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!
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.
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.
2024 was a bumper crop full of celestial events and now 2025 is starting out very well. Tonight I observed, in order from east to west: Mars, Jupiter, (insert Earth here), (insert moon here), Venus, Saturn, and Mercury. Six planets are currently in alignment. Bonus: I also observed the Hubble space telescope.
The alignment of Mars, Earth, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Venus, and Saturn occurred on January 21, 2025.
Coming soon, Saturn, Mercury, Earth, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars in a planetary alignment on February 25, 2025. Hopefully we can talk someone we know into setting up his telescope for optimal viewing.
This will be the 17th year at attempting creating life-long habits for myself. I’ve realized a long time ago that at the end-of-the-year holidays, I am not mentally or physically capable of sticking with resolutions for the upcoming new year. I need a break so I take the whole month of January off to reflect and plan. Hence, the start of a new Groundhog Day Resolutions.
Today 2/2, Groundhog Day, is the day for a fresh start and a new year. (Chinese Lunar New Year started as well)
The first goal is to check-in here and review my progress. Every month until December 12th 2025.
The first check-in is on March 3 (3/3). After that will be 4/4, 5/5 and so on.
Here we go:
Nutrition
I like the idea of going back on to the Keto diet for quick weight loss, but have you seen the price of meat and eggs lately? The Mediterranean diet was clean and helpful too. Plus, I read that it reduces inflammation. Perhaps a hybrid of both plans could be advantageous. I am back working in the field and the convenience of fast food options on the go is strong. I need to be stronger.
Quit smoking. Yeah, I grabbed a cigarillo every now and then before the holidays.
No alcohol. I need to be encouraging and supportive for those around me that have an issue with alcohol so no need to bring it out. This will be easy.
Fitness
The previously mentioned job has me walking and lifting outdoors every work day so this is a start. Time to supplement this with extracurricular physical activities such as:
Yoga and stretching, because I can feel my body tense and become less flexible.
Meditation will help with calm my mind, increase oxygen levels and lower blood pressure.
Cycling is something I enjoy but haven’t done in a month. Time to get back on the saddle.
Strength Training at home. The Apple Fitness app has improved while I wasn’t looking and I’d like to make use of that subscription again. Kickboxing anyone?
Strength Training at the gym. We have a membership but haven’t used it due to a lot of changes around here. Eager to get back into it again.
Geocaching. Let’s take this outside and explore more while getting some walking in.
Create
Photography- The endgame is in site for a completely organized workflow and asset management. It’s seen decades of neglect and it’s only been a few years trying to reign it all in. This is difficult because of my other photography goals: adding more, better images that I am taking lately.
Writing- The same can be said for decades of writing and that is almost organized as well. As long as I am on the topic of writing, the book(s) have taken a backseat like everything else in the past two months. Progress needs to be made so I can get it all out of my head and free up space for other projects that I get myself into.
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.
Technology
No new tech in 2025. I almost broke this one right off the bat but I returned the new Kindle in favor of the existing one.
I have a desire to finish making the Mini machine into a proper photo and file server. Not just for me, but to grant anyone else I want to have remote access to it too.
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!
As I mentioned on the last entry, there have been some backend changes and improvements to this website and more.
Version 3.0- Switched virtual servers, host. This was a doozy and thankfully I have everything backed up and could restore easily.
Added a new subdomain to host the Archives website. This is a repository in case this website encounters a disaster.
A new subdomain has been created for the Photography website as well. Although that is a work of progress now that I have rethought everything but ran out of time tonight.
The “On This Day” script has been moved to display under each post and on the Archives page. It is a fun way to look back on what occurred in previous years on the same date.
Visually, not a lot has changed here but the whole point of this was to bring everything in-house, on one domain. Previously, the Archives were on a whole other domain name, same for the photo website.
Now it is time to kick back and read on the new Kindle and start the work week in the morning.
This website may be down for a bit due to some backend changes and switching virtual server hosts. Hopefully I can get everything restored quickly. The things we do for our domains…
I neglected to mention in the last post about all of the beach web cams, manatee cams, dolphins cams etc etc. I am also digging watching the tides go in and out based on the wind and lunar cycles.
A phosphene is the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye. Thanks, Ms. Optometrist.
Apophatic translates to negative theology, or teaching beyond reason or language.
The global ship tracking website is great for spying on all of the marine vessels in the area. I’ve been observing a lot of watercraft in the bays and gulf and wondered where they were coming from and going to. This helps.
It’s quite possible the Game, colloquially named “Rabbits” has been going on for centuries and from China.
Also while driving up and down southwest Florida, I was curious to know how big my work responsibilities actually were. Apparently I am responsible for approximately 270 square miles from the tip of Captiva Island down to North Naples. Wow,
Amazing how Rabbits always manages to pop into my life. I first discovered this phenomenon in 2023, the year of the RabbitI have a large office with an ocean viewShip tracking view from the Gulf
