The other day, I edited Big Muddy’s “About” page, which was previously a copy of the inaugural “Welcome to Big Muddy” post. This version promised a “Simon Willison-style links-and-notes blog” and “interesting links, brief write-ups, quick experiments, and the occasional deep dive.”
It now reads like this:
Big Muddy started as my take on a Simon Willison-style link blog, but I now use it for short posts about technology, science, politics, data, and whatever else I can’t quite leave alone.
As I noted in my post celebrating one month of the blog, this blog started as a way to clear out my “temporary” bookmarks folder: either do something with these links or get rid of them. Another observation from that post: I hadn’t done any “quick experiments” or “deep dives”. After over 200 posts, this is still the case. While I still use my blog to metabolize my bookmarks folder, the content I really wanted to write ended up being short essays.
Which brings me to the other inspiration for this blog: Odysseas’s video “I’m begging you to write essays”, released in late December of 2025, about a month before I started Big Muddy.
The argument is simple: writing forces you to reckon with the inchoate thoughts rattling around in your skull. Trying to get those unformed ideas onto a page forces you to confront the fact that you know less than you think you do. The essai gives those vague notions form, and when you finally wrestle them onto a page, it gives you the distance to judge whether they’re actually any good.
The essay doesn’t have to make a big point. The short essay is about whittling a single idea or observation to a sharp point. Because it is short, you can make a habit of it.
That turned out to be much closer to what I wanted from Big Muddy than the initial “links-and-notes blog” description suggested. The link is often just the thing that sets the thought in motion. The post is the attempt to see what survives contact with the page.