Slipbox
Created: 2025-05-27 (19:20:00) — Modified: 2025-07-10 (15:10:37)Status: ongoing
I’m a relentless note-taker. It’s not enough to add pages per day to my journal and composition books, or add entries to my personal wiki, I’ve been keeping for years at this point a physical zettelkasten too.
A zettelkasten, a slipbox, is a system for organising your notes in the order they were created. I think. There are extensive resources out there and if you are so inclined you can disappear deep down the index card productivity rabbithole.
My method probably preserves all the overhead and none of the benefit, but it seems to work well enough. It’s how this website is organised!
I want this entry to be like an ongoing sampler of my handwritten notes. Sort of like a random-access blog, an accumulating collection of out-of-context half-thoughts. Um… enjoy!
2025
2025-07-28 (11:45:36)
Most people who read Engine Summer would, I imagine, not mind too much if they had to inhabit its largely peaceful postapocalyptic future. This is hardly utopia. There are some terrible truths that exist at the roots of this world. But if you lived in Little Belaire it is probably not something you would worry about in your day-to-day.
I’ve always liked the character of Blink, that John Crowley makes room in this world for someone who deliberately lives apart from others, in a tree in a meadow far upstream, but who is nonetheless known and valued. In the postapocalyptic future, I would probably want to live off in a tree too rather than hunkermunker in a warren.
2025-07-10 (10:18:24)
Reagan Library is a memory palace where what is signified has gradually and tectonically shifted from its signifier. Voices blurring together. Gaps in recollection. The things the monuments around the archipelago originally commemorated have been forgotten.
So, is the guidance text you encounter actually ever a reliable source? I get the impression it is more archaeological than authoritative. Which may be why it loses its coherence, loses its claim to represent the truth of this world, as all the other textual fragments gradually shuffle back into place.
2025-07-02 (10:07:44)
Sick day notes. Something for the website maybe. Linguistics reflections. I have never really written about this even though for several years it was everything to me. Reflections on:
- falling in love with linguistics almost from the get-go and reorganising my whole undergraduate degree around it;
- falling in love with all its different subfields, with phonology, morphology, syntax, computational linguistics, descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics… (never quite as fully with sociolinguistics or theoretical linguistics, but this might be because there were no courses on them); and
- finally, falling out of love with it after my honours thesis, going from that intensity to… nothing, for reasons that were never clear.
Why am I not a linguist, these days?
2025-06-27 (19:31:35)
Fashion thoughts. I may never be able to wear the nice accessories and clothes from places like Mimco, Myer, Witchery, et.al. Wandered into one this afternoon and they were certainly welcoming but there is no way their delicate, fuzzy, pretty things will go with my fraying jeans and op-shop shirts.
I have locked myself into a goblincore path dependency.
2025-06-25 (19:20:35)
Rereading Raving has led me down some strange alleys this month. McKenzie Wark frames raving as a temporary, dissociative escape from the scarification and no-future of our moment.
“what was once outside the spectacle, the two forces that might disrupt it: pollution and the proletariat. but we lost. now only pollution surrounds it as its externality, the remnant of historical time.”
I wonder if it’s an oversimplification to interpret this as simply about raving in the ruins, partying while the apocalyptic tidal wave bears down. Counterintuitively, discussing raving in these terms may open space for imagining redemptive futures at the same time it asserts there is no future.
Some things this has loosely led me to:
- Gruppo di Nun, Revolutionary Demonology, mainly for dark winter moods;
- Johanna Isaacson, The Ballerina and the Bull, and the idea of expressive negation; and
- José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, for its discussion of queerness as a horizon.
Assumably this will all lead somewhere.
2025-06-08 (09:11:08)
Idea for a zine about memory cards. The Animal Crossing essay could go in, of course, but also:
- finding other people’s save files on pre-owned cartridges;
- returning to old save files on memory cards after literal decades; and
- finding save files for games you no longer own, maybe never owned, only borrowed from friends or rented from Video 2000, or Video-EZY, or their grungier sibling Civic Video.
What did we lose when we stopped embedding these records of our play in proprietary, chunky memory bricks?
This is not just an exercise in nostalgia. It could also be a way of mining natural history, in the vein of Walter Benjamin, unearthing what these obsolete artefacts tell us about the cultural, economic and material forces of the time.
2025-06-02 (19:02:00)
Talking with R— who is working on a bootleg Gameboy cartridge, which immediately reminded me of the Sachen 8-in-1 Color cartridge I once owned and now appear to have lost.
8-in-1 contained such games as Ant Soldier, Sky Ace, Dan Laser, Zoo Block, Cap Knick=Knack, Flea Circus, Explosive and Magic Maze…
So imagine my surprise when we went to look it up, on finding alternative versions with entirely different sets of games.
Artic Zone [sic], Magical Tower, Railway, Worm Visitor, Bomb Disposer, 2nd Space, Black Forest Tale, Armor Force…
Virus Attack, Electron World, Trouble Zone, Dice Square, Pile Wonder [!!!], Snake Roy, Puppet Knight, Suleiman’s Treasure…
Alternative timelines branching out. What if, instead of struggling with Dan Laser and Cap Knick=Knack, I had all those years ago at Revolution CD purchased instead the version with:
Worm Visitor
or Pile Wonder [!!!]
Imagining videogames, but what about imaginary bootlegs? Or when the game exists but is so unfinished or illegible that the imagination cannot help but get pulled into the vacuum, to attempt reconstruction and salvage?
Something for the zine.
Endmatter
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