Musings, Down The Rabbit Hole

I’ve got a dark secret. If you were to check my private, carefully curated social media highlights you might think I’m actually pretty cool. My family and a few close friends know I’m not. I’m a geek.

Or rather, I’m a serial digger. A walking, talking, reading spelunky. If you were to be a bee on my shoulder and watch as I hop from one wikipedia article or blog to another, digging further and further down the rabbit hole on every subject from FPGAs, to food science, to music theory, to LLMs, to programming languages and cpu architectures, to marvel characters, to sports and media personalities, to black history, to roman history, to the origins of life, to nuclear forces, to who knows what else you’d probably wonder what’s going on in my head and be slightly concerned.

It doesn’t even help taking myself away from the tech and watching a movie. I hop from the movie to IMDB, from IMDB to Wikipedia and the process begins again.

Honestly, when I’ve gotten to the end of it all even along with the ahas along the way I still wonder if it was all worth it but the whole process of making connections, understanding the things beneath the surface just fascinates me. My hobby is just absorbing knowledge for some reason and learning new things. Ask me something interesting that I either don’t know the answer to or know the answer to but don’t know why and it could be RIP to an afternoon/evening (or week) for me.

”Going (or perhaps falling) down the rabbit hole” is a metaphor for getting lost in something, or ending up in a strange/all-consuming situation. It comes from the 1865 novel from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It just so happens that was one of my favorite stories growing up because it was just all over the place, insane and I could probably relate to it on some weird level. It just so happens that it was also my first and only attempt at creating an NFT!

I just asked ChatGPT and it seems to agree: “You might relate to Alice in Wonderland because of the creative and exploratory themes woven throughout the story. Just like Alice, you often find yourself navigating intricate and unexpected “rabbit holes” in your professional and personal life—whether it’s diving deep into the nuances of new programming languages, exploring innovative project ideas, or engaging with technical concepts in unconventional ways.

Additionally, the surreal and whimsical nature of Wonderland mirrors your willingness to embrace complexity and challenge norms. Your interests…showcase a balance of playfulness and sophistication, much like Alice’s curiosity”

I’ll take the compliment Gippity! The problem, though, is I actually have important things to do like focused study and research and I’m not feeling 100%, but it irks my brain if I’m not scratching that itch. Maybe it’s multipotentiality or maybe it’s just the reason I get migraines. Maybe I’m lamenting a road not taken…

So if you find yourself asking (and getting) the answer to something that I probably shouldn’t know the answer to it’s because somewhere, someday I likely got lost deep down a rabbit hole. If, on the other hand, I didn’t know the answer then now, well now you’re probably responsible for what happened next…

…Just musing.