my neck of the woods.
- Readwise would overlap with this, but not sure I’d share the readwise highlights page.. maybe that’s a link in this post?
Form
- Link to item
- Quote or thing pulled from item
- Brief commentary, why it’s interesting to me, how it ties to other stuff I’m looking at
- Make sure to credit the original creator
- Link to my highlights page of the item (if available)
2) Back-End Section
- The messy research lab and vault of knowledge, including raw data, highlights, questions, lenses, etc.
- Posing questions, collecting information, and trying to answer them. The key is to do this work out here in the public, because the answers can’t just come from idle and passive information I find online. It has to be done in conversation, and in community.
- I can’t research and think and overthink and write and edit endlessly and ad nauseum, trying to hone the perfect answer and then post that as if it’s my final say. That’s not only madness, that’s hubris and egotistical. The best work comes from working with others, of being in conversation with others.
- I want to put it out there, work on it, flaws and all.. and iterate constantly. I want to “speak in drafts”, a term I heard from Rifka, co-host of the podcast “Movies vs Capitalism”. It’s such a brilliant turn of phrase that resonated with me. Speaking in drafts feels more freeing, albeit more scary and vulnerable. We can’t get everything right the first time, but we can talk things out and work collaboratively instead. As long as we’re okay making mistakes (hence my Mistakes section as well).
