A users handbook for this site

You may use this site however you like1, but given that my hope is that some people may one day find this site useful, it seems appropriate to offer some guidance for how to get the most out of it.

The content of this site organises itself into a number of braided2 streams:

Nonsense

This is my twitter. Mental vomit. Unvarnished rubbish. Who knows, you might one day find a diamond in the (mostly) rough, but don’t count on it. A microblog, a no context, no friction, no quality stream of unconsciousness.

Rambling

Slightly longer bits of writing, usually developed extracts from my journal. Transient, situated in place.

Wandering

My travel journals, to be read (usually) linearly, from beginning to end and (hopefully) enjoyed. If you enjoy reading them or you have thoughts you wish to share with the author in the form of praise, questions or clarifications, or constructive criticism I would love to hear them. reply@silasjelley.com

Notes

Diverging from the append only nature of my journal & journeys my notes are a place of iterative refinement, they will change, they are destined to be indefinitely amorphous. These notes are pulled directly from own personal collection of notes, most of which are private. Only a miniscule portion of my notes have made their way on to this site so far, in this way what has so far been published is but the tip of an iceberg. And while some notes will remain forever private, it is my intention to steadily increase the proportion of my notes that are publicly visible. The purpose of this public corpus is to think in public and use that scrutiny – real or imagined – as a forcing function to encourage me to round out my notes into a useful, reference-able body of work. In many ways my notes are a digital Zettelkasten, an indexed, heavily inter-linked network of thoughts.

Pearls

Pearls, Archetypes, and Lodestars. This is my recursive acronym and my digital museum. Pearls is my attempt to curate – and so remember – some of the things I find beautiful, influential, and interesting.

Summary version: Nonsense is what I’m thinking, my journal is what I’m doing, wandering are my travel journals, notes are for reference, pearls is for looking closely at beautiful artefacts of all kinds.

Consider a future device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
— Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945

  1. Though I do ask that if you borrow from or quote from this site, that you do so honestly and with attribution. If you want to reproduce larger portions of its contents, please consider linking to them instead, or asking permission first.↩︎

  2. Braided because it’s not always clear why the streams are considered distinct, nor why they exist at all. Know that the metaphor is useful to me, however.↩︎