Pursuits / Inspirations
Things I found, and could not leave alone.
Pursuits are what I do. The library is what I point to. These are the fourth thing: other people’s ideas after I have had a go at them. Each one started as something I found and admired, and ended as an instrument I could actually use. The source is named first, because the idea was never mine.
What an inspiration is here
The library holds other people’s work as it is, with one line on why it matters. That is the honest way to recommend something. But some things I find are not finished with once I have read them. A question tree in a blog post wants to be asked one question at a time. A taxonomy in a table wants to be a map. This shelf is for those: the idea is someone else’s, the build is mine, and the useful thing is the combination.
The test for an entry is whether the rebuilt version does something the original could not, without changing what the original meant. Where I have changed the meaning, it belongs somewhere else and says so.
Why I rebuild them
Partly because it is the only way I know to find out whether I understood something. Reading an argument and agreeing with it is cheap. Turning it into a thing that has to work exposes every place where I had been nodding along.
And partly because a good idea in the wrong form goes unused. The pursuits page says I poke at new tools by building something small and slightly too ambitious with them. This is where that habit and other people’s good ideas meet.
Available
The inspirations
Each opens in its own tab. The source is named on the row and credited again inside.
One so far. Others will appear when a thing I found has turned into a thing I use, not before.