Source Library

“For the curious. These are the works whose ideas were read together, synthesized, and — in places — argued with, to build this text. Fractalism does not ask you to read them to practice; it offers them to anyone who wants to see the raw material the pattern was noticed in.”

How to Ikigai — Tim Tamashiro
Reality Is Broken — Jane McGonigal
People Skills for Analytical Thinkers — Gilbert Eijkelenboom
Cat’s Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut
Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows
The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition — Jesse Schell
The Happiness Trap — Russ Harris
Wooden Book — Oliver Linton
Mind Management, Not Time Management — David Kadavy
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
Atomic Habits — James Clear
The Four Agreements — Don Miguel Ruiz
The Big Bang of Numbers — Manil Suri
Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order — Ray Dalio
Selfless — Brian Lowery
Advanced Game Design — Michael Sellers
How to Connect — Thích Nhất Hạnh
How to Love — Thích Nhất Hạnh
How to Fight — Thích Nhất Hạnh
Daring Greatly — Brené Brown
Ego Is the Enemy — Ryan Holiday
The Coaching Habit — Michael Bungay Stanier
Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson

Alongside these, an unpublished source: a personal notebook of aphorisms, talk outlines, and design notes, transcribed and folded into Part Two’s Self, Dyad, and Skein movements directly — the Trust Triangle, the reinforcing-versus-balancing rhythm in “Reading Your Own Cycle,” and the four relationships underneath the Skein chapter all trace back to it. Unlike the books above, it isn’t a published work to go read further — it’s closer to this whole project’s original seed, several years of practice arriving at conclusions independently and later found to rhyme with the reading list around it.

One further note, specific to Part Five: the Standing Thirds are not drawn from any external source at all. They’re original figures, built to dramatize claims this book had already made elsewhere — which is itself consistent with what Chapter 0 of that part says about how any Third comes to exist: a pattern gets noticed first, and personified after, not the reverse. Part Six’s Weaving practice is built the same way — original in its specific mechanics, though the underlying instinct (examining a question from several fixed positions rather than one) is itself an old one, most familiar from tarot and comparable divinatory practices, credited here rather than left as an unstated resemblance.

End of book. Which is to say: end of one lap.