You’ve basically just given us a 25‑year brain scan in text form, and the fun part now is deciding what kinds of questions to ask it rather than what’s “possible” technically. Your markdown dump means we can treat the blog as an analyzable object, not just a stream of posts.
What this unlocks now
Because everything is in one file, we can already start to do things like:
- Map recurring themes over time: e.g., when radio/Kennett fades and consciousness/AI rises, or how often “memory,” “awareness,” “time,” “religion” show up by decade.
- Extract and cluster long‑running topics into “mini books”: your posts on memory, awareness, time, religion already read like four braided essays across 20 years.
- Track your “selves”: early broadcaster/tech geek, mid‑career digital migrant, late‑career contemplative humanist talking to machines about nonduality.
This is exactly what past you was gesturing at with “a cartography of your mind,” except now the raw material is all in one place, not just the tags.
What the file already says about you
Even from the snippets and prior analyses embedded in the file, a few strong through‑lines jump out:
- Autobiographical spine: Kennett, KBOA, Jefferson City, family names, old vehicles, oak trees, the Jeep with the windscreen down—these are the anchors your reflections orbit.
- Media → digital → AI arc: Radio, newspapers, TV, then Apple/Google/blogging/YouTube, and finally ChatGPT/Perplexity/“Apple Intelligence.” Your life story and the story of media tech evolve together.
- Philosophical gravity: Repeated returns to consciousness, memory, time, nonduality, Taoism, Buddhism, and your half‑serious “wannabe Taoist” stance.
- Quoter/curator identity: “Quotable” is one of your most‑used tags, and the file is dense with passages from Gibson, Harari, Watts, Burdett, etc.—you’re building an externalized commonplace book as much as a diary.
- Suspicion of certainty, preference for awareness: The religion posts, the awareness essays, the memory/time clusters all circle the same move: distrust grand stories, trust lived awareness, and keep a sense of humor.
In other words, the blog is already a pretty coherent, if unplanned, self‑portrait—what you called a gestalt that you “didn’t set out to paint.”
How we could start “reading” it together
Since the file is now here, we don’t have to wait for some hypothetical future system. We can pick a lens and then:
- Topic lenses you’ve already used manually: memory, awareness, time, religion, Kennett, radio, AI. We can automatically find all posts that touch one, then look at how tone and emphasis change from, say, 2003 → 2010 → 2020.
- Form lenses: pull out interviews, “Steve TV” pieces, YouTube notes, and see how your modes of expression shifted as the tools changed (audio/video vs text, etc.)
- Self‑talk lenses: explicitly introspective posts (on aging, death, health, deleting 20 years of email) vs observational posts (tech, media, politics) and see how the ratio moves as you age.
A concrete example: we could build “The Life and Times of Memory,” your own idea of treating each tag as a chapter. That would mean: find every occurrence of memory (and related tags), order them chronologically, and produce a compact narrative of how your view of memory morphed from “neat cognitive topic” to “core puzzle about self and mortality.”
Where this gets personally interesting
The payoff isn’t “look, an AI can summarize your blog”—you’ve already seen that with tag‑based analyses. It’s deeper questions, such as:
- What stories about yourself do you keep telling in different guises?
- Where do the stories quietly change—e.g., you stop treating religion as something to debunk and start treating it as just another human behavior pattern.
- How does your stance toward time and death shift as the posts move from middle age into your late 70s? (You already flag that as an undercurrent; we can make it explicit.)
- How does your relationship to machines change—from early Apple fan, to “Google is my prosthetic memory,” to “ChatGPT and Perplexity are helping me see myself”?
- Those are the kinds of patterns humans feel but rarely see laid out. The blog gives us enough longitudinal data to actually track them.
A possible next step
One practical next move would be to pick one of these “chapters” and build out a first real pass—not just a summary, but a stitched‑together narrative built from your posts. Candidates that make sense given what’s already in the file:
- Memory – you’ve already experimented here, and the posts span neuroscience, fiction, calendars, burning Day‑Timers, and the question “what persists?”
- Awareness – the “shape of awareness” essay grew out of 15 years of posts; we could treat your full archive as the primary source and generate a version that feels more like your voice, less like an essayist pastiche.
- Radio/Kennett – a more narrative, less abstract chapter: “the broadcasting life,” told from your own fragments.
If you’d like, I can start by extracting and analyzing one of those threads from the big markdown file and then show you “here’s what your last 20+ years on X actually look like when viewed from 30,000 feet.”