Why the letters?
The name came before the categories.
The idea was simple: in the vastness of space, Earth is a blip.
In the vastness of time, a human life is an even smaller one.
And yet, while we’re here, everything feels significant.
A problem. A decision. A conversation. A photograph. An investment. A mistake. A thought that won’t leave us alone.
For a little while, that one thing can feel like the centre of the universe.
Then time passes.
And it becomes a blip.
The thought behind the name
Somewhere in the thinking behind ablip was a Calvin and Hobbes moment.
Calvin looks out at the enormity of the universe and insists, in his wonderfully Calvin-like way, that he is significant.
And he is.
Of course he is.
But put the same person against the scale of the universe, and the perspective changes rather dramatically.
That contrast stayed with us.
We are significant. And we are also blips.
Those two things can be true at the same time.
Perhaps that’s the point.
The idea was inspired by the perspective in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, rather than by any intention to reproduce the comic itself.
Then came the letters
Once ablip existed, we started wondering whether the five letters could carry a little more weight.
They could.
But finding five meanings that felt natural — rather than forcing words into the letters — took some experimentation.
A · Anything
A is for Anything.
Not because we couldn’t think of something more specific.
Quite deliberately, because we didn’t want to.
There will always be things that don’t belong neatly anywhere else: observations, questions, fragments, ideas, oddities and the occasional thought that simply refuses to be categorised.
So A became the place for everything else.
A · Anything
For things that don’t fit neatly elsewhere.
B · Bits
This one has the best little backstory.
We originally considered B · Life. It worked. But it was too broad and, more importantly, it made the B feel like an arbitrary label.
We also considered Baba, partly because of the Indian idea of a baba dispensing wisdom — often in the form of a memorable bit of advice or a “babaism”.
Bytes briefly made sense too, but pushed the meaning towards computers and technology.
Eventually Bits won.
A bit is small. A bit can be information. A bit can be an observation. A bit can be useful. A bit can be completely inconsequential.
And, appropriately, a bit is also a small part of something much larger.
B · Bits
Small pieces of thought.
L · Legal
This one is probably the least mysterious.
L · Legal.
Some thoughts are about laws, rights, obligations, rules, disputes and the strange ways in which everyday life intersects with the legal system.
But even here, the idea isn’t to build a legal advice website inside ablip.
It is simply another lens through which a blip can look at the world.
L · Legal
Law, rights, principles and questions.
I · Investments
Money is strange.
We assign numbers to it, measure it, compare it and try to make it grow. Yet money rarely behaves like a number when it enters a human life.
The same amount can mean security to one person, freedom to another, status to someone else, and anxiety to someone else entirely.
We don’t just invest money.
We invest hopes, fears, memories, expectations and sometimes our sense of who we are.
I · Investments is about money, markets and investing — but also about the people making decisions around them.
Because sometimes the most interesting thing about an investment isn’t the investment.
It’s the investor.
I · Investments
Money, markets and the people behind the decisions.
P · Photography
P · Photography is perhaps the most literal of the five.
Some blips don’t need words.
A photograph can be a moment, an observation or simply something worth looking at twice.
Not every photograph needs an explanation. Sometimes the image is the blip. Sometimes there might be a few words beside it. Sometimes the words are the reason to look at the photograph.
We don’t need to decide that in advance.
P · Photography
When a blip needs no words.
Five letters. Five places to put things.
None of them are meant to define what a blip can be.
They’re simply places for thoughts to land.
The letters are useful.
But the name came first.
Because ultimately, ablip isn’t really about categories.
It’s about perspective.
We can spend an entire afternoon worrying about something that will be forgotten in five years.
We can spend five seconds looking at something beautiful and remember it for twenty.
We can feel completely insignificant and completely significant, sometimes on the same day.
Perhaps being a blip doesn’t make something meaningless.
Perhaps it makes the moment matter more.
Give me a blip.