Public Thoughts, Private Room

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Public Thoughts, Private Room

I sat down late yesterday afternoon (Sunday) to write my weeknotes, and for 20 minutes, nothing came down my arms, out of my fingertips, and onto the screen.

On the one hand, this was surprising. Having written here week in, week out since January 2018, there’s always been ‘something’ to say. Some thought, some observation, some fragment of tohught to post.

Last year, I wrote at length about how this blog has been a place for ‘thinking in public‘, and that blogging in 2025 is owning and controlling one’s personal infrastructure. AA blog can be whatever you want it to be: “A blog can be a body of work. A map of obsessions. A garden. A reliquary. A trapdoor. A field report from your corner of the internet.”

People often talk about blogs as a kind of open diary. I think this is close to how I currently feel about writing here. Of course, I also make a podcast, make a zine, write here, etc. But one of the things I’m quite clear about is that this is a personal website, and my podcast is a personal podcast.

One thing I have refused is the niche. I wrote about this last year:

I have purposefully resisted the urge to ‘niche’ down. To turn this blog, or my podcast into a single subject show. Which I think/know has cost me in terms of ‘legibility’. But I don’t mind really. I’d rather be a complete person on the Internet, than a shallow slice chasing clout on a topic (Something I know that I could have done several times over the years had I wanted to)

But I realised this morning that my not having anything to say last night was because I did, in fact, have plenty of things to say. They all gushed out of me in my diary/journal this morning. But none of them were things that i would like to say on the Internet.

Over time, naturally, a blog becomes a collection an archive of public interests: In my case technology, culture, worlds, futures, Solarpunk, Saints, hardware, AI, whatever. But the key here is public. I have occasionally written on here about meditation, and people can guess from my readings section that I’m trying to make sense of a spiritual journey.

But as we all know, the internet isn’t real life, and one can never give a complete picture. Just because someone doesn’t write or post about something doesn’t mean they don’t care about it. And choosing not to write about certain things is, in a way, the opposite impulse of having a ‘niche’—of only writing about one topic.

But as we all know, the internet isn’t real life, and one can never give a complete picture. Just because someone doesn’t write or post about something doesn’t mean they don’t care about it. Something that social media I think confuses. And choosing not to write about certain things is, in a way, the opposite impulse of having a ‘niche’ and only writing about one topic.

I like that some things are just for me, and I think that’s healthy. In fact, sometimes I think or feel that people writing or talking about things that matter to me online is cringe. But I know this has far more to do with me than them. The cringe usually comes when the thing that matters becomes that person’s niche.

A blog is not—and never will be—the full contents of a mind. And proper diary remains a private room. And I’m okay with that.

In the end, the only niche here is what I choose to post online.

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On The Blog

Accessions | 070525

The paperback edition of J David Osborne’s cyberpunk epic Gods Fare No Better arrived last week.

Photo-a-day for the month of April 2025

Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 4.Photo-a-day for the month of April.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• The big report is nearly finished
• Lots of notes written!
• Several meetings
• Huge break though with the meaning of life AMA

Terminal Access

I can’t recommend this Oral History of AI, and how LLM’s broke an entire field of computer science in 2019/20 enough

“On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched its experimental chatbot(opens a new tab). ChatGPT hit the NLP community like an asteroid.“

CHRISTOPHER POTTS: Somebody in our group got early access to the GPT-3 API. And I remember standing in my office, right where I’m standing now, thinking: I’m going to prompt it with some logic questions and it’s going to fail at them. I’m going to reveal that it has just memorized all the things that you’re so impressed by. I’m going to show you that this is a party trick.

I remember trying, and trying again. Then I had to fess up to the group: “Yeah, this is definitely much more than a party trick.”

Reading

I’m still reading Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation by Mark J.P. Wolf and once thats done i’m going to finish What Is a Dog? by Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger.

But after my apologia for my kindle last week and some synchronicities I started reading New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. I justify this by saying its been on my kindle for years – rather than it being a new acquisition. The book itself is alive. wow. I can see why this was a bestseller post war. It is however strange to be reading a text and be on the other side of knowing.

Viagra Boys – viagr aboys

New Viagra boys album is amazing. It’s very different subject matter to 2022’s Cave World. Instead of social commentary, it’s a reflection on the personal condition in contemporary society. The album is quite meta compared to their previous ones but there’s some real bangers on it full of sleezy riffs.

Two highlights below.

Remember Kids:

one clue to an important word is that the author quarrels with other writers about it. When you find an author telling you how a particular word has been used by others, and why he chooses to use it otherwise, you can be sure that word makes a great difference to him.

How to Read a Book – Mortimer J. Adler