I started My wikiblogarden over a year ago.
You’re reading it right now.
A few of my early posts went viral, mostly from reaching the front page of hackernews. This includes:
So yeah, it turns out that “X is bad/good” is a winning formula.
Minification is evil is my favourite because it’s Just a tiny poem.
But please remember, Hackernews is a vile website.
Just continues to be my most viewed post, flaring up on social media every few months or so.
Some people love it and some people really really hate it because they fail to Just read the article, which helps the virality, I think.
I’ve picked up the habit of linking to Just any time I say Just in one of my blog posts.
I can’t unsee it now.
As time went on, I began to write more and more personal stuff, not just computer stuff.
One of the early occurrences of this was the Lu loo tales but the most personal (by far) was My conversion therapy story.
Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t share such personal information, or what would happen if my friends or colleagues saw it and it changed what they think of me.
On the other hand, it’s the blog post I receive the most emails about. Many people tell me they went through the same nasty things as me.
It’s nice to know I’m not alone.
I gradually became more and more comfortable with writing longer posts.
The longest one is currently I went to an algorave and I’m pleased I made it that length.
Sometimes you need a long time to tell a story.
Another of the long ones is Cardboard cutouts, which remains as one of the only posts I have ever written about my teaching career.
I still find it hard to write about my teaching days because it makes me quite emotional, but I hope to do it more in the future.
The difficulty pushed me to adopt a fractured writing style which makes use of lots of interspersed little snippets of story. I have grown to love this approach and I now use it often.
Here are some posts that make use of that cutout style:
It’s practice, Just practice, when I write on My wikiblogarden. And supposedly, I am getting better at writing. But sometimes I get frustrated and all I can think of is that Words are hard and Words words words are out to get me and writing is Just one of those Things I am bad at. But yes, I do believe I am getting better / a little bit better / little by little.
For a very long time, I wanted to write up my Define define video into a blog post / an essay. I tried and I tried, I wrote and I wrote and I rewrote my words into many— I tried many different shapes and forms and moods and lengths but I couldn’t figure it out.
But after tons and tons of practice, I managed to bash it out in an hour with Definitions that don’t matter and it ended up quite short. You can be the judge of whether it was worth it or not
But yes, the more I write, the more I write more fluidly.
When it was time to sit down and write up my Arroost work, it went okay. I wrote an essay called Unblocking creation with friends and I’m happy with it.
I could never imagine writing a whole essay like that before, not even twelve months ago. I’m pleased (relieved) that I can do it now.
I’m also pleased to see other people spin up their own wikiblogarden projects.
I’ve seen quite a number of websites start with an opening post saying how they were inspired by the wikiblogarden in some way, like Sven’s I’m here now and Jayrude’s Hello friends and Enderprism’s I made a blog because Todepond asked me to.
I also get sad when they inevitably end.
The wikiblogarden has now attracted some subtle criticism too! Which is surely another milestone.
Yes, Philippa Markovics winked at the wikiblogarden in Things that happened in September.
In that introductory post, she states that her website is a website, and not a wiki or a blog or a memex or a garden or a blah or an anything like a wikiblogarden, and she reminds you of this in the footer of every single page:
This website is not a memex nor a garden nor a blog nor a diary or dairy or a portfolio or a wiki. It’s a website.
And if you click on “website”, you get a poem. She hints (in the poem) that “wikiblogarden” is a long and fancy word and you don’t need to make it so stupidly complicated. It’s a minor mockery / parody of the wikiblogarden and I welcome it.
Of course, her mockery of the word “wikiblogarden” embodies the exact obsession that the word “wikiblogarden” mocks, and so, as a response, I now— In this very moment, right now, as you read this, I will now permanently change the name of the wikiblogarden to something else.
I, Lu or Luke (either’s fine) Wilson, hereby rename the “wikiblogarden” to the “wikiblogardenite”!
It is no longer a wiki or blog or garden. It is now a wiki or blog or garden or site, seeing as three clearly wasn’t enough for some people.
The wikiblogardenite gave me a place for tiny little coded experiments. Yes, I started building small and slippy things for the Tadi lab.
Counter went decently viral, which is surprising when you consider that it’s just a button with a counter that increases when you press it.
I guess the interesting part is that it increases the number for everyone in the world, not just you. And It’s remarkable how difficult it is to do this with modern tools, despite what some people might tell you.
By far, the biggest success to come out of the lab is Login and, by extension, the Logiverse.
It’s a fully distributed / decentralised social media network, which sounds fancy but all it means is that multiple people are now running their own servers / instances / stores / appviews / websites / whatevers. Ah— That does sound complicated…
It’s a social network that isn’t just run by one company or person. Multiple people run their own parts of the network, and we all connect to each other’s parts and together it makes a large network. It makes the network stronger because if one of us goes bad or disappears, the larger network can continue being good. It means that no single person or company has control over the whole thing. It’s shared responsibility.
There are already things out there that claim to do this, like mastodon and bluesky, but they’re so difficult to do that it’s more of a hypothetical. Especially bluesky.
And it’s not easy in the Logiverse either. But it does seem to be a little less hard.
Yes, I’m really quite impressed by what people have done with Login. It was nothing to do with me, so I’m thankful for the community for doing all that work.
One of the more ‘highly rated’ posts on the wikiblogardenite is Building community, where I share my findings from a question I asked loads of researchers.
More largely, it represents a moment of change for me in my own work, away from making things, and towards making space.
We are truly within the No more ideas era of the todepond universe. And also No more tools and No more products and so on.
We have enough!!!!!
One thing I know is… I will Never stop writing. And that’s certainly not easy. In difficult moments, I find myself doubting myself / asking myself Why bother but I’ve managed to keep going so far
Those uncomfortable moments when I’m writing— When writing feels— Whenever I’m uncomfortable— I learn most about writing when I’m uncomfortable and I’m writing. I try to keep pushing through those moments.
It took a real push to write the Vomit diaries. For a start, the act of writing it made me feel physically sick. But it also took a long time too.
Despite all that, I am pleased I did it. I shared something that I wanted to share, and I practised writing an episodic story.
I started the Vomit diaries because there was another episodic thing that I was trying to write but I was finding it too hard, so I thought I would practise with something less important first / with the Vomit diaries.
And people seemed to like it. Thank god for that.
The best way to keep myself writing is by writing my blog from my phone. I explained my thinking for this in Write your blog from your phone, which was turned into a song by ngons.
Through my incessant writing, I have picked up various habits / quirks. The most prominent being Dashes, which I explained in the long I went to an algorave post.
I’ve also started using slashes to represent branching pathways / options that I don’t care about choosing between. It’s like a dash but— With dashes, I’m making visible— I’m showing you a moment where I’m not sure whether to delete something or not. With slashes, I’m showing you when / where I can’t decide what to add. If it makes no / little difference, then why not show both?
I run a heavy Quality control system. The vast majority of my posts get rejected / thrown in the bin.
However, I have recently started to share my binned posts, as long as they have the disclaimer that they are binned, such as Pasta gang (binned). You can read the beginning of the eventual unbinned version in I learned a programming language by accident.
But it’s funny: After all that, I actually prefer some things from the binned version.
Either way, you get to see both / to see my process.
Another binned post is It’s weird when people recognise me (binned).
Despite being binned, it is still true.
People used to only—
No. This section is binned.
At some point, I realised that headings / titles were my crutch.
All of my writing followed the same sort of structure and it became boring and repetitive. So with No more titles, I decreed that I wouldn’t use titles anymore, and I stuck to it / I went cold turkey for a long time. I didn’t use any titles or subtitles on any post, even though this meant you couldn’t even click on those posts because there was no title to click.
I only re-introduced titles after I grew free from them, with Blog posts don’t need titles
the titles were back but my writing style was changed
I started putting my weekly Pondcast on my wikiblogardenite too. It feels good to be free from closed platforms like patreon and substack
With Todepond, I started changing the look and feel of the pondcast, to further differentiate it from the rest of the wikiblogardenite.
This lets me mess around in wikiblogardenite land without harming the visual language of the slightly more serious pondcast
And here we are, in the present day.
Turns out, (quite) a lot of people read the wikiblogardenite now and that gives me a (small) platform. So of course, I feel obliged to try to use it for (a little bit of) good.
Yes, I’ve been using it to share some of the struggles I experience as a trans person, in Sulfasalazine and Sulfasalazine: The sequel and The enshittification of GenderGP and Today is a sad and Clickbait title and so on and it really is quite boring / tiring but I feel obliged to say something.
I also write about the challenges I face from other queer / trans people with things like My internalised transphobia and Baby trans considered harmful and Passing is bullshit and Transition in slow motion and—
my theory is that some—
There’s a lot of biphobia and enbyphobia within queer circles and unfortunately I am both of those things so it’s nice to have a place to rant about it!!!!!!!!
As I’ve said in the past, my only goal with this blog is to have written a blog post about absolutely everything, so that when anyone says anything to me, I can say “I wrote a blog post about that”.
I even wrote a blog post about how I wrote a blog post about that and it’s fun being able do that double tag joke in person.
If you don’t know what a “tag” is then feel free to read my post about jokes called What is a joke.
Sometimes people send me private messages, despite me asking everyone to Please stop sending me messages. And sometimes they ask me to write a blog post about something, or to hurry up on one that’s in progress.
This helped me discover a new business opportunity to add to my list of How I get money: I offered to fast track any blog post for the obscene price of 99 pounds
Surprisingly, two people paid it. Thank you to both of you! One person specified no preference, so the second person got to choose, and they chose Chaos to the canon.
So where are we now?
I gave my first ever talk about the wikiblogardenite. It was only indirectly about the wikiblogardenite but it really was about the wikiblogardenite. The talk is called Death of the tadi web and it was a fun one to perform.
And yes, as foretold by Are analytics good, I did eventually add analytics. They’re publicly available on my Analytics page and also on Goatcounter.
I’m not ashamed.
From the very first post until now, poems have featured heavily. I didn’t expect that to happen but it did.
Here’s a link to every single poem on my wikiblogardenite:
Thank you for being here this year. Onto the next.
Back to the wikiblogardenite.