When is something 'known' by society? It's probably somewhere along this progression:

1. Someone, someone knows an new fact (their luggage combo)
2. Someone talks about or publishes a new fact in e.g. a journal or book
3. A public fact is well-known among specialized communities
4. You can mention a fact in most spaces in a society and someone will say "oh yeah, I've heard that about that"
5. A fact is common knowledge

I draw the line at #3. Something is 'known' by society when it gets to the community level. And I would like more cool things to get to this level!

I'm biased here. In terms of building cool shit, I've found community-based organizing to be the most powerful and transformative force we have. In fact, this very website is kindly hosted with my friend! 🔨

You'll probably also realize that these webpages are a crystalization of some of my spiels 🙂. The same questions seem to come up in batches in the friend groups I'm in, and for some of them I try to research and refine a satisfying answer.¹ Heck, I'll come pretty close to just uploading chat logs; the audience for this blog is pretty much things I want to write for my friends 👥

So you probably know me personally if you're reading this. The corollary is if you read something interesting on one of these pages (if you appreciate or disagree with something), you always have an open invitation to screenshot it and send it to me! 📨 I love to hear from my friends, and that's how the best ideas are created: together.

Along the way, I'll leave footnotes along the way with extra tidbits, tangents, and most importantly pointers to sources if you'd like to go down the rabbit hole further!² If I leave a source in a footnote, you can read more into that source if you'd like!

For example, if I put "Terry Pratchett, Going Postal" as a source for something about The Clacks,

1. Look up that source on https://libgen.li/ with an adblocker (or another libgen/Anna's archive mirror)
2. Download a copy and Ctrl-F in it

That's about it. You'll probably know other places to look, e.g. https://scholar.google.com, a search engine, Libby/your library, or who knows maybe even your bookshelf!