about this site

The front page is a letter. Certain words in it are underlined, and an underline means one of three things. A solid line invites the sentence to grow a short aside. A wavy line hands you a small stack of my essays on that idea, which slides in along a bookshelf. A scarlet line is a door taking you somewhere else.

If you have JavaScript turned off, the asides are ordinary footnotes at the bottom of the page and the stacks are simply all shown. Same words, plainer arrangement. Nothing is hidden from you either way, and the shelf has everything on one page if you would rather just read a list.

The library

The library is the table of borrowed books: the works and the people all of this came from. Its piles stand in a different order every visit, shuffled in your browser as the page loads — a library is not a ranking, and the order things happen to be written down in shouldn’t read as one.

Nothing else on this site moves, and nothing anywhere moves as you scroll.

Privacy

No cookies. No analytics. No tracking of any kind, first or third party. I do not know that you are here, and I have not built anything that could tell me. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

How it is made

Written in markdown, built with Astro into plain static HTML. The letter carries a couple of kilobytes of JavaScript, the library carries a few hundred bytes, and every other page carries none.

Set in Source Serif 4 by Frank Grießhammer, with Fraunces on the book spines and the tabs — the things that are objects rather than words. Both self-hosted via Fontsource.

There is one photograph on this site, of me, on the bio page. Everything else you can see — every book, the table, the cloth — is drawn in CSS.

There are no dates anywhere on the site. ☼ marks what is newest.