First Post!
I'm not entirely sure still why I started this blog. To be clear, I'm aware that's an awful way to start anything. I just really want a blog of my own where I engage in the sort of archival and synthesis that my Zotero / Notes app / Obsidian have traditionally been home to, sans any compulsion to link things to PDFs or to think about Markdown folders and such.
For as long as I can recall, I've admired blogs of others who do this kind of thing. Simon Willison's weblog and Cosma Shalizi's notebooks and weblog come to mind especially. I really like how they've found different ways to go beyond concerns of organization and just focus on the writing and reading they do. This is the dream.
I am not sure yet what form this will take for me. I struggle to think of the unit of analysis and synthesis when I'm making notes. Do you archive at the level of what you're reading? At the level of themes across what you're reading? At the level of themes you've inferred from what you're reading? Some fuzzy combination of all the above? In another life, I would have loved being a designer of taxonomies.
Anyway, this post is more an exercise in reflection than anything else! And a way to assert to myself that I'm kickstarting something. At the very least, I hope to have some fun writing here, even if it does not result in mental satiation that I've collected everything under the sun that interests me in ways that I've aspired to all my life. Maybe those are entirely mutually exclusive? To be found out!