Babble, [2025-08-21 Thu 13:59], Relaunching emsenn.net

I did it! I finally got my files uploaded to emsenn.net! This is a big step in bringing myself back to the Web in a way that I'm comfortable with, and feels aligned with my position and orientation, as best I could describe those things.

I've babbled a lot about picking what tools to use to write and publish, but figured I'd give myself this space to discuss it as-it-is, right now.

Consistently for the past few years, I've structured my personal website as a digital garden, influenced by note-taking systems like Zettelkasten. There are a lot of individual pages, and then pages that list other pages. For example, there's this babble, and my blog (my babble-log), which lists all my public babbles.

I'm using Emacs as my text editor, using a custom configuration I've named GnoponEmacs - a neologism from gnosis (Ancient Greek for to know), ponos (to toil), and Emacs.

A big part of that is using Org-mode and Org-roam, two powerful and related modules that extend Emacs toward creating complex documents and interlinking, respectively.

Org-mode is like Markdown, in that it's a way of adding formatting to plain text. But because it's built ontop of a specific piece of software, Emacs, it is able to do a lot more to let that markup be computable. Additionally, Org-mode has components for managing an agenda, templating the creation and modification of files, and notably, publishing files to other formats, including HTML.

Org-roam lets me build a database of a selection of Org-mode files, more readily working with some of that data. That's what lets me quickly find and insert links to other files in things like this babble, and build catalogs like my blog listing.

All this is a bit hard to explain, in this sort of babble, where I'm babbling with the intention that it be read by any random visitor to my website - who might be an expert Emacs user, but more likely hasn't ever used it, or probably even heard of it.

So, shifting gears a bit, let me just say: I'm using this specific set of software to take notes and publish my Website. The main page for that software is at GnoponEmacs, for the nerds who wanna read more about it. (That's another perk of lots of pages: I can just, redirect the reader, as the writer.)

You might've noticed that a lot of the links that are in this babble don't appear to go anyplace, and if they do go someplace, they go to a mostly-empty page.

That's because this version of my digital garden, I only started working on in early August, 2025, after I finally upgraded my laptop to something better than the lowest-class Chromebook available in 2019.

That old Chromebook (which is currently streaming trash TV as I babble and tidy my house) was what I got to replace my last "real" computer, which broke catastrophically when I was doing backups.

Because of that, I've lost a lot of my writing and research archive, and what I do have, is fragmented across different formats, like Markdown. I've got a goal of bringing that stuff into my files, but it's going to take time. And so a part of that is using babbles to populate nodes that will help fill in the gaps between stuff.

So, let's see… freshly updated Website, returning to high-quality free open-source software, and working to create this network of files…

Yeah - let me move toward explaining what I'm doing with why there's so many links - and in fact, I'm only adding as many as I feel like, not as many as there really should be in a text like this.

People who've only known me the past few years might not know, but when I was younger, I spent a lot more time exploring computers and programming.

In fact, this might be a good time to babble what has become somewhat of a formulaic babble from me, but a quick search shows there's no version of it in my current files:

Before computers could do graphics, it was all text: You'd type commands, and the computer would type things back at you. (In the Beginning… was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson is a good (but out-of-date) essay about these interfaces, early graphical user interface, and the significantly different user experience of the two.)

Of course, as soon as they could, people started making games that worked that way. Zork is an early text-interface adventure game that was many folks introduction to the concept. And, of course, as soon as networked computing came around, people started making, and playing, multi-user text-interface games. Coming from folk who already loved playing tabletop war games and tabletop role-playing games, the first major genre of these games were called multi-user dungeons, or MUDs. (These days, that same acronym often gets expanded as multi-user dimension, as the genre developed significantly past its role-playing game roots.

When I was a young, a few things happned:

• I was born.
  • This was the condition for being young.
  • Notably, it happened in Switzerland, in 1990, so I was mostly exposed to Schwyzerdütsch (Swiss-German), along with a lot of German, French, and some English and Italian.
• About four years later, I was moved to the United States of America.
  • General American English became the main language around me.
• I also got a personal computer, a desktop, which was quite a thing to have as a child at that time.
  • I even had Internet access. (Real Internet access, not AOL).
• Somehow, I found out about MUDs.
  • Among the wide world of MUDs, I found the Discworld MUD.
    • This MUD - still running! - is derived from an early form of the Discworld, a fantasy setting created by Terry Pratchett.
      • The MUD, like Pratchett's fiction, has deep world building delivered with clever writing.
      • Unlike Pratchett's books, it had chat channels and other social features.
      • This made it a place where I spent a lot of time, and learned a lot about English, language, computer systems, and many other parts of life.

One consequence of playing MUDs was that I started wanting to program this. This started small: learning how to change the descriptions of rooms, to fix typos and stuff. But over the years, I learned how MUD engines work, and MUDs became kind of the central component of how I understood how computers worked, and how I thought they should work.

Let me remind the reader, this is a babble, it is unstructured and unplanned, so any difficulty arising from my (lack of) form is to be expected.

Which is to say, I don't have a good segue, except to say that language, MUDs, and computers, are tightly tied concepts for me, and as my life brought me other places, they never stopped being some part of things, if only as an influence.

One of the ways MUDs have been an influence is on my approach to writing and theorizing, in ways that I'm struggling to express, but…

…certain ideas about computer programming made their way into my worldview before traditional mathematics. So when it came around to learn algebra, x being equal to something like 2 wasn't an unfamiliar concept: I had first-hand experience with stuff like sword's weight equalling 2 kg.

That's not quite the idea I'm trying to express. By playing in a virtual, computed environment, that simulated things like physical environments and basic economics, I had a fairly hands-on experience with ideas that would continue to get introduced in other contexts, throughout my life.

This was even true when I started getting into real nerdy philosophy: post-structuralism is a little less unintelligible when you are so familiar with synthetic systems.

I want to try and wrap this babble up, by tying it back into my Website.

In some ways, my Website is a MUD: multiple users come and explore it, though there's pretty much just one command: move page.

And there's none of the social or game features that are expected from a MUD (yet).

But what there is, is… the thing all of this babbling was a preface to talk about, yet I still feel underprepared to introduce.

My interest in MUDs, world-building, theorizing, anti-colonialism, spirituality, and so on and so forth, have woven together into an orientation toward developing some sort of encoding of the world as I understand it.

My current iteration of files, what this babble is a part of, is a big part of that. I don't have the notes currently imported, but over the past few months, I've been working to develop a robust vocabulary, derived from the epistemic lineage of the Milesian school of natural philosophy to post-structuralism, but drawn from my own synthetic ontology, a deviation of the forms I've been exposed to - perhaps primarily Lakota, post-structural, and Taoism.

One perspective on this from my anarchist lineage, which is that this project - my files, my website, and anything that might come from it, like essays, stories, or even MUDs, is an attempt to subvert what was identified in A Thousand Plateaus as "overcoding".

Overcoding is a process by which systems erase or invisibilize the difference of things that are members of that system. As a concept, its tied to territorialization and deterritorialization, and how the State forms its power.

I've written in essays that I'm yet to import here that a lot of this overcoding, especially of social and embodied relations, is now done through distributed systems like social networking.

This website, these files, are a part of that, but are notably oriented toward developing my own individualized and holistic world-code, not participating directly-but-indiscretely in the development of the State's overcoding.

By selectively publishing parts of this, I'm able to perform a type of fugitive overcoding, where a typically normative practice is designed to hold space for what the normative overcoding would make illegible.

Looking at it from my sociologist lineage, I've coined a term for this practice: vernacular autoethnosis: the self-developed practice of studying and knowing the culture I make by being.

There's a lot of other ways to look at what I'm doing, and what it means from those different perspectives, but at this point it might be easiest to say:

I'm creating files not just for prose like babbles and essays, but to encode what I mean, functionally, with the words and phrases I use. Drawing on things like semiotics, actor-network theory, and homotopy type theory, I'm hoping to establish a relational field, composed of nodes, each of which represents some form of relationality.

The philosophy that goes underneath the implementation is a bit complex to explain in this babble, but it results in the following:

• Every file is a node
  • Every node has a unique identifier
    • i.e. This babble has the ID 32d5e9f3-d254-4dd3-beed-18563f87d50c
  • Every node has a form: a node that it is derived and differentiated from:
    • i.e. This babble has the form:
      • [[id:d542e8d2-3512-47a0-adbb-4a393e161ecb][babble]]
    • (If a node doesn't have a form specified, it's assumed to just be a "node")

There's a set of derivations I've constructed that establish a core set of nodes and their forms, which are inherited by all nodes within the relational field. Notably, the inheritance between these forms is often postulated without proper derivation, or is even simply speculative.

These core forms are act, condition, and structure.

For example, the babble is a form of text, which is a form of code, which is a structure that results from the act of encoding.

What differentiates a babble from another text is described in its file. (Or, will be; at present a lot of the nodes are empty placeholders, created to help me get a feel for the naming of nodes.)

In the case of babble, there is a literal encoding of what a Babble is, as an Org-roam capture template. This brings this babble that I'm doing back to GnoponEmacs, my Emacs configuration:

By writing Emacs-compatible code in my files, I can use Emacs as an interface for the relational field I'm mapping with my files. That's how I'm able to generate my blog: I use Emacs to generate a list of every node that is formed from a babble. (Due to my own inexperience at the relevant programming languages, it also lists the page for babble itself. Oh well.)

…That actually feels like after a lot of buildup, I said what was the actual thing I've been babbling toward too easily, or quickly.

I'm using Emacs to create files that represent nodes within a relational field that represents my personal way of looking at the world. These nodes are, to varying degrees, computational, influenced by my experience with MUDs. These nodes are the basis for my freshly-relaunched personal website, which is going to be a limited selection of nodes, published for others to use however they want.

Right now, there aren't very many public nodes, and what nodes there are, aren't very detailed. But this sort of work is nicely accretive: every little tweak brings the repository as a whole a little closer to an accurate and precise representation of things, as I see them.

Which is something folk have asked for, pretty explicitly, when reading my essays: simply, more text that helps explain the connection between ideas and the world that is built from that, in greater depth. There's parts of re-establishing my personal website that are tied into how I relate to the contemporary Web, its platforms, its commercialization, and my own survival.

But it is also something I'm keen to do for a reason that's easy for me to deprioritize, in the face of things like climate breakdown and ecofascism:

I like writing deeply detailed fictional settings, a lot more than I like writing stories in them.

And this format I'm pursuing with my Org-mode repository seems wonderfully situated to - over time, with enough nodes developed deeply enough - allow me to sketch out these worlds, their logic, their meaning, in a way that will let me use them as the basis for things like tabletop role-playing game source material and MUDs - while encouraging me to develop a MUD engine that can interpret any part of my relational map.

Which brings me near the end of this babble. I'm very, very excited to be on a computer that lets me actual do computing. I'm excited to be getting back to using software I know and think can bring me toward the type of software I want to use. I'm excited to have a space on the Web that can help me improve how I'm bringing myself to the Web. I'm excited to see how I'll fail to encode ideas like "governing by endurance" in Agda, a programming language for formal mathematics.

But most immediately, I'm excited to drink coffee out of my new thermos, that Terran got me as a gift for getting my Website uploaded, and to play My Time at Sandrock, a video game I got for my Humble Choice membership, my gift to myself for getting back to writing in this slow and hard way. I've only just started, and will probably babble about it some more in the future, but I'm really enjoying it - it's just a lot more playable than I found Stardew Valley, where I always felt like I was choosing the wrong things to do at any given moment. Here, it feels like there's enough time for me to get to be wrong, which lets the game feel as sandboxy as its environment.