This will be a place to host my everyday thoughts. If you'd like to see my chess games, see some chess puzzles, or see my attempt at chess analysis. You can head over to this page.
The First Seed in a Garden
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Hello All. This is now my digital garden. I got the idea from Maggie Appleton and a few others. The idea of learning and collaborating in public sounded really intriguing so I thought I'd give it a try
Some of my current main interests are Witchcraft, Chess, Politics, Music, and poetry so there should be a good portion of those.
Also I want to maybe find ways of creating and exploring new ideas without necessarily having to go to a depressing media silo.
I've noticed there's an increasing pressure to consume an endless amount of media and I feel like as a consequence my ability to create and actively engage has become a bit stilted. Hopefully this will be in a step in the right direction.
Also as an interesting side point. This is all being edited in Emacs text editor. I'm starting to understand the basics of it.
Tools that shape our thinking
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One thing I've been thinking about quite a bit is the way that the tools we use often have a greater impact on our thinking than we realize. It impacts how the workflow goes, how we approach sharing something, and the way we think about it.
Mark Bernstein'swritings were instrumental in me thinking about this. He is one of the more old proponents of hypertext writing and he has a lot of exciting stuff to say on the matter. Several of his papers have a fascinating thought process. I highly recommend the following
Patterns of Hypertext by Mark Bernstein 1998
Hypertext Narrative by Mark Bernstein 2009
Can We Talk About Spatial Hypertext by Mark Bernstein
A Villain's Guide to Social Media and Digital Storytelling by Mark Bernstein and Claire Hooper
I'll probably be posting notes and thoughts about these in the comming few days.
Small Web Thoughts
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There's been an interesting movement slowly building up of people rebelling against the corporatizing web. One aspect of that is known as the Small Web. A fascinating group concerned with websites focusing on humanness, personality, and small file sizes as opposed to the much more bloated corporate websites that track all of your data. Some of the interesting Sites I discovered while looking into this were.
A fascinating and political look at how the common ways we navigate the internet end up harming us and a hopeful look at making the creation of independent web spaces easier.
Here's a club that promotes websites that are 1mb in size or less.
Here's a club for those that think a whole megabyte is too bloated. This one promotes sites that are 512kb large. (For Scale my entire website right now comes in at about 469kb.
And finally here's the clubfor those who want to see 250kb and smaller websites. This reminds me of when I was reading about some alternative ways of posting to the internet using the gopher protocol and the newer Gemini protocol. Web protocols that only really allow text and so no ads or anything can chase you around. My experience on Gemini was that it was a much quieter more peaceful place. More notes to come later.
Resources
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This Website is a really cool website that allows you to check if your customs have enough contrast according to html 5 standards for easy readability. What makes this one better is it doesn't just test your text vs the background. It checks your text, link colors, And background.
Transmisogyny and Stress
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I've been thinking alot about the ways that transmisogyny impacts day to day life in ways that are both seen and unseen. Especially on social media landscapes which profit from pitting people against one another. How you end up becoming hypervigilant of every action you take. You become terrified of people misconstruing you, or bending your words out of context. Everything needs eighteen clarifications and caveats. Otherwise you end up in an explosive fight.
For alot of trans women who make their livelihoods online or anyone who's livelihood and shelter is connected to their reputation this is deeply terrifying. Even if nothing ever directly happens to you, the sheer stress of something that might happen is terrifying.
Here are two articles that I found really impactful about transmisogyny. Hot Allostatic load by Porpentine is a brilliant article that dives into the after effects and pain of the after effects of callouts and harrasment campaigns. It should be noted that Allostatic Load is a term referring to the wear and tear that occurs to the body and mind due to chronic stress. (Hereis an article on that.)
Another article I find very Insightful is The Abuser's Guide to Transmisogynyby Wyatt fractal Starlight. It takes a more sardonic approach while examining the precise methods by which transmisogyny is carried out through whisper networks and callout docs.
Chess Analysis Proposal
One of my most recent goals has been to improve at chess. I'm still at the stage where I frequently blunder my pieces. I was thinking that one thing I could do to improve my chess was to publically analyze them. Botvinnik in his book "One Hundred Selected Games" said one of the most important ways to develop ones skills was to analyze ones games. Interestingly enough he said it was even better to do so publicaly as it encouraged a level of objectivity. Which I think is a very interesting comment considering more modern day trends of doing learning in public and things like that.
So from here on out I think I'll take at least one or two games of mine a week and publically analyze theme here. At least once I figure out how to embed the chess file with comments lol