Human Devlog 00

01-Why I built this place

I wasn't too old when I realized that I was wired off-axis.

Not in any destructive or problematic way, but in a way that affected how I saw the path from some A to some B: It was a diagonal path, at least to others. Across traffic, domains, and dimensions to me that seemed the elegant and obvious one. Not diagonal for the sake of being different: I didn't know it was different until I bumped heads with the world.

It was the most ordinary outcome I could imagine: there were always a plurality of perspectives competing in my head and the projection they made in sum was that elegant, direct, and reasonable path between things. Their internal mutterings came together seemingly in harmony to me, and (surely) as discordant to some.

Here I learned about feedback, both in the audio sense of the self-amplifying loop and in the inputs reflected from the world as you collide with it. The path to my understanding was both self-reinforcing, and from the outside in, seemingly difficult to understand. It became apparent that having shortcuts to good outcomes was helpful, but being able to explain them was more important than ever.

02-Trying to explain the automatic

"How do I breathe in my sleep?"

It took me a very long time to become acquainted with articulating the 'how' of this process. How I would make the seemingly unintuitive but measurably-nice-after-the-fact jumps? How I would do that repeatedly? It always felt a bit like getting the answer on instinct and then needing to reverse engineer the solution so the teacher wouldn't get mad.

Pre-emptive pardon on the cop-out, but my experience of detailing process has been much more fruitful when it is observed in motion: It's nice to think about what you might do, and it is helpful to reflect on what has been done (with the benefit of hindsight), but the 'how' lives between those in the automatic minutiae of decisions that are both difficult to predict and easy to over-explain later.

So, I borrowed one of Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's tools unknowingly: random spontaneous prompted surveying in the midst of aciton. I later on learned this has a name: Experience sampling method (ESM).

That brings us full circle: This is an experiment of 'how'. This place is 'how' --unfolding as it tries to explain itself with the help of prompted self-refleciton. A forum where my particular blend of instincts, addles, and expertises find concourse, mingle, and project that inner world outward onto a fixed plane. A showing of my thinking, as I see it, as it's observed, ,easured, considered, and articulated in some form or another.

03-Before what follows, thanks.

My prelude to the prelude--I offer my thanks: Were it not for the you's of this world, I wouldn't feel compelled to reason my way back through the lateral jumps and dimensional hoops that make up my daily automatic cognition.

Were it not for you, I'd have missed on what an invigorating experience it is to re-explore the machinery behind the curtain and the drive behind the machinery.

So, thank you.

Whatever comes from this experiment I hope will serve as a stand-in for my truth: A junkyard for my mind and a dreamscape for my electric sheep.

May it make you feel at home, or at least, at home with yourselves, --Ryon