But before that; why do I have a website? For one, I am not someone who has a lot of thoughts worth publicly writing about. And while I certainly enjoy documenting things1, more often than not, I struggle with words.
This website began, like a lot of things do with me, as a way of measuring progress; specifically, trying to learn how to write fragment shaders by making tiny shaders and then explaining the process as best I could by writing a small article2. Sadly though, I never got quite far with that series, and after chess board, texture land, and mondrian, I continued to write more shaders but never got around to writing another article.
Then sometime in January 2022, I decided to redesign my website every year on twitter and the current version is a continuation of this exercise with some major structural redesigns and less important visual ones3. It started with wanting a better workflow for writing to help me think better, and the idea of building a digital garden 45 really stuck with me. I am giving myself the space to not agonise over every single word and how it may sound to an external audience, and instead use writing as a way to consolidate floaty bits of thoughts that I sometimes happen to have.
Let me then make an incomplete list of things this garden might have
- notes about current projects
- half cooked slash uncooked ideas for new projects
- rationalizing slash historical bits, like this one, about why I do certain things
- unasked for opinions
- jokes in footnotes
- more jokes than references in footnotes
- more incomplete lists
- lists saying “lists are fun but totally pointless”
- on art made with software poems
update - 30/05/2023 I have not been writing a lot or taking notes. This website is almost turning out to be just like the previous ones where I engage with it only rarely. I want to stop that and write more often even if it doesn’t make sense. I want to tend to this garden. So I will try to make a habit to do this whenever I am consuming some media and integrate them into the garden at the end of the day or whenever feels right for a few seconds.
Footnotes
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PCD India is a community of creative coding enthusiasts, tech artists, designers, live coders, data nerds, musicians, architects, paper engineers and artists whose practices contain these and more elements. We are a group of enthu cutlets who love experimentation and sharing, come hang out! https://processingindia.com/2021 ↩
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My first article hello shader literally begins with a cheerful ‘Hey!’ haha ↩
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cos who likes to write css revisions in the first month of a new year; not me. yes, I will continue to use footnotes for silly jokes. ↩