writing dec 10's adventure

Author: nilaykumar

content-org/garden/december-adventure.org

@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ I've taken the liberty of retroactively logging the days I missed.
 | 日 | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 |
 |----+----+----+----+----+----+----|
 |    | [[december 1][01]] | [[december 2 - 3][02]] | [[december 2 - 3][03]] | [[december 4][04]] | [[december 5][05]] | [[december 6][06]] |
-| [[december 7][07]] | [[december 8][08]] | [[december 9][09]] | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
+| [[december 7][07]] | [[december 8][08]] | [[december 9][09]] | [[december 10][10]] | 11 | 12 | 13 |
 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |    |    |    |
@@ -231,7 +231,6 @@ radical shapes, and writing some code, but I got a little too interested in seal
 scripts and the translation was tough, so I'll leave that for tomorrow.
 
 * december 9
-
 Before I fell asleep last night I was doodling kanji, trying to get a concrete
 sense of how kakuji are designed. As the passage above points out, kakuji are
 designed after seal script, so building an intuition of how the contemporary
@@ -277,6 +276,72 @@ it here for now. I suppose I can return to this and swap to keyboard controls,
 though it definitely won't feel as smooth. Then finally onto the interesting
 part: understanding the patterns behind the gaps in ink and the radical shapes!
 
+* december 10
+
+Today I let the intrusive thoughts win and started seriously considering writing
+my own static site generator. It feels like the illogical next step to starting
+a digital garden. I don't know if I have the technical chops for it, but I'd
+like to try writing it in C, potentially avoiding writing any parsing-related
+aspects for now, just to keep things near my pay grade.
+
+One motivator for me is to stop publishing my site using =org-mode= and =hugo= (via
+=ox-hugo=). I definitely have mixed feelings here. As much as I enjoy using and
+learning =emacs= and =org-mode= (and to be clear, I don't have any plans to stop
+using =emacs=), I've always felt hopelessly out of my depth, and I never end up
+setting aside the time to get comfortable enough with site generation toolchain
+that I use. This leads to frustration with little things like not being able to
+quite control the final HTML markup that's generated. Sure -- maybe there's a
+way of fixing the little issues that bug me, but I'm easily intimidated by =ox-hugo=
+and =hugo=. It'd also be nice to remove =emacs= in the toolchain -- I sometimes have
+trouble getting the publishing to work on my laptop (and, indeed, I couldn't get
+it to work -- I'll have to finish this update up on my desktop).
+
+I think, generally speaking, I'm coming around to some sort of desire for
+human-scale computing in my personal life. It's some kind of diy
+right-to-and-have-time-to-repair attitude whose emergence in my mind has only
+been hastened by the current state of big tech and ai slop.
+
+All that being said but what am I looking to get out of a new ssg and therefore
+a new site design? And what should my small-tech toolchain be and do? Trying to
+answer this question led me through an associative trail of hypertext
+digressions, first with reading Vannevar Bush's essay [[https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1945/07/176-1/132407932.pdf][As We May Think]] on his
+speculative concept of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex][memex]] (memory-extension), and then reading Ted
+Nelson's [[https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800197.806036][paper]] that coined the term /hypertext/, to learning about the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)][Gopher]] and
+[[https://geminiprotocol.net/][Gemini]] protocols, and then finally learning about various human-scale technology
+movements like [[https://smolweb.org/][smolweb]].
+
+I haven't yet distilled those ideas into any sort of design outline yet, though
+I am inspired by a few concrete examples such as [[https://xxiivv.com/][xxiivv]] and [[https://pluralistic.net/][pluralistic.net]]. One
+thing I will note, though, is that I've always been interested in experimenting
+with annotation on the web (I have occasionally used [[https://web.hypothes.is/][a browser extension]], but
+not with any serious philosophical thought), though this may be in opposition
+with that word /static/ in ssg... I was reminded of this interest when I read
+Nelson's definition of /hypertext/:
+#+begin_quote
+Let me introduce the word "hypertext"^a to mean a body of written or pictorial
+material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be
+presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its
+contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and
+footnotes from scholars who have examined it.
+
+a. The sense of "hyper-" used here connotes extension and generality; cf.
+   "hyperspace." The criterion for this prefix is the inability of these objects
+   to be comprised sensibly into linear media, like the text string, or even
+   media of somewhat higher complexity...
+#+ATTR_HTML: :class attribution
+T. H. Nelson, A File Structure for The Complex, The Changing and the
+   Indeterminate, p.96 (1965)
+#+end_quote
+In any case, I'll see if I can't put something down in writing tomorrow.
+
+Slightly unrelated... but I also ended up reading Grothendieck's [[https://www.ccnr.org/grothendieck.pdf][The
+Responsibility of the Scientist Today]] (a self-defense mechanism triggered by
+reading Vannevar Bush?) and skimming a paper showing that nyc's PM2.5
+concentrations may have fallen by 22% after the implementation of congestion
+pricing. It looks like they analyzed a combination of epa and city sensors. I'd
+like to get around to understanding this more carefully, though, so maybe I'll
+leave this for another day (it seems the code is on [[https://github.com/timothyfraser/nyc_congestion_rep][GitHub]]).
+
 * future adventures?
 
 Thought I'd collect the little project ideas that tend to pop into my head when