Welcome
Welcome to my Digital Garden π± started on the 30th of June 2025.
Contact: serenitysrest01@proton.me
Feel free to contact me about anything in my digital garden if you wish!
Everything in this digital garden is constantly being tended to and therefore in an imperfect state. Nothing in here is 100% complete, as knowledge is always changing.
Get Around!
Here are some of the topics in this digital garden that have a lot branches currently! They are typically higher concepts or concepts that have a lot of links to other things within them.
New and interesting notes
Random notes from my vault that I thought might be interesting to some people!
History
Tech & The Web
- Home Server π³
- Personal Digital Sovereignty π±
- What is a Server π±
- What is a VPN and The Downsidesπ±
Psychology
Gardening
{ .block-language-dataview}
(Will add things here soon!)
Literature
Books
The latest books I have studied inside my digital garden.
| File | Cover | Author | Genre | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1984 by George Orwell | George Orwell | Fiction | September 03, 2013 | |
| Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman |  |
Neil Postman with Andrew Postman (Contributor) | Non-fiction | - |
Films and TV
Films and TV shows that I have thoughts about or have begun studying/analysing recently.
I'm getting sick of consuming media and then forgetting them soon after. By writing about them I hope to make each piece of media I consume both a fun and meaningful experience.
![[Film and TV Bases.base#Table]]
| File | image | year | genres |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Lord Of The Rings |  |
- | - |
| Amadeus (1984) |  |
1984 |
|
| The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity (2025β) |  |
2025 |
|
| Star Trek - Deep Space Nine (1993β1999) |  |
1993β1999 |
|
| Better Call Saul (2015β2022) |  |
2015β2022 |
|
| The Walking Dead (2010β2022) |  |
2010β2022 |
|
About
I love learning, and I often let my curiosity take me down rabbit holes.
I started this as a place to expand my knowledge and find links between all the things I have been studying or thinking about to make a map of my knowledge!
Here you will find:
- Notes on things I have read, watched, or listened to and how they have informed my knowledge on many different topics
- Book/character analyses
- Musings/random thoughts
- and more!
This is not a blog. This is where I will store my knowledge on the different things I learn and study as well as random little thoughts or fast opinions I form about things (like films or TV shows). This is closer to something half-way between a Zettelkasten and a Digital Garden π± where as I create notes, new connections between notes will form and I can see where each piece of knowledge that I garner are connecting, and where the gaps in my knowledge on certain subjects are!
There are a lot of unpolished notes in this garden, as well as some random notes or opinions that still need research and fleshing out. There will be a lot of half-formed ideas as well. As time goes on I hope to begin fleshing more of them out and watching my knowledge, thoughts and opinions grow to reflect that.
My current structure for this digital garden is:
- π± Seeds: The beginnings of your knowledge. Small thoughts or ideas that you want/need to expand upon and are not currently fleshed out or well-researched, don't have many connections or notes that I feel need a few more sources before I can call them a well-understood piece of knowledge.
- π³ Trees: Higher concepts or notes that now have many other links to more information, expanding upon the original idea. Think of the branches of a tree, they are connected to the main idea, but have branched into their own network of information. Can be used as a jumping-off point to explore around the garden.
- π Fruits: Finalized ideas, writings, thoughts or essays that have solidified themselves in the garden and require little to no tending anymore.
- π₯ Defunct: This is one that I personally use, it means that I no longer agree that the content inside the note is accurate or I have abandoned it for now and will likely not be tending it for more than a year.
Rationale
I have many reasons I wanted to make this.
One being, collecting information can be a hobby in itself. It's fun to research things and even more fun to write down what I learn to look back at, and having it all in one place like this makes it really easy to find things when I need to!
Another big reason I wanted to make this was that, when you write about the things you learn, you realize just how much you understand a subject.
If I struggle to write about something, it means I still don't quite understand the topic, which indicates I need to do more research. It also reflects back to you what your current knowledge or opinions are and you can see if you need to do more research instantly. And, writing about what you learn helps to solidify that knowledge in your brain as well as giving you a reference (that you have written in your own words, making it easier to understand) to come back to later!
I am starting out small and slow, and I know I have a very surface-level idea of most things at the moment, but I hope to grow my knowledge as I go along!
As my knowledge grows, my opinions and ideas may change, but I will not delete notes. I will just change the name to include 'π₯' or something similar as this happens. That way I can look back and see how far I have come!
I also want to slow down how much I am consuming content and really force myself to process what I am consuming.
We live in a world now where there is so much information that we have to process in any given day, much more than our brains were designed to process. Doing all this helps me to slow it down and really think about the things I am looking at and really ask myself: 'What is this text telling me?' 'Is this important?' 'What was the motive behind this text?' etc, instead of just taking things at face value without using my brain, which is what I do when I veg out and look at TikTok.
Writing about the things I watch and read forces me to not only process the information again on my own and slow down, but it also reflects back to me what I actually think and feel about the piece of media and gives me a chance to analyse those thought and challenge my own beliefs and ideas.
I have found that doing this can also tell you so much about yourself. If you are someone who struggled with introspection, either because your are bombarded with social media all the time and have no time to think, or because you're afraid of introspection, this can be a really useful tool to learn more about yourself because you quickly see 1) the kinds of media you are consuming and 2) your own opinions reflected back at you in your own writing. If there's something there you don't like, it opens the door for introspection!
**Please note: This entire garden is not to be taken as fact, or meant for anyone other than myself really to give any credence to.
Also please note: I do a lot of research on things that I do not personally agree with (e.g political ideologies, concepts from fandom, films I think are stupid, etc to better understand both why I disagree with those things and to better understand why someone else might agree with those things. Understanding both sides to anything is important to me before I feel I can speak on any subject credibly.) Not every single thing written in this digital garden is in line with my personal beliefs, I just let my research follow my curiosity. You may disagree with some things I have written about, and that's okay.
My current interests include:
- Reading (A mix of classic literature and more modern sci-fi and fantasy stories)
- Sewing
- Filmmaking
- Story/Character analysis
- 3D Modelling
- Gardening
- Random little bits of psychology
^ My garden will probably start out with a lot of notes on these kinds of things.
How did I make this?
I use Obsidian as the writing program for this page. I love it, it's free and works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Also, this page is run using the Digital Garden plugin for Obsidian using Vercel as the host. If you also want to make one, please note that Vercel does not accept Proton emails at the moment and you will need to use some other provider in order to make an account.
Why post this publicly?
I dunno, fun? I like putting the things I am doing up on the internet for other people to see! There are tons of things across the internet that others post mainly for themselves that I also enjoy looking at, and I wanted to do the same, because maybe there is someone out there who is also interested in some of the topics I am looking into here!
I also want to inspire others to make their own digital gardens or research projects, because I believe there is a decline in people who want to learn things and with the rise of censorship and the use of AI where people just let the AI tell them what to think, I feel learning how to research and think for yourself is more important now than ever.
If you also think like me, maybe try out Obsidian! Take notes on things you are interested in, do a book study or a film study! Read some scientific papers that have opposite arguments and try and figure out which might be more reliable than the others and why, learn how to spot misinformation. You don't have to be perfect either. This is a journey that I am currently taking and as I learn I will get better, just as you will if you begin! And once you begin, you will begin to start thinking more critically about the information that is being pushed onto you.
I also think this can be a really awesome ideation device! Once you have a bunch of notes, you begin to notice that completely different topics eventually gain a link to one another, for example you have two notes in different topics and realize, "Hang on, I think these two ideas have some kind of correlation" So you make a new note, and BAM! You've got an idea for a piece of art, or an essay, or a zine or anything else you love making.
Get Started
Still confused on what this page is? Here's some more info:
Much like a garden in real life, this place is always changing, always growing and always being tended to. My opinions and knowledge will change as time goes on and as I grow my knowledge and my understanding of certain topics. What is here now will look very different from 5 years from now once I have learned more! Notes will change, combine or grow to create new ideas.
Check out the folders along the left!
I have structured things like this:
Sources: This is where I keep all the sources I have referenced in my Knowledge notes. These will really only contain a quick synopsis or overview of the source and some direct quotes that came from that source. I also sometimes put my immediate thoughts on that source while I am consuming it in the source notes, kind of like a live blog with quickly formed opinions that I intend to look into more after I begin analysing the source more critically.
Notes: This is where write all my notes on each of my sources that I read after doing a bit of analysis. So in there I will put quotes and how I interoperate them, notes on what I thought on certain things brought up in the sources I read and other things that stood out to me.
Knowledge: Every note this folder are structured and thought-out notes that I have written on topics after I have done research or worked to analyse a text! These are my more solidified notes where, after I have done a lot of reading on a certain subject, I will write down all the knowledge and idea I gained in my own words, and independent of the source material.
These are the only notes in the digital garden that will use the notes status emojis (π±π³ππ₯) to show their stage of growth, as these are the ones that hold my actual knowledge, while the others do not.
These notes will be as concise as possible, unless it is too hard complex to break down into smaller notes (trying to keep them to around 200-400 words as much as possible).
Musings: This is where I write thoughts about topics and maybe even questions to myself to look into later (currently unpublished on this page)
Having so many folders for different topics can seem like it is defeating the purpose of the digital garden, and this may change later on where I remove all the folders. But for now they are there so that if I ever want to refer to a specific subject, I can find it in that folder and use is as a jumping off point to look through my notes. The graph view and the links within each note are really the point of this whole thing though.
This is how I structure it! So first I will read my source, take notes on it then I will move to solidify what I learned by writing in my own words about a topic that the source brought up. For example, if I did a film study and I noticed that the framing in a certain scene changed the tone of the film, I will take notes on that source, find more sources that tell me about how framing is used in films, then I will link all those sources to a new note that I will call something like "Framing can have an affect on the tone of a film" and write about what I learned from all those sources together.
I could even then make another note that is higher than that called 'How to create emotion in a film' where I can link the previous note to, and then begin researching other filmmaking techniques that could influence the emotion in a film.
If you look at the graph on the right, you can see that slowly, as I learn things, I can link more and more things together and it forms a web of knowledge!
That's the basics of how this all works.