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posted: 2025-06-05

On the Strange Reality of People Reading My Stuff

I happen to have a digital footprint that extends all the way back to the distant year of 2005, so I’m certain people have read “my stuff”. It is not a strange thing to consider that someone out there has seen something I put on the internet and then continued to scroll on by. A lot of it’s junk. I can’t fathom someone reading something I wrote on a forum when I was under the age of ten and thinking to themselves “hey, this is pretty cool!”. God, I hope no one has actually done that. Despite this existential dread from considering someone gaining an opinion of me based on a temporally disconnected version of myself, I continue to post on the internet. It seems as though it’s all I know how to do.

These days though, I try to curate my digital footprint just a weeeee bit more. For one, I happen to post articles, and essays, and shitposts on my lovely website (which unless someone has shared / reposted / stolen / scraped this piece of writing, is where you are reading these words right now!). For two, I happen to publish my working notes on a variety of subjects to my Obsidian Publish page 1, which I update only when the thought crosses my mind 2.

The former of these two methods, I happen to advertise insofar as I cropdust my local discord and bluesky communities with a pasted link and a quirky little sentence-long pitch. I usually get some lovely readers responding to me with fleeting discord messages or in replies section which is just lovely. I react in the most basic of ways: I kick my feet which dangle from my chair a foot off the ground as I sit at my lab bench, as I am doing anything other than coding these switch statements for my subpixel imaging script I should be writing. I do not maintain any kind of dedicated Guest Book or comments section on my Neocities website for a variety of reasons (don’t know how and am not interested in learning at the moment, afraid of being vulnerable, don’t want to contend with annoying internet people 3 , etc. ), nor do I track any kind of analytics beyond the raw number of people who have visited my website. Because of this abstention from on-platform conversation, I have to live with the self-imposed void-like emptiness that comes from considering that the things I make are hosted in a single little corner of the internet, away from anyone besides only the most curious or those in my immediate circle. Maybe one day this will change, but presently it’s a good exercise in posting without needing validation. I make something, I put it out in the world, and then every so often I share it with people when it feels appropriate. Heck, maybe one day I’ll bother to actually submit some of these here pieces of writing to someplace greater than my own self-hosted platform. Or maybe I’ll even turn them into YouTube videos which will all get one skitillion views according to my good friend who made a video that went viral. But that won’t be for a while. For now, people might be reading my stuff, but I won’t really know unless they care to tell me, and that’s alright with me.

Regarding the latter of my posting habits, I maintain an Obsidian Publish webpage which hosts my “working notes”, and by “working note” I mean notes on literally anything I find interesting. The notes are all in markdown, so I’m not worried about them being complicated, they’re designed to be readable to me first, and I guess anyone else second. Usually these notes have the most useless gunk words I’ve thought up, along with some helpful external links for my own references. Sometimes these links lead to GameFAQs, other time they’re to specific spreadsheets I’ve made for additional logging. I pay a little monthly subscription to let people read my inner machinations on video games, among other things. Yes, seriously! It’s not like people are paying me for my raw and unfiltered opinions on Linda Cube Again, rather I am the one paying five bucks a month to host them all on a website upon which the hopelessly lost internet hiker may stumble. I need to emphasize, I have not made any kind of effort to make these notes search engine optimized by any stretch. I channel the vibrations in my brain with my fingertips (no matter how helpful these vibrations may be), realize them as words, sentences and even sometimes paragraphs, and then every three months click the “publish” button. I don’t even go to the webpages that are generated afterwards.

So then, imagine my confusion one day when I got an email from Google alerting me that someone had “requested permission” to access my private Google Sheets spreadsheet with all the Animal Locations in Linda Cube Again. The three creases on my forehead started to define themselves as I pondered how this would even be possible. It wasn’t a name I recognized from someone I knew in real life, nor was it a name that seemed to even allude to a username of someone I interacted with. The contents of this spreadsheet gave me a clue as to how someone might have found this spreadsheet on their own; I had linked this spreadsheet in my Obsidian note about the Animal Locations in Linda Cube Again if only to fill it in as I went. The note itself only had 105 of the 120 collectable animals, so perhaps someone had found this page somehow, realized it was incomplete and then saw I had a spreadsheet made as well, and figured “maybe all the information’s in here instead!”4 or something.

To test this theory, I opened up a private tab in Firefox and searched “Linda Cube Again Animal Locations”. And guess what showed up first as the aggregated summary by Google:

Let me be, once again, clear. My notes were (and are) written for me. They were not designed to be a walkthrough that I intended to post on the internet in the capacity and rigor that one would expect when reading, say, a Game FAQs guide. Of course, by publishing these notes online, I have opened the door to the potential for people to use these notes however they see fit. I am not allowed to decide how people interact with the things I have made, even if the things I have made are very obviously incomplete. I would have an issue with this in theory, if it weren’t for the fact that I make it very clear on the landing page of my Obsidian publish site that these notes are entirely incomplete as they’re my “working notes”, rather than final copies. The space itself is a Digital Garden; the website and its content are going to change as I update them. Furthermore, when I update these pages I am not thinking of anyone else using them besides myself. I want to encourage people to be willing to share their “stages” of work because I’m so tired of pretending to be sooooo smart and sooooo sexy all the goddamn time.

This of course begs the question: Because I am posting my things online and because my Obsidian webpage on this subject happens to be the literal first thing that appears when you google the topic, do I have a moral responsibility to present the information as exactly and accurately as possible? Given the absolute state of the internet right now, with algorithms deciding what we do and don’t see, with the amount of noise further silencing the signal of information growing monotonically by the day, one would argue that I have a duty to present this information with a high level of of integrity. I would hope that if I were on the other side of this question, the knowledge holder would do their best to present the information as accurately as possible.

Still, I have a personal opinion in the matter too- I would really prefer people do the work to find all these animals themselves. I put in that time and had a wonderful time doing so. To look up the answer to “where the fuck are the ladybugs in Linda Cube Again” would cheapen the experience to the degree that it would effectively ruin the experience of play. I’m not an experience purist but the joy I obtained from playing Linda Cube, a game that now sits in my top five favorite video games of all time, came primarily from the hunt itself. I would hope that everyone would be able to get that exhilaration I felt upon discovering just where the hell the whales are, on their own. But then again, who am I to gatekeep this information? Do I want people to play the game exactly how I played it, or do I want them to get the same feeling I got from playing it?

All of this contemplation here on a Tuesday afternoon. All of this contemplation over a very small request from a stranger.

I’ll tell you what I opted to do. At the top of the note, I did the rare act of “breaking the fourth wall” in my notes, by writing the following:

"prelim note:

hi! if you found this by googlin’ “Linda Cube Again Animal Locations”, please note two things:

  1. My notes are written for me: I did not intend for this to be a walkthrough of sorts when I made this note. I just happen to post my notes online, and I guess it shows up in search engine queries now, and often as the first result. - I do somewhat feel like I have an obligation to make sure I have all 120 animals listed on here for myself.
  2. You should really try and do this all on your own, even if it can be kind of ridiculous and obscure sometimes. Still, I’m not your dad. You want to use my notes, be my guest. Just know that I was able to do this all on my own, and if I can do it, you can too."

I then made the spreadsheet public. If someone wants to use my notes to find all the Animals in Linda Cube Again, let them be my guest. They’ll just have to contend with that notion that I don’t intend to “improve” these notes in any capacity for their sake. It seemed like a good enough compromise.

Still, this instance forced me to reconcile with the notion that anyone might be able to find and use these notes for whatever they may need, even when they might make absolutely no sense to them at first glance. This subset of public notes are usually recreational, and so I figure no one would ever want to use these notes for anything besides taking a moment to peruse the inner machinations of this neurodivergent research scientist made manifest. These notes are just a journal with extra steps and fewer deep personal truths and reflections. Though as I say this, I must also admit that I believe in the power of linking ideas and thoughts from extremely disparate sources to capture the context in which my thoughts were made. This is why I have a note about Pokemon Heart Gold linked to a research concept I was working on at the time. I was thinking about Heart gold when I was reading a paper about the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound , and for better or for worse, my understanding of the subject is tied to the idea of Shiny Hunting for a Sudowoodo just beyond Goldenrod City. Without knowing this context, one would wonder how this Pokemon game related to a concept in statistical calculus. Truth is, they don’t! Or at least, they don’t in a way that is remotely understood without living my personal experience. And my personal lived experience in the form of my notes happens to take on a presentation of a person who likes video games and music and movies and TV shows, who also happens to be studying a lot of physics. It is impossible to link these two notes without having my brain.

So then, consider, again, my surprise when someone reached out to me, this time via a direct email, asking if they could use my notes for their research.

Hi [my name],
I am a PhD student at the [their Institution] investigating how AI tools can collaborate with scientists on creative scientific tasks.
At the moment, I am developing an Obsidian plugin that aims to find gaps, interesting connections, latent models etc. in the Vault of an academic. As I was researching how scientists and researchers organise their academic workflows with obsidian, I came across your digital garden. I would be very grateful if you could grant me permission to use your digital garden in my research for: 1. Testing my plugins 2. Demonstrating functionality of any developed software Any plugin I develop will have its code open-sourced after development and ideally will have corresponding publications. I will not use your digital garden for  Commercial purposes.  I will also ensure to reference your digital garden on any work that relies on it.
Please let me know if that is fine with you. Thank you, Kind Regards, [Their name]

Again, my brow furrowed at this request. On the one hand, why would anyone want to do this? What could they possibly gain from these public facing notes about this nonsensical attempt to present myself through my working notes? Still, I considered, the fact that someone was reaching out to ask permission to use my notes, rather than simply scrape everything into a bucket of textual sludge was enough to convince me that this person, if legitimate, was acting in good faith. A careful background check of googling this person’s name and their institution yielded a research group page with this person and their research advisor, along with several publications in the area the had proposed. I even found the person on LinkedIn.

So, a legitimate someone wants to train their neural network on my notes for the sake of studying how “academics” develop workflows to study creative approaches to tasks. I suppose they must’ve struck gold finding my Aiba then, huh? As a researcher, which I suppose is synonymous with an academic to his person, with my Digital Garden I am providing my thought process on something beyond my “academic research”, while still adhering to the same methodology. Truly, the way I take notes about my GEANT4 simulations while at my lab bench is not so different from the way I take notes when I’m playing Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy while sitting on the futon. As a very simple general example that applies to both cases: I record observations that I deem “of note”, and then keep on doing what I’m doing, usually following some kind of process that I may have also devised earlier on when thinking through how to go about my tasks. ‘This is actually exactly how I ended up playing Linda Cube Again’ I thought to myself, further justifying this curious individual’s particular prospectorish notions about my mountain of markdown files they had just discovered.

And this researcher wants to train an artificial intelligence process on me. Let me justify my extension of self here: my notes are things I wrote for myself, without any sanding of particularly rough edges with the express intention of use later. When I write the notes in this digital space of mine, I attempt to distill my thought into a pure essence. My thoughts define me as a person. No one else can have my exact thoughts, I generated of these exact thoughts myself 5. They might think the same things, but they cannot, by definition think the exact brainwaves into words that I have. This research scientist has decided that they would like to train a neural network on these unique ideas and connections I’ve synthesized from my head and chosen to share with the world. In that sense, this scientist has decided that my thoughts are worth incorporating into the grand scheme of the artificial intelligence monolith to study in greater detail. How do I take this? As a compliment? It makes me both excited and nervous even still after I told him, “yes you can use my notes for your research, it’s why I publish them for people to see in the first place”.

I have consented to have my soul be incorporated into the machine. I put my notes out there for anyone in this digital age where the internet has been scraped to hell and back for any and all forms of human “essence” through letters and numbers, I’m not stupid. As the large tech companies continue to amass data on my digital presence, I can at least find solace that at least some of my naturally-produced data will be used to further science at my own discretion. Somewhere in the distant future, when the entire human consciousness resides in a series of diode gates, I can rest easy knowing that at least I could choose to let someone use my thoughts for purposes beyond my own. Maybe this sounds overly existential, but I think I am able to find some twisted sense of empowerment here. I am able to own my data and what of it I share in a very explicit sense. I control what this person gets to include in their models. It will not be “me”, but more of a subset of my self. My ghost of my own choosing will reside in the shell. Don’t you wish you could do this at all? Don’t you wish you even had the option to say yes? 6

But does this make me complicit in the negative aspects of artificial intelligence? am I now at least somewhat responsible for the negative impacts on the environment caused by artificial intelligence data centers? I could say “well no, because I’m not the one actually training the AI on my thoughts”, and feel reasonably justified. But then again, I am still willingly posting my notes and updating them on a regular basis for this researcher to use. So then I have to ask, “is posting these notes making me complicit?”, which we could argue in the affirmative easily enough. I could just take my entire notes offline and keep them to myself, and that would be that. But even then, just because this one researcher won’t have access to my data, doesn’t mean that my data won’t still exist elsewhere, to be used by the people who did not ask for my permission. It’s like the problem of recycling: am I, the individual, responsible for the state of the environment when there are greater powers at work that can create far greater problems on a greater scale without my impact? They will use the results of my digital footprints regardless of whether or not I consent, right? So by consenting to let this singular researcher use my data, I have accepted my role in providing the data to analyze. I am complicit, but it’s not like I wasn’t before. I’ve posted for the love of the game for as long as I can remember. At least now when I post I can feel the warmth of knowing I’ve helped someone else extend their own studies further. I have to be alright with this.

I let them do it. I want to stick to my words: I’m working with the garage up, if someone else can value in the footprint I am producing naturally, then who am I to prevent them from accomplishing their own goals. Much like the person looking to learn more about Linda Cube Again, I found myself at a point where I owned a level of information, and was offered the chance to share it in a capacity that I was allowed to choose. Why else do I post on the internet if not to be able to share my thoughts and opinions with the random browser? Why else do I create at all if not for the love of the game (aside from the minor rushes of dopamine and oxytocin that flood my brain when I learn someone has read, and likes my stuff)? “It’s already out there, go for it. I would appreciate it if you shared anything you publish from using my notes and if you acknowledged me in those works”. Let the world know that I am a vain little shitposter sometimes.

This heavy line of thinking can get exhausting. People want to use the things I make for their own projects, and I have to be alright with that. Some of the good people out there are the ones willing to at least ask permission first, these are the people I want to feature here. They’re the curious individuals who are making use of the new human shared subconscious that we have available at our fingertip, and I am one of them too. It’s a little scary when I think about it. It’s like I’m sending out a Golden Record upon my own personal Voyager satellite, just on a much smaller scale. I never expect to hear from anyone, and up until very recently any time I did get an email about the site, it was from someone asking to use it in some capacity.

This changed a few days ago. I got another email. It wasn’t from anyone asking me to use my notes. One might call it “fan mail”.

Hello!

I’m [their name], a rising second year graduate student at the [their institution]. My focus is on nuclear physics, and I stumbled across your published Obsidian vault while looking for information on Frisch grids. 

I just wanted to say that I find your Obsidian vault really inspiring! I’ve only just started using Obsidian a few days ago, since this is my first time doing real research and I figure it’s better to start thinking about how I want to document it early on. There are a couple of things I saw in my brief look which I find really, really interesting. 

The first is the general idea that talking about your hobbies and your work in the same place lets you draw connections between them, and opens opportunities for science communication down the line. I have myriad hobbies I’d also like to eventually track, and I’ve been considering whether or not to keep them in the same vault as my research. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, but it’s interesting to think about.

The second is your page on how learning the background of science is learning history. I think this is really insightful and important, especially as another scientist interested in nuclear. I’ve been reading a couple books about it, I’ve finished one about Hanford and have started one about Los Alamos. The history and its impact on the field are really fascinating to me, and I’m also trying to extend that to my understanding of how current research is influenced and shaped by the climate it takes place in, on interpersonal, institutional, and international scales.

Anyways, I hope all is going well for you!

Best, [Their Name]

Like before, I did some cursory research and found this person on their lab group’s website. They’re real too.

It’s difficult to put into words how this email makes me feel. Whereas the previous two emails were clear forms of transaction, this email was a simple message of appreciation. Someone I didn’t know, found my notes and bothered to take the time to send me an email. I can hypothesize how this student may have found the website, but I suppose that doesn’t really matter in the end, does it? I never expected to get an email expressing some kind of thankfulness for the bare minimum amount of effort of “posting”. I never fashioned myself as someone who might one day be recognized as a “thinker” or “intellectual” or anything like that 7. I’ll say it over and over again, but I’m just doing what feels right, posting for the love of the game. Let history remember me as someone who liked the sound of his own voice that he could hear in his head as he wrote sentence after sentence, each more amusing than the last.

Compared to the feeling of empowerment I got from the researcher asking to insert my soul into their machine, the feeling I got from this email was one of validation. I was able to move someone by just being myself. A passive presentation of my thoughts and opinions was enough to excite another person to write more than 200 words to tell me “thank you for inspiring me”. I don’t think that has ever happened in such explicit terms before in this academic setting. Hell, I don’t think I’ve received a legitimate compliment in my academic works from my peers, ever. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t actually made anything yet still 8.

I have received compliments about things I’ve made in the past on some creative efforts, but I struggle to internalize them. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and have concluded that this rejection stems from the notion that I have no formal training in these creative fields. And what I can deduce from that notion is that I need someone else to tell me that what I have done is “good”, but is that not the same thing as a compliment? No, there is a measure of objectivity to the “training” nature of what I feel like I need.

And if that’s the case, then why am I taking for granted my current “academic” standing, and everything else along with it? I mean, for goodness sake, I am receiving what can only be described as the “most formal form of modern training”, where I’m literally at the number one program in the entire united states, doing the cutting edge research that not even national laboratories do, and yet I feel inadequate. So what if I’m not the greatest graduate student of all time? I still am one and I am still doing my best work. Maybe that work isn’t as good as some of my peers, but was I ever going to be the most perfect research scientist out there? No! Of course not! Sometimes there’s so much competition to be the very best we can be that it feels disingenuous to compliment someone when there’s still clearly someone “better” out there. And this is the through line between my academia and my creative measures.

The one thing I want out of life is the one thing I can never claim for myself: I want the world to understand me and recognize that I am worth something, anything. I don’t want people to deem me ‘bad’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘inadequate’. It’s why I am often so afraid of asking for feedback, or advice, or being willing to handle criticism, especially when it comes to things that I feel so impassioned about, I don’t want to look like a fool when I feel so confident about my own creations. I’d rather be invisible than bad, even if it means hiding myself from the potential to be good. Whatever “good” and “bad” mean. So I post my raw work out there in the open, so that people can see that I’m learning.

I am not allowed to define my own merit, the world must cast its judgement on me. I’ve grown so accustomed to being just another datapoint in the oceans of data out there that when someone does pick me out in their net, I’m properly caught without my breath. I power through under the radar on my own merits because it’s the only thing I know how to do now. I block off ways for people to communicate with me about things I’ve made and am sharing, even as I continue to produce all these different things. I close off almost all of the rest of the world because I would rather get nothing than criticism. I move forward on my own interests and merits because it’s the only thing I know how to do. Because there is always something. I am not interested in things I am bad at. Or at least, I’m trying to be more interested in these things that scare and challenge me. But in private. Maybe one day I’ll make those notes public.

This complimentary email snapped me back to reality. I’m a twenty-six year old doctoral candidate in the field of nuclear science. And when not in the lab, I run 20+ miles a week, I just planned and executed my own wedding (which went perfectly by the way), I am literally the second-most important student in the entire professional society to which I belong, and on the side I write on my website to a small selection of people who seem really cool and have a fuck load of friends. This isn’t to brag, this is just what I have to remind myself of. I am doing pretty fucking well for myself. Is that enough am I enough? Will I be enough? Who gets to decide that? Everyone else? Why shouldn’t it be me?

I do my research for the same reason I write, for the same reason I run, for the same reason I boot up my MiSTer FPGA and play Linda Cube Again, for the same reason I do anything else: “I like doing it”. What an unsatisfying uncomplicated answer, right? I go into the lab a little before nine and leave a little after five for the five days of the work week not because I want to make something to make me famous. I do so because I want to, because i enjoy doing so, because it stimulates my brain 9. I did not choose to go get a Ph.D. because I expected to be respected. I posted for the love of the game. And I’m not particularly skilled at what I do, I won’t change the world with the quality of work I produce, but I’m alright with that. This is true of most things I do. I do these things for me, not for anyone else.

When people reach out to me, then, and tell me that they find inspiration in what I do, it means more to me than almost anything else in the world 10. To the people who reach out to tell me they were impacted by the things I do, make, and share, thank you. I will do my best to believe you, and to share what I can. Sometimes I feel very alone in these parallel realities. It’s nice to know that my actions can have real positive consequences. I will continue to do what I can do to be me. I hope that in that process you can continue to find some kind of joy. I won’t compromise my own personality to appeal to you all, but I understand that this makes my internal desire for appreciation and validation less “easy”. I just appreciate your time, attention and care. I’m glad that I might be able to provide a positive moment in your life.

The ghostly imapct of my words on you prove that we both existed. I think that’s comforting, especially now. Don’t you think so?

and of course, footnotes.

  1. Which I will, once again, not link here because I encourage you, the curious reader to find them for yourself. I’m not trying to hide these things from you, but you have to work for this stuff, especially since I really don’t think they’re worth showing off. My notes are written for me, and if you do find my Obsidian publish page, then congrats, you get to see a carefully curated selection, maybe thirty-five percent, of my total, ever-growing set. They’re really not all that fancy, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read them…↩︎

  2. For the sake of keeping things short, I will not talk about my note-taking process in excessive detail. The last thing I want to be doing is writing another article about how I write articles. You can find my primary example of “writing about itself” by reading “How I Filled My First Media Journal”, if you’re explicitly curious. I also really don’t feel the need to take notes on how I take notes… if you want to know how I do so, just email / DM / message me, and I’ll talk your ears off about my process.↩︎

  3. If you are reading this in good faith, you are not one of these people, don’t worry :]↩︎

  4. there’s actually less info in the spreadsheet than in the markdown note LOL↩︎

  5. This is, of course, how I feel about generative language learning models. They cannot create, only reproduce. they can model the human mind, but the human mind can have inspiration and intention in the way a machine never can. The machine can direct a person within the box, but can never think beyond the box.↩︎

  6. god i sound like a freak, why are you still here reading this?↩︎

  7. Please do not think of me as anything other than a ritalin-addled maniac who happens to have a lot of hobbies, a distinct lack of fear of asking difficult questions, and a distinct fear of people pointing out my own inadequacies. Thanks!↩︎

  8. I’m wokring on a publication, I promise, I swear!↩︎

  9. and becuase it pays me well enough to live well enough to have some hobbies on the side.↩︎

  10. Load-bearing word being “almost” here. There are a couple things I can think of that mean more to me, but you don’t get to know them. Let’s just say that this feeling I’m alluding to resides in my Top 10 and let you ponder the other nine feelings.↩︎