During the last few years, I've been experiencing a mounting sense of anxiety about the inauthenticity of the Internet and the effects it's been having on me personally.

But I digress.

This is an 'About' page.

So, let's start with me.

No more concealing myself under the aliases of TEC squared, English Riot or The Riot Way; I am Damien Herlihy.

Backstory

Having been born and raised in Brisbane, Australia, I eventually returned to live there - bookends bring a sense of closure, don't they? 

Everybody loves a neatly wrapped package.

And here's mine:

Bookend

• Twenty-five years old. Leave Brisbane. Travel the world. Fall in love with South East Asia - it must have been the lack of guardrails that made me take a liking to it.
• Did a Celta in London. Got my first teaching gig in Bangkok - teaching children. It was a car wreck of terrible lessons, screaming kids, and hangovers.
• Felt guilty about the 'passengers' in my car wreck, and decided to get serious about teaching English. I undertook a Masters of Teaching English as as Second Language.
• Taught in Melbourne in an English for Academic Purposes setting. Wore a variety of hats: Teacher, Coordinator, IELTS examiner, Action researcher, Award winner... The car wrecks were in my rearview vision now.
• Met my future wife, tied the knot, and together we opened a language school in Trat, Thailand.
• It was hard work, but we made something of it. Fingers crossed the students at our school get something from it too.
• Lots of side projects - different iterations of the same thing. At its core a failed YouTube channel about teaching and learning English as a second language. Oh, also, had a kid.
• Pandemic with a side of mental health woes. If it doesn't kill you, it only makes you blah, blah, blah.
• About two years ago returned to Brisbane.

Bookend

Now

So now I run the school remotely - a silver lining of the pandemic. I rebuilt my mental health over a year or two. I freelance for the English Teaching Professional making bi-monthly videos.

And then there's this project!

Let's return to my opening statement. My unease over the coming shitstorm of inauthenticity on the Internet - aided and abetted by AI. Content is forever being dumbised, optimised, or algorithmised for likes, shares and subscribes. Don't get me wrong I was in there - getting my hands dirty - for a slice of that eyeball pie.

And maybe I'd still been in there if I had been successful at it. The thing is though, AI is going to speed up this content treadmill exponentially. If things seem inauthentic now, you ain't seen nothing yet...

So, I had a hit wall with the current paradigm of content creation and I wasn't sure what was next... Until I stumbled upon Maggie Appleton and the 'Digital Garden' movement.

Appleton described a 'Digital Garden' as follows:

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.

This articulated a vision for my unease. A place to still create and share, but without the inauthenticity of social media. I've borrowed heavily from Maggie's format for a 'Digital Garden', but decided to give my garden a space theme. Instead of a garden populated by seeds, buds, and evergreens, I have a digital universe with stars/notes, constellations/patterns, and galaxies/essays.

Let the countdown begin.

Oh... If you want me to be shooting star in your personal knowledge universe then read my 'Services' page!