About This Website

In the most general sense, this is a website devoted to the exploration of any interesting thoughts and any acts of creative expression that I feel inclined to share. However, more specifically and more distinctly, this website is about embodying the qualities of nature (e.g. emergent effects, serendipitous exploration, freedom, decentralization, evolutionary change) in how one engages with modern life, but especially with how one engages with technology and with creative or artistic mediums (such as game development, books, digital painting, digital sculpting, 3D modeling, music composition, sound editing, computer programming, and games... just to name a few of my own interests and aspirations).

I think that the concentration of power in the hands of just a few entities in society combined with the hyperconnectivity of the modern internet has become all too often harmful to users (especially to users' scope of awareness of what's possible and to diversity of thought) and I miss the days when computers were not beset with a multitude of unethically intrusive and user-hostile design elements (e.g. "dark patterns"). There is no reason why things have to be like that. Companies could have decided to make much more wholesome and ethical choices and would still be just as profitable or indeed probably (I think) even more so.

I like standalone software and offline applications much more than anything web-based. The less entangled and interdependent software becomes the better for everyone. However, in the meantime one has no viable practical choice but to use websites in order to reach an audience. As such, that is the role this site will fill. I want to provide useful and interesting things and to have a canvas upon which to express my creativity. A static website seems like the best compromise for accomplishing that and for striving for a more free and wholesome computing landscape insofar as I can as just one person.

Creativity is like evolution in that it operates most swiftly and creates the greatest diversity and most vibrant beauty when everything is not interconnected all the time. This is analogous to how the greatest biodiversity in real life occurs on isolated or semi-isolated islands. Darwin's theory of evolution was coincidentally originally formulated by exploring chains of islands, in fact, because such islands were precisely exactly the kind of environment that evolution's influence would have been most apparent.

Hyperconnectivity is thus in some sense inherently antithetical to diversity. Hyperconnectivity has a strong tendency to lead to creeping homogenization of anything and everything. One can also see this effect in how when big corporations establish footholds in foreign countries those countries tend to increasingly lose their corresponding cultural diversity (within overlapping niches) and what makes those cultures unique and interesting, in increasing magnitude proportional to how strong the intruding entities' influence is.

Hyperconnectivity is also rationalized as being "good for everyone" when in reality it often mostly (or perhaps even only) benefits whoever just (as a fluke of history and circumstance) happens to hold the reigns and perhaps also "benefits" whichever other random people have views that just happen to align with those of whatever the dominant entity is.

Therefore, if one truly wishes to foster diversity then a healthy amount of decentralization and of disrupting or breaking up hyperconnectivity is essential. Diversity struggles to survive in an overly hyperconnected environment because more powerful entities tend to inevitably try to suppress anything that doesn't suit the more powerful entities' own goals. Things like "the internet of things" for example are thus likewise probably mostly harmful to diversity (via the inevitably homogenizing influence of centralization and hyperconnectivity) and thus consequentially harmful to the future of all of humanity in the long term.

As such, returning to what I said earlier about the core guiding principle of this site: This notion of returning to embodying more of a metaphorical "spirit of nature" in all aspects of how one engages with modern life is reflected in the name of this site (Wraith Glade) in that a "Wraith" is a "spirit" and a "Glade" is a small secluded opening in the woods (such as a circle of trees with a small meadow in the middle of it).

This mirrors the guiding idea of respecting the values of decentralization, partial isolation (which helps foster evolutionary change), and giving sufficient breathing space for beautiful microcosms of truly diverse thought and authentically fresh creative works to spontaneously emerge and unfold from the mists of time.

"This website is under construction!" as we used to say back in the olden days of the more freedom-respecting internet of the past.

In the meantime, I sincerely thank you for your time and for reading my page.