Hi there 👋!
I’m Xavier Roy. I work in user assistance, which means I spend a lot of time figuring out how to explain complex things simply. This has taught me that the clearest explanations usually come from someone who just learned something, not from experts who’ve forgotten what confusion feels like.
You can also fine elsewhere 🌐
- Odyssey - a generic, mostly personal blog
- XavierRoy.in - a nameplate site
What This Place Is
Paper Arrow used to be a blog about user assistance. Now it’s become my thinking space, a place where I can save interesting ideas, make connections between different topics, and leave notes for myself to find later.
Why I Write Here
I write primarily for me. I need a way to remember what I learned, why it mattered at the time, and how I was thinking about certain problems. But I’ve noticed that when you write honestly about your own questions and confusions, other people often recognize their own.
This isn’t about building an audience or establishing expertise. It’s about having a conversation with my future self and maybe helping someone else who’s wrestling with similar ideas.
How I Think About Knowledge
As a kid, knowledge was just collecting facts and trivia. But now, I understand that it’s building a framework for understanding how things connect. This garden is my attempt to make that usually invisible process visible, albeit a messy work of trying to make sense of the world as I see it.
Some ideas here are fully formed. Others are seeds that might grow into something useful, or might not. Not everything here is practical or immediately useful. Some things are just interesting or surprising, and I think there’s value in trivia too.
Connect
If something here sparks a thought or connects to your own thinking, I’d like to hear about it. I’m especially curious about ideas that challenge what I’ve written, connections I might have missed, or resources that relate to themes you see emerging.