i've always disliked it when sites don't have anything on them, so one of my goals from the start has been to avoid that. unfortunately after two years it's looking like i may have done a little too well in filling up my site and now there's too MUCH stuff, more than anyone can keep track of (including me sometimes). prompted by the fact that people keep emailing me to ask about stuff i've already written about, i wondered if there was any way to make it easy for people to check in advance, but without having to read literally every word on the site. then, inspired partially by this novel with unusual structure i've been reading lately (dictionary of the khazars, i realized that books had already solved this issue centuries ago by including an alphabetized index at the end, and that i could make one for my site too. i suppose in my case it's particularly helpful because i have a tendency to go off on random tangents in the middle of essays on completely unrelated topics, and i suppose in a pinch this could also serve as a catalog of my interests and obsessions, especially entries with many links. i did this all by hand of course, so no guarantees are made about completeness, and of course sometimes i chose to include something not because i thought it would be useful but because i thought it would be funny.