First Post

After (re)discovering the analog web, I decided to start a blog of my own. I don’t know what it’ll be. A diary? A learn in public platform? A thought experiment?

I don’t yet know what I’ll say, but I know that I want to say something.

I’m writing this inside Obsidian, where I do all of my writing. Nothing I’ve written in here has ever been publicised. Indeed, almost none of it has been written with publicising in mind. The first thing that I find myself thinking as I sit in front of this blank file, titled First Post, is that I feel an instinctive pressure to filter. “Should I just write what I’m thinking?” “Can I even say shit like this online?” “Should I swear?” “Will anyone care?”

The reason I mention this upfront is because I feel I should start by explaining the name of this blog. Thoughtbox is the name of a folder in my Obsidian vault. It’s been there for years, acting as a repository for writing that doesn’t fit into any of my vault’s other spaces. The folder contains, for want of a better word, “essays” on various topics: my religious beliefs, my thoughts on death, free (libre) software, journaling, and an attempt to precisely calculate how much egg might be holding the Great Wall of China together.

The eclectic musings in my Thoughtbox folder all have one thing in common: they are unfinished. In the process of offloading my thoughts to markdown, it’s like my brain forgets the offloading itself, along with any intention of revisiting these topics to develop and reflect on ideas. What I’m left with is a gaggle of consciousness streams that border on incoherence, and I’d like to turn them into something better than that.

The thought of making such topics public is intimidating. As I drag these files into a new folder called WIP Posts, I wonder if I’ll be able to post them at all, if it will even possible to strain such personal thoughts into something I could share. But thinking about it, I think this might be the best thing for them. Reshaping these essays for blogging will force me to consider them with renewed criticality, and perhaps with more rigour than I would if left to my own devices. Don’t get me wrong: I expect almost nobody to ever read this blog. But if they do, I at least owe them a well-rounded and considered read.

So welcome! And thank you for reading my first post, if you made it this far.

The next question: how long should a post be? I expect this to vary, but it looks like this one is going to be 457 words, so we’ll start there.