Behind anecdot
In 2021, my dad passed away. His name was Eric Sean Webber.
I will never again meet someone like my dad. My dad taught me to question the status quo, to trust the blood in my body, to step up for the little guy, to let music overtake me.
The morning he died I went to the beach. That was where Dad liked to be. He would wake up before 7 and ride his bike there, over the bridge in the early morning sun, to taste the ocean tang, to sink his feet into the cool, salty sand. He relished movement.
It’s among the bitterest ironies to me that my dad, who so dearly wanted to live, died at age 56. For all his vitality, athleticism, and lifelong dedication to health, a glioblastoma still claimed him in an absurdly cruel death. He was not ready to go.
When I looked at my dad’s headstone, I realized that the words etched thereupon could not capture the richness of his humor, his pain, his vision, and the legacy he left behind.
I created anecdot to allow his story to be written somewhere, compiled from the voices of all who knew him. The aim of this platform is to help everyday people capture the story of their lives — or the lives of their loved ones — and share them easily.
Some people may want to write their own life story before they pass. Or the story of how they met their significant other, to share at their wedding.
You can write a story out in sequential order, and invite contributions from different people from the subject’s life. You can gather anecdotes, which don’t fit easily into a chronological story, alongside that story.
Although I am not a fan of the hype currently surrounding Large Language Models, I have created a feature which allows you to answer a series of questions about the subject of your story. anecdot then retrieves a piece of writing from OpenAI’s ChatGPT based on your responses. This is available for each chapter in your story. I’ve added this feature in spite of my aversion to LLM-generated writing, because I hope it will allow even those who struggle with words to preserve the stories they hold dear. Personally, I would be happy if you then heavily edited that writing to reflect your own voice.
If you have any questions or need support, please reach out at hello@anecdot.co.
