obligatory hello world
I am beginning my experiment in processing out loud on a weblog platform. My goal is 200 words a week.1 My base motivation can be surmised by a John Green quote:
But when writing, there is always for me a hope that one day I will not be alone—not in this work and not in this world. It is a bit like that old children’s pool game Marco Polo, where one person closes their eyes and swims around the pool trying to tag someone else. “Marco,” the person with eyes closed says, and the other pool-goers have to answer, “Polo.” “Marco, Marco, Marco,” cries one kid, and the others reply: “Polo. Polo. Polo.” Writing is like that for me, like I’m typing “Marco, Marco, Marco” for years, and then finally the work is finished and someone reads it and says, “Polo.”
John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
So this is my first try at "Marco."
My other web-logging motivations include:
- Working on thinking entire thoughts and in full sentences. I have regrettably outsourced a lot of my thinking to LLMs in the past year and I would like to reign that in. I don't want to lose my voice in the sloppification of the internet. I also want to refresh my grammar.2
- I would like to have an actual archive of the way I think and processing what I consume in this moment in time. I also want to stop only consuming.
- I want a body of work I can point to, something more formal than a journal but less formal than any actual publication.
- The title of this blog (notitia = "knowledge", par = "equal") is meant to symbolize that a main thread of everything I do is minimizing information asymmetry in both my personal and professional life. I enjoy learning new things and I want to use this as a series of post-it notes of things I learn translated into digestible briefings for myself and anyone I care about, whether or not they see it.
- I have been newly drawn to the online open source community and am interested in participating more.
- I tend to fiddle to a fault. Themes, plugins, any novelty that can be optimized takes up so much of my time. I think the ethos of Bearblog.dev will help me work on this.
