I got the term from Rudy Rucker's The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, The Meaning of Life, And How to Be Happy (2016):...a lifebox is a small interactive device to which you tell your life story. It prompts you with questions and organizes the information you give it. As well as words, you can feed in digital images, videos, sound recordings, and the like. It's a bit like an intelligent blog. Once you get enough information into your lifebox, it becomes something like a simulation of you. (11)...The original meaning of "gnarl" was simply "a knot in the wood of a tree." In California surfer slang, "gnarly" came to be used to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail (99)
...Part of being a colorful speaker or writer is having the gift of choosing words whose subsidiary meanings complement, contrast with, or comment upon the primary meaning. (288).
And from Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker:
...With the thesis word, "lifebox," I meant a large database that might include, in my case, my books, my journals, my interviews, my photographs and perhaps an overarching memoir—with the various pieces connected by hyperlinks. A lifebox might resemble a large website....Our perceptual system is all about perceiving patterns—even if they're not there.
and still more recently, on his blog:
...The idea, which is fairly familiar by now, is that you might be able to emulate a person if you have a really large database on what they've written, done, and said. And if it's SF, then we add some AI to the lifebox so it's an intelligent mind.
(not sure I'm ready to go there yet)...and there's Rudy's fascinating record of the process of creation of the book: Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (pdf)
So. A personal Archive. A stab at Legacy. A grand Project.. I wrote this in the Narrative: (January 2022):
(Rucker's original description) ...surely pointed me in the direction of building a personal manifestation as a hypertext, sculpting material (and immaterial) into a sort of auto-biography, organizing and improving accessibility (and thus interconnection) among memories and exemplars and realia, in a Borgesian space, fractal in that the detail appears as you look into it, and seems to go on and on.
And that's what I seem to be engaged upon, following from Links from Former Days and Found while exploring oook.info filespace, from last week.
This space aspires to be a launchpad into (index of, precis for, commentary on) what I am trying to construct in /lifebox.
perspectives on oook.info: the last 20 years of Folders/directories explored...stuff I've collected, in various media. Every item added wants a gloss to explain its allusions, signification, charm, connections; and the whole collection requires a Finding Aid to navigate the jungled vastness ...a very tall order.
29viii25
A year ago I posted a first omnium gatherum, which found its wings in the et cetera list from February 2025. And this morning I realized that I've been doing the /lifebox thing all along, in various forms and formats. The blog can be read as a 20+ year ...essay in articulating what I was doing, finding, wanting to remember, and wanting to share with like-minded others via show-and-tell.