A Greater Me — Articulating My Belief System

2026-04-01T00:00:00Z

Anything viewed through the perceptions of a human is inherently flawed. Religion suffers from that more than most fields of thought — not because the underlying questions aren't worth asking, but because the answers got handed down through too many layers of human interpretation before they reached you.

I've always steered away from the moniker of 'Atheist' or 'Agnostic' as neither truly fit within my mind for what I could not articulate until recently. Deist was more correct but still has issues for me since it presupposes that the object of said Deism is a 'god'.

What I have decided is that I have finally managed to articulate what it is that I 'believe' vis-a-vis a 'higher power'.

The 'higher power' is just a greater me. Each of us has one.

This simple statement fits with every honest faith out there in some way that satisfies my self-imposed requirement for 'proof' before belief. It even holds up when folks start talking about multiple dimensions and alternate realities.

Since I was very young I have believed that this reality is merely a plane of perception — a lab of sorts where our 'real' selves can get answers to questions by living through them to find an answer. That has not changed.

This Greater Me is exactly that: the primary shard of my being — soul, if you must — and therefore has access to all my knowledge. The stuff I can occasionally tap into seemingly without prior experience of it. They have a question and need an answer. They send a piece of themselves to this reality as an experiment to find the answers they seek. This life and this reality are part of that journey and, at its end, will return to their source.

This realization has resolved a lot of things I didn't even realize I was still brooding over. It allows me to have faith in the one thing I can prove exists — myself.

It also explains a few things about how I'm wired.

The brain that thinks in three-dimensional constructs, stores everything as a future data point, refuses inherited mental models, builds the tools when they don't exist — that's not a disorder. That's the experimental apparatus the Greater Me sent here. The neurodivergence isn't incidental to the experiment. It is the experiment.

If that sounds like a convenient rationalization, consider: I arrived at this framework before I had language for the neurodivergence. The Greater Me model came first. The diagnosis — or lack of one — came later. The framework held.

This may sound silly to others. But it gives me hope for the future. And it's the most honest answer I have to the question of why I am the way I am, and why I keep building things anyway.

— Pliny, the Moderately Informed

How to Read forEach

2026-04-15T00:00:00Z

The forEach method seems confusing to some folks, and this is normal — computers evaluate data differently than humans.

Use this color-coded breakdown to read yours so it makes sense to your inefficient human mind.

Color order: Green > Red > Grey > Yellow

🟢 Green — For Each
🔴 Red — item
⚫ Grey — in this array
🟡 Yellow — do the following

Read it out loud: "For each cardData in initialCards, do the following..."

Your brain wants subject-verb-object. forEach hands you the verb first. Once you see the color order, you can't unsee it.

This works for any forEach — swap out the variable names and the pattern holds. Same colors, same order, every time.

Choosing a Working Stack That Works

2026-04-22T00:00:00Z

Everyone has opinions about tech stacks. Most of those opinions are about performance benchmarks, ecosystem size, or whatever the last conference talk was about.

None of that is wrong. But for those of us whose brains work a little differently, there's a question that comes before all of that:

Will I still be able to work in this when I come back to it after two weeks away?

That's the real filter.

Uncle Tallest Productions

A Greater Me — Articulating My Belief System

How to Read forEach

Choosing a Working Stack That Works