Strange Strands Preface

Strange Strands was on my shortlist of names for the successor to What Planet is This?, another periodical hosted on inamidst.com, but I'm settling on "Eastward Ho!" for at least the codename of that successor project, so Strange Strands is freed up for this thing.

This is just the latest in a series of places that I've used to keep notes, including Bring It On Home, Swhack, miscoranda, noets, Eph, and What Planet is This?. You'd think I'd be sick of this sort of thing by now. Indeed, I also have numerous other private websites to jot down such things, and notebooks and scraps of paper and so on.

It's a mess, but as William Loughborough says, the clutter is inherent in the organism! I always learn stuff by setting up and maintaining these things, even if they feel like disasters at the time.

Often, these kinds of things change character very quickly. For example, What Planet is This? started off as a simple weblog style rantbox that was nice and sleek and elegant and didn't have any superfluousity. But as I concentrated on the kinds of things that I like to write I realised that antiquarianism was something I was really enjoying writing about, which forced me to become much more formal and painstakingly research each post. Eventually, of course, that became too much to maintain and so the original goal of just posting whatever comes to mind was lost, which was sad, but on the other hand I gained something which is still fuelling new ideas in the form of the aforementioned Eastward Ho!

So anyway, this is a bit of a fork of that original idea, but with the lesson learned that technological ramblings are something that should be confined to Swhack and miscoranda, though they might creep in from time to time. The plan is to invert, or rather swap, the amount of time that I spend on technology with the amount of time I spend on antiquarianism and other miscellaneous subjects.

The name "Strange Strands" is of course taken from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, i.e. "And palmers for to seeken straunge strondes | To fern hawles kouth in sondry londes." The strand in that context is of a beach, but I like the connotation of strand as in something that can be woven together into a tapestry, and also the district of London and the publication that first gave a home to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. The word strand is derived from P.Gmc. *strandas, possibly from the PIE root *ster- which means to stretch out.

It was last on the first shortlist I did for the Eastward Ho! project, which is interesting because often I'm at my best when I'm initially listing project names. I guess it's the zen factor. Sansmotif, the font name that I came up with for Cody Woodard, is a good example of that; phenny, my IRC bot, another. On the other hand, names such as pyrple and inamidst took an awfully long time to come up with.

I wonder what Shakespeare would've used as a nickname were he to have been able to get onto IRC? It's thought that one of his early sonnets was published in John Florio's work "Second Frutes" under the name of Phaethon, so perhaps that's a candidate.

Talking of Strange Strands, Shakespeare, Prefaces, and Phaethon, it's notable that I alliterate best in words starting with S or, especially, P. I'm not sure if that's because I'm most familiar with those because of my name, or if there's some other reason. I also tend to take note of words beginning with those letters.

One nice thing about Strange Strands is that I don't feel as compelled to give the posts nice neatly wrapped up endings, which I've often found to be a problem on miscoranda (though not, oddly, on What Planet is This?). I suppose it's because periodicals are by their natures open ended, so if each post is leaving off at a point where it's easy to start up again, that's optimal.