i have a brain that has, historically, been very scattered. i was diagnosed with ADHD and promptly forgot about it until my dad told me a decade+ later, and i'm generally plagued with bad memory. but something has fallen int o place lately and though i couldn't place the responsibility solely on one thing i feel as though i am much more capable of having organized thoughts than i was perhaps five years ago.

i will assign blame to two useful things that have happened that seem relatively central, which i hope others may find useful:

1. The Timeless Way of Building (Christopher Alexander)

i read this book and Alexander's way of describing patterns was life-changing, brain-changing, whatever. i read the entire book in a weekend, cramming its hundreds of pages of structure into my brain. also i skimmed the book because this is a book that wants to be skimmed, that is designed to be skimmed. i bring up ADHD because holy shit this changed the way i approach books forever and now i can read all the books i damn well please. here is one of the very first pages of the book:

okay, that's only a small part of the book. i missed my chance to maybe email Christopher Alexander because he's dead now, he died pretty recently, and i should really start emailing people who have changed my life because a lot of them are going to die before me. i don't know what i'll say to them or what they'll say to me but i guess i'd better find out.

anyway, i read this book and then immediately afterwards thought, "oh, it isn't so crazy that my thoughts are a big disorganized mishmash after all. it's because i never had this structure to put them in!"

2. newforum.droqen.com

i've tried SO MANY NOTE-TAKING METHODS.

• physical notebooks.
• digital notebooks.
• digital notebooks that i published into a physical zine every month for three years as a half-baked patreon reward idea (the patreon no longer exists! i sorta miss doing the zines.)
• voice memos.
• emails to myself (cluttering my inbox).
• voice memos that automatically get emailed to myself (cluttering my inbox).
• weird bespoke note-taking apps.
• so, so many weird bespoke note-taking apps.

and finally, the one that stuck was... i made a forum with one user (me) using the technology that ran a forum i was comfortable in when i was a younger droq (TIGSource, Simple Machine Forums), and now i just have this forum where i can post the brain stuff that i need to post :) it is the best. it's the best. here, you can read the thoughts i recorded while i was reading The Timeless Way of Building!!! actually i'm going to reread these notes too, always nice to retrace an old mental state...

~

from hereon out you can expect me to use cohost to assist in my research, and very occasionally make funny jokes and observations when the mood strikes, but i really hope it doesn't strike, i always regret it. i don't regret making funny jokes and observations but getting into the habit of it on twitter sucked when twitter became less like 'place with friends' and more 'weird public billboard with ads and pointless things going viral all the time'.

from hereon out you can expect me to use cohost to assist as i, as i put it on my mastodon, 'interrogate reality', or otherwise share stuff that results from such. thankyou.

p.s. i love to explain myself, but i'll probably refrain from doing much of that here either. in fact i don't know why i wrote this entire cohost post! but here it is, my premortem. in the future i'll probably keep this stuff to my newforum.

p.p.s. is this the way to make a cohost post? it rules. it feels wrong, somehow, to not be making a million separate little messages flimsily chained together. but also, i feel suddenly freed from the prison that is a character limit. i promise i will not abuse this privilege.

anyway if you follow me on cohost look forward to lots of weird existential questions that i want answers to, and (hopefully) other people's answers. thx.

love,dro qen