This notebook is probably for real time discovery

I'm really tired today but also somehow really verbal and keen to churn out lots of short posts, it's a weird state.

I'm still trying to understand the difference between this notebook and my normal blog, and maybe this sentence from an earlier notebook post today helps:

I've got this vague memory of a relevant chunk from Bret Victor's Learnable Programming, hmm where is it, oh yeah it's this bit.

If I was writing a normal blog post, to appear in a prestigious publication like dross bucket dot com, I wouldn't write 'hmm where is it, oh yeah it's this bit'. Arguably it's pretty stupid to write that down, but it somehow felt like the right thing. And that post felt particularly close to the core of what I want to do with this notebook. I want to stay as close to real time and as close to speech as I can, and I want to be learning what I think more or less as I type it. I was discovering my argument in real time as I wrote the post, and I remembered the Bret Victor post, and I had to stop to look it up, so... I just wrote it like that.

These posts from today have felt right, whereas there are a couple of other half-written posts in my drafts from earlier in the week that felt like the wrong thing, and I think this is the main difference. In those other two posts I was mostly writing down some thoughts I already had, and apparently this notebook is not for that, it's for real time discovery.

This might also explain some of the pervasive feeling of fakeness and wrong-thing-ness I had during Notebook Blog Month, where I was trying to clear out my drafts folder and write slightly stale things I didn't really care for any more.

I guess I will confirm this suspicion by writing more posts and seeing what happens.