Alexander's Thoughts

Temporary Notice

Hey there! This website is better viewed through a PC.

I’m not yet that tech-savvy, so I struggle to implement the industry-standard and proper accessibility in this website without smashing multiple monitors and keyboards in the process — as in I only know basic HTML, CSS, and JS to edit some minor things around…

but I don’t really know how to manipulate the nooks and crannies of the website’s source code so that I can do some fancy stuff, like put the Explorer on mobile view without breaking a few other things in the website.

Unfortunately, another context I can give you before you browse my website is that some things may be broken here and there. An example I can give would be the footnotes of my notes. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t; it’s the same with some in-line references at the heading level. I’m actively communicating this to the Quartz Discord community and pro-actively looking for solutions myself. However, as I said, I am in no way a developer and I’m basically crawling myself to properly contextualizing the information I see on the Quartz Documentation so I could tweak things here and there, so I ask for your patience when things do not work the way I intend them to work.

Rest assured that I’ll repeatedly nag myself to push through my coding education so I can finally do the modifications and bug fixes that I want.¹

Until then, if you’d like to simply browse through the website and read through some of the stuff in here, I ask for your patience as this public journal is an ongoing project.

It is, in some sense, very much dependent on the developer of Quartz as well, but it is with open arms that I accept the ramifications, should Jacky stop working on the project for any reason. It is for this reason that I will actively work on my coding education, so I can translate my Obsidian vault into a detailed, accessible website that is hassle-free for everyone to view.²

OPEN ME!

Hi there. It’s Ian from 2024-05-09 | 08:24:25 PM.

If you’re here because of my social media stories, thanks for giving just enough shit about me to click the link. Regardless if you came from my social media stories or not, I would like to quickly give context that this website is still in its very nascent stages. I’ve only been developing it since 2024-04-29, and I would say above 85% of the manually-written content here is all over the place. I have a guiding philosophy for this, however, which shines through these snippets of my writing from this journal:

Case Study No. 1:

Regarding the callout's grammar and typographical errors.

I apologize for the imperfect (as a matter of fact, mistake-rich) writing of the callout. That’s because the highlights come from a Podcast, using an app called Snipd, which I honestly don’t fiddle with that much.

I would write my entire philosophy on this, that minor mistakes such as grammatical, semantical, and typograhical errors, are okay in a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. However, what I would want to highlight in this context is that the mistakes don’t matter that much to me, since there’s enough contextual information to build upon the idea I’m trying to communicate. I’d rather I can find something easily through an imperfect way — what’s important is I and my PKM system remember the context in which the material is written¹ — than not find an idea because of how pre-occupied I am with the technicalities of capturing something.

The way I see it is this: It’s important to polish an idea through refining the medium. In the context of writing, it could be crafting the perfect prose to communicate an idea. That can be done through the proper placement of punctiation marks, the deliberate placement of footnotes, the utilization of an oxford comma, etc. In the context of 3D art, that process could look like choosing the perfect image or procedural map, deliberating on the roughness parameter of a specific part of an object, “But where should the light be?”, “Should I use this displacement map, or this?”

As for the my thinking process in my PKM system, I don’t really mind about those specifics. To go back to the metaphor I used regarding 3D modeling: the model matters more than the texture. The form, not the details.

I’ve heard some people define this in layman’s term as a derogatory remark towards people who tend to struggle in the English grammar: “It’s the thought that counts.” And though I disagree with the act of berating someone based on their linguistic capabilities, I can’t help but support the overarching educative concept of such double-edged remark. It is, after all, the context that counts.

Circling back to the topic of errors, I am 100% confident that you would find a lot of grammatical, semantical, typographical, and perhaps even spelling errors on this website.

However, the one type of mistake you won’t find is contextual errors.

Everything in my public journal is context-based. Without the proper context, I wouldn’t be able to write anything of substance in this space. Hopefully that makes sense.

Link to original

Case Study No. 2:

Please note that I don’t write for anyone here, but myself. I write for myself, which is a huge factor in why you probably wouldn’t understand half of what I would be writing about. Nonetheless, I would like to engage in this project with a Gary Vaynerchuck sort of mindset to document, document, document.

Link to original

Case Study No. 3:

Such is my thinking process: a messy, I-legitimately-do-not-know-what-the-fuck-this-is thing — like the scribbles of a child, except in the form of words. A sketch, if you will, to examine, understand, and contextualize the world.

Link to original

If time allows, I could write an entire note (as in a webpage) for such philosophy. Until then, please let me know if you find an error truly bothersome, so I could fix it. I fix these errors on a daily basis, and I manually go through each page to find them, so it’s extremely laborious, which is against my principle of just wanting to have good enough — not perfect — content for people to see. Though I’m all for presentability and having polished work, I think what I’m ultimately after is to convey the truth of my thinking process. And that process, I must say, is imperfect. I could even go as far as to say that all our thoughts aren’t developed, unless we manually go through the effort of building upon them. Each of us has different ways to develop a concept, thought, or idea, and my chosen method has always been writing.

I think through this craft, and it is not, in any way, the business of people to meddle with how I do so. Having said that, if you would like a glimpse of my thinking process, then all I can say is this:

Welcome. It’s a messy world here, and I hope you don’t mind. If you do, then feel free to exit from here and never bother checking my public journal again. There’s a lot of perfect content out there that you could see, and this website isn’t one of them. This is not something I’m making to please anyone outside of myself, nor is it a piece of material to impress my future employers. As a matter of fact, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. To understand more about the nature of this website — what it is, and why am I making this — please read on. I hope you could enjoy the journey of reading my public journal as much as I do making it. I’ll see you on the other side, wherever that is. 🩶

Wtf is this?

Welcome to Alexander’s Thoughts, a dedicated online space for my thoughts to live in.

I’m Ian, a 22-year-old graphic designer from the Philippines.

I’m pursuing a BAMMA (Bachleor of Arts in Multimedia Arts) at CIIT Philippines and, at the same time, I’ve been working at Hatch Corporate Solutions as a graphic designer for already more than a year.

I have years of experience working in the creative industry, both in the freelance and corporate setting. If you’re interested about my design work, here’s my partial clientele:

For my creative work, you can check out my portfolio (TBA).

Should you want or need to contact me, please feel free to do so through my email: ian.aquino.personal@gmail.com.

If all else fails, ping me over at Viber, Telegram, Discord or iMessage.

In case you can’t use those links, my username for Viber, Telegram and Discord are the same:

@s0ro_ffs

And if, for some reason, none of those links work, here’s my public mobile number, which you can reach out to instead of the embedded Viber, Telegram, Discord, and iMessage links:

+63 975 683 3648

What about this website?

The short answer is I made this website originally to write about whatever I want. The long answer is that I’ve a bunch of interests, much to my chagrin: design, 3D, business, writing, plus a shit-ton more… and I need a channel through which I can yap about those.

I can do all these on a social media account, sure. But the thing is I don’t like social media that much, so I chose a blog. Some may call this project a digital garden, but I think of it more as a public journal:

…a dedicated online space for my thoughts to live in.

I just want a safe space where I could dump whatever I want, without the pressures of having this many likes, this many followers, this many positive comments and all that bullshit. All I want is to talk about what I want to talk about without having to think about what people have to think, or say, or criticize about my work.

I want this space to be one that allows my brain to develop its own interests without any external pressure from any stupid vanity metric.

Plus, I get to share the more important (can be positive or negative!) moments of my life to those who so willingly remain curious, and to those who go out of their way to find this link in whichever place it could be found.

As you probably could pick up on my blog post regarding quitting social media, I cringe at the idea of broadcasting my life to the public. As if it’s something people need to know about! As if they need to know that I felt this way at this exact timestamp, that I meant to say this rather than that, that I ate fucking corn for breakfast, and that I liked Taylor Swift’s new album:

See, the internet has evolved to have a recency bias, where myopia seems to be the norm (h/t David Perell). It’s always the recent stuff that get pushed to our feeds. Bad or good information, doesn’t matter — it gets shoved in our faces.

Link to original

I just… want to be genuine.

And that’s all. That’s all there is to this website (or at least that’s all there is to what I want this website to be) — a place where I could be unequivocally honest.

And if that’s something you’re interested in, then feel free to browse around and let your curiosity take you wherever. I can’t promise it’ll be fun. All I can promise is that I’ll probably bore you out of your mind because you’d soon realize that this website isn’t like how everyone else builds their website to be.

So, dear reader, where to next?

If you don’t know where to go next, I urge you to check out _READ-ME-FIRST, so you could get to know me, the author of this public journal. Then, as much as I would love to leave the next steps to you, it would be best for you to familiarize yourself with the content of this website, which I do a good job of discussing over at _READ-ME-NEXT.

If that sounds boring, I recommend checking out my highlights on several materials (articles, books, podcasts, tweets, videos, and whatnot), which you can find on the Explorer, to the left of your screen.

If you’re on a mobile device, I apologize as I don’t have a better option at the moment than to direct you to the search and advise you to type whatever you want (but feel free to read _READ-ME-FIRST also!).

If you don’t have anything particular in mind, I suggest starting off witharticles, where you can surely see some interesting stuff. Then maybe try searching the keyword Matter, if you want more. Perhaps you just want to get a general feel of how I think — you might want to check out my idea dump. If my idea dump sounds interesting and you have a little extra time to spare, my dailies might catch your attention.

Whatever you do, just remember to follow your curiosities. They’ll lead you somewhere, I promise.

P.S.

My highlights come from applications called Matter and Readwise, respectively (I’ll probably write something about this soon, if you’re interested).

P.P.S.

I do not usually manually maintain my highlights, so if a few of them are broken (like some links, for example), I ask for your patience as they’re really not within my area of interest to fix at the moment. Maybe in the future, but I highly doubt. Such is the case because Readwise and Matter compile the direct links (oftentimes from newsletters) from my inbox. At that point, if that said link is inaccessible to you, it becomes dead for everyone else except the original recipient of the message, which is me.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. I tried a few years back but I quit due to some things in my personal life that required attention — hence my surface-level knowledge about some of the languages. These languages are HTML, CSS, and JS. ↩

2. This will remain highly possible, given the context of Obsidian as a local-based Markdown text editor. Everything in this vault is made of plain text, except for a few plugins here and there, which are written in different languages like JS and Python, for example. Should I get the capability to build my own digital garden-like website, a sort of personal wiki, I will immediately hop to it so I can translate all my content into a system that I would personally create which, I assume, would be much like Quartz. I would approach this endeavor, however, with an extremely high level of patience, since I understand that learning the topic of coding and development could take somewhere between 3-5 years before I could formally be competent at it. I understand this, but the nature of development being a continuous learning process, much like arts and design, is extremely interesting to me. Having said that, I’ll see where this interest could take me. As of writing, it’s 2024-05-11 | 02:59:46 PM. I’ll come back to this in the future and eventually realize I’m already at a different place in my coding education ↩