Garden Day #2 (2025-12-06)

Summary

A live blog detailing the first 12 hours of the Garden’s existence.

Hello! Welcome! it’s been six months since the last Garden Day. I’ve been meaning to do one of these for a long while now.

Weather report:
      \   /     Sunny
       .-.      10 °C          
    ― (   ) ―   ↘ 5 km/h       
       `-’      11 km          
      /   \     0.0 mm

(it’s been a cold but beautiful winter so far! not a cloud in sight today.)

Since the previous Garden Day, I’ve made a great deal of forward progress! It’s still a messy and chaotic place, but now in a good way (that more accurately reflects my state of being).

There is still so much more to do. Because I’ve been focusing on the Garden, I haven’t written a real blog post in over a year. It seems likely that I won’t release the next one until 2026… but I have a bunch of really cool stuff in the pipeline.

Today, I hope to set myself up to not need to think too hard about Garden-related things for the next several months and focus entirely on long-form, well-reserarched blog posts. In order to do that, I’ve been working on figuring out what I want to write about, how to identify the intersections + cohesiveness between my various diverse interests, and why I’m doing all of this in the first place. My current mental model makes sense to me, but now it has to pass the test of being able to write it down.

Today’s Goals and Intentions

Time: 12:11pm

High level goal: publish newsletter #3!!! I’ve done a terrible job at following my intention to publish these monthly. It’s been 5 months since #2 came out. There’s a great deal of content I want to include in the newsletter, much of which hasn’t actually been written down either. I hope to cover all these prerequisites today.

Preparation

• Plan out the Garden Day. (write this section!) [completion:: 2025-12-06]
• Clean up the Garden Days index page a bit + internalize my intentions behind doing these. [completion:: 2025-12-06]

Finish v7

• Stare at bencuan.me for a while and finish fixing the rest of the design bugs + poorly formatted blog content. [completion:: 2025-12-06]
• [?] See if I can get an LLM to catch any obvious wording issues or broken sentences in my blog posts!

Interior Design

• Draft the Garden post for it (in the guides section).
• Ensure all the photos I need are taken before it gets too dark. [completion:: 2025-12-06]
  • Edit them in Reve for anti-doxxing purposes. [completion:: 2025-12-06]
• Include a link to the new page in the colophon.

systemd.works

• Update the systemd.works website (the info is very outdated).
• Edit and upload a few of the technical posts I’ve been working on.
  • Create a new Garden section + intro page.
  • Draw a simple logo for it. (probably penguin themed lol)
  • Upload Demystifying NCCL
  • Upload Ray notes

Frameworks

• Start drafting the new Frameworks page to reflect my current personal research syllabus (and a light introduction to why I care about these things).
• Try to make an initial diagram draft for explaining the legibility of bridges.
• I will not get to actually writing the values document today, but update the placeholder to fit in with the rest of the stuff i’m making today!

Draft the newsletter!!!

• Write the newsletter entry! It should be fairly straightforward because all of the puzzle pieces were just assembled from the steps above.
• Do some inevitable housekeeping work that comes from the review.
  • Recipes
  • Bookshelf
  • Lead climbing notes
  • Update the coming soon page

Finishing V7

Time: 1:09pm

Last month, my main project was redesigning my website (again… for the seventh time). I finished it in record time— previously it’s taken me several months; this time only took two weeks. This was mostly a visual redesign, with the intention to make my main site compliment the Garden better now that both will coexist for the foreseeable future.

Changelog from today’s bug bash session:

• Made the Garden look very slightly more natural by replacing the Catppuccin green and background color with the new bencuan.me color scheme.
• Fix the font weight of italicized text.
• Fix the link to the History of bencuan.me page from the colophon.
• Cleaned up a few references to current literature on digital gardening.
• Updated my Obsidian color scheme and fonts to better match the garden.

Upon review my past self’s writing seems… fine, actually. Don’t think it is worth the effort to LLM-edit it at this time. (maybe, in the future, finding a human editor would be cool!)

and, a lunch+coffee break.

Interior Design

Time: 2:43 pm

For the main article, see notes on interior design.

Did a quick photoshoot to cover some missing scenes! I did one initially last month, but have since made some additions, so ended up redoing a few shots. (Also, the lighting seems really nice today!)

I used Reve to edit these photos, with the main goal being to avoid doxxing myself. It took a few iterations to get what I wanted, but I ended up being happy with the result! Here is the edit instruction I used— I made a few images and chose the best one out of the bunch.

Replace the scenery of the window with a generic background of a city view with trees and greenery. Adjust the color balance of the window so that it better matches the rest of the scene's brightness. Do not edit any other aspect of this image.

Because we haven’t (yet) added normal pixel-based controls to the Reve app yet, I went ahead and manually adjusted the brightness and color balance of these images in to get the final results:

Time: 11:27pm well… I ended up spending 10 straight hours writing about interior design. Not part of the plan, but I’m not mad about it either! There will be plenty of other time to finish the remaining parts, and it’s quickly shaping into one of my favorite pieces of this year :)

My adjusted goal: to get through the list I made today and publish the newsletter entry before the holidays. This should be very doable and allow me to spend some time off work to focus on the bigger, more research-heavy writing projects I have in the pipeline!