Introductions

Danny from 2017: Accidentally, I’m adding this on New Year’s Day, 2017, which seems to harmonize with the notion of arbitrary beginnings and the declarations around them.  This was more coherent than the first first post, but clearly not by very much.

 

I think, more or less, I’ve stayed true to my proclaimed intentions for the blog, though Philomathy did (and likely continues to) suffer from the dereliction I anticipated.  The website I referred to, incidentally, was www.thestairwell.com, which has been totally defunct since well before 2009, and had been a high school collaboration with Victoria Panos (and eventually Geoff Core in university) where we’d post our webcomics, The Stairwell and Snow in October, respectively.

Alright, perhaps a high-twee mission statement with an extensive pre-ramble wasn’t the most astute PR decision I could have made, though in a few years, when Philomathy.org rules the Internet and cyber historians clamour to write its biography, its aggressive salutation will be vindicated and lauded. Luckily, I have between now and then to remove the actual first post where I was still fooling around with themes and emphasis colours.

Welcome, readers! At the time of this writing, you don’t exist yet. That’s fair: at its peak, my first (collaborative) website project was getting about two hundred unique hits per day, and nonetheless things were allowed to slide into dereliction1—I suspect I won’t have a web-comic this time around to entice readers for whom my tedious prose and occasional verse are insufficient to foster loyalty and fanaticism.  Part of the reason I’ve been averse to resuming a regular web presence is my worry that I’ll flake out again and disappoint a strangely large number of people.  I’ve also been grumbly about the (self-perceived) association of Weblogs with exhibitionism since the rise of LiveJournal, let alone Facebook, and this gross oversimplification has stunted my regrowth appropriately.2 I remain broadly impatient to follow the affairs of my friends using a broadcast model and expect nothing less than your impatience for the same; an open diary would sustain neither of our interests, and so this website will not be one.  I’m eager to provide value, insight, or at least pleasure for the honour of your time and consideration (though you may be even now in the throes of procrastination and I am contributing to the eventual dissolution of your academic or professional career), so while my publications may incorporate anecdotal information, I promise to vigilantly maintain their use as a means to an end.

What end, then?  I first conceived (and secured) philomathy.org in the hope of having a space to share my love of learning and knowledge with patient friends and likeminded strangers.  When I discover a fresh bit of information—or more importantly, a fresh and promising avenue of information—the pleasure it gives me is instantly diminished if I find I must inefficiently enjoy it alone.  I’ve also systematised many of my learning habits in ways that I think people interested in stuff might make use of, or build upon; rather than repeating these strategies irritatingly to a room full of semi-willing recipients with varying interest and sympathy, I plan to talk about them here.  Then, if you find you already know about these things and/or don’t care, you can depart with perfect discretion and not trouble yourself with pity for my idiocy.

Footnotes!  There will be footnotes.  I’ve discovered that WordPress is especially good at implementing footnotes copied directly from Microsoft Word3, and the digressional freedom this gives me is unmatched even by the noble parenthesis (which is self-consciously obtrusive by comparison, at least when not used in moderation, succinctness, or termination, thus).  I promise that my footnotes will always be of an entirely ancillary nature concerning the body text of my posts, so don’t trouble yourself for a moment to follow them.4

The topics I expect to write on largely concern self-education, the philosophies of information, learning , and study which I encounter, cerebral things which may give joy to more people than just myself, language and words (as you’ve already seen), resources I discover and possibly produce, and maybe the odd poem if I get really self-indulgent.  There is a beautiful, friendly, silly dog, as well as four inquisitive and photogenic cats in my family home.  I will never post pictures of them weekly.

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