What not? They can include:

• study notes, taken while I learn
• guides / tips
• cheatsheets
• observations
• movie lists and other attempts to systematize
• open questions / confusions

Most of all, it's not a blog. Blogs (and social media) tend to peg each post to a point in time, so that they age like milk and not like wine. That's the "stream" in The Garden and the Stream. I always saw more sense in the "garden" a.k.a. evergreen/long content, where you continually reuse, refine and extend your pages.

If there's any guiding principle, it's the notion of a slipbox as described by Book: How to Take Smart Notes, though as of [2023-11-23 Thu] I think future-me wouldn't call this a good slipbox just yet.

It may make sense to realize the notes existed before the website, they're not written for it. I was writing them anyway, for my own purposes.

1. Writing enables more complex thoughts. Ever heard the expression "I don't know what I think until I write it down"?
2. It answers how to always have interesting conversations. I've often felt stumped on contributing to a conversation because it's hard to explain my thinking in real time without having first explored the topic by writing.

My original motivation was rooted in #ADHD. When talking to therapists, I wanted to give them a way to pick through my brain for a more complete picture.

Anyway, a better question is why not? Glory in the useless web!

What you're seeing is a Svelte app in a Docker image hosted on Google Cloud Run, where I also rent the domain name. Source code: github.com/meedstrom/svelte-frontend

The notes themselves, I write as plaintext files-on-disk according to the conventions of org-roam.

When it's time to update the website, I follow these steps:

1. In Emacs, run M-x org-publish to turn my org-roam files into HTML files.
   • custom org-publish config: raw.githubusercontent.com/meedstrom/doom.d/master/50-publishing.el
2. Run a local Node.js script that packs the resulting collection of HTML files into a posts.json and put it into the frontend's assets folder.
3. Rebuild and push the Docker image to Google Cloud Run with the commands gcloud builds submit && gcloud run deploy.

• The Garden and the Stream

• The "indie web"
• Movies I've seen

I decided long ago on a 92mm CPU fan, not a 120mm beast straddling the whole motherboard blocking DIMM and M.2 slots and giving the case the experience of a cramped cupboard. I don't like "efficient" when it leads to that. A stationary computer is partly an art piece for me, I want to feel peace and harmony when I look into it!

That's the upside of the classic ATX miditower: the experience of roominess and easy access, and I've seen 1990s pizzaboxes that created the same experience. To do so, the case should leave about 5 centimeters of margin around every component (and between the component and outer panels), allowing cables to go around the components as if they were roads around buildings.

The best modern example I've seen is the HDPLEX H5, but there's surely room for improvement. It holds no candle to the unidentified 90s cases I've seen—I wish I could link to those.

In my mind, "pizzabox" refers to those 90s cases that didn't try to be small-form-factor, just thin. They emphasised easy access. You didn't have the typical trouble with modern SFF (small-form-factor) PCs where you must try to get your hands in under other components to make adjustments in nooks and crannies, nor did you have to remove other components to get them out of the way — you could access any one component in isolation and swap it out in isolation! That's my pizza-box dream.

For another distinguishing trait, you know those roof brackets, whatever they're called, that run across the middle of many modern slimline chassis to help with sturdiness? The thinner the case, the sillier this looks. In a 1990s pizzabox, you didn't have that – you just had full-blown walls, i.e. the pizzabox could be divided into 2-5 separate compartments. They could do this because they didn't put so much of a premium on low volume per se, just thinness.

I'm biased, but I think here's an unexploited market segment. That's particularly true for 1U-thin cases, because there are at least three tricks that become obvious once you permit yourself to be generous with the X and Y dimensions, but I've never seen them in the wild:

• Water cooling: 1U gives just enough headroom (44mm) for a radiator plus slim fans.
  • (And it'd easily look fantastic)
• The FlexATX PSU can be quiet if you cool it with a slim 80-120mm fan in front of the PSU – you simply remove the builtin 40mm fan and perforate extra air grilles in the PSU enclosure.
• Even if you don't watercool, It would be easy in a 44mm headroom to perfectly plan the airflow and thus force regular chassis airflow right through the CPU and GPU heatsinks on its way out. (As an illustrative example, you could file down an Artic Passive AM4 heatsink to fit.) Thus, you don't need any fans hugging the heatsink diretly, the fans can be elsewhere in the chassis, and as a consequence the chassis can permit heatsinks of reasonable mass.
  • Imagine a three-compartment pizzabox: along one edge sits three 120mm+ slim fans… one for the PSU compartment, one for the entire CPU compartment, one for the GPU compartment.
  • As an aside, it seems to me the small-form-factor market would be interested if someone made a mini-ITX motherboard with a boxed CPU heatsink that perfectly fits the motherboard in question, using all the free volume over its 170x170mm area (and for non-pizzaboxes, inviting an 170mm fan on top of it all)!

• Things I (don't) care about

• Knowing your weaknesses
  • Things I struggle with
• Coping strategies
  • ADHD coping measures
  • Coping with jealousy
  • Calming & Coping routine
• Repertoire of tricks that work when you really need to do something
  • Book: Focusing
• Self-advocacy
• Things that aid therapist
  • Keeping a readable diary
• Find your aliefs and "unofficial beliefs"
• The skill of Looking / kensho / cognitive defusion

• Keeping a readable diary
  • Noting when you try something new
  • Noting when a conflict happens
    • When a conflict-like thing has happened, you rarely understand it that well in the moment, and this can give you a writer's block or ugh field, so a tip is to just start describing mechanistically what happened, saving interpretations for later.
  • Noting when your partner starts a new project, so you can ask them about it later
• Keeping a history of check-ins/tea dates/kickoffs/planned Serious Talks and what we said and agreed on (History of tea dates)
• Keeping a history of lessons learned (Lessons learned with G)
• Keeping a history of what your partner has said they need
• Keeping a list of things you've appreciated about your partner at one point or another (Things about G I like/respect/endorse)
• Keeping a list of commitments (Commitments Martin)
• Keeping track of what your partner has planned or is planning – maybe pen her plans into your own calendar. (Related to "Living through the other")

• Owning your feelings
• Being emotionally available, not an uphelpful wall "one partner (often the woman) wants a more honest and transparent relationship while the other (often the man) remains stuck in emotional irresponsibility, unable to grasp what the issue is because of their unconscious shame."
• Doing shadow work (inner work, peeling the onion) to bring the real you to the relationship
• Ability to engage with others on a topic that's painful for you, e.g. your recent handling of a relationship even though you are ashamed of it
  • Separate observation from judgment
  • Replacing Guilt
• Re-approach the small things in your partner that bother you

As I understand it, the term "emotional resources" can involve:

• Having friends who help you process
• Asking people for help
• Looking up online advice
• Asking for advice on a subreddit
• Using exercises from books
• Using writing prompts
• Using an N-step template for e.g. conflict resolution
• Knowing you have material such as How to listen, Debate scripts, Checklist for situation
  • Thinking of it at the right time
• Psychotherapies
• Book: Focusing

• Clarifying your expectations
• Keeping track of new things I try – like when I restrict Safari on the phone to 30 minutes. Make a note in the diary that I did so. Treat the diary as not just a place for braindumps but something you can share with your therapist.
  • (think of it this way: making your notes more utilizable for your therapist also makes them more so for you.)
  • This helps me look back and tell G what I've done
  • Standard followup: scheduled on calendar after 1 week and 1 month.
    • This could be an iOS shortcut.
    • Or if not an iOS shortcut, could I just transmit calendar events thru Beorg? I suspect that if it's not to feel stilted – if I'm to get over that hump and start calendaring more and more things thru Org, so that Beorg feels more and more like a natural extension of me – then I should sync my entire roam folder onto my phone. I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. But that would be the natural way: so that I can spawn a subheading in literally any of my files, titled "Review this", and not think about finding the specific file.
      • But it's true that todo lists don't really work for me and this will not change that. So I would only use it for reminders that don't attach much of a todo, or timeful reminders. I suppose instead of a todo.org I could have a reminders.org.
    • Ideally (again, from the perspective of a psychologist), I write something in my diary to say how I thought it went, and link back to the original diary entry when I began, if there is one.
      • (I note that this would be more automatic if I in fact made an org subheading in the original file scheduling a review a week in the future – then my notification/agenda will link me directly there, so I don't have to remember it exists to be referred to)
• Commitments Martin
• Agreements

• If you want honesty, make sure not to punish it
• Don't use silence to communicate (nor as punishment)
• Conflict resolution
  • Conflict in relationships are usually net positive
  • Steer towards forbidden conversations

• Neel Nanda's Intentionally Making Close Friends
• My Pre-social checklist
• side-topic: intentional communities (such as ecovillages)

• Remembering about the other / Living through the other
  • so you'll realize they will need this or that, and they don't need to watch for all roadbumps themselves because you help out on that
  • Leave someone better than you found them
  • Innermost circle of concern to envelop the other / "Selfless Dating"
  • Each partner needs to maintain their sense of self
• Understanding the other
  • Level 2 theory of mind (where did I read about this?, maybe a comment from the Simulacrum levels discussions?)
  • Other stuff under Rationality:Interpersonal
  • Bridge a mismatch of communication style
    • Communication cultures
    • That I try to disprove everything I hear can feel like I want to disprove everything you say, and if so it's my bad, it's just how I develop an understanding of things
• Love-oriented life approach, the way Bell Hooks talks about it
• Managing a long-distance relationship
  • Basic LDR checklist
• Joint documents – like Griselda & Martin's shared pages
• Always-good advice
• Good relationships aren't built on combining two halves, but two wholes.
• Reflect on the perspective I have of relationships, as a result of my place in society
• Self-advocate

• 2024-06-04
• 2023-04-13
• 2023-02-24
• 2023-02-22
• Teaching as learning
• 2022-11-26
• Portals