This website is a canvas to refine my thoughts. It’s neither a blog nor a personal wiki. Most pages are written for a specific audience I want to communicate something precisely to. Some pages are written to be read by myself. Some pages are tools (i.e. JavaScript programs) to be used by myself or others.
I will sometimes remove pages from Index if I don’t like them in their current state. However, they will still exist and be accessible if one has the URL.
Current interests include fighting games, game design, philosophy, prediction markets, and technical writing.
Other public presences:
Design
A lot of the design is straight from Butterick’s Practical Typograph,
and the site primarily uses his Century Supra font.
I have always liked Georgia and this font is more-or-less that but strictly better,
and the size of the .woff2 files is small enough that I think it’s acceptable to use as a web font.
The overarching goal is to make the text the main focus. Headings, dividers, text etc. do not use underlines or borders. This ensures that as much of the “ink” on the page is pure text.
Color is kept to a minimum. Links are the same color as regular text. This is a contentious design choice, as combined with the above it violates one of the most basic norms of web pages: Links are often both colored and underlined. Some websites forgo one or the other, but here they are neither.
So allow me an explanation.
Links on these pages are mostly supplementary to the text. Many blog posts and online news articles make use of inline links as a substitute for footnotes or inline citations, sneakily implying “my position is justified and I will not argue for it.”1 A litany of blue text exists primarily to say “look, I’ve done my research, buzz off.” The writer knows that barely anyone will click those links. Blurring the line between a link and a reference results in text designed, perhaps not intentionally, to deceive the reader and persuade them into a particular position.
When the links are merely supplementary to the text, they’ll still be seen when one is actually reading the text. They just won’t be seen at a glance.
By making links almost invisible by default, the text must be structured in a way to make them stand out if they want to act as links (i.e. something one skims the page for while on a journey to somewhere else). For example, in the lead of this page, there are a bunch of links. They are all at the end of a list item, in a list where each item is only one line. Did you have trouble finding them?
The exception to all the above is with code blocks, which use both colors (for syntax highlighting) and borders. Why? It looks prettier. Not a great answer. I’ve often thought that syntax highlighting is a bit ridiculous—one would scoff at English or any other human language being syntax highlighted. Why should a programming language be read differently? But no matter how many times or for how long I try and turn it off, it just doesn’t look right. The rational mind is subordinate to the monkey brain.
Built with
See Rewriting my website in Rust for the code (and the old code).
See also Should you make your own SSG?
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A footnote also lacks that persuasive power, being about as conspicuous as the little red circle I have denoting links. They’re also still in the text, just elsewhere, so they’re far less elusive than a link.
Inline citations are about as visible as blue links (cthor.me, 2025), but those are too formal. You would look strange using them in a blog post.
In any case, footnotes are a crutch for bad writing, letting the author ramble on and on about nothing with no regard for the reader’s time because “Well it’s just a footnote. You didn’t have to read it!”↩︎