About me

Updated Jan 23 2024

Hi! I’m Jamie, and this is part scratchpad, part library, part second brain, a repository of whatever I’m reading or learning at the moment, evolving as I do.

I think in nonlinear fashion, so the content is more of a web of connections than a chronological blog. Choose your own adventure—there’s no wrong place to start.

I’m a freelance graphic designer, vocateur reader, amateur writer, artist, and book collector living in rural NC. The book collection here is actually highly incomplete, find me on Goodreads for the more extensive (yet still not exhaustive) list. I also occasionally appear on Instagram when I’m not in hibernation.

Internal wiki-type links are underlined, external links are bold text. You can browse by tags (for notes) or by genres and shelves (for books). Tags are different than genres or shelves—it’s the only way I could make the book sorting work—so it doesn’t hurt to look both places for a topic.

Books can also be sorted by author, publisher, and series.

My spoiler policy for books is haphazard at best, but occasionally I will tag for a particularly spoilery bit. If you see redacted text like the following, you can click to spoil yourself. It was a ghost all along! 👻

There’s actually 2+ years of brainstorming and philosophy behind this fairly simple site. I was burnt out on the social feed, but also frustrated by the chronological demands of a blog. I wanted something book-centric, partially inspired by Mandy Brown at A Working Library, but even more interlinked and informal. I started mapping how I read, think, and write (lots of links, citations, and lots of cf’s), and started from scratch about a dozen times over to figure out a system that works for me.

My goal is that eventually, there won’t be a dead end, and each note and book will link to another. An endless network of trails to wander down and get lost.

Bear gets all my raw thoughts, dumped in there like a junk drawer. Obsidian gets my edited, slightly-more-comprehensible notes. This site is built on Quartz 3, which then takes the markdown notes from Obsidian and generates a Hugo-based static site, hosted on GitHub.

Huge thanks to Jacky Zhao for Quartz¹, even though I customized the heck out of all the layouts and taxonomies. 😊