instabram

The Weekend is Over

give up on books, embrace highlights

Bram Adams

08 Sep 2025 — 5 min read

Personal Library Science (PLS)

Personal library science has received an indirect blessing from a restructuring of how I think of Your Commonbase as an organization. I've always kind of wanted Your Commonbase to be a research organization, but I've never really formalized how that would happen.

Because of my recent driving need to bring income into the organization, I've realized that I can structure the business as a research organization which has a B2B arm and a B2C arm. The B2B arm is focused on consulting, and the B2C arm powers both the end user software and the open-source initiatives.

There's no immediate impact of this restructuring outside of the idea that hopefully once the money is stable, I'll be able to start working on my first research proposals and start working on calls for papers as it pertains to personal library science topics, such as:

The advantage of master ledgers
The density of information between different information types
How people pay attention and highlight information
The idiosyncratic data structures of a commonbase
etc

Your Commonbase

I've partnered with one (potentially two) companies to white-label my services for YCB Consulting. I've also narrowed the scope of the offering in a way that can seem more effective and profitable towards an organization.

I've run a few audits, and I'm turning those into generalized case studies.

I'm trying to be really aggressive with my outreach in terms of making connections that I can continue to build. I even went ahead and created a CRM on Google Sheets for myself, which is new because all of the work that I do is coding day-to-day. This has been more relationship management and it's been a different skill set for me to work on.

Reading

I finally started reading again because I allowed myself to let go of the Power Broker as a blocker. Overall, I read about 75% of it if you look at the page count. I probably wouldn't have read that much if I wasn't involved in a pretty amazing class/reading group that made the material much more engaging.

I noticed that reading books for me, because of building YCB, has now become mainly about how many interesting highlights I can capture as entries into my commonbase.

There's a saturation point for any book where the information becomes really repetitive. You'll start to notice that a cluster around, for example, Robert Moses gets super dense and is no longer really interesting to engage with when there's a bunch of new novel books out there that are filled with information to discover.

The new books I picked up are:

Creative Coding

I made my first Claude artifact.

I saw a Wikipedia page that showed how many years old different life forms were like fungi or sexual reproduction or the common ancestor of life on Earth were and I thought it would be funny if you could just add random things to this. Of course, I didn't want to actually spend the time to code that, so I just copied the outer element of the table as HTML, ported that over to a Claude artifact, and had Claude code it.

I think that the app looks kind of ugly, and I didn't want to spend more than 10 to 15 minutes on it, but it's cool that I can now add stuff to a timeline and take a screenshot, and I think that this is a good example of what prototyping and creative coding looks like in the future where there are more of these not very serious projects that are just fun little one-off things that don't really need a lot of constant attention.

Fitness

In my effort to become more consistent at the gym, what I've basically been doing is a trivial workout consisting of a mile walk on the treadmill and then taking 17.5- 20 pound dumbbells and doing curls, overhead presses, tricep extensions, and shrugs.

My goal at this point isn't to build insane muscle definition. It's just to lose a bit of weight and to become consistent at the gym. My weight is currently a little over 200 pounds, and ideally I'd like to be down near 180.

Songwriting

Nothing interesting to report

Musical Improv

I had my first musical improv class last week. It's actually pretty interesting how ingrained musical logic is into the human brain. We seem to be a musical species by default. Like, for example, there were tropes that I learned as a high school musical performer almost two decades ago that I was just able to awaken from my subconscious without much thought. Makes me think about the shared nature of what song and performance does to the human brain.

There's definitely extra tricks to musical improv that isn't present in regular improv that I'm excited to pick up over the next couple weeks.

But my overall goal is to become a better singer from musical improv, not necessarily to become a better improvisor.

Sleep

I'm getting worse and worse at sleeping, it seems. I really need to make an aggressive effort to go to sleep earlier. I think it's starting to affect my memory and word recall in a negative way. Overall, not happy about this.