I anticipate confusion regarding the name of this site. How is it a book? Sure, it abides by the criteria of a socalled

– multimedia, readerdriven, nonlinear, etc – but it’s still basically just a blog, isn’t it?

Granted, this is not a book. Not yet. But over time, it may become one. In fact I hope it will become multiple, overlapping books. I intend to accumulate relevant and complementary content without prescribing a single vision or intention for it so that it can take a shape of its own. Shapes of its own. At points in the future I may be able to collect multiple pieces into discrete, booklike forms.

It’s been two years since I began this project and already emerging are various potential booklike projects. An obvious one is compiling posts from a title series like

,

,

,

, and so on, into a single work. The same for

,

,

, and future entries. These titles are intentionally broad so they can hold a variety of perspectives pursuing the topic in different directions so that the entries may later be combined to serve unforeseen ends. I expect that any attempts I make to assemble multiple pieces into a whole will prompt me to explain the construction through writing that in turn naturally becomes part of that new whole.

But that’s only one way in which I want “books” to develop from this site. I also want them to sprout organically from the haphazard crosspollination of ideas that features like tagging and backlinking enable. I recently implemented another feature called revisions – which I talked about in my Sept 30th 2024

update – that adds yet another dimension through which a reader (including myself) can traverse the content on this site. Automation is a powerful way to highlight implicit relationships that already exist between pieces. They enable unplanned connections to grow across topics and time. The next feature I intend to automate is a simple and intuitive one: links between posts in a title series.

It’s fitting that this site itself is the fusion product of

. As I’ve said before, the Zettelkasten method of knowledge management is one of them. The method, as noted by researcher Andy Matuschak on his own Zettelkasten-inspired website, enabled Germany sociologist Niklas Luhmann to publish more than 70 books. My writing ambitions are far more modest, but I am interested in adapting the method into a way of writing “books” directly, as opposed to its original purpose of amassing research into a network of information that may then be synthesized and captured in newly written prose. I want to start by writing prose in small chunks and see if the resulting pieces can themselves comprise a booklike thing.

And yet the point of this site is not to become a book, but to provide booklike experiences

of a book. The point is not merely to create books through piecemeal writing, but also to offer pieces by themselves and as an assortment of nonlinear orderings, unlike the offering of the traditional book: single, linear, and monolithic. This site is not just a means but an end itself.

Finally, I want to say that, despite all this, I don’t look at books with scorn. I love books. They have changed my life for the better and I’d like to return the favor.

I’ve been snowboarding, walking, listening Vieux Farka Touré, developing hoverboxes for this site, and more.

My weight loss progress has stalled. I’m 15lbs lighter than I was in June of last year but the red needle on my bathroom scale has been trembling at the same position for weeks. I’m playing soccer twice a week now, but going on fewer walks. I am mindful about what I eat, but I don’t track it. I said in my

that I would try not finishing my serving just because it’s served, but even with the goal in mind I find it very difficult to do. Years ago I saw an ad for a habit-focused weight loss app called Noom that said that finishing your plate is often an impulse ingrained in childhood. I think that’s true for me. In any case, I suspect my biggest hurdle to further weight loss is snacking before bedtime. I’d still like to lose another 25lbs, but I think I’m going to put it on the backburner for now. Cruise until I catch a second wind.

Like I mentioned, I’m playing soccer twice a week. 7v7 games, mostly. My cardio is not amazing, but definitely much better than it was at the start of the year.

I’ve gone snowboarding twice. Finally! Once at Cypress Mountain on a weekday evening and once at Mt Seymour on a weekend afternoon. Both are within a thirty minute drive from Vancouver, which is incredible. From Cypress there are stunning views of the city, the inlet, and the nearby islands. The season is coming to an end but I’m hoping to go to Grouse Mountain soon, which is less than twenty minutes away from Vancouver. Access to ski resorts in Vancouver is astounding.

Z and I have been

around us and loving it. Occasionally I go for a long nighttime walk on my own, as I have done for years, and a recent one resulted in Z and I getting tickets to see

. It turned out to be one of the live music performances I’ve most enjoyed attending.

Z and I did a five week improv course in Vancouver. We met some nice people and had a novel and interesting experience. We think we might take standup comedy classes next. Z is initiating these activities, but I’m happy to follow along.

Z and I are going to Tofino for my mom’s birthday in May and then to NYC a week later.

We recently stayed at an Airbnb on Lake Cavanaugh with friends. We jumped in the water and it was freezing. I’m very happy I did it though.

A couple weeks ago I silently celebrated my two year anniversary working on Microsoft Loop. It’s the longest I’ve worked on a single product or team and by far the one I’ve enjoyed the most. The problems are interesting, the work is in line with my career interests, the product is exciting, the people are great, the work life balance is stellar.

Although I had a dip in motivation several weeks ago, I’ve been quite motivated recently. Managing one’s motivation is a nonobvious and little discussed but essential skill. Over the years I’ve recognized it as such and tried to improve at it.

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk about rewriting history in Git. I’m looking forward to it!

I implemented hoverboxes on this site! If you’re on a computer, hover over

and you’ll see a preview of my previous ‘now’ update. It was nontrivial but educational to implement. I’ve always liked the idea of doing DIY. Does this count?

I haven’t worked on my app Muze Radio for a couple months. Spotify denied my request for an extended quota, which would allow anyone with Spotify Premium to use it. I addressed their silly reason and resubmitted the request. That was well over six weeks ago, which is their expected turnaround time. On the Spotify Dashboard, I see a message banner stating that The review is taking longer than expected. Yeah, I know. I suppose I can’t be too annoyed though. It’s free. Once they accept my request, I’ll probably have motivation to resume work on it.

Listened to a good deal of Mary Norris’s Between Me and You: Confessions of a Comma Queen. I enjoyed the first bit, including the part about Ben Webster and the dictionary, which I found really interesting. But my interest in the book began falling sharply with Norris’s rants about the gender of pronouns and such. I just didn’t care. According to her, ‘they’ doesn’t work as a gender neutral pronoun because it’s plural. Silliness.

Room to Dream, David Lynch’s autiobiography-memoir. A great read, especially as companion material to

. I found it inspirational. Not only is David Lynch an important artist, but also a good person.

, which I read out of interest after reading

and because I love

.

Some New Yorker articles, including one on Female Violence.

I sampled Temple Grandin’s book about Visual Thinking, but I didn’t have appetite for it.

I continue reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, without haste. I am trying to digest and

its ideas.

I’ve been writing with some regularity. Mostly, but not exclusively, reviews and journal entries. I wrote

of

, a project I’m excited to continue.

I keep watching Arsenal games and they keep winning. Arteta is undeniably effective. His decisions are questionable sometimes, but so far he has managed to produce answers for them. Arsenal still has a chance at winning the English Premier League, but it isn’t entirely up to them. Everyone is thrilled to have three title contenders with only a handful of games left and nobody can predict who will win it.

I’ve also been working on the decor of our apartment. I put up small floating shelves in our bedroom, which was intimidating because I had never before drilled holes for wall anchors. Bought a rubber plant and a wall mirror for the plant corner in our living room. Continually propagating my pothos snippings and planting them in nursery pots. In addition to Never Too Small, which I’ve been watching for years now, I’ve started watching videos by Noah Daniel, a small new YouTuber who is an interior designer with a passion for modern architecture and design. It’s been interesting.

True Detective season 4, which had my attention at first, but then lost it.

The Curse. Have only watched a couple episodes but I think it’s so good. Can’t wait to keep watching.

Veep. So funny. Reminds me a lot of Arrested Development and Peep Show, other shows about pathetic characters written with scathing comedy wit. The Other Two is similar. I’ve been catching episodes of it here and there while Z watches it.

The Office continues to be a go-to comfort show for me. I have that strange but apparently common capacity to rewatch it endlessly. I do the same with the Ricky Gervais Show, even though I think Ricky is a prat and his standup comedy unimaginative crap.

, which was a worthy Lynch work.

The Zone of Interest, which was stellar.

which was pretty much as good as a megablockbuster gets.

I have some interesting tasks at work right now. Looking forward to seeing how those progress.

I’m looking forward to visiting Tofino and NYC. Also looking forward to doing more outdoor activities with friends, like paddleboarding and playing volleyball.

I have tickets to see Nate Smith, Carrtoons, and Kiefer in Seattle in May. Excited for it. I’ll update

afterward, like I did for

.

Excited but nervous about the last several EPL games. It’s going to be a huge disappointment if Arsenal don’t win the title after such a fantastic season.

Z and I are developing new friendships in Vancouver. Looking forward to forming a dynamic with a group of people like we have in Seattle.

As I write, I don’t have substantial reading or writing goals. At this point, I have developed both habits, so I expect them to carry me on for the next several weeks, at least.

I’ve been developing Muze Radio, reading Stephen King, watching Poor Things, and more.

Finally filed Z’s green card papers. Phew! Now we wait.

Whereas I was enjoying the fall, I’m not really enjoying the winter. Winters are so gray here, in the Pacific Northwest. It’s making Z and I fantasize about living in a place with sunnier winters.

Visiting my mom and sisters in Victoria. Spending lots of time in my favorite coffee shops – Hey Happy, St. Cecilia, Discovery Coffee. We’re not staying for long, so I probably won’t see many of my friends. Our cousin is with us, visiting from Spain.

Z and I have been socializing with friends and family a lot in the last couple weeks. Luckily, we both have a need for periodic “alone time”, a term I learned from her. We support each other in our routine quest for it. I’ve been realizing that I’m quite introverted. I think it’s taken me a long time to realize because of how social Mexican culture is.

I think I lost another 4ish pounds, but I’m a bit skeptical of my vintage bathroom scale that I bought at Goodwill a few years ago. Can my weight really fluctuate 8lbs in 24hrs?? Z googled it and apparently it’s possible. I confirmed by weighing myself on my mom’s bathroom scale (also vintage) while visiting Victoria. Apparently it’s true! I’ve lost ~17lbs since mid-June. At this rate of 2.8lbs per month, I’ll hit my goal weight by October 2024.

I’ve had fewer chances to play soccer recently. Looking forward to playing in January. I went to the physio and got some exercises to address a recurring issue I have with my right hip/groin. I’m not diligent with the exercises though, never have been. I find it hard to keep to scheduled or pre-determined activities.

I didn’t end up working on this site. I’m bad at adhering to plans, even my own. Instead I tend to follow

.

Instead of working on this site, I started a new project: a web app I called Muze Radio. It’s a new and improved version of Muze Player, a web app I made in my last year of university (2018-2019). The code is here and the beta version of the app is available here. I started on the new version on a whim and ended up obsessed for several days.

As my obsession gives way to a healthier interest, I am very happy to have published a functional version of the app. Ever since I read this article in 2016, whenever I work on a project, I dutifully remind myself: if you want to build a car, build a skateboard first. Then a bike. Then a car. At the end of each stage of the development process, you should have something that is not only an improvement on the previous version but also useful by itself. This prevents wasted effort and enables incremental improvement. If I suddenly stop working on this app and return to it in a year or two, I will find a minimal, functional app. I could pick up where I left off without having to first fix a bunch of half-implemented features. If instead I returned to an ambitious but incomplete prototype, I’d be (rightfully) tempted to scrap it and start over instead of trying to salvage it.

I ended up reading all of Stephen King’s

. Really enjoyed it. Many of the recent posts on this site reference it. In his book, King was entertaining and insightful, but he struck me as somewhat narrow-minded in an interview he did with Charlie Rose. I understand that King was one of many blind to the brilliance of Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, but I was put off by King’s unwavering confidence in dismissing the film as a failure.

I got curious about Stephen King’s fiction and started The Green Mile, which is supposed to be one of his best, but I lost interest. The audiobook’s cheesy narrator didn’t help. My impression is that King is a capable pop fiction writer, but not a literary standout. Maybe I’ll give The Stand or The Shining a try later on.

I’ve been loving audiobooks on Spotify. I can’t believe my luck. I started listening to Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, but then thought of Mark Lanegan’s memoir,

, which is supposed to be great. I put that on instead and it gripped me instantly. It reminds me of

, but is much bleaker and written in a conversational voice. More on this book forthcoming.

A hundred pages into

. We’ll see how far I get. Read up a bit on the cultural lore around this book. The New Yorker article How to Read “Infinite Jest” was one of the highlights.

Continuing with Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Over two hundred pages in, still great. She’s not afraid to follow up her criticisms of orthodox city planning with concrete criteria for good city planning. She values concreteness and reality above almost all other things. She routinely and smartly derides “abstractions”. What matters are real people, real places, real events.

Started Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott. Did not grab me. I suspect I’d have to push or skip through a bunch of content that I’m already familiar with to get to the new and thought-provoking stuff. This is to be expected, considering I’ve read a lot of

. I might listen to Bird By Bird some more, but I have a few other audiobooks waiting in my Spotify library:

I saw Rick Rubin’s book displayed in a store window for $40 or something like that. It was a pretty book, but $40, really? I checked Spotify and sure enough the audiobook is included in Spotify premium. We should resist the invitation to view books as commodities. When you feel the impulse to buy a book, ask yourself: How excited would you be if the cover was ugly or stained or if the book was used but in fair condition? That is, do you want it for its substance or its aesthetic?

I am happy to see, looking back at the past month, that I’ve written several small pieces:

As I mentioned above, many of these reference Stephen King’s book

. I love letting my activities overlap like this. Let what I am reading feed into what I’m writing, what music I’m listening to, what movies and shows I’m watching, and vice versa.

How To with John Wilson, season three. Didn’t realize this was the last season until I casually finished watching the last episode.

The Last of Us, season one. I loved the ending of the season, although it also broke my heart. Brave, truthful writing. (Regarding Joel, at least. It’s ludicrous that the other characters gave him the opportunity to do what he did, though.)

Severance and Westworld, both season one. Both have really interesting premises, but neither grabs my attention. The writing in Westworld feels a bit off-the-mark. And Severance is a bit slow-paced.

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s new movie. One of my favorite movies of recent times. More thoughts

.

Promising Young Woman. Second watch, this time with Z. She’s right that the movie is disappointing in its treatment of such a serious and important subject. It pulls every punch. Instead of rage and vengeance, we see wrist-slapping and finger-wagging. Poor Things promises much less and delivers much more feminist catharsis.

Catch Me If You Can. Turned it off. I’m realizing Spielberg is not my favorite. Maybe he’s like the Stephen King of movies. Several weeks ago I started watching The Fablemans on the plane and it felt a bit ridiculous, had to turn that off, too.

Keep losing weight. Get back to playing soccer regularly.

Go snowboarding with friends. Go on a weekend trip with Z to a hot springs resort.

Keep reading, keep writing.

Continue working on Muze Radio. Recruit my friend Isaac for help. Get my younger sister Dani to design me a favicon.

Spend time with friends.

Get back into the groove of work after the holidays.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. I say ‘virtual’ because the greatest possibilities I see are in the virtual world of computers. Ebooks and audiobooks are just the beginning. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their more subtle attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.