Continuous meta reflections on my life and work. Quick notes. No editing. [[2026-03-07]] I need to be making so much more software than I am writing now. I need to be writing, publishing and making so many more videos that I am right now. The types of software worth creating now is so expansive. There’s so many processes still not handled by software. I should look at every part of my life and work and think about how software can affect it in some way. It’s fascinating. [[2026-03-07]] Temporarily adjusted the colours on this website. I’m not sure if it will stick because it’s hard for me to consistently stick with anything that isn’t a black background with white text, but I find these colours to be more readable and better for long form text for some reason. I also made some slight refinements to all of the typography on the website. Also just focusing on readability. [[2026-03-01]] I do like the idea of writing here to reflect on this website and how it’s developing. I think it’s an interesting point of view on the project. Seeing the author reflect in a meta way about what works and what does not work. It gives a glimpse into my relationship with this project as well in a way that the other notes cannot. Maybe I will consider bringing this page back. Not sure just yet. ### on moving away from a standard navigation I removed the navigation on this website tonight. I think it’s part of leaning into the bi-directional nature of this website and the flexibility that comes from just editing and maintaining these markdown files. The benefit of the navigation was that it clearly drew your eye to specific links that I thought were important. Without the navigation, you are just looking at text and you can click around on things. Maybe it takes a bit more effort but I think that this kind of experience makes sense for a project like this. There’s also this little quirk with [[Obsidian]] where when you have the navigation enabled, everything that you publish automatically gets added to the navigation so I have to go to publish settings and hide it if I do not want it to show up on the navigation, which I almost never do. Without a navigation, I never need to worry about that again. But also, I already feel with the navigation gone, publishing feels less formal. The goal now is to create a world that a reader can dive into and explore. To create a lot of different pages and elements that feels special and unique to my work and life. It’s like when you go into someone’s home or a specific restaurant, you can tell when they have been there for many years, settled in, it’s the way they do things that make it them. There’s a restaurant in [[Toronto]] called [UFO](https://share.google/7kuMPSXnY6Iq67oeG) that captures the feeling I’m talking about. *It is what it is because it is what it is.* I would like this project to move in this direction. And I believe this will be the last website of my life. I think this is it. I’m not even sure what the value of writing will be going into the future, so I’ll just create this kind of archive or whatever, and maybe someone will discover this in the future and it will mean something to them. ### on a graph based navigation ![[Pasted image 20260301011119.png]] I think it would be interesting to create a website that is genuinely rewarding while exploring through a graph based navigation. A website that has enough depth and interesting perspectives where you feel curious about clicking around and each time you come to it you discover something different. It needs a lot of depth I think to truly pull off an experience like that. Where it really feels like you’re in the mind of someone. It needs to be thousands of files, and each one should feel like you are reading the voice of the author, it can’t be something generated by an [[LLMs|LLM]], it needs to genuinely feel like the voice of the author. Some of the writing is refined, some of it feels like notes left on a napkin. A dynamic, inspiring rabbit hole that feels like it never ends. Yeah this is definitely my last website. ### on the [[Projects]] page This page needs to be fundamentally reworked. I think for the anchoring projects that are listed there I need to write my own perspective on what the work was, the fundamental questions that were explored, perhaps what was learned, and more, not only to express that information to others but for my own sanity to have it documented somewhere. These are huge chunks of my life that I have put into some projects, it’s time I will never get back, and at minimum I should have some kind of documentation of what happened. It’s my birthday in 2 days, and so maybe I’m thinking a lot more about documentation that I usually do. It’s a big birthday… but yeah, I need clear documentation of some of these anchoring projects that have either been completed, archived, or just shelved.. as a record of what happened and how I spent my life. If anything for my son to read when he gets older to understand what I was working on, what the world was like, and why. More than ever, something that terrifies me is not having a comprehensive documentation of how I spent my life. I wish I was documenting like this earlier on, but this is how it goes and now, as usual… I need to retroactively document things and collect things, but I’m confident as far as documentation goes for me, a bi-directional system like this is the best solution. If I had to pick a a design architecture for the last website of my life, one that would be around when I am dead, this would be that architecture. Something that can feel like both the Internet, and a rabbit hole at the same time. ### 0n a [[Meta]] log like this I think for the way that I am going to create this website, or this project, it’s not really possible for me to not have some kind of [[Meta]] log like this. It’s kind of a necessary component to the entire project. In a way it’s kind of like a [[social media]] feed where you are reading thoughts on a profile or something like that, but also it just seems necessary as a way of seeing how someone was thinking about this project as they were working on it, and also a way to discover divergent links. If there’s a backlink just randomly here that’s interesting and you click it, this becomes a source for unexpected discoveries. That being said, I wonder how long a file like this can get before it becomes completely unusable or something like that. I can say if you visit this website for the first time, and off the homepage you click the [[Meta]] link and then end up on this page, that’s pretty cool. There’s a lot of depth already developing here, it feels immersive, there’s very little filter between the reader and my mind here because I’m giving you a direct glimpse into my [[Obsidian]] vault here. I do not think or filter myself when I write here. My brain has kind of trained itself to just type, it doesn’t process that anyone would ever be reading this outside me, so yeah that’s cool. The experience of this page probably feels genuine to a reader because it is. And arriving here unexpectedly off a click on the homepage is cool. I think if it happened to me, it would feel immersive. Meta reflections in general are interesting, and perhaps that’s how I should think about [[X Articles]] in the way that I am using them. It’s not necessarily taking the notes from here and sharing them there, but rather, just writing meta reflections on where ever I am expressing myself and finding the right format to express those thoughts in. Not exactly sure yet, but I think in a way [[The Other Stuff]] is very similar to this page in its own way. I do not know what this is fundamentally, but I can say it all feels kind of similar. [[2026-02-28]] ### on writing here, vs writing somewhere else I think this note is going to become subscriber only posts on [[X]]. One of the issues I had with this page is that it feels like I’m writing in a void, even though I can kind of tell a few of my friends and some new visitors are reading when they click around. Maybe I should keep something here but I’m not sure. I do think this kind of continual commentary is helpful to me to write creatively, and on some level, helpful for people to read as well. I use to do this kind of writing on early versions of [[Futureland]] and maybe on some level i was under-estimating how valuable it was to me and to others. So I’ll experiment with writing like this on [[X]] subscriber only posts and see if that affects anything in my process. Even if no one reads it, I still get all the benefits of writing the raw in process thoughts, like I do here, but I’ll get more feedback there on if people find it valuable or not. Let’s try it out. [[2026-02-19]] The problem with "doing too much" is that you are doing too much, but at the same time there's a generative quality to it where even though it tires you out it also leads to a level of output and pattern recognition that I think would be impossible without doing too much. This is interesting, on some level I think what I am trying to do is create [[Navigable Intelligence]], at the highest level of abstraction whatI liked to do is take a domain, build deep organized context about it, and make that context navigable by others. [[2026-02-16]] I caught a cold or something. I've been in bed all day just trying to rest. I asked an LLM how to speed up my recovery and it said I need to rest, like completely rest. No low-grade productivity stuff, just completely shutting off, doing nothing. And yeah. All of this has made me realize how much I suck at truly taking a break and how I have become so bad at it. ### on [[Editorial Thinking]] [[Editorial Thinking]] is a concept that may or may not stick around for me. I really, really enjoy sequencing information together across mediums, it puts me at ease and it seems useful to others as well. I’m beginning to investigate what my relationship with structure even is, a work definition I got through speaking with [[Claude]] was: *the strategic, critical process of selecting, organizing and framing information to create meaning and context for an audience*, but I’m not sure how I feel about that just yet. I started reading [[In the Blink of an Eye]] again today, well I guess truly for the first time. Most of what I understand about writing, editing, and structure I’ve picked up through instincts, doing things, and a bit mentorship, but I’ve never really taken it as seriously as I probably should have. ### Emotion & Story in [[Editorial Thinking]] I’ve been put off by how powerful Emotion and Story can be, and I’m trying to change that. Mostly because I do not like that one can have power over how someone perceives things by sequencing them in a specific way. It’s a pattern that has bothered me for a long time. But I think it’s about time I accept it and see how far I can go with all of this. This sequencing is unavoidable. It’s something the brain always does. For example, right now, you are reading this sentence one word at a time and then together it takes on a new meaning in your mind. Any word on its own does not have the same meaning. There’s no way for me to escape this reality. Humans connect things. The only thing I can do is go into it with full awareness and responsibility of its power. Emotion is how something feels. Story is what something means. With Emotion alone, you have feeling without meaning. With Story alone, you have meaning without feeling. When you fuse these things together it becomes significantly more powerful and more memorable. It becomes it’s own new thing. This interplay is a core dynamic of great editing. As you watch something or read something, how does it make you feel, and as you’re feeling that thing, what new information, or understanding, or meaning should be revealed at that exact moment so you have an experience that fundamentally shifts how you see something. In progress thoughts. I’ve never tried to externalize these things… [[2026-02-15]] ### on maintaining the latest context: One of my frustrations with this website, or any website I have ever created is finding a way to reflect the latest context of what’s on my mind. It’s like every website that I have created for myself becomes obsolete almost instantly. This is part of the reason why I started working on [[Futureland]]. The idea was that it was a way to display an identity and body of work in process. These days I use [[X]] a lot to share my rough ideas (and almost always have), but even there I find it hard to truly share what I am thinking about, in process. My following and audience has grown on that platform and the algorithm works a specific way. What I like most about [[X]] is the comedy of it, and the distribution it can create for your work and ideas, but to take advantage of that distribution you have to formulate your ideas in a specific way. So this page is about capturing a free-streaming thoughts. I’m not sure how long this will last. I’m not sure how much I will edit things. ### on visual thinking: Are visuals and thoughts inseparable? What about sounds and thoughts? If they are, is that why it feels like I need to listen to specific music to think a specific way? Does that mean if I spend some time looking at specific kinds of images, I can have new ideas? Is there always a back and forth relationship between these forms of media and the kinds of thoughts I’m having? ![[original_9f61457c7371e310adfe505b42583570.gif]] >[!caption] >By [Nik Arthur](https://www.are.na/block/21871657) ![[nikarthur_dominicfike-gif 1.gif]] >[!caption] >By [Nik Arthur]([https://www.are.na/block/21871657](https://www.are.na/block/21871641)) ### on this file: I wonder how long this file is going to get. I write *all the time*. I basically think through typing. If I keep using this file eventually something has to fuck up but for now I guess it works. I also wonder like who am I writing for? I need to write and document these things for myself because they are core to my creative process, but I don’t know why, there’s something about putting my ideas into the world that changes them in some way, have not been able to figure out why this is or if it’s just in my head. Something powerful happens when I publish stuff on the Internet. ### on [[Claude Code]] and [[Obsidian]] Canvas: I am writing a lot more about this because I’m going to be presenting how I’ve been using [[Obsidian]] and [[Claude Code]] to expand the way I think and also to learn new things faster. It’s like part two of an essay I wrote titled “[[Using LLMs for Cognitive Enhancement in the West End of Toronto]]”. But one of the cool things I’ve encountered is that you can use [[Claude Code]] to generate canvases in [[Obsidian]] for you because it’s all json. It’s a cool way to dump a bunch of a notes in a file and then get an agent to help you see it in a different form. ![[Screenshot 2026-02-15 at 9.30.02 PM.png]] >[!caption] > Screenshot of a canvas about How I Use Obsidian ### On new writing projects: I’m feeling the desire to write things that are less meta, and less explain-y. I want to write much more immersive and complex pieces. I need to write more fiction. I should push myself much further as a writer, especially now with [[LLMs]] and [[Artificial Intelligence]], I should use these tools to learn faster and break past ceilings and levels of abstraction I’m stuck at. Even if no one reads the pieces, I like writing stories and creating worlds enough to do it, just to deepen my understanding of how it works.