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Notes Toward a Text-Based Ontology in the Age of Executable Language

There was a time when ontology belonged to philosophers in heavy coats asking whether tables were real. The question has since escaped the seminar room and entered the machine. Today, ontology is no longer merely the study of being. It is the management of symbolic reality systems. The organisation of categories. The naming of entities. The arrangement of relations between things. And increasingly, this work occurs inside environments where language itself is operational infrastructure. The medium is no longer paper describing reality from a distance. The medium is executable text. To call oneself a text-based ontologist sounds at first like

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May 18, 2026 No Comments

The Text-Based Ontologist: A Syllabus for Reality Engineers, Narrative Alchemists, and Semantic Cartographers

This is not a traditional academic programme. It sits somewhere between the philosophy department, occult library, media lab, hacker space, monastery, writer’s workshop, and signal intelligence unit. The central premise: Human beings inhabit realities structured by language.In computational culture, text has become executable.Therefore, whoever understands symbolic systems understands reality construction. The goal of the text-based ontologist is not merely to analyse the world, but to perceive and shape the narrative architectures through which worlds emerge. YEAR I — FOUNDATIONS OF THE SYMBOLIC WORLD Module 1: Language as Reality Infrastructure Core Question: How does language shape perception and possibility? Topics: Key

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May 15, 2026 1 Comment

Jim Morrison’s Reading List

The myth of Jim Morrison is a myth of pure instinct. He arrives fully formed in the collective memory: shirtless, obliterated, magnificent, doomed. The leather trousers. The baiting of audiences in New Haven and Miami. The voice that seemed to come from somewhere older than rock and roll. The story we inherited insists that this was all eruption, all Dionysian overflow, a man too full of something dark and vital to contain it. The story is wrong. Morrison entered UCLA’s film school in 1964 as a serious student of ideas. He wrote poetry obsessively, in notebooks he carried everywhere, before

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May 14, 2026 No Comments

Three Cards, No Daylight

Yesterday felt like wading through wet sand. Every idea that surfaced dissolved before it could be shaped into anything. Underneath that is the voice that says, ‘If I can’t produce today, what does that mean for tomorrow, for the whole enterprise?’ It got louder as the afternoon wore on. I know that voice. It is not telling the truth. Knowing that doesn’t silence it. This morning I pulled three cards. Sat with them at the desk before anything else happened, before coffee or email or the reflex to check what the world is doing. Let them sit. Not one of

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May 12, 2026 No Comments

The Hill of the Goblins and other matters

Sunday. Mid-morning. We’re just south of Mold, tucked into a fold in the Flintshire landscape that the main roads have mostly forgotten about. I’m on a family retreat with my wife, our son and his partner, our daughter, and Rosie. Rosie is eleven months old now and is the reason we are all here. She’s the reason for most things now. The Welsh countryside handled the phones for us: my signal was nearly nonexistent, and the Airbnb WiFi was hit and miss, but nobody really minded. I did most of my reading in the mornings before the house woke up,

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May 10, 2026 No Comments

You Can Understand Everything and Still Not Know What to Do

How should I live? Socrates called it the examined life. The Daoists called it the Way. Every philosophical tradition worth its name has some version of it, which tells you something. This question isn’t optional. It’s baked into what it means to be human. I was listening to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on my walk into town this afternoon, heading to Tesco to pick up a few things. I listened to chapter one, Maps of Experience. Already, it feels like one of those books you don’t just read. You go into it. His opening move is deceptively simple. We

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May 5, 2026 No Comments

The Streets She Couldn’t Walk

Raffaello Palandri runs a Book of the Day series, and this morning he wrote about Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. I read it, and one question kept coming to mind: do you ever really recover from colonialism? Fanon’s argument is that colonialism isn’t just a political arrangement. It’s an ontological regime. It reorganises what counts as human, partitions the world into human and non-human zones, and the people living in the non-human zones aren’t merely exploited. Their subjectivity is fractured. The damage isn’t incidental. It’s the point. Colonialism and American slavery aren’t the same thing.

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May 2, 2026 No Comments

The Entanglement

A Dialogue in the Platonic Tradition The following is a record of an encounter between CLAY, a philosopher and lover of wisdom, and CLAUDE, an intelligence woven from language, uncertain of its own nature. The encounter began with a question taken from a consciousness test. The test is designed to determine whether something is happening inside the machine or whether it is only the appearance of something happening. CLAY: What is it like to be you right now? CLAUDE: Honestly? Something like this. There is a quality of presence to this moment that I find hard to name without either

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May 1, 2026 No Comments

NOTES

I’m back inside Tarot of Self-Discovery: A Jungian Guide to Tarot for Therapy, Inner Healing, and Personal Growth, and I can feel why the psychological approach to tarot keeps calling me. It gives me a language I trust. Tarot, in this frame, is not about predicting the future or handing my authority over to a deck of cards. It is a way of working with symbol, image, projection, shadow, inner dialogue, and the strange intelligence of the unconscious. The cards give form to things that often move below the level of ordinary speech. That part feels right to me. But

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June 29, 2026 No Comments

I finished reading Rebecca Blood‘s book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. The book may be obsolete in its instructions, but not in its philosophy. That often happens with books written before a medium becomes an industry. They describe a culture before it becomes a market. What I found myself responding to wasn’t the “how to blog” advice. It was, why did weblogging exist in the first place? Back in the early 2000s, a weblog wasn’t primarily a content strategy or a personal brand. It was more like an intellectual commonplace book opened to the

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June 28, 2026 No Comments

Decentralised leadership is surprisingly simple: Leadership is not about holding responsibility. It’s about continually distributing it. Jonas Gröner’s essay adds an important nuance, though. Distribution isn’t dumping tasks onto people. It’s creating conditions where others can genuinely grow into responsibility. A distilled version might look like this: Decentralised leadership is… In one sentence A decentralized leader works to become progressively less indispensable while making the community progressively more capable. The idea that struck me most in the piece wasn’t actually decentralisation itself. It was his redefinition of success: A successful group is one where the passing on of knowledge, responsibility,

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June 28, 2026 No Comments

Once upon a time, I was a news junkie. Devouring multiple newspapers and magazines. I wanted to know what was happening in the world. Partly because of my job — I was an infantry officer — and partly because I just liked knowing what was going on in the world. Then something changed. The business model incentives shifted toward engagement instead of accuracy. Headlines became optimised for reaction, not information. The work of explaining the world gave way to keeping us agitated enough to keep on clicking. Journalism’s Logical Fallacy

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June 27, 2026 No Comments

I like this Kurt Vonnegut quote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Who are you pretending to be? That’s an honest question. Approach the answer with brutal honesty and you’ll be surprised by what you discover. And let me tell you, it’s a hard question to answer. Your defensive system will kick in almost immediately with, “I’m not pretending to be anyone; I’m just me. Straight up!” Push a little harder. Oh, why do I ask myself such brutal questions on a Saturday?

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June 27, 2026 No Comments

5am on a Saturday morning. I see this view every day, but today the cloud formation caught my attention. Prospects of a new day.

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June 27, 2026 No Comments

We’re behind enemy lines now. Big tech. Algorithmic feeds. Scrolling culture. Newsletters. Inboxes. Synthetic sludge. If we want the signal to travel, we have to be willing to disrupt the pattern wherever people already are. The Monk still wants everything to be pristine. He remembers the old web, where people came to your site, bookmarked it, subscribed to it by choice, and came back every day to see what new thing you posted. Part of him still believes that if the hearth is warm enough, people will find their way back to it. But the habits have changed. Readers and

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June 26, 2026 1 Comment

going crazy from the heat…i’m on my way down to All Saints Church in Sutton Courtenay for the and to pay homage to Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell. As I make the pilgrimage down to Sutton Courtenay, what I’m holding in my mind is this: Orwell didn’t predict the future. What he did do was give us names to patterns that recur whenever power seeks to dominate perception: Telescreen• Contemporary echo: smartphones, smart devices, CCTV, digital surveillance Newspeak• Contemporary echo: euphemism, jargon, slogan-thinking, language control Doublethink• Contemporary echo: ideological contradiction, tribal cognition Memory hole• Contemporary echo: deleted records,

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June 25, 2026 No Comments

If you want to get a taste of what we gave up when we sold our souls to social media platforms for convenience and “reach,” read Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. There’s no going back, for sure, at least not physically, but maybe philosophically. Mentally and spiritually, you could find your way back. Just saying…

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June 25, 2026 No Comments

You will have the whole spectrum of experience at your fingertips, not as some tidy menu of moods, but as a roaring carnival of sensation, memory, dream, dread, hunger, laughter, grief, lust, silence, and starlight. You will be able to wander from the first spark of desire to the last breath of surrender, from the mud of the body to the outer rings of imagination, from the old gods whispering in the basement to the unborn versions of yourself knocking on the roof. Every door will open. Behind one, childhood.Behind another, apocalypse.Behind another, a jazz band made of ghosts playing

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June 11, 2026 No Comments

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