The words this house uses

A codex is the bound book that replaced the scroll: pages, an order, a place for everything. The site is kept as one, added to slowly and meant to be reread, rather than as a feed.

First earned at About →

The one hand that writes, revises and signs the codex, and chooses what hangs in it. Every visible byline reads Epimystic; the keeper is the person behind that name.

First earned at About →

The two Greek roots in the name. Episteme is what can be verified and defended at a blackboard; mystery is what resists the blackboard entirely. The house lives in the narrow country between them.

First earned at About →

The single line the nine rooms stand on. Mathematics, physics, philosophy, technology and intelligence on one side; art, music, mythology and literature on the other. A thread or a link that crosses from one side to the other is said to cross the seam.

First earned at the home page →

The boundary between the knowable and the unknowable is kept as a shoreline, not a wall: somewhere the codex goes down to often, rather than a limit it stops at.

First earned at About →

Art, music, mythology, literature, mathematics, physics, philosophy, technology and artificial intelligence: the rooms the house actually has. Mathematics stands between the two sides as the hinge.

First earned at the nine themes →

Each of the nine has a room: its invocation, its essays as field notes, a short shelf of works with an opinion on each, and the doors across the seam to its neighbours.

First earned at the mathematics room →

Each room has a drawn polygon, three sides for art up to eleven for intelligence, that is drawn on arrival and reused wherever the room is named. The nine together are the constellation on the home page and the map on the Index.

First earned at the colophon →

The panel behind the Index button: the nine rooms with their invocations, the sky at a glance, and the routes through the codex. The square of nine on the home page is the same nine, laid out as a map.

First earned at the home page →

An essay is set the way type is set: the month it first appeared. When it is revised later, the revision is named beside it and recorded in the revisions.

First earned at the revisions →

A change to an essay after it was set that a reader should know about: a correction, an addition, an instrument. Each is dated and explained; a change to the furniture around an essay is not a revision.

First earned at the revisions →

A word two or more essays carry. Follow it to see where the same question is picked up in another room. A word only one essay carries is not a thread; it stays on that essay unlinked.

First earned at the threads →

Five essays in an order a person chose, each path crossing the seam at least once. Three exist; each essay on a path says where it leads next.

First earned at the paths →

The keeper’s mark at the end of every essay: the room’s sigil, the date set, the door across the seam, the next step on a path, the plain-text and JSON forms, and the four verbs.

First earned at an essay’s foot →

One of the seal’s verbs, and the small word beneath each pull quote: it copies the line with its address, so a sentence can be carried off and traced back.

First earned at an essay →

The site has no sign-up and sends nothing. To be told when the codex grows is to give a feed reader one of its addresses.

First earned at Follow →

The essay’s leaf alone turns to parchment; the rest of the site stays dark. The choice is kept in the reader’s browser and nowhere else. Celestial is the dark leaf, the default.

First earned at an essay →

Every essay carries drawings in the house’s hand, made in code and drawn in light on the page; many were first set down in pigment in the atelier. Each opens as a plate.

First earned at the atelier →

The keeper’s paintings, hung in rooms. The geometry the figures draw in light was first set down here by hand.

First earned at the atelier →

Every work an essay leans on, in one place, with a line on each and a link back to the essay that read it.

First earned at the library →

A full-screen instrument of living geometry, played by hand. An instrument, not a text: what you make is the address, and the link keeps it.

First earned at the loom →

What the rooms have promised and not yet written, kept with the premise each was promised with. A promise has a date of beginning and none of arrival.

First earned at the bench →

In the yantra, the point from which the figure unfolds. The house has a centre too, reached from the centre of the map rather than from a link; it asks for understanding, not for a click.

First earned at the home page →

One essay a month on what moved in the machinery of intelligence, written from the record in the month’s last days. The one dated thing the codex keeps.

First earned at the series →