I’ve lost the knack of making sense

In which the reader is introduced to the initial purpose of this website, and the Dutch word “verbeeld”.


For the last few years, I’ve been primarily micro-blogging, on Twitter. This is going to change; I’ll still be reading Twitter and Mastodon, but I’ll primarily be writing here.

Why?

I want to be more in control of where I publish what I write. I need to write to order my thoughts. Twitter has been a fantastic public notebook to incubate ideas, to explore lines of thinking, or just to publish some nice pictures along the way. But Twitter is in turbulent waters nowadays.

“I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Nevertheless, Twitter remains a fantastic place to read. It’s such a rich source of so many interesting insights or facts I didn’t previously know. And I’ll probably keep using it, to follow-up what seems to be happening (next to Mastodon and LinkedIn I suppose). But less and less to directly write what I’m thinking about; I’ll be doing that here on verbeeld.be.

My Twitter profile on 5 November 2022.

The term ‘verbeeld’

“Verbeeld” means “imagine / imagined” in Dutch.

In 2003 I launched my own photoblog, fully written in php and css, called verbeeld.be. The code stopped working along the way, but I still have all the source files. I hope to reanimate that site one time, and keep them on an archived section here somewhere.

Since then verbeeld became my default username online. It also symbolises what I want my online presence to be: imaginative.

Mixing languages

I’ll be writing both in Dutch and in English, whichever feels right for that post (and my mindset at the time). When the site gets more content (and traction) I’ll see where I can find something like a “Translate this webpage” button using DeepL.

Gibberish

For now, I intend to polish my blogposts to the extreme. But a dynamic weblog will inadvertently include gibberish in the long run. I do apologise.

I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.
“I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.” — Kurt Vonnegut