By Sebastian, May 17, 2025.
One of the reasons I have my own site instead of a Substack or other common solution is because I want to be able to make something which breaks the mold of what a blog is a little bit. I want to develop more tools and more interesting ways to write and read, something characteristic of the internet and computers, instead of emulating print. I'm highly inspired by Ted Nelson, the creator of hypertext, especially his essay collection Selected Papers.
To that end, one of the big themes you will see as I develop this site is experiments in hypertext. The first you may have noticed in the top-right corner. I think that one of the powers of the internet is that there is such a great wealth of information, and I want to point the reader to that. However, if you saw every single link that I had at once, it would probably become overwhelming, and the links themselves would lose significance. Hence, I've added a few toggles to help decide what kinds of links you want to see.
In cases where a specific citation is being made or a link is being called out, I categorize them under "default links." When I make reference to a certain concept, if I have not written anything on it, I'll drop a link (usually to Wikipedia) categorized under "external links." There can be a lot of these, so they are turned off by default. If I am referencing a specific concept and I have either written about it or it is a foreign term, the associated link will be categorized unter "definitional links."
These categories are bound to change as I consider how to most usefully categorize links. Further, I will be adding additional forms of hypertext, such as stretchtext and popups as time goes on. The hyperlink is really a very specific case of hypertext.
I'm very open to feedback or discussion on the directions I can take this site in in the future. Reach out to me at [email protected] if you have any thoughts.