If you browse the home page of this website, you won’t find a conventional blog roll arranged as a strict reverse-chronological feed (ah Wordpress, those were the days!). You won’t find a timeline where yesterday’s thoughts slowly sink into an archive graveyard just because the calendar moved forward.
Instead, you’ll find Constellations: an interconnected star map of essays, technical projects, fleeting notes, and visual artwork arranged across a visual field.
Here is what the Constellations concept means, the web lineage it draws from, and the celestial terminology used to chart it.
Inspired by the Digital Garden
The concept of Constellations is directly inspired by the Digital Garden movement.
For decades, the web has been dominated by what web theorist and educator Mike Caulfield termed “The Stream” in his foundational 2015 essay, The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral. The Stream represents the default mode of social media feeds and traditional blogs: ephemeral, chronologically ordered, and optimized for immediacy. The mind doesn’t work that way. It jumps from thought to thought, goes back to an old idea, transforms and evolves an insight into action, or just gets bored and moves on.
In contrast to the traditional blog roll, a Digital Garden treats personal publishing as an ongoing, exploratory craft. As designer and researcher (and big inspiration) Maggie Appleton beautifully articulates in her comprehensive essay A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (and demonstrates in her own Digital Garden):
“A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly sorted by their publication date. They represent an ethos of thinking in public, cultivating knowledge over time, and embracing imperfect, work-in-progress thoughts.”
Other early pioneers—from Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens to Joel Hooks’ declaration that My blog is a digital garden, not a blog—have echoed this shift:
- Topography over Chronology: Organizing knowledge by relationship, context, and concept rather than pure timestamp.
- Cultivation over Performance: Ideas can be planted as seedlings, pruned as they mature, and revisited years later without needing a brand-new “announcement.”
- Interconnected Hypertext: Embracing the open, associative nature of the web rather than a closed, linear feed. (I don’t have enough content yet to implement this properly)
Why “Constellations”?
No particular reason. I’m just a space and sci-fi nerd. So I picked the digital garden concept and applied Cosmology nomenclature to it. This represents the breadth of topics I’m curious about and interdisciplinary connections between them.
An isolated idea, project, or sketch is like a single star in the night sky. In isolation, it might look like a distant, lonely pinprick of light.
However, when you step back and draw imaginary lines between those points of light, you discover Constellations—patterns that tell stories, reveal hidden relationships between disparate disciplines, and give travelers a map to navigate the unknown.
A technical essay on cellular automata might connect to a Godot game prototype; a comic panel might link to a philosophical note on communist manifesto. Constellations are the emergent shapes that form when diverse curiosities cross-pollinate.
The Celestial Lexicon
To navigate this corner of the cosmos, here is a guide to the terminology and iconography used throughout this site:
1. The Constellation (Star Map)
The overarching mosaic grid on the home page. Rather than forcing all content into a single linear timeline, the Constellation gathers articles, projects, notes, and visual artwork into a balanced multi-column masonry layout where featured anchors and recent discoveries sit side-by-side.
2. Articles (Deep Sky Surveys / Bright Stars)
*Substantive, long-form essays, technical teardowns, in-depth tutorials, and researched syntheses. These are the fixed, bright navigational stars—the Polaris points—that anchor major areas of investigation.
3. Projects (Exploration Probes & Orbiters)
Functional software, web games, interactive web simulations, and open-source tools. Like robotic exploration vessels dispatched into deep space, projects test theoretical concepts against reality and send signals back home.
4. Notes (Comets & Field Signals)
*Ephemeral sparks, short-form thoughts, devlogs, quotes, and reading notes. These are swift and unburdened—transiting observations captured in real time before they solidify into larger bodies of work (I plan to connect this to X or Mastodon.)
5. Artworks (The Human in all of this)
*Hand-drawn line art, ink illustrations, digital sketchbook entries, and comic panels. Artworks supply color, texture, and visual atmosphere to the universe, reminding us that humans and their creation exist as a source of meaning in this meaningless universe.
6. Sectors (Orbitals & Disciplines)
The thematic categories (such as Technology, Game Dev, Essays, and Design) that define different orbital sectors across the site, allowing you to filter your telescope to specific subjects.
How to Explore
There is no prescribed reading order here. You don’t need to start at the top and read downward.
Feel free to filter by sector, follow a curiosity thread from an engineering build to a sketchbook panel, or simply wander through the night sky. As with any true constellation, the meaning is found in the connections you choose to draw.