Alfie Chadwick

Hiya, I’m Alfie, a PhD student from Melbourne, Australia. I know a little bit about a lot of topics — besides the discourse around the energy transition in Australia, I know a fair bit about that — which means that I end up having a lot of half-formed ideas that have almost definitely been worked out by someone who’s much better informed than me. Despite this, it’s still fun to write about this stuff, and a blog presents me with a good place to write about things that my friends would roll their eyes at if I tried to bring them up at the pub. Definitely don’t treat this as a good or valuable source of information, just somewhere I can dump the contents of my brain.

I’m trying to set this up as a digital garden instead of a blog – which is a pretty wanky discrepancy – but still an important one for me. I want this to be a place that I curate and expand upon, and not just be a place where I put out polished pieces. This is the spot to replace my Goodreads, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium … and so there are going to be a big range of quality and polish on the posts. To help with this, I’ve set it up with 5 tags that I put my content under:

Sprouts: 🌱
Little posts and comments, rushed thoughts and open questions

Buds: 🌿
The first bit of thinking, maybe a couple of hundred unedited words

Flowers: 🌸
Long-form, polished pieces that I have spent a good bit of time on and have had time to mature

Bees: 🐝
Cross-pollinators – Books, movies, papers, podcasts – that have made me think

Pot Plants: 🪴
Things that aren’t really part of the ecosystem but I like having around – snippets of published articles, media stuff

Lineage
I tend to have a habit of pathologising some of my thoughts – trying to understand the reasons a thought pops into my head. It’s cool to be able to see this, so all the posts have Soil and Seeds, being what an idea spawned from and has spawned into.