Welcome to my website!

When I was younger, I misread a story about reeds keeping secrets

I was wrong

In the read story the reeds share the secret. They whisper it when the wind blew through them. But thats not how I remembered it, I thought you could tell the reeds anything and that they would hold it

So I did

For a long time I would start journal entries with "Dear Reed," like it was something that could listen without judging or speaking back

Since then I began working on a commonplace book and now I'm working on this website to be a companion to my pen and paper commonplace book

A collection of things I would tell the reeds but can't be added to a pen and paper book

If you've stumbled onto this website feel free to look around

What is a commonplace book?

A commonplace book is a personal notebook used to collect information that the writer finds interesting, useful, or otherwise memorable

Commonplace books have been a thing for a long time, with people such as Marcus Aurelius and Mark Twain keeping personal commonplace books

They can include quotations, facts, lyrics, drawings, essays, or anything else that the writer might want to keep in a handy place for later reference

My commonplace book

I started my own commonplace book because I wanted a place to keep thoughts that felt less restrictive than a journal

I know that I wrote about starting journal entries with 'Dear Reed' in the main page, and that is true, but I always found it difficult to keep up with journaling. I just found it hard to force my life into a narrative

So when I found about commonplace books liked the less restrictive idea. Maybe I'm insane because I found it much easier to actually write just random things I find interesting than to do the whole 'today I did..." song and dance

The next obstacle was how to actually write it. You ever buy a nice looking notebook or journal only to never use it because you don't want to 'ruin' it? Yeah, thats what I was afraid of, especially since I had awful handwriting

And another issue? How would I organize things? I was afraid that trying to force specific categories or tags would cause issues. I'd run out of pages or give too many to a category that I won't use

My solution was to use a secondary wastebook. I buy a cheap spiral notebook and add any entry without worrying about organization, just writing as it comes. I add a simple tag to each entry

'Quote','Stickers','Media Commentary','Recipes','Today I Learned'~ Stuff like that

Once I fill out that cheap spiral I tear all the pages out and organize the entries by tag

That’s when the actual nice notebook comes in, the one I'm afraid of ruining. After organization I rewrite all those entries into that notebook, which is my actual commonplace book

Is this the most efficient system? Absolutely not

Is it an overengineered solution to an extremely simple problem? Yes

So what is this website?

Soon enough I came across another problem

How could I add certain things to my commonplace book? Things like gifs or fanart or sounds?

Does the nature of their medium mean they shouldn't be eligible to be 'interesting' enough to keep in a commonplace book?

I think not. But I also didn't just want to save those things to a simple file. I've always seen my commonplace book as a museum of things I find interesting, like my pen and paper commonplace book the other portions should be curated the same way

Is this the most efficient system? Absolutely not

Is it an overengineered solution to an extremely simple problem? Yes

While its not much now, it is functional, which is better than I honestly thought it would end up for someone who had no experience with HTML

Blinkie and Stamps Gallery

Part of what inspired me to build this website are blinkies. I didn't grow up in this era of the internet and these icons always fascinated me

Originally these would have been on their own page but I decided to just put them on the main page