StackedStones

Thinking, making, and practice

What this place is, and where it's headed.

StackedStones is a little hard to categorize, and that is on purpose. Part digital garden, part blog, part open-source project. What holds it together is not a tidy structure but a way of thinking about how making things, writing about them, and doing the actual work all feed each other.

Someone lands here and isn't quite sure what to call it. The hope is that they stay because it's interesting, and come back because there's something worth returning to.

The name carries the idea. A stacked stone is three things at once: an engineering object, balanced and load-bearing; a small work of art; and a trail marker, placed so the next person knows they're still on the path. That is the whole thing in one image.

This owes an obvious debt to people who built places like this first - gardens where the work itself is the reason to visit, and the credibility follows from it rather than leading. Three worth your time on their own: Maggie Appleton, Andy Matuschak, and Tom Critchlow.

A rough map of what you'll find, and what is still arriving.

One principle worth stating plainly: the system and the writing stay free. You are not the product here, and nothing is locked behind a wall.

This is early, and small on purpose. It is a side project, built carefully, with no hard launch date and no finish line that doesn't exist yet. The measure of whether it is working, at least at the start, isn't traffic or revenue. It is whether the right few people find it and want to stick around.