About This Site
Noctis: The Latin translation is “of the night.”
Adversaria: A very old word. It once meant a book of miscellaneous notes, remarks, and extracts. A place where a person kept what they weren’t ready to throw away, but weren’t quite sure how to organize either. Not a diary. Not a scrapbook. Something in between. A collection of random things worth keeping.
What's Kept Here?
A few bits and bobs.
Vintage typewriters. The machines themselves, and what gets typed on them. Short lines, half-finished thoughts, the occasional repair. Some of which might actually be successful.
Black and white photography. Strangers, mostly. People who agreed to be looked at for half a second, or didn’t notice at all. Maybe an old building on its way to becoming a parking lot. If you’re the stranger in one of these photographs, get in touch. I’ll send you a copy if you want it.
Whatever else earns a place. Random thoughts and opinions. All kinds of detritus, both found and invented.
In Good Company
The commonplace book is an old practice. Marcus Aurelius kept one. What we now call Meditations started as notes he wrote for no one but himself. Leonardo da Vinci filled his with sketches and stray observations on everything from anatomy to water.
John Locke wrote an actual method for keeping one. Thomas Jefferson kept several. So did Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and H.P. Lovecraft, each collecting lines and images they weren’t ready to let go of.
None of them were trying to build something. They were just saving what mattered enough to keep. This is the same thing, only with a camera and typewriter instead of a quill.
About Me
My name is Tony, and I’m Gen X. One of the Latchkey Kids.
By day I work in marketing, developing and maintaining a company website, running social media, increasingly building things with AI. Most of what I do lives on a screen.
Typewriters are the opposite of that. They’re tactile. Real. Moving metal parts you can actually see. Hit a key and something happens, right then and there. No server, no distractions in between.
I’ve been a photographer for over twenty years, and never made the jump to film. Tried it. It’s not for me. Digital works fine there.
In school, I won a few Young Author awards for short stories I wrote. Somewhere in a life I didn’t end up living, maybe I’m a journalist. Maybe a writer. This blog is the closest I’ve come to it.
The older I get, the faster time seems to move. Years feel like yesterday.
We used to treasure fleeting moments, preserving them in scrapbooks: faded green Polaroids with handwritten notes on the back. Now those moments live on a smartphone, forgotten the instant they’re taken, lost forever somewhere in the cloud.
That’s the pull, really. Not nostalgia for its own sake, but the urge to slow down long enough to notice something before it’s gone. A typewriter makes you commit to a word. A photograph, even a digital one, makes you pay attention for a second longer than you would otherwise. This blog is where I try to hold onto that. My own scrapbook, typed instead of taped in.
I’ll probably never write that novel, or sit behind a newsroom desk. But I can write this.
One post at a time.