Why I built this

I have started and closed enough ventures to notice a pattern. Each one had a website, and each website died with the venture. The domain lapsed, or the platform pivoted, or the export button produced a folder of files that no longer opened. Whatever I had written was gone, or close enough to gone that recovering it was not worth the afternoon.

So this site is the opposite of that. It is mine, not a tenancy on someone else’s platform. The words are plain Markdown in a repository I control. There is very little machinery underneath, and what machinery there is stays boring on purpose. My working assumption is that a file I can read today I should be able to read in twenty years, on hardware and software I cannot yet picture. Ventures come and go. This one is meant to stay.

What the writing will be

I think in one register and apply it in a few places, so the range here will look wider than it is. I expect to write about belief and evidence, and where the two meet or fail to. About seeing, and photography as a way of paying attention. About ancient texts, and the people who copied and compiled them in ancient south-west Asia. And about building things that are meant to last, in code and otherwise.

The connective tissue is a habit of mind more than a subject. I want to know what is actually known, what is merely asserted, and what nobody can yet say. That distinction interests me more than being right.

This is a place to think out loud, which means some of what I post will later look wrong, or half-formed, or superseded. I would rather leave the record honest than tidy it after the fact. If you are reading this, you have found the first entry. There will be more.