Exobrain diary

What's this doc?

1. A place to ramble about the process going on here at the exobrain
2. And to chew over / whinge about / hopefully make some headway on testing different ways for my brain to exist in the world, do things I want to do, or possibly realise the reasons I thought I wanted to do a thing might change the direction things take.

Obsidian / exobraining the sci-fi book? 2025-12-13

The thought: since the original post about a 'get sci-fi book live' plan on CiB, it's become apparent the process I was embarking on was wider. The book is part of it, but it's also gone into full re-assess-brainsystems mode, in light of trying to figure out how to work with my brain, not just smash it against the wall while blaming myself (last CiB post).

A few things flow from that:

• The book gets embedded in everything else in the exobrain. I can smush it all together and to an extent not worry about that mess or where it goes.
• It's only really in the last week that I've thought - ah, all this ridiculousness actually did have a point. This is now feeling like pushing on an open door, not trying to... how did I put in a text? "I WILL SHAME MYSELF INTO BEING A BETTER, FITTER, HAPPIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE PERSON." Quite. After many abortive attempts trying other avenues, this latest collection of things is feeling like something that's (a) on my own terms entirely and (b) is actually getting out of the way and letting me just flow a bit more. Might be worth coming back and chewing over why exactly that is - it has reduced barriers to me just turning up, quite how, I don't know - but for now, let's just continue to test - it's early days, plenty of time for early promise to flounder. But... testing continues.
  • Quick reflection on this: I don't think it's incidental that it's an open system I have full, transparent control over. Nothing and no-one is trying to tie me into a closed system. That is allowing a fluidity that is absolutely working for me. That's interesting. That may also apply to the book, which I suspect will be coming out of Scrivener into here. (There is of course an Obsidian plugin for that...)
• I am mulling picking on scenes from the book and working through them openly to piece the whole together. That way I can partly tell the story as it goes, though not necessarily linearly, and in ways that may alter as we go.
  • Doing this, I'm mulling how to connect to people who might be interested in this fairly odd way of doing things.

So, picking a single scene - Hill/Rem first...

Regional econs writing - why / what / maybe not? 3rd-Feb-2026

Here, I'm chewing over the topics in Regecons live question list, where I'm trying to gently explore issues with the regional economic data we're using in the UK. It would be good to use this as a chance to pull together stuff I've learned over the past couple of years wrangling this stuff.

But first, pulling focus a bit. If I'm not just going to try and headbutt my way through this as per usual - and quite likely feel like I've failed in various ways - what do I want from it? What counts as OK? Why do this at all? How could I tweak what I'm doing to maximise the odds of it being something I want it to be?

The actual content is easy enough to state, is it, I think?

• National accounts are now a global accounting framework built into economic governance/management. Accounts have to balance. It's a ledger.
• Regions have to use that accounts framework because it's all there is. Or rather, it's the only accepted framework for national / international bodies to view regions through. It's a top-down lens, reflected in the fact that much of the data itself is top-down - national numbers divvied up between the regions based on some proxy. E.g. public sector output: a national output number in pounds, sliced up based on job counts and regional average public sector pay. Any apparent regional public sector output differences reflect nothing except pay and job count.

And then I think I want a bunch of examples that ask "how different could regional economies appear if we use other lenses? How sensitive are they to these choices?" Most of which I've already coded up, at least in part.

And that's key too - doing the data openly and making that available to others. That could be a useful thing.

(Noting in passing one I haven't yet looked at, but we should - regional price indices. See e.g. David Hearne's paper on estimating regional price differences.)

..

The plan might include:

• Starting drafts of each on the exobrain, and getting feedback on those before publishing anything else.
  • Or not. I mean, probably not. Spreading it over 3 different blogs would be pretty insane, no?

..

So that's all great. But what about the 'so what' and the 'really, this?' and the 'are there ways to do this differently' stuff? Tricky given headbutting through is how I've always done it. But let's have a think.

I could probably start by going through the List of writing questions. Let's see what jumps out for thinking about this project.