I’ve had a Tumblr for 13 years now, almost to the month. I posted pictures and videos and wrote about whatever I was thinking about at the time. It was like a public journal, but very low-pressure. There were stretches of time when I posted every single day for over a year, and in those times, I could see how my writing improved, how my thinking changed, and how my arguments developed.

That Tumblr still exists, but for all intents and purposes, Tumblr itself died a long time ago. The community we had there — or at least that I used to have there — no longer exists. So for a while now, I’ve been thinking of starting a new self-hosted blog and infusing it with that same low-pressure-public-journal energy of my old Tumblr.

The name is in reference to this post by Andy Matuschak about working with the garage door propped open:

“This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. Anti-marketing.”

The things I will write about here will most likely be things that I’m still thinking about and working through, and over the coming weeks or months — or perhaps even years — I’ll keep coming back to them and refining — over and over — digging deeper and deeper with every iteration.

For the longest time, my bio on the Internet has included the phrase Tinker of culture.

Well… welcome to my garage. The door is propped open. So if you’re wondering how anything here works, just ask me.