So I’ve had this domain – CastleNottingham.com – for going on two decades now. Originally it was for my little neighborhood Halloween home haunt . I’d use it to let everyone know when the haunt was happening and post photos of the build and event itself. It was great fun for a while, but eventually, like most things, it faded into the past. It was, in essence, my own little thing on the web.

I’ve been away from doing such things for a while, though as you can see from my photo, I still enjoy a bit of weirdness in my daily life.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that I needed a home on the web again. I don’t have any social media presence anymore except for Instagram. I’m pretty sure Facebook and Twitter have been used more to destroy than to build which is why I’m no longer there. If I’m not going to participate there, then why not make my own place again?

I’ve kept a hold of this domain. I used to have a Halloween and Horror blog called The Raven’s Barrow. Either due to incompetence or lack of ability it never seemed to pay for itself so I let it go. I’ll probably talk about this more in future post I suspect, but the end result of letting that domain go was that a Chinese link farm suddenly snapped it up. It had thousands of back-links so for them it was probably a good deal. I still regret letting that go because of that.

So here we are – the Commonplace Book of Patrick I Nottingham.

From the Wikipedia:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.

I don’t really plan on doing anything so that people can find this site. I’m mostly going to put a hodgepodge of things that interest me here and see what turns up. You might find a Halloween how-to right next to a post about Black Lives Matter which will be right after a great vegan seitan recipe. It’s my place, and there’s a lot things going on here.

If you find something – or many somethings – you like then leave a comment.

Until we meet in the real, Cheers.

Patrick I Nottingham

June 18th, 2020