An Active Archive (preface)
Oct 2017

I built the site as an exercise in 2012. At the time, I had just learned about the basics of web development and open source software, having clicked buttons and dragged the cursor across corporately licensed interfaces.

It seemed like a distant past when I named this section blog, even though my posts were never as frequent as blog posts should be. In fact, the blog was the landing page, on which I was reluctant to declare any identity. In the about section, I quoted Neruda (Which yellow bird fills its nest with lemons?) and hinted at the idea that this site was but a space for thoughts.

Most of the posts were elusive experiments on the form of text and vague discontentment associated with the labels I felt obligated to own: designer, developer, designveloper, technologist.

Without being entirely aware of it, I wished to stay anonymous when I did not know who I was.

The site finally feels like an extension of my identity - and not just a presentation of it - when I change the current landing page into an introduction to my becoming. I have found solace after years of questioning where I should belong. The blog was renamed thoughts and lived almost unnoticed by others and myself alike. I seldom thought of composing a new post.

Yet as a by-product of time, thoughts has captured my life. Although it is biased for the earlier years (2012 and 2013), I am happy to see what has emerged from it. Once a loose collection, it is now an active archive of my transitions and growth.

To demarcate this realization, I searched my commits and dug out a version of the site when it still featured the logo, so that I could preserve a piece of the past, not as an definitive end point but a process towards something else.

This gives me an idea: a systemic exhibition of preious versions of the website as a documentary of personal changes.

lemony.space

jue[at]lemony.space