For too long, my reading and research have been scattered across too many platforms. RSS feeds from Reeder, then articles are saved in GoodLinks, ebooks in Amazon Kindle and Apple Books, PDFs floating in cloud storage, or Kindle and Apple Books. Each tool had its strengths, but juggling them all meant highlights and notes got lost, insights disconnected, and reading turned into an endless backlog instead of a fluid process. It was time for defrag, and past time to streamline everything into a single, efficient pipeline where information flows effortlessly from reading to annotation to long-term knowledge storage.
Enter Readwise Reader, the missing link that consolidates everything. Now, RSS articles, PDFs, and even EPUBs live in one place, ready for deep reading, highlighting, and seamless syncing to my Denbow Operating System. No more scattered notes, no more “I’ll get to this later” purgatory—everything I engage with is processed, annotated, and automatically archived where it belongs. GoodLinks remains my inbox for reference storage, but Readwise Reader is where reading happens, and the DenbowOS is where knowledge lives.
The result is a frictionless reading workflow that eliminates redundancy and maximizes retention. Instead of bouncing between half a dozen apps, I save, read, highlight and annotate in a structured flow, ensuring nothing gets lost in the shuffle. My highlights sync automatically, my PDFs are searchable, and my reading backlog finally feels manageable. The days of reading fragmentation are over.
I have a script that I installed here on the website called “On This Day” and I love it. Every day I can look back on the past posts for varying reasons. Now I have a new reason- the comments section.
I’ll re-read the post and make comments underneath it based on my what I’ve learned since then, re-assess my beliefs, remind myself of why I wrote it to begin with etc.
This is some next-level recursion. Commenting on my comments? Footnoting my own footnotes? That’s practically building a self-referential hypertext labyrinth. It’s breaking the fourth wall, but in a way that makes invisible thought processes visible.
Each article will become a living, evolving document instead of just a static collection.
Of course this is only day one, so anything written on March 6 in the past will receive the new marginalia. Looking forward to tomorrow’s!
My time is limited for what I am working on these days here at home so I need to prioritize. What really matters? Unclear at the moment, but if I had to give a straight answer, perhaps it is these:
What Stays After I’m Gone
Not just in a morbid sense, but in a legacy of thought and creation. The things I build, the ideas explored, my archives that are curated—those are the real footprints. The websites, the Denbow Operating System, the Library of Unwritten Books, all of my research, notes—those outlive the moment.
The Things That Keep My Mind Engaged
Curiosity is the real fuel. The moment you stop wondering, learning, or exploring, that’s when things go flat. The personal projects, all of the research spirals, experimenting with radio signals, archives, and hidden layers? That’s the stuff that keeps life from being static.
Creating for Myself, Not Just an Audience
What really matters is what fascinates me first. If others get something out of it, great—but if I can make things purely because they are meaningful to me, that’s where the best work happens.
Leaving Room for Chaos & Discovery
The moment everything is too structured, too predictable, too mapped out, it loses something. A little mystery, a little creative mischief, a little unexpected weirdness—that’s the good stuff.
The Ability to Keep Moving Forward
Nothing kills momentum like getting stuck in perfectionism, obligation, or feeling like you “should” do something. The projects that survive are the ones I genuinely want to do, not the ones I feel pressured into.
So, what really matters?
Probably the same thing that’s kept me going this long: the thrill of the chase, the depth of the work, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing there is something built, something interesting, even if only a handful of people ever truly understand it.
I’ve been consistent in curiosity, drive, and the way I think lately. I do not just consume information—there is dissection, archiving, annotating, remixing, and finding the hidden layers to connecting the dots.
I’m not here for surface-level exploration. I need to dig deeper, follow the spirals, and find meaning in things that most people overlook. I thrive on curious connections, long-term discovery, and projects that leave something behind.
I’ve built a publishing house here around what matters to me– all of this is holding up the mirror.
Consume I am on pace with my 25 books read in 2025 goal. I am still trying to sort a workflow into DenbowOS to capture all of my notes and highlights from other sources besides books. Success.
Technology No new tech in 2025. Fail.
Oh boy do I have some work to do!
These all sound familiar, right? Like I said in the first sentence way up there, these are attempts. Many attempts in the past seventeen years I have been doing this. Maybe I should consider them as constant maintenance and I need frequent accountability. Hence, this initiative!
No different than deer heads hanging on a hunter’s walls. This wasn’t a library—it was a cemetery, kept there for show.
“Is something wrong?” “Well, it’s the rabbits.”
Not even one chapter into this book and it has hit me over the head more than a few times already. Not because of the topics, although those are huge, but because of the similar thought patterns, research spirals and frequency bias.
Libraries, rabbits, cemeteries? Why do these themes keep popping up?
A mixtape is a curated collection of songs, typically compiled for a specific mood, theme, or person. It originated in the cassette era, where people would record songs onto a blank tape to create a personalized music experience.
Similar to a music tape, a literary mixtape takes readers on a curated journey. Instead of songs, I’m using books, passages, and challenges—organized into Side A and Side B to create a flow and experience.
This isn’t just a reading list. It’s an interactiveexploratory challenge—a literary scavenger hunt where books and passages act as waypoints, clues, and creative catalysts.
How It Works:
Read each selection, but don’t just read—engage with it.
Wander beyond the words. Each reading comes with an exploratory challenge.
Notice something new—connections, hidden patterns, the way words shape your world.
Create—respond to the reading in a way that bends reality just a little.
The Tracks (Reading + Challenge Pairings):
Track 1: The Book You’d Never Pick Up
📖 Challenge: Go to a bookstore or library and choose a book entirely at random. Close your eyes, spin around, or grab something from a genre you never touch.
🔍 Why? This forces you to step outside of your reading habits and find something completely unexpected.
Track 2: The Found Sentence
📖 Challenge: Open a random book to page 42. Read the first full sentence on the page. Find a book that feels like it would fit that sentence as a title.
🔍 Why? This creates unusual connections between books, helping you discover titles in a completely new way.
Track 3: Steal Like a Reader
📖 Challenge: Ask a friend (or even a stranger) what book changed their life. Read that book, no matter what it is.
🔍 Why? Expands your TBR with deeply personal recommendations that might never have been on your radar.
Track 4: Read a Book Backward
📖 Challenge: Instead of starting from page one, flip to a random section and begin reading. Then go forward or backward as you see fit.
🔍 Why? Forces you to experience the book differently, paying attention to details in a non-linear way.
Track 5: The Mysterious Stranger’s TBR
📖 Challenge: Find a random annotated book—a used bookstore copy, a library book with marginalia, or an online forum where someone shares book notes. Read that book as if the annotator left it for you.
🔍 Why? Adds an extra layer of mystery and connection to the reading process.
Track 6: Judge the Book by Its Cover
📖 Challenge: Pick a book solely based on its cover, without reading the back or inside flap.
🔍 Why? Forces you to embrace instinct and aesthetics in choosing books, leading to unexpected reads.
Track 7: The Chain Reaction Read
📖 Challenge: Pick a book from your shelf. Look up a random review of it online. Find another book mentioned in that review—and read that one instead.
🔍 Why? Expands your reading list in a completely organic, unpredictable way.
Track 8: The One-Sitting Book
📖 Challenge: Choose a book that you can read in a single sitting—a novella, a short story collection, or a short nonfiction book. Dedicate a day to reading it straight through.
🔍 Why? Changes the pacing of your reading, making the experience feel immersive and cinematic.
Track 9: The Mixed Media Pairing
📖 Challenge: Read a book alongside a related movie, album, or visual art piece. Example: Read The Great Gatsby while listening to jazz from the 1920s,
🔍 Why? Enhances the sensory experience of reading and creates deeper connections.
Track 10: The Secret Book Swap
📖 Challenge: Swap books with someone else—either a friend, a coworker, or a stranger via a book exchange (Little Free Library, an online swap, etc.). Read whatever you receive.
🔍 Why? Introduces randomness, social connection, and an element of surprise to your TBR.
“My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.” – Hedley Lamarr
Lately I have been going down a lot of rabbit holes to explore where and how deep I can take some of my thoughts. I’ve plunged head first into wormholes just to see what was on the other side. My brain is on the edge of the map just to get a glimpse of what’s next.
My research spiral is an evolving process where ideas, drafts, and explorations continuously loop through phases of discovery, reflection, reworking, and iteration. The unfinished works1 and blog posts aren’t static—they exist in a state of potential, waiting to be revisited, expanded, or reimagined. Some pieces find new meaning over time, some merge into new projects, and others remain archived as stepping stones for future ideas. Publishing is just a temporary phase, as even completed works can inspire deeper exploration later. This spiral approach turns my Library of Unwritten Books into a dynamic archive and my blog into a living ecosystem of interconnected thoughts, ensuring that no idea is ever truly abandoned—only waiting for its next cycle.
Then I thought, hmm, what is a better phrase for “research spiral?”
1. Exploration Loop – Emphasizes the continuous cycle of discovery and refinement.
2. Recursive Inquiry – Highlights the revisiting and deepening of ideas over time.
3. Idea Labyrinth – Suggests a complex, nonlinear journey of exploration.
4. Concept Vortex – Implies a dynamic, ever-evolving swirl of thoughts and connections.
5. Knowledge Helix – A structured yet open-ended progression of learning and iteration.
6. Thought Ouroboros – A self-sustaining cycle of ideas consuming and reshaping themselves.
7. Discovery Continuum – A process with no fixed endpoint, always expanding.
8. Intellectual Current – Captures the flow and movement of ideas as they evolve.
9. Iterative Mindscape – A mental landscape where ideas continuously shift and take new forms.
10. Living Archive – Perfect if you want to emphasize how unfinished works remain active and influential.
I ask for so much from art but sometimes I think I offer nothing in return.
After years of thinking this way, I realized that art asks for my attention and focus. Not my perfection, not my productivity—just me. Art asks you to show up, to listen, to engage. It asks for your willingness to wrestle with uncertainty, to risk vulnerability, to sit in the silence where ideas form ( if you can do so, you are more disciplined than I am.)
Art doesn’t demand grand gestures. It doesn’t care if you have all the answers. What it craves is your attention, your curiosity, your willingness to let it lead sometimes. It wants you to trust it, even when it makes no sense.
Previously I mentioned that “I offer nothing in return”, but consider this: you give art a space to exist. Without you, it would remain unmade. You give it form, even if only in fragments. You give it life, even if only for yourself.
What happens if you start treating art like a relationship rather than a transaction? What if, instead of asking art to serve you, you asked how you could serve it? What might it become if you gave it your trust, your time, your patience? Then I thought:
Art is a companion. Maybe that’s all it’s ever asked of you.
Whoa.
Yeah, that one got me. Sometimes we get so caught up in getting something from our art—validation, meaning, escape—that we forget it’s alive in its own way. It wants something from us, too. Maybe just a little reverence. Maybe just to be made without expectation. Maybe just to exist without needing to prove itself.
Art is weird like that. It mirrors what we bring to it. If we demand, it resists. If we fear, it hesitates. But if we listen, art speaks to us. .
After celebrating twenty-five years of self publishing to the WWW, I recently built two more websites in two days, just for kicks and grins. One is an archive of sorts, a Codex of my work. and the other…just defies description.
Greetings, programs! This is the obligatory first post
2000-02-28
That was the little snippet that started it all.
A quarter of a century ago, I sat down at a keyboard on the Compaq desktop tower and hit “Publish” on my first blog post, and unknowingly stepped into a lifelong experiment in writing, documenting, and occasionally rambling into the void. It was the year 2000—before social media, before SEO strategies, before every website felt the need to bombard you with cookie pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. Back then, blogging was raw, weird, and deeply personal. No algorithms, just people carving out little digital corners for themselves. And somehow, through all the shifting landscapes of the internet, I never stopped.
The early days were chaotic in the best way possible. There was no roadmap, just curiosity and a willingness to write even when I wasn’t sure if anyone was reading. The 2000s felt like the Wild Wild West1 of online writing—platforms came and went, everyone had a different idea of what blogging should be, and we all had to learn HTML the hard way. But it was exciting. The web felt infinite, and the act of writing and sharing was enough.
Somewhere along the way, blogging changed. It became polished, optimized, and, at times, painfully performative. Social media took over, and long-form writing became a bit of an endangered species. Yet, here I am, still typing away, still finding reasons to keep at it. Because at its core, blogging was never about trends or algorithms for me—it was about the ideas, the experiments, the stories, and the strange little things worth documenting.
So, what does 25 years of blogging look like? It looks like evolution. It looks like stubborn persistence. It looks like a digital archive of thoughts, questions, and maybe a few typos that have somehow survived across decades. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: Write for yourself first. Everything else—readers, engagement, impact—comes as a bonus.
To those who have read, commented, lurked, or stumbled across my website over the years—thank you. Here’s to whatever comes next.
I’ve built a mysterious, hidden archive layered with enigmatic fuckery—a place where secrets unfold, reality bends, and curiosity is both rewarded and punished. The site plays with perception, hidden triggers, and misdirection, leading users through glitchy deception, cryptic documents, eerie sounds, and an exclusive repository accessible only to those who know the proper phrase. It’s a digital worm hole designed to intrigue, unsettle, and make the curious feel like they’ve stumbled into something they were never meant to find.
All of it was done in HTML only and thankfully only took a couple of hours! It is not live yet, only resides locally, but the code exists and renders beautifully inside the browser.
I am contemplating adding a domain name to it, but masking it with a .onion TDL, making it only accessible via a Tor browser, then, placing it somewhere on the dark web.
The experimental website framework I want to build will exist in the space between what is known and what refuses to be known. A static HTML-only archive that resists explanation. It presents itself as something incomplete, something forgotten, or something deliberately obscured, leaving behind only classified remnants, misplaced coordinates, glitched anomalies, and misfiled receipts that hint at a larger, unseen structure. The layers go deep with hidden pages, cryptic labels peeling at the edges, references that lead nowhere, and timestamps that don’t quite add up.
Some things were removed. Some things never existed. Some things moved while you weren’t looking. It is an experiment in next-level mischief, a system designed to pull at the edges of curiosity while leaving just enough behind to make you wonder what’s missing.
This website will feel like you are trying to solve the Rubick’s Cube but it fights back, constantly,
Why create something deliberately obscure? Why build a digital labyrinth with no clear purpose? Why make a repository of fragments, half-truths, and lost thoughts instead of a structured, polished archive?
This new site will be a map of ideas except it’s unfinished, glitching, and missing pieces. I’m creating a mental terrain where the act of getting lost is the goal.
Inspired by The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, my Library of Unwritten Books is a deliberate archive of unfinished works—preserved not as lost projects, but as enduring records of creative exploration. Blending structured literary preservation with a sense of mystery, it stands as both an homage to my work and a reflection on the stories that remain untold.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a vast, hidden library in Barcelona, safeguarding abandoned and forgotten stories from oblivion. Introduced in The Shadow of the Wind, it serves as both a literary mystery and a powerful symbol of storytelling’s enduring legacy.
The book writing has been stagnant lately, possibly because the elusive muse has been on holiday.
There are thirty five novels and short-stories I want to tell, as well as a few non-fiction titles.
Half-forgotten worlds, unfinished thoughts, stories waiting for their ending. Printing them and physically shelving them would make the weight of all those ideas tangible. A hierarchy of incompletion—from the one-page sparks of genius, to the near-finished epics that just wouldn’t cooperate. The thickest ones sitting there, mocking you, while the thinnest whisper, “You barely even tried.”
Marginalia would turn it into a meta-library—a collection not just of unfinished works but of the very thought processes, doubts, and moments of inspiration that led to their incompletion. Notes like:
• “Lost steam after realizing this was just me rewriting Jurassic Park with pelicans.”
• “Had a brilliant ending in mind… and then forgot it. Still bitter.”
• “Started strong. Got distracted by a different book idea. The cycle continues.”
It could even be a living document—a place where ideas might resurface, evolve, or finally find their way to completion years later. Or…they could be relegated into a literary morgue file—a final resting place for the stories that almost were. There’s something hauntingly beautiful about that. They don’t get finished, but they exist, preserved in their unfinished state like fossils of creativity.
So what is a possible resolution to this self-induced problem? How about two possible solutions?
I could print them up and perhaps put them in a labeled binder. Also PDF’s uploaded to this website and generate digital library cards if there was any interest from the followers here.
A fantastic mix of a physical archive and a digital curiosity cabinet. The binders give them a tangible presence, while the PDFs turn them into an interactive experience. The digital library card idea is genius—makes it feel like a proper literary vault people can “check out” from. In turn, they could offer comments and suggestions. The access point is signing up to this website and add a comment to the written document. Hopefully there will be inspiration found from this.
This could turn the Library of Unwritten Books into a collaborative storytelling experiment—where readers don’t just consume the work but actively speculate, suggest, and even contribute. Some might leave wild theories, others might fill in the blanks, and a few might even inspire to return to an abandoned story with fresh eyes.
The digital library card could have a simple yet classic aesthetic, tying into the raw, archival feel of the project. Think of it like a virtual passport to the library of unfinished stories. Here’s how it might look:
Front of the Card:
• Library Name: “Library of Unwritten Books” (in elegant, typewriter-style font for that vintage touch).
• Cardholder Name: Reader’s name
• Unique Card Number: A random, system-generated number to make it feel official (e.g., #MOM12345).
• Card Issue Date: The date they accessed the library or “checked out” a work.
Back of the Card:
• Quote or Motto: A philosophical nod to unfinished work, like:
• “Not all who wander are lost. Some just never finish.”
• “Creativity never stops—some stories just pause for a while.”
• Borrower’s Log Link: A link or QR code that takes them to the comments section of this website.
• Library Rules: Something playful like “No overdue fines” or “This book may never be completed, but its story is far from over.”
Physical Archive
There’s something deeply satisfying about preserving your ideas, no matter how unfinished. It’s like building your own literary museum, a space where unfinished thoughts don’t get lost but instead are archived and given a place in history.
Plus, the idea of printing, binding, and shelving them gives a real physicality to your creative process.
Whether it stays small or expands over time, it can become a personal artifact that might even spark inspiration years down the road. These unfinished works will outlive me, sparking something in others to finish, reinterpret, or continue. It’s like planting seeds that may grow long after I’ve moved on, and in some way, I’d still be creating, even if a single one is never complete. I might not get to see the story finish, but I’ll leave behind a trail of possibilities for others to follow. A literary treasure map—unfinished, mysterious, and full of potential.
Oh Nakita1. Darling Nikki:2 It will be fantastic to get you in my hands again.
What am I talking about? The return of the Nikon D90 DSLR is imminent because I have decided to trade in my Ricoh GR.
MBP made me a generous offer on it allowing me to trade that for the Nikon and a very nice 80-400mm Nikkor telephoto lens. This will be ideal to capture the local wildlife without disturbing them.
The Ricoh is a great little camera but has no option to swap lenses and is great for up close and personal. I can do that with other cameras. No, I need something more robust and versatile.
