\n\nBlygging is hereby declared to be Eldritch-blogging
\nFits with my Be Slightly Monstrous theme.
\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe elderblog is a garden gone wild.
\n
\nThe eldritch blog is a garden that has begun gardening you.
Below is all ChatGPT, The TK tag doesn't work for some reason:
\nI think I see what Rao is getting at. “Eldritch” here does not primarily mean horrific. It means something closer to uncannily alive, other, recursive, and no longer entirely under the control of a single human author.
\nThe ordinary dictionary meaning is “strange or unnatural, especially in a way that inspires fear.” The word’s deeper etymology is uncertain, but one proposed reading connects it to an “other/beyond realm” or fairy realm. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"} That sense of something familiar becoming subtly inhabited by an alien logic is particularly apt here.
\nRao's elderblog idea was already heading in this direction. In 2019 he described a mature blog as having accumulated enough history that you stop merely writing new posts and start playing second-order games with the archive itself. The archive becomes a landscape.
\nHe later described Ribbonfarm's blogchains as tunnels underneath the old city of posts, and then shifted to the image of Angkor Wat: old human-built structures becoming entangled with wild growth. By the final Elderblog Sutra in 2022, he was already explicitly making the Lovecraft joke: perhaps blogging could return as an “Elder god”, quoting Lovecraft's line about death dying in strange aeons.
\nSo the elderblog is roughly:
\n\n\nA large body of past writing becomes terrain that the present writer can wander through, reinterpret, link, excavate, and build upon.
\n
But it's still recognizably your archive.
\nThe blyg introduces machinery that makes this much stranger.
\nRao describes Blygger as a decentralized, peer-to-peer, AI-native medium in which writing exists as versioned fragments and threads. Items can be quoted by transclusion, forked from pinned versions, revised without erasing earlier pinned states, and subscribed to across independent sites. A quote isn't merely a link: it incorporates the exact version the writer saw, permanently, even if the original later changes.
\nAnd then AI gets woven inside the writing process. His [ TK ] mechanism lets an author place an instruction directly inside a draft, have a model generate material there using other blyg items as source material, and preserve provenance for that generation. He explicitly calls this “AI-intertwingled” writing rather than putting an AI chat box beside a conventional editor.
That is where I think eldritch blogging starts to make sense.
\nImagine this little chain:
\nWho wrote E?
\nThere's an answer in terms of provenance. But there's no simple answer in the older literary sense of authorship.
\nAnd even stranger: what is the object?
\nIt isn't your blog.
\nIt isn't Rao's blog.
\nIt isn't a conversation thread.
\nIt isn't an article.
\nIt's a temporally extended network of texts continually branching, remembering, mutating, quoting older selves, and recombining across people.
\nThat is very eldritch.
\nThere are four kinds of weirdness bundled together here: temporal weirdness, because many versions of a thought coexist; identity weirdness, because human, AI, source material, quotation and fork become entangled while remaining technically distinguishable; memory weirdness, because dead writing can suddenly become active causal material again; and collective-mind weirdness, because the emergent object begins behaving as something larger than any participant.
\nThat last piece isn't me projecting too much onto Rao. In his April 2026 writing on AI and “liveness,” he talks explicitly about AI producing “strange loopiness,” “memory revivification,” and connections between individuals from which “transhuman egregores” or “graph minds” might emerge. And in the Blygger presentation he says the purpose is to give AI-generated material liveness: unlike a dead chat transcript, a blyg artifact can be revised, cited, forked and built upon by others.
\nThere's also a wonderfully telling line in his recent Ribbonfarm resurrection project. He says he deliberately preserved the familiar old-blog surface while changing the machinery underneath to produce an “uncanny experience where the surface feels familiar, but something tells you an alien logic has taken over the innards.” He then gives his dead archive an AI “archival self,” which he describes as old intellectual baggage becoming “pseudo-sentient” and able to interact with his present self.
\nThat's almost a definition of the aesthetic.
\nSo I would distinguish the terms like this:
\nBlogging: I think → I write → you read.
\nElderblogging: I have accumulated a world of writing → I wander around inside my own ruins → new writing grows out of the old landscape.
\nEldritch blogging: The ruins wake up.
\nOld text becomes active again. Other people's text can inhabit yours. Your text can propagate into theirs. AI can digest and recombine both. Versions branch while old states remain accessible. Ideas return to you after traveling through processes you didn't control. And through all of this, provenance remains visible enough that you're not simply dissolving everything into undifferentiated AI soup.
\nThat last qualification is important. The eldritchness isn't loss of structure. Blygger is almost obsessively structured about provenance, versions, pins, origins and snapshots. The strange thing is precisely that this rigorous machinery allows something much more organic and difficult to conceptually contain to grow on top of it.
\nWhich gives me an even shorter formulation:
\n\n\nThe elderblog is a garden gone wild.
\n
\nThe eldritch blog is a garden that has begun gardening you.
I couldn't find the exact indexed fragment where Rao uses the phrase “eldritch blogging”—his live blyg was timing out to the crawler—but the lineage from Elderblog Sutra through the Ribbonfarm resurrection, his “liveness/graph minds” thinking, and the Blygger design makes the intended meaning surprisingly coherent.
\n","content_hash":"sha256:e819cc721d308e1ed2351391f8db896859204cf80f57c300745c596537bab647","media":[],"transclusions":[],"changelog":[{"version":1,"at":"2026-10-02T01:07:53Z","note":null}]}