(OKLCH is the cylindrical form of OKLab — lightness, chroma, hue — designed so that equal numeric steps look like equal visual steps.)

The problem with picking colours by eye is not taste; it's fairness. This site is six sections that must feel like siblings — same lightness, same saturation, different hue — and human eyes are famously bad judges of that. A yellow and a blue with the same HSL "lightness" are nowhere near equally light. OKLCH fixes the yardstick: oklch(0.88 0.055 h) is perceptually the same pastel whatever you substitute for h, which is the whole mirror idea in one line of CSS.

Posts go one step further. Each post's surface drifts from its section's base by a few degrees of hue and a few hundredths of lightness — enough to feel, too little to name — and the drift is a pure function of the slug:

export function shadeFor(section: SectionKey, slug = '') {
  const base = SECTIONS[section].hue;
  const h = hash(slug); // FNV-1a — stable forever, everywhere
  return {
    hue: base + ((h & 0xff) / 255 - 0.5) * 16, // ±8°
    L: BASE.L + (((h >> 8) & 0xff) / 255 - 0.5) * 0.06, // ±0.03
    C: BASE.C + (((h >> 16) & 0xff) / 255 - 0.5) * 0.03, // ±0.015
  };
}

Try it — this widget runs the real function, live:

Deterministic means accountable. The same post is the same colour forever, on every build, on every machine. No database row stores it; no human maintains it. And because the palette is a function, it can be tested like one — the build runs every derivable shade against WCAG contrast thresholds and refuses to ship if a single combination fails. Taste gets you a nice palette; a build gate keeps it nice.

The full derivation lives in the colophon, because on a site about a mirror, showing your work is the brand.

Every piece began as an actual letter — drafted, addressed, and then played instead of sent. It is not sublimation, or not only. Some things want to be said at a pitch that words can't hold, and a stairwell at 11 p.m. turns out to be exactly that pitch.

Dear silence is the oldest and simplest: nine notes, patient. Second floor, evening has the neighbours in it — a door, a dog, a kettle — left in deliberately, because a letter with no world around it is a lie. What the radiator knows is built on the pipes' own E-flat. Unsent is the long one, and the only one I still can't play straight through.

The excerpt is synthesized placeholder audio, generated from code in this release’s key; the remaining durations are final and await their masters.

The film is silent except for the city's own first sounds, recorded on the spot — I have come to believe that dawn has a room tone, and that it is different from night's by one or two birds and a certain quality of bus.

Four minutes. No faces, no music telling you what to feel. The excerpt above — like the poster — is a procedural stand-in generated from this film's own shade, holding the player until the footage is exported.

We are surrounded by sealed things. Sealed appliances, sealed software, sealed arrangements between people that nobody is allowed to open and look at. The seal is sold to us as convenience and it is, mostly. But it teaches a posture: things arrive finished, and when they stop working they leave whole, and the interior of everything is somebody else's business.

Repair is the opposite posture, and it turns out to be load-bearing.

That winter I fixed the kettle, then a lamp, then the zip on a jacket I had worn maybe twice because the zip was broken and taking it to a tailor felt disproportionate. Then — and this is where it stops being about objects — I wrote to a friend I had let go quiet for three years, for no reason either of us could have named. The letter took longer than the kettle. The mechanism was harder to see. But the gesture was identical: open the thing, look at what actually failed, resist the story that it failed because it was always going to.

Most of what breaks does not break dramatically. A contact oxidises. A thread wears. Someone doesn't reply, and then the not-replying becomes the easiest thing in the room. Repair culture — real repair culture — is just the habit of noticing early, while the fault is still ninety cents.

The jacket works. The friend and I had dinner in March. The kettle is loud now in a way it wasn't before, and I have decided to hear it as purring.

These frames are from a week of walking the same kilometre of the Naviglio at the same twenty minutes, which is the closest thing I have to a discipline. Same route, same lens, no exceptions for weather. The constraint is the point: when you can't choose the subject, you start actually seeing the light, which was the subject all along.

A note on these images: the studies shown here are procedural placeholders, generated from this post's own shade of the section palette, standing in until the scans come back.

Personal sites die of dependency, not of neglect. The essay from 2009 is fine; the CMS under it is not. The database needs a version of PHP that needs a version of a server that nobody rents anymore. Every moving part is a clock counting down to a weekend of migration — and eventually one migration doesn't happen, and eleven years of writing 404s into the fog.

A directory of HTML has no clock, or almost none. Its dependencies are the browser and the filesystem — the two most backward-compatible artifacts in computing. It can move hosts with rsync. It can be archived by anyone with wget, including future me, including the Internet Archive, including a grandchild with a USB stick. Longevity is mostly the art of having fewer dependencies than the things trying to kill you.

The build can be as modern as it likes — this one runs a component framework, a typed content pipeline, and a contrast-checking gate — because the build happens once, on my machine, where complexity is cheap and reversible. What leaves the machine is inert. The reader pays no tax on my tooling: an article here is readable with JavaScript disabled, because the JavaScript is decoration, not load-bearing wall.

There are honest costs — no comments without a third party, search done ahead of time, anything "live" fenced off — and this site accepts every one of them. They are the membership fee of the only club that interests me: sites that will still open.

People pass through, but at this compression they become weather. A visit is a flicker; an afternoon of work is a shadow that leans; Christmas is a warm lamp burning in the corner of six consecutive seconds. What persists at this timescale is not activity but arrangement — the chair, the window, the light obeying its enormous clock.

I made it to learn what the eye can't sample and patience can. The solstice is visible. You can watch the year turn on a wall.

Player to come with the media phase; the poster is a procedural stand-in in this film's shade.

The mechanism matters. A ranked feed optimises for the marginal second of your attention, which means it optimises for whatever bypasses judgement. A chronological subscription — RSS, a newsletter, a friend's site checked on Sunday — optimises for nothing at all. It just delivers, in order, what someone chose to publish. The choosing is the signal. Everything a ranking adds is, definitionally, noise: it is the difference between what your people said and what a system predicts you'll react to.

(This site ships full-text RSS per section, plus a combined feed — built in the standard-pages phase — precisely because of this post.)

The practical setup is almost insultingly simple. A feed reader with maybe thirty subscriptions, weeded seasonally like a garden. No unread counts — that number is the ranking sneaking back in through the window. Sunday morning, coffee, read what's there, done. Some weeks that's forty minutes; some weeks it's five, because my thirty people had quiet weeks, and a system that can be quiet is precisely the point.

What I lost is real: serendipity at scale, the occasional gem from nowhere. What I got back is a reading life with a shape — authors whose thinking I can watch develop across months, disagreements that stay in context, and the restful knowledge that when there is nothing new, nothing pretends to be.

I had the top berth. Below me a man of about seventy read a paperback with the cover folded back, one thumb keeping his place, the way my grandfather did. We never spoke beyond buonasera. At Bologna he was replaced, silently, by a student who slept in her coat.

What I keep from these trips is never the destination. It is the stops in the small hours — Pescara, Termoli — stations lit like aquariums, one man with a trolley, the recorded announcement talking to nobody. You see a town with its face washed, before it has decided what to be for the day. I find it almost unbearably tender, and I have stopped apologising for that.

Somewhere after Foggia the light started. Not sunrise — the thing before it, when the window stops being a mirror and becomes a window again, and the sea arrives on the left like something remembered. I went to the corridor. The student was already there with two paper cups of coffee from the machine, and she handed me one as if we had agreed on it the night before.

Bari at seven smelled of bread and diesel. I walked from the station to the old town with my bag on my shoulder and my back complaining about the berth, and I was — there is no better word for it — arrived. Eleven hours is not what the journey costs. It is what it is worth.

The detours produced their own cast. A courtyard with a bathtub full of succulents. A bar that only seems to exist on Tuesdays. Two chess players in a doorway who let me film their hands but not their faces, which was the correct artistic decision and they knew it.

Eleven minutes, handheld, cut to the rhythm of walking. The soundtrack is an unedited voice memo of my own footsteps, which sounds like a gimmick and plays like a heartbeat.

The player lands with the media phase; the poster is a procedural stand-in in this film's shade until stills are ready.

Low water is the honest hour. The sea pulls back and shows its working — the mussel ropes, the dark stones, the old men who appear with buckets as if summoned. Everything smells stronger. The light comes in flat and long and lies across the wet sand like it is resting.

The turn is the strange one. For about twenty minutes nothing moves, and the water holds a stillness you can photograph but not quite describe — a held breath with a horizon in it. I missed it twice by getting coffee. The tide table does not wait for coffee.

High water arrives in the evening like furniture being put back. The beach shortens, the colours go deep, the day's evidence is filed away under half a metre of sea. I shot the last frame and walked back up the lane, and the tide, having no further need of me, carried on.

The studies shown are procedural placeholders in this post's shade, holding the layout until the scans arrive.

Ci torno ogni anno e ogni anno la casa mi restituisce una versione precedente di me. Nel cassetto del comò c'è ancora una scatola di conchiglie catalogate con l'etichettatrice, l'opera di un bambino che credeva che nominare le cose bastasse a tenerle. Sul muro della cantina, le tacche a matita delle altezze: io, mia sorella, due cugini che adesso vivono a Berlino e chiamano casa un'altra lingua.

Il tempo, qui, non passa: si deposita.

Quest'anno ho notato per la prima volta che mio padre sale le scale tenendo il corrimano. Non ne abbiamo parlato — non è una casa dove si parla di queste cose, è una casa dove si apparecchia per le otto e si discute se il basilico va lavato o solo pulito. Ma l'ho visto, e la casa l'ha visto, e tra le sue funzioni c'è anche questa: essere il luogo dove le cose si vedono un anno prima che si dicano.

L'ultimo giorno faccio sempre lo stesso giro. Chiudo le persiane una a una, stacco la corrente, lascio le chiavi nel posto che tutti conosciamo e che non scriverò nemmeno qui. Poi resto un momento nell'ingresso, al fresco, ad ascoltare la casa che torna ad essere di nessuno. Ci vediamo l'anno prossimo, le dico. Vediamo chi ti porto.

The first roll taught me how much I had been leaning on the delete button — not as a tool but as a licence not to look before shooting. The second roll taught me patience with my own seeing: half of it was shot in the same courtyard, at the same hour, because the light there earned it. The third roll I barely remember shooting, which I've decided is what fluency feels like.

The scans came back in September like letters from a slightly better photographer. Not technically better — there are missed focuses here that a phone would never permit — but better at choosing. Thirty-six chances make you a critic before the shutter instead of after.

Studies shown are procedural placeholders in this post's shade until the scans are prepared for the web.

The take runs from 23:40 to a little past midnight, twenty-five minutes in which nothing happens twice. The patch drifts the way analogue circuits do when a room cools: oscillators settle, a filter opens by a hair, and by the end the piece has moved somewhere I did not send it. That drift is the performance. My role was mostly to sit still and not intervene, which is harder than playing.

Patch notes is thirty seconds of me explaining the signal path, kept because listeners asked. The morning reprise is the same patch, powered on again at 6 a.m. — the machine remembering the piece slightly differently, the way you remember a dream at breakfast.

The playable excerpt is synthesized placeholder audio until the masters arrive; the other durations are final.

Each loop starts as a short phrase — piano, a bowed note, half a chord from a choir record — dubbed from tape to tape until the copy of the copy of the copy begins to bloom. Tape degradation isn't subtraction; it's a slow trade. You lose edges and gain fog, lose pitch and gain weather. Around the seventh generation each phrase stopped being a recording of an instrument and became a recording of the machine remembering an instrument.

The titles are honest: these are functional loops, made for specific situations. One for washing dishes in the evening. One the exact length of my old bus ride. One for the hour when the building goes quiet and you can finally hear how much sound "silence" was.

Volume two exists already, on three cassettes, waiting for the machine to break a little further. The playable excerpt is synthesized placeholder audio until the tapes are digitised.