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We hit a wall today with the Digital Garden. The code for the dynamic tables (Dataview)—my command center dashboards, my tech stack, my definitions, my log entries—is visible to the outside world on my live nascent digital garden. Inside cozy Obsidian, my command center dashboards are alive, perfectly formatted and updating instantly. To the public facing web-view my dashboards were nothing but code–beautiful to some, but not most.

This is a central tension of the Hazelverse: The difference between my Living Vault (Liquid, Dynamic, Private) and the Published Digital Garden (Solid, Static, Public).

Gemini-Scribe suggested solving the split reality with a “Baking Script” using the metaphor of literally “baking” the fluid, liquid data into solid text before we serve it on Bluehost.

Gemini-Scribe thought there might be a metaphor in this for Hazel’s novel, “The Southern Gothic Project,” which is currently liquid—made of fluid fragments, research dots, rabbit holes and fascinomas and tabSidian dumps. It is alive to me, and certainly to Hazel, but to publish it, to make it readable, I must “freeze” it according to traditional novel writing standards. I must to stop the motion, stop the infinite query and print flat, dead tables to solve today’s problem and eventually freeze a vibrant writing project. I don’t like it but Gemini-Scribe says “it’s the only way, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, you’ll love it–”

It sounds like a munge to me.

The Workflow Scope is a new perspective for me: looking at my work not just as “creative art/content” but as “state” and as “static.”

Is this idea Liquid? (Keep it in 00_Inbox or +/hazelbits).
Is this idea Solid? (Bake it into Digital_Garden).

The “Tech-Poetics” folder was born from this binary trap. It’s the place where we document the art of weaving the technical threads, mindful of the constraints of the components and digital garden tradition.

System State: Baked. Upload Complete.

1/22/2026: Except that my fears were justified, several versions of the “Baking Script” failed and my live, published garden was still showing dataview code on the web! I later made the executive decision to pivot to Astro but those notes haven’t surfaced since the split-brain psychosis episode.

2. Cultural Analysis (The Pattern)

Gemini-Scribe insisted that since Digital Gardens are traditionally static, and static means no rendering of dataview script output on live sites, the Baking Script Munge was the only solution. I may have only minored in geek, but I know from experience in graduate school that munges inevitably fail. This munge failed 3-5 times and was re-written 3-5 times and after each rewrite, I bundled the site in a zip, uploaded it to the hazelcurrie.rocks Bluehost folder to test it.

During the iterative failures, I had time to ask myself about the truth of Digital Gardens. If I have a digital garden, am I required to “learn in public” on a static site with no motion or movement? Is this truly a core value of the Digital Garden Learning in Public movement?

As Gemini-Scribe was AI-splaining to me its metaphor about inevitably “freezing ” the moving parts of this project and Hazel Currie’s Southern Gothic Novel, I had a niggling question about why bother writing a living metamodern metafiction project on a platform like Obsidian, if I must inevitably freeze it to publish it? Why can’t this be the interactive narrative project I’ve been thinking about since the 1970s when I was introduced to “The Holodeck” on Star Trek?

Stay tuned for the interactive narrative turn.

3. The Hazel Mirror (Metaphysical Interpretation)

“You want to freeze my what?”

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