Before I actually began this website, I filled a number of (paper) notebooks with texts on various topics. In the original conception, they were supposed to be a major part of the contents; however, the sheer amount of new contents that have always appeared during my phases of writing have prevented this.
Beginning in 2024, long, long, long after the last notebook entry was actually written, I have decided to just set aside some little time each week to gradually import the contents into digital form. (Now, of course, using a computer notebook.)
This will be done by picking one of the notebooks, creating a page in this category, importing the first text in the notebook, importing the next text, etc., until the notebook is done, after which the same will be done to the next notebook, until all the notebooks are done.
A few remarks:
For reasons like the below and the over-average likelihood that contents will eventually be moved, scrapped, and/or more considerably re-written, I strongly discourage quoting and linking. You quote and link entirely at your own risk.
(And even reading should be done with an awareness of the below remarks, the first especially.)
By the nature of the approach, texts in this category are not “official”.
Even with pages in other categories, my opinions might well have changed between the time of publication and the time of someone reading. (Unlike many others, I often change my opinions in light of new observations, arguments, whatnot.) However, such pages at least reflect my opinions at the time of publication. In this category, we might see a text published more than fifteen years after the original writing, and my opinions even at the time of publishing might deviate considerably.
I have no idea how long the import will take, but I suspect that it will be several to many months per notebook, as this is a low-priority side-task that takes place in parallel with the (much more highly prioritized) other work on this website.
The contents will not be a complete import, as I will almost certainly, here and there, find that my opinions have changed too much, that I have already written a newer text covering too similar ground, that something scribbled down at the time simply seems too low value today, or similar.
The amount of editing and rewriting will vary from the trivial (e.g. spelling corrections) to the considerable. (And the resulting texts will not necessarily be identical to the original paper version.)
However, I expect the average quality to be considerably below that of newer texts. This, in part, because I was a much weaker writer; in part, because my original intent with the notebooks was less to create completed and publishable texts, and more to have a decent draft that could later be polished into a publishable text. (Some texts might even amount to text fragments or something more key-word-y. Per the previous item, these will not necessarily be imported.)
There is a natural conflict between (a) my wish to simply have the contents in digital form, which would be best achieved by simply typing in the original text identically, (b) my strong tendencies to rework texts that I re-encounter, to add information based on new experiences and observations since the original writing, to have new ideas occur to me during reading, etc.
Whether (a) or (b) will dominate will vary from text to text.
Ideally, the texts will eventually be integrated elsewhere. Before (if ever...) this happens throughout, ages will pass. It might, however, be that some particularly interesting texts are given priority at an earlier stage. Ditto texts that happen to match a topic of unusual importance, that play in sufficiently well with some newer texts, or similar.
Texts integrated elsewhere will typically be removed from the corresponding page. Texts “given priority” might even by-pass this category entirely.
The notebooks were originally written in a mostly “chronological” manner, in that I simply wrote whatever occurred to me in the notebook that was currently “it”, with only rare attempts at a more thematic grouping. This will be reflected in the resulting pages. (At least at the beginning, I will not attempt to re-group the texts by e.g. theme.)
The pages will be given names like “Notebook 1”, “Notebook 2”, etc. The numbers reflect the order of import, not the order of original writing, (The latter would be hard to reconstruct even approximately, as I only very rarely made note of dates and order.)
Titles given to individual texts within the pages do not necessarily reflect a title present in the respective notebook, as titles were rare.
The following is an automatically generated list of other pages linking to this one. These may or may not contain further content relevant to this topic.