The library cushion

Spending your afternoons waiting for pickup in a library teaches you things. Like which cushion is the most comfortable, which corner has the best light, and exactly how many times you can read the same encyclopedia before you've memorized the page numbers.

For many years, I spent most of my after-schools and Saturdays at the school library. Being the only student there on most weekends, I'd earned the quiet permission of the librarians to move a round cushion over to whatever rack I was exploring that day and settle against something solid, with the weight of a book in my hands. Their modest collection of mostly science books and curated classics became my entire world. When you're there long enough, you don't just read books—you inhabit them. Especially the history books and encyclopedias that traced how we got from there to here. Those stories of discovery never got old, no matter how many times I read them.

It's the feeling I go back to in my head whenever I read. There was something magical about that time and space: the comfortable, organized interconnectedness of it all, where I could follow my curiosity from ancient civilizations to modern science without ever feeling lost. Everything had its place, and I had mine too—wherever I'd dragged that cushion.

But somewhere along the way, that feeling got lost. At some point, most of my reading turned into screens, websites, and the internet. All the information in the world at my fingertips, but very little of that familiar comfort. Screens don't have the same warmth, the same clarity. Instead, there's information buried in databases, concepts scattered across pages, and no cushion to sit on while I figure it all out.

Life got busier after that. School, work, less time for those long afternoons with books. But the curiosity never really went away, it just found new outlets. In university, I fell into reading journals and research papers, and later, they became my way of understanding new ideas and keeping up with discoveries. Here was the cutting edge of human knowledge, the modern equivalent of those encyclopedia entries that had fascinated me as a child.

But reading them always felt like archaeology. I'd dig through citations, lose track of which papers were actually interesting, and struggle to connect ideas across different fields. The magic was buried and intangible.

At the end of the day, whether it's an illustrated encyclopedia, website, or a research paper, I'm still looking to understand the stories—stories about how the world works, how we got here, and where we might be going next.

So when I found myself in a rather explorative period in my work, I decided to start reshaping the medium to my liking and make some software to bring back a little of that feeling—something to recreate that sense of comfort and clarity I remember from my library days. Where concepts can be explained simply, where connections between ideas become visible, and where the joy of discovery doesn't get lost in the chaos of information.

I call it Research (although I did briefly consider Wonder or Atlas). It doesn't solve everything, but it brings back just enough of that library feeling to make reading on computers feel like discovery again instead of work.