This article describes a philosophy and rationale to the usage of the encyclopedia eidolica.
Circles of broadcasts
There are two questions I consider when communicating on the internet:
- how long, and with how much polish, does the format allow?
- for what audience, and how conversationally?
As of 2025, these choices are generally paired along a single axis: you can have completely unpolished, high-conversational content; or you can have polished, highly-unidirectional content (comments sections be damned). Polished, high-conversational content exists in select niches; unidirectional microblogging looks a bit like a ‘now’ page, a low-traffic sense of ‘status.’
I’ve been creating additional niches to allow myself more modes of communication, somewhere in the middle, and for smaller and smaller audiences. I don’t want to completely prohibit people from finding my thoughts, but I don’t want to make it so completely professional that off-the-cuff aphorisms coexist with longer reflections.
For example, with paralogue, a creative forum I co-run with some friends, I might discuss strategies for project management, conclusions from a book — I construct the post with the sense that it’s opening a broader dialogue.
However, if I read a book and I have some general reflections on the book, I don’t necessarily need to announce it, place it alongside major projects, etc. It can live as a set of spare thoughts for inter-reference.
Speaking of interreference…
We tend to fetishise tools, when we really should be fetishising our habits.1 I find myself maintaining the same habits but finding new venues in which to perform them and elevate them to higher effectiveness. I used GTD for almost a decade; but my life changed over time, and in the absence of a massively cross-context, cross-modal lifestyle, my task tracking habits looked a lot more like a day journal. I would open a text editor, jot down what I was assigned or what I set out to do, and then just get it done that day.
In the past while I’ve migrated to bullet journalling on paper for quick, inter-referenced notes about my day. And I think in general it increases my comprehension, creating prompts and mnemonics to increase chronological recall.
As I read and annotate books, I often have little thoughts, but honestly nowhere to put them. I track the citations I want to preserve, but nothing further. If I collect enough citations across books and synthesise them, I have a blog post. This format doesn’t really happen that often for me, though.
In the absence of a system…
… things decay. Here’s how the eidolica is being constructed in intention:
- mid-length, low-polish thoughts that are reflective and non-dialectic;
- poems that don’t necessarily belong on my blog;
- and other reflections being worked out over time
You can’t adopt anyone else’s system wholeheartedly. There’s always a way in which it has to become yours.
I do not yet have a system for using this notebook, so this document will stay a living one.
Footnotes
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That is to say, many digital gardens blossom and die due to their own potential — staying too open, never eventually solidifying into a place in one’s life. In trying to create this notebook, I scoured a variety of projects, ‘frameworks’ and bespoke gardens for reference and inspiration but inadvertently they were disposed of by their authors. ↩