About
30 Oct 2021 - 24 Jan 2025
To be freed from self-obsession – no imperative more urgent. But can a cripple abstract himself from his handicap, from the very vice of his essence?
- – EM Cioran, The Fall Into Time, p43
- About the Author: Mike Travers, Doctor of Media Science, aka @mtraven.
- This is an experiment in hypertext writing. Part of the experiment is that I can't really define or explain it; everything about it is still evolving. I feel a need to preemptively apologize to anyone reading it for not organizing it in a more comprehensible manner. My excuse is that I'm doing this mostly for my own amusement.
- It's easier to describe how it started than where it is going. I started it at the end of 2020, basically due to the confluence of three things:
- My long-standing amorphous network of ideas and interests and obsessions, on things like agency and computing technologies. The hypertext within.
- A particular task appeared (Reviewing a publication from the LessWrong community) to crystallize the amorphousness. See LWMap/A Map That Reflects the Territory, although the focus on Rationalism is diminishing over time.
- The emergence of Roam and other interesting new hypertext writing tools.
- One result of this is that pages are in varying points on the spectrum between finished coherent essay and rough notes to myself. I've thought about trying to have some kind of visual difference between these, to help manage reader expectations, but for now you are on your own.
- Currently there are two top-level documents or starting points:
- LWMap/A Map That Reflects the Territory A review of a recently published set of books from the Rationalism community.
- Agency Made Me Do It, a hypertext/open-notebook document dealing with agency and related subjects.
- The first is more or less meant to be read like any other document; the other is more like an open notebook project. Parts of it are essay-like but other parts are collections of rough notes or pointers to content that doesn't exist yet. The two parts are somewhat intertwingled (to use a term of Ted Nelson's)
- All this hypertext goodness is based on Logseq, a newish note-taking tool which I've recently adopted. It's similar to Roam and was started with Roam, but after a brief fling with that I've decided that I can't use it, and Logseq is the best alternative. Because these new hypertext tools are a bit deficient on publishing tools I rolled my own starting from an existing open source project.
- I see from this old blog post that I have been thinking about doing something like this since 2011, and probably longer.
But I digress. No apologies required, constant digression being the saving grace of senile reminescence.
- – Carr, Travesties, Tom Stoppard
- Here's another way to visualize the content:
- Spiritual guidance: J. R. "Bob" Dobbs
