🍀 wilde at heart

I lived a lifetime reading Infinite Jest. The book, by David Foster Wallace, is 1,079 pages long. Approximately 100 pages of that are endnotes. No, you can’t skip them. It was one of the easiest reading experiences of my life. Well, kind of. When I say I lived a lifetime reading the book, I mean a few things: I went through a lot spiritually, emotionally, and mentally during. My first attempt was between my sophomore and junior years of college....

In the quotation below, author David Foster Wallace touches on a core aspect of the Modernist movement of literature and art: there are Grand Narratives, inherent truths, that guide our lives. These narratives are “how things should be.” The chaos and disruption caused by WWI made it seem like those Grand Narratives were gone. Think of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” a sort of Modernist interpretation of the Fisher King story....

Instead of personal knowledge management coming from the need to restore control over our attention and knowledge, it can come from the desire to explore and create. David Foster Wallace describes this as an “intellectual adventure.” We don’t restore meaning and patterns, we find them. Our relationship to information can be exploratory and curious. For me – I mean, a lot of the motivation had to do with, it seems to me, that so much of pre-millennial life in America consists of enormous amounts of what seem like discrete bits of information coming, and that the real kind of intellectual adventure is finding ways to relate them to each other and to find larger patterns and meanings, which of course is essentially narrative, but that structurally it’s a bit different....

Two things are very important to me: Documenting my workflows. Sharing my knowledge with others as freely as possible. As of time of writing, I’m participating in some “learning sprints” for queries in Logseq. I actually don’t consider myself a Logseq power user or anything, at least compared to the folks who build these complicated dashboards and workflows for every aspect of their lives. I mainly use Logseq for my Zettelkasten; therefore, my needs aren’t too complicated....

During the [[055 - Feminist Scrapbooking]] episode of my podcast [[librarypunk]], we had on feminist scrapbooker Kristin Tweedale to talk about scrapbooking as a mode of information and knowledge management and how to do it in anti-capitalist ways. One of us (I’m blanking on who) mentioned someone in the family having a scrapbook with all the pictures removed. Not only was the scrapbook empty, but it had once been full of photos that were no longer there....

The [[189 - Library Socialism & Usufruct]] episode of the [[Srsly Wrong]] podcast mentions that writing in library books is not defacing or destroying them; rather, “value” is added because the library lends out the thoughts and scribbles of everyone who had that book before. Even if an item hasn’t been scribbled in, the library, in theory, is still lending that item with its entire history of having been used and enjoyed by others....

Zotero is usually pretty good at recognizing the format of something you save via the browser extension. I’ve noticed it doesn’t pick up podcasts, even though that’s a format you can cite. However! If you have the Zotero iPhone app, you can use the “share” function in your podcast app (Spotify, at least; I haven’t tested others) and send it to Zotero. It recognizes it as a podcast when done that way....

The above image is the visualization of my Logseq graph, at least as of June 26th, 2022 at around 3:00 PM EDT. I know it’s not as pretty or big as some others you may have seen, but I think it’s a great way to see how I use Logseq, its linking capabilities, and its integrations. You’ll see some clusters there in the center. That represents the reference notes, topic tags, and main notes of my Zettelkasten....

How can I learn enough about algorithms and Clojure so I can create generative art without tutorials? What do I need to know about Clojure? What do I need to know about algorithms? Fields Voronoi What do I need to know about composition? What do I need to know about Quil? What do I need to know about clojure2d? How do I explore aesthetics in knowledge management? How can I improve my thinking to make better decisions?...

Opera queens (gay men who are fans of opera) collect the ephemera of opera to a degree which borders on hoarding: recordings, programs, pictures, signatures, interviews, memories, etc. There is no larger system by which they capture or organize this information, nor is there anything these men do with what they collect. Instead of using personal knowledge management systems, opera queens are personal information management. They are the tool which captures information....