Update 10/31/24:
I've copied over some rather vanilla/ professional notes from my Trilium to this site; I've yet to really write any of the topics below that I've really wanted to explore & publish.
# My intentions for this website
## Background
During my senior year of high school, I took a design & technology class which involved creating a personal portfolio; I kept this portfolio through college as a way to document projects.
After graduating, I've begun to write significantly more. So far, I've been keeping notes in this open-source, self-hosted app called Trilium, and it's been excellent for personal knowledge management. While sharing some of these thoughts with friends, I've been told that it should be published, so I deleted my previous site and signed up for Obsidian Publish - so that I can tie together concepts in a similar manner. Here's what my Trilium note map currently looks like:
![[note_map.png]]
I'll probably continue using Trilium for my direct ramblings & personal notes on a day-to-day basis, but will use Obsidian for publishing more final pieces.
## Potential Topics
I'm not sure what I'll end up publishing, but I have a lot of ramblings, and off the top of my head these topics include:
* mental health
* understanding the default mode network (DMN) and task-positive network (TPN)
* social vs. medical models of disability: is it you, your environment, both, or neither?
* executive dysfunction vs. authenticity: accepting never being who you want to be
* justice sensitivity & conceptualizing expectations: when radical acceptance feels wrong
* self-control is authoritarianism internalized; what's the alternative?
* lessons from injuries
* what is healing? adaptation to vs. removal of painful stimuli
* internal ecosystems: a more grounded version of IFS (internal family systems)
* alienation
* egocentricism vs. allocentricism
* the Seattle freeze: a historical perspective
* the limits of an agent's ability to form community
* Epictetus' the Art of Living & connecting to Nature
* oppression
* intersectionality & massive moral grey areas
* internalization: what does "choosing your values" mean if you're a product of your environment?
* common origins of patriarchy
* memetics & culture
* intergenerational trauma through a memetic lens
* nature is to genetic life as war is to memetic life
* anthropology
* a review of The Dawn of Everything
* absurdism / existentialism
* hopelessness is not defeatism
* the relationship between defeat & rest
* an IFS approach to (passive) suicidality
* everyone has survivorship bias
* criticisms of art & creativity
* the cruel indifference of art within injustice
* what is righteous art, and what is trauma porn?
* creation is overused: a love letter to integration, preservation, cultivation, observation, & destruction
* art as egotistic, anthropocentric, individualist reductionism; is nature not art?
* solidarity for whom? therapy for whom? art for whom?
* moral issues & philosophy
* life & death
* why effective altruism sucks, but means well
* moral proximity: a bittersweet bias
* neuroethics
* accepting the uncertainty of the responsibility gap
* against certainty: skeptical to a fault
* valuing human life
* restorative vs. punitive justice & fighting ideas vs. fighting people
* the limits of compassion
* political theories & praxis
* the tension between epistemology & praxis
* doing it vs. letting it happen
* art history
* design principles
* dog training
* media reviews
* video games
* books
* movies
* Mind Game (2004): an absurdist approach to valuing even the worst life
* Anbe Sivam: "Love is God" - a Tamil movie about communism as spirituality in a world filled with chaos and capitalist oppression
* random hyperfixations
* love
* relationship saturation as an ideal state of being
* the inseparability of monogamy and patriarchy
* intersections between all of the above
## Pyrrhonist Preface
I'd like to note that this website is not meant to be as self-ingratiating as it once was - or as I find many other personal websites to be. For the most part, these thoughts are partially-baked explorations into concepts which may not be novel, useful, or certain.
There are a few things I really hold with high conviction, but for the most part, I withhold judgement and am in a state of constant inquiry; more often than not, I can make as many points against beliefs that I hold than for. So if you're reading this, I hope you know that despite the grand or poetic tones I may be writing this content with, they're just parts of me thinking out loud - not necessarily statements that I wish to shout with certainty (except for a few in which my conviction will be clear).
Mainly, I enjoy the process of putting things together in a document and polishing it for someone else to see; it's a good creative outlet. But I really do hope that someone searching for some insight on a topic will come across a post of mine and maybe find it valuable - similar to how students searching for answers to coursework came across my former site.