My Goals and Method

I poured a lot of love and time into Drollery’s design and then I let it stagnate for a long time. During that stagnation I’d visit the website, partially because it just gives me joy and partially hoping that I’d find some inspiration to start using it again. That inspiration did finally arrive, not from a nostalgia trip, but instead from a rekindled love for the medieval that grew in me while reading “The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis”, as well as exploring medieval theology more deeply. A few other things transpired to provide the ultimate inspiration, including my starting of “The History of English Podcast” and a renewed desire to read weighty works.

My new, primary goal for Drollery is to be a place to share the primary sources of the Middle Ages, as well as writings adjacent to or in the same spirit as those Medieval writings. That’s why Tolkien’s Mythopeia poem exists in the ‘Folio’, it’s a spiritual successor to that body of text developed between roughly 300 A.D. and 1500 A.D. If that was the sole purpose of Drollery than it’d prove redudant and would take a back seat to many wonderful places to obtain these texts. My own spin on this is to not only share those works, but to do so with a reinvisioned, modern take on marginalia. I intend to put my own thoughts into the margins, adding doodles and drollery that fit the texts, as well as notes I’ve made during my own reading. That means that these pages will be somewhat “alive”, my notes will grow and expand as I consider and reconsider the texts.

For now my intended method is to mark up and annotate these texts on physical paper, with a literal pen, and then transcribe those notes onto the website. I’m hoping that by working this way I can keep this more sustainable, as I’m already interacting with these types of works in this way, so it should be just the extra step of transcription.

To that end, I’d like to make a disclaimer regarding this decade’s newest buzzword; “AI”. I am not anti-AI/LLM. I use them every day at my job. In truth, I will likely use it here as well. However, I want my words to be my own, and so they shall be my words that are found in the margins, and not the words of Claude, Grok, or any other LLM. My use of LLM is going to largely be in the editing process. Getting these texts formatted properly on this website is a lot of tedious work and it’s the exact kind of work that LLMs are excellent at doing. This largely will mean pulling in source texts and properly adjusting them to fit the markup required to be styled properly. I’ve also started to use Canva for editing the original medieval marginalia, so that’s another main use here. Finally, I am going to play around with using image generation tools to create original images. I will try my best to annotate these generated images appropriately and I do not intend for them to become the only or even primary source for my drolleries.

Lastly, just a housekeeping note, much of the original posts that were found here at Drollery have been moved to die-trying . If you want to continue keeping up with my very sporadic personal posts, that’s the best place for them. I also have a not-yet-finished theology website I’ve been working on called “Particularly Baptist”, it’s got a similar design to Drollery, but with a 17th century aesthetic, I’ll move my very few theological posts there when it’s ready.