About

The world wide web of the late 90s and early 00s was fun because there was less structure. SEO, recommendation systems, and LLMs are designed to give you the minimal viable content, but sometimes its good to have a bit of roughage. This collection of creative writing, opinions, projects, and links to the work of others are my contribution to that.

The Exobase especially is a place for me to scout ahead with some `lol what happens if` ideas about the future and see if they work. I noticed a tendency in a lot of the sci-fi I consume for the medium term future to be hand-waved away as a dystopia or simplified to some Unified Earth, and I wanted to see if I could write a different style of future. Writing generally helps me practice conveying concepts and vibes clearly, concisely, and not boring-ly (LLMs seem to do the opposite!), whereas someone who never writes might struggle to have fully formed ideas about anything as nontrivial and interesting as the future.

Colophon

This site lives on the edge — Cloudflare Pages - which is free as in beer for me, and means faster response times for you regardless of where you are in the world. This site gets a 93/100 rating on PageSpeed insights, with most of the delay coming from useful cloudflare features like obfuscating my email address for automated scanners.

This is actually a static site, in that it loads everything from the server once, as even the entire Exobase is just a few hundred KB of text. This is committed into github so I have a versioned history of everything I write, and automatically deployed from there via wrangler.

Although very convenient, I have mixed feelings about Cloudflare being the gatekeeper and tracker of usage for this site and may well move to self hosting once it is a bit more stable. I am not a web developer, but I have found the Remix framework easy to work with, and tailwind css to be simple enough to create layouts which (mostly) adapt gracefully from phone to desktop. And I do use LLMs for help with various technical issues, since after all I am only human.