I wrote in Obsidian for years, and the vault is still where this site's notes live. A vault is a folder of markdown files with links between them, and the links are the point: an idea about Titan's methane cycle sits one bracket away from the Cassini mission that found it, and a reader should be able to walk that path the way I do.

The first version of this site was a Next.js app that walked the vault for me. Set published: published in a note's front matter and a build script found it, turned the markdown into HTML, resolved the links, and pushed the result to Vercel. It worked, and I wrote a whole series about how it worked. It also grew the way side projects grow: a component for every kind of embed, a search engine of its own, a 3D background with a camera system, a taxonomy generator, a content-tree cache. By the end there was more code about the blog than there was blog.

Ikonic is the operating system I am building, and one of the first things I wanted it to do was know my work. So the vault became an Ikonic workspace: the same folder, now with a small file beside it that says what it is, who publishes it, which folders are the public site and which are private, and how the projects inside it relate to each other. Ikonic read the vault's own structure, topics and series and the links between notes, and built a graph of projects and sub-projects from it. Nothing was moved. The vault stayed the source of truth, and Ikonic never writes back into it without being asked.

That graph is what you see in the corner of every page here, and it is what the contents rail is built from. It is not a menu I maintain. It is the shape of the vault.

In Ikonic's vocabulary a glass is a surface that only quotes. Publishing this site is now one of Ikonic's jobs: it bakes the workspace into a pack of pages, one real address per page, and deploys that pack to Vercel. Every page is a note I marked published, rendered as I wrote it. Every answer the omni gives is a passage from one of those notes with its source. There is no generation anywhere in the chain. If you ask about something I never wrote, it tells you it has no page for that.

What the reader gets from the change is mostly things the old site could not do:

• You can talk to it. The line at the top is Ikonic's omni: type, or say "computer" and speak. "find science", "open cassini", "show by time", "where was I".
• It reads like a magazine. Columns that fit the screen, a picture or a figure at the top of every page, headings that look like headings, a pulled sentence now and then. All of it is placement and sizing; none of it is rewriting.
• Links are real. /cassini is the Cassini page, a wikilink goes where it says, and the graph in the corner shows where you are.
• It remembers only if you ask. Say "remember my reading" and the pages you open and how long you stay are kept in your browser, nowhere else, so "continue" works. Say "forget me" and it is gone.
• It gets faster and more capable with the system. The shaders that used to be a React component are a subsystem now, and the rest of the interactive pages are becoming subsystems too. When Ikonic learns a new instrument, this site can use it.