Silas Jelley's Corner of the Web / Nonsensehttps://silasjelley.com/feeds/nonsense//icon/48.icoSilas Jelleyreply@silasjelley.com2026-04-01T02:02:38ZApril 1, 2026 2.49AMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:42c9beb4-a658-4c86-87ad-bf9efd5d643c2026-04-01T02:49:37Z2026-04-01T02:50:38Z
<p>If I remember one thing from this hostel besides Alen and Tamilan, and the wonderful focus of these days, let it be the wonderful door latches. When opened, the latch of the door stays retracted, either by magnet or spring, and only when closed again does an attracting magnet pull the latch back out of the door and into place to hold it shut. This has the minor effect of making the doors look tidier, smoother, when open, but much more resonant with me is how quietly it lets the doors close. These, coupled with a softer closing (dampening) door frame would be a mute dream.</p>
<p>May my future home have such a set of doors, if doors it should have at all.</p>
2:49am on April 1, 2026<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“April 1, 2026 2.49AM”">Reply via email</a></p>
March 23, 2026 11.20PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6ea83a27-9e88-43c8-a352-086d49f0dc972026-03-23T23:20:23Z2026-03-23T23:20:36Z
<p>We find pieces of ourselves in the people we let in.</p>
11:20pm on March 23, 2026 from Atyrau Oblisi, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“March 23, 2026 11.20PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
February 27, 2026 9.57PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bd5d0743-6ccb-4494-8bea-c145af6e0a262026-02-27T21:57:15Z2026-02-27T21:57:15Z
<p><a href="https://kornelius.substack.com/p/india-the-bike-trip-the-book">India, The Bike Trip, The Book?!</a> by Kyle</p>
<p>Reading just before bed so here’s my little stream of consciousness before I nod off.</p>
<p>This feels like a true Kyle of a book concept. All around you are enriched by your particular ability to digest and synthesise what you read and relate it to us, and this feels like taking that skill to its natural conclusion. As a fellow traveller, and without having read Botton’s book, I feel like I’ve already received the core of what that book might teach me. Not to say that there isn’t likely much more I could glean from reading the book itself, but the right idea at the right time is so much more effective than everything right now (makes me think of Ferriss’ move from reading ahead-of-time to just-in-time).</p>
<p>Creative work, and the communication of it, is a kind of filtering of the world as we perceive it. I’ve read and learned many things downstream of your prolific sifting/filtering of the world that I would not have had the capacity to discover alone. By reading these filtered outputs we get glimpses/tastes of a broader set of experience than we could consume individually and from there we can continue to pull on just the thread that feels like it has more for us.</p>
<p>I think knitting this directly and imminently into the sharing of a journey feels like a good fit. Where a lot of self-help shtuff is so prescriptive, this feels more humane, gives us more to engage with when inevitably some chapter (thinking book form) doesn’t grab us as much as another had.</p>
<p>As always, I love the frankness (and humour) of your writing, looking forward to the chapters to come!</p>
9:57pm on February 27, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 27, 2026 9.57PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
February 13, 2026 3.20PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:0ac87b3a-55fa-4f11-97d7-678212efb6d52026-02-13T15:20:20Z2026-02-13T15:20:20Z
<p><em>adapted from an email I sent to Matt Webb</em></p>
<p>Just a quick mail to say I loved this. It’s a weird, fascinating, far-fetched, and slightly-dystopic-but-not-in-the-ways-we-might-have-guessed future we’re being conveyed into. This paragraph:</p>
<blockquote><p><p>With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.</p></p>
<cite>— <a href="/2026/02/13/152004">Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026</a></cite></blockquote>
<p>conjures the experience of taking care of a loved one, of service; beautiful amongst humans but oh how wretched to give that too to the machines. Sometimes it seems so much of what we’re doing here in the future is taking care of machines, asking machines, answering machines, our every thought a footnote or reaction to some energised filament thrown off by the ur-machine, that pseudo-sentience come substrate that binds it all together: the Internet.</p>
<p>Maybe a day comes when we really are fully in service of the machines, not because <em>they took over</em> but rather because we woke up one day and realised (or didn’t) that we could no longer distinguish ourselves from them. And maybe if that day comes we’ll be so exhausted by it that we’ll throw in the towel of our humanity and willfully succumb, make every desperate attempt to lower ourselves into that infinite binary pool of suspended animation, that we might be free at last from the machines we have become.</p>
<p>But! Like us, the machines are brilliant but, like us, made in our own image, they are also stupid. We worry that with their arrival some simpler time has come to an end. We worry because the limits of our memory & empathy let us believe that this vague and amorphous “simpler time” ever existed. Life has always, and ever will be fraught, confusing, and rife with external affairs of fickle malice that loom on dystopic horizons; and has always, and ever will be full of love, charm, and beauties so dazzling we wish we could linger ever in their embrace.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/12/18/Humanist-Plumbing">Humanist Plumbing</a> is not gone from this world.</p>
3:20pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 13, 2026 3.20PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
February 13, 2026 12.22PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:84e3ac28-1d00-4f34-aa7b-d0f1ef65c1f72026-02-13T12:22:27Z2026-02-13T12:22:27Z
<blockquote><p><p>I don’t understand anything about flavour, that’s the problem. My taste buds are like a child’s. I’m perfectly happy with convenience store bento boxes and curry from cheap restaurants.</p></p>
<cite>— <a href="/2026/02/13/122112">Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 9, 2023</a></cite></blockquote>
<p>I’m a little like Rika. I lack taste and, at times, I am self-conscious about that lack of taste.</p>
12:22pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 13, 2026 12.22PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
February 12, 2026 9.07PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:830489a3-ba79-4ac6-9f3c-490695edc6e92026-02-12T21:07:07Z2026-02-12T21:07:07Z
<blockquote><p><p>The way that Reiko spoke made it seem as if her baby already existed in the world, Rika thought – as if they were all just waiting for it to appear in the room. It was the previous summer that the obstetrician had told Reiko it was likely that stress was to blame for the fact that two years into her marriage she still hadn’t conceived, and Reiko had promptly quit her job in the PR department of a major film production company […]</p>
<p>When Reiko had resolved to give up the job that she was so good at, Rika had thought it a waste. Not just that – her friend’s decision had produced in her a sense of loneliness and resentment that had left her sleepless. They had argued about it several times over the phone.</p></p>
<cite>— <a href="/2026/02/12/210118">Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 5, 2023</a></cite></blockquote>
<p>There’s a quiet expression of loud truth, that the world is so caught up in the identity of work that we’d run ourselves to ruin in its name.</p>
9:07pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“February 12, 2026 9.07PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
January 30, 2026 2.35AMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:1499ffae-b9e4-4773-89d4-0286467d13cd2026-01-30T02:35:58Z2026-01-30T02:35:58Z
<blockquote><p><p>Have my parents forgotten that they were young once? Apparently they have. At any rate, they laugh at us when we’re serious, and they’re serious when we’re joking.</p></p>
<cite>— <a href="/2026/01/30/023542">Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 235, 1947</a></cite></blockquote>
<p>I just noticed that I am reading page 235 of <em>The Diary of a Young Girl</em> at 2.35am.</p>
2:35am on January 30, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“January 30, 2026 2.35AM”">Reply via email</a></p>
January 28, 2026 10.00PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:8f212e4c-3275-474c-8704-4ca117dc93672026-01-28T22:00:26Z2026-01-28T22:00:26Z
<p><a href="/2026/01/28/214251" title='Anne Morriss, Starbucks \"The Way I See It\" cup #76, 2009'>The time has come to commit to something.</a></p>
10:00pm on January 28, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“January 28, 2026 10.00PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
January 22, 2026 10.38AMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:365b2788-5513-4c28-be5b-cf242853af942026-01-22T10:38:09Z2026-01-22T10:38:09Z
<blockquote><p><p>Dearest Kitty,<br/>I’m seething with rage, yet I can’t show it. I’d like to scream, stamp my foot, give Mother a good shaking, cry and I don’t know what else because of the nasty words, mocking looks and accusations that she hurls at me day after day, piercing me like arrows from a tightly strung bow, which are nearly impossible to pull from my body. I’d like to scream at Mother, Margot, the van Daans, Dussel and Father too: ‘Leave me alone, let me have at least one night when I don’t cry myself to sleep with my eyes burning and my head pounding. Let me get away, away from everything, away from this world!’ But I can’t do that. […]</p>
<p>Everyone thinks I’m showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I’m silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I’m tired, selfish when I eat one bite more than I should, stupid, cowardly, calculating, etc., etc. All day long I hear nothing but what an exasperating child I am, and although I laugh it off and pretend not to mind, I do mind. I wish I could ask God to give me another personality, one that doesn’t antagonize everyone.</p></p>
<cite>— <a href="/2026/01/22/103714">Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Penguin Books (2008), p. 81, 1947</a></cite></blockquote>
<p>I imagine this is how mum feels in the face of my critical nature.</p>
10:38am on January 22, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“January 22, 2026 10.38AM”">Reply via email</a></p>
January 10, 2026 11.48PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:cf4c8a2c-967c-4e1e-85bf-a6caf93836e12026-01-10T23:48:04Z2026-01-10T23:48:04Z
<p>Don’t forget to tell people how you feel.<br/>I think I do that a lot. I’m not totally clear on why, perhaps it’s on account of being a little bit further along <em>the spectrum</em> than most folk, but I never really learned that skill that lots of folk seem to have of just… telling people how they’re feeling, and what they’ve been up to, and yada yada. What I do know is that it is (probably) possible for me to learn this simple, connective art form. I just need to remember.</p>
11:48pm on January 10, 2026 from Bristol, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“January 10, 2026 11.48PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
December 27, 2025 10.33PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:c6abbb70-55db-43b0-b42b-e5840daad5c82025-12-27T22:33:04Z2025-12-27T22:33:04Z
<p>As children we fume that our parents <em>just don’t understand us</em>. As adults we are afforded the gift of trying to understand our parents.</p>
10:33pm on December 27, 2025 from Ilfracombe, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“December 27, 2025 10.33PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
December 9, 2025 12.02PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:c10c313e-ffa1-4523-b0dc-1443a4b9e1202025-12-09T12:02:49Z2025-12-09T12:02:49Z
<p>Back to paper! This life is the experience of repeatedly thinking I have figured something out, only to realise again and again that I haven’t. More charitably, it is the experience of figuring out what is needed for the given moment and then discovering that that moment was not destined to last forever.</p>
12:02pm on December 9, 2025 from Ilfracombe, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“December 9, 2025 12.02PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 26, 2025 1.17PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:6c475684-93e8-4b29-a25f-7a61d142375c2025-11-26T13:17:36Z2025-11-26T13:17:36Z
<p>We either accept life with all its complications or not at all.</p>
1:17pm on November 26, 2025 from A plane flying from Tbilisi, Georgia to London, England<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 26, 2025 1.17PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 25, 2025 9.46PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:f79153ee-9587-404c-84e1-88a6b34a56b52025-11-25T21:46:59Z2025-11-25T21:46:59Z
<p>The trouble with writing is that it seems to imply that <em>all that is</em> can be written. But it can’t. What is written here in these (digtial) pages is less than a crease in the fabric of this life.</p>
9:46pm on November 25, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 25, 2025 9.46PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 22, 2025 10.34AMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:4f08119c-3648-4643-ae44-f7ac27577a3a2025-11-22T10:34:03Z2025-11-22T10:34:03Z
<p>“People is very normal”</p>
<p>This is how Nato says people are fine/good/same everywhere.</p>
<p>“In Georgia, Russia, Britannia, all country… people is very normal.”</p>
<p>It’s unfortunate that she sometimes follows it up with a racial jab — “Not Chinese, not young Chinese, but every other people is normal” — but the core of the thing, that everywhere people have much the same wants and warts, is an idea that I love and have long held dear.</p>
10:34am on November 22, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 22, 2025 10.34AM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 22, 2025 12.08AMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:c9454961-c0ac-4579-bab5-d69fb8c48b8b2025-11-22T00:08:20Z2025-11-22T00:08:20Z
<p>There have been times when I’ve not reached out to Cy to get a call in, because I’ve noticed that it’s always me. Sure, he’ll say “let’s get a call in soon pal!”, but it’s always me that actually suggests a time and makes it happen. But that doesn’t bother me at all anymore, not right now anyway. Just think of all the ways people accommodate my quirks, my lapses, and how grateful I am for the friendships I can have because of those accommodations. Why should I ever be annoyed for having the opportunity to give the same gift? Thank you Cy — you who have shown me so much, expanded the possibilities of life for me — for needing me to play this part in our friendship.</p>
12:08am on November 22, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 22, 2025 12.08AM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 21, 2025 11.14PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:5c7388fd-d6d6-4d82-9371-275a9f9ca0ad2025-11-21T23:14:06Z2025-11-21T23:14:06Z
<p>One thing I’m realising as I develop <a href="https://git.sr.ht/~silasjelley/taskline"><code>taskline</code></a> is that I have taste, but I lack talent. By taste, I mean that I have an intuitive feel for the ergonomics, for how the program should feel, its surfaces. I’m proud of the design, but I’m hemmed in by my technical ignorance.</p>
<p>I’m reminded of my disappointment at Birdy’s self-written songs, and how I remarked that her taste exceeds her talent. Her debut was made so achingly beautiful by hearing her cover those incredible songs, written by people who’d lived far beyond her few years. To hear those vivid, vulnerable songs rendered in the naked naivety of her voice was such a spellbinding contrast that her own writing, coming later, was perhaps destined to disappoint. I wonder what her music will become. Ten years from now, will she have the lived experience and the talent to write songs that equal her taste? And even if she has, will her voice still ring the same? Ten years from now will I have the skill, the talent, to reach beyond the programs that my taste can imagine but I cannot yet bring into being?“</p>
11:14pm on November 21, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 21, 2025 11.14PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 20, 2025 8.32PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:656cb271-4e7c-4967-b6c5-9c9050d3896a2025-11-20T20:32:09Z2025-11-20T20:32:09Z
<p>We will be satisfied when we want for nothing <em>more</em>.<br/>We will want for nothing more when we can be satisfied with what we have.</p>
8:32pm on November 20, 2025 from Atyrau, Atyrau oblysy, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 20, 2025 8.32PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 20, 2025 2.26PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:cecac05f-7618-4248-afd5-3ef3318bc7b32025-11-20T14:26:14Z2025-11-20T14:26:14Z
<p>Better to make a good decision now, than the perfect decision after it’s too late.</p>
2:26pm on November 20, 2025 from Atyrau, Atyrau oblysy, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 20, 2025 2.26PM”">Reply via email</a></p>
November 16, 2025 2.58PMtag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:04a58756-3dc7-43cd-8f18-90e84fb2b5e12025-11-16T14:58:58Z2025-11-16T14:58:58Z
<p><em>Abbreviation</em> is kind of an ironically long word, right?</p>
2:58pm on November 16, 2025 from Atyrau, Atyrau oblysy, Kazakhstan<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“November 16, 2025 2.58PM”">Reply via email</a></p>