I've always loved footnotes. Endnotes, not so much. They're often a lot . . . dustier. Academic. But footnotes often have a lot of fun in them. In fact, there's been quite a few times when I was puzzled as to why the footnote wasn't in the main text: That was so informative! That was hilarious! Such a good anecdote... Parentheticals feel like clarification. Footnotes seem to be the sweet spot.

There's just a few problems: Footnotes a just a ugly. They immediately draw the eye when the page. What's that?  The text is usually obnoxiously small. And when you finally hit that superscript, you teleport to the end of the page, but when you're done? Well damn, where did that little superscript go... oh there it is. Ok, now I can pick up where I left off.

That almost 3 decades of internet has not improved upon this surprises me. So I brought to life a little idea I've had for a long time: Embedded Notes.¹ So what is an embedded note? It's a foot note that exists within the actual body of the text which is expandable and collapsable. You should be able to click on that superscript at the end of the previous sentence and the text will magically split, open and reveal the embedded note. But there's something else that I built into this new embedded note functionality.²

I'm fond of rabbit holes and red herrings. An unfruitful rabbit hole can feel like a red herring, and a red herring can prove to be a productive rabbit hole, if only you give it enough time, and the context changes enough, and you find out that the things you discovered or learned or figured out in the depths of that rabbit hole apply to something else you never expected.

Other updates: There's another book that's done. It's a very short one. Slim and sexy. It's called PAUSE, and it's a book about meditation. a few years before I started Tinkered Thinking, I was pushed by a handful of variables to commit seriously to developing a meditation practice. The experience was incredibly valuable and that commitment was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I'm currently updating the Tinkered Thinking Bookstore. It was my first project and it needs some overhauling to make it easier for me to get new books on it. I might get some other stuff on there too... We'll see.

There's also a meditation app which I have been "working on" forever. Which is to say, it got thrown on the back-burner faster and more often than pig decides to wallow in mud. A bummer, but it's literally in the final couple percent of progress. It's even already been approved for release on the Apple App Store. 

I'm also realizing just how rich my life was with a daily writing practice. I've got a dozen chapters of a novel written, but it's not the same to work on a novel. A novel requires long stretches of time. Tinkered Thinking evolved to be a kind of gesture-with-words. A quick sketch. It is a skill all on its own with benefits that are a bit different from slower, more methodical forms of writing. But that's another topic, for another day.

I think Tinkered Thinking needs to continue evolving. I'm not exactly sure what that means other than more essays, more stories, more books. If you have any thoughts. I'm all ears. In the meantime: be careful of the context.

Oh, also. Tinkered Thinking now has dark mode. There's a very faint moon in the bottom right hand corner. Click it.