emsemioverse

I did it! I finally got my files uploaded to emsenn.net! This is a big step in the relaunch of emsenn.net, and 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 tooling, and continuing to build a relational map of concepts, practices, memories, and projects, 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.

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.