Quick bits:

• I got confused by the weather app, which told me to “party cloudly.” I wasn’t sure why a weather app would tell me to party, and was even more confused by what “cloudly” meant, but then came to the realization that that app was actually saying “partly cloudy.” Ahh! Conclusion: the weather app is sensible, but no fun.

• This week I learned that my left eye is my dominant eye. For most people, their right eye is the dominant one. Hooray — I’m special.

• It is nigh impossible for me to sit and home and get much done. I need to find places to work that are conducive to getting stuff done. The Shut Up & Write meetups are great for this, but I’d like to find places that I can go to whenever I feel like it. The city libraries, perhaps?

• No luck in my job search, alas. The job market for software engineers seems remarkably small right now. If you have any leads, I’d love to know about them — check out Get me a job in 2024!

• I’ve made progress in renewing my passport after being stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare for weeks. The Belgian consulate requires a recent Meldebescheinigung (proof of residence), for which making an in-person appointment is nearly impossible due to overwhelming demand and severe lack of appointment slots. The trick was to not attempt to book an appointment online, but rather call 115 (the Berlin Bürgertelefon), where they are able to give out appointments even if there are no online ones available. Whew!

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I have adjusted the design of denisdefreyne.com and now the headers are the same size as the text. I’m going for a more subtle, more minimal way of distinguishing sections on the site. I’m rather fond of it; the reductive design language feels nice and tight.

I have always had a soft spot for minimal black-and-white design, though never really gotten to the point where I was able to pull off something like that myself. It is remarkably difficult to do without sacrificing usability, but I think I succeeded with the latest design refresh.

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As I was browsing the internet for web design inspiration, I came across a handful of personal web sites that no longer exist. For some web sites, the connection times out; for others, all you get is a 404 Not Found error.

As I was finding more and more web sites that are gone, I felt a sort of discomfort, a sort of sadness. I felt this the strongest when I ended up on Zendaya’s web site — a site which I remembered had a particularly striking design, but which no longer exists:

Tell me I’m not the only one experiencing a sensation of sadness upon seeing this.

A personal web site is such a treasure. It is such a powerful way of expressing oneself. It reveals so much about its owner. Most obviously, this is in the way it is designed: use of color, typography, and whitespace, and the like. This is in the content as well: what does the site contain? What does it not contain? How is it structured, ordered? Where did the creator’s attention go?

Visiting someone’s web site is like being invited into their home. Each home is unique, and is an expression of its owner. Sometimes, that expression is powerful and in-your-face, and sometimes it is subtler. In any case,¹¹¹ Readers, you would not believe how hard I struggled not to make an “in any casa” pun.  a home always expresses its owner, and even the absence of expression is expression too. Being in someone’s home is an intimate experience.

And so it is with visiting someone’s web site. A personal web site is someone’s home on the internet, and even though the connection is parasocial, it is an intimate experience — quite subtle, but it still is.

So, when a personal web site disappears, it is a loss. It is emotional, because it is gone — it’s not somewhere else; at this point in time, it does not exist, and cannot be found anywhere.²²² Web sites often end up being archived by the Internet Archive, but an archived web site is not a replacement. It has lost its personal-ness; it is someone else’s property now. 

Fiction and creative non-fiction pieces of writing that exist in print, like books and magazines, are also an expression of their author. So are paintings and sketches. But those pieces use a medium that has an intrinsic longevity to them. A book cannot simply vanish.

Web sites can vanish — evidence provided above. How would I know that denisdefreyne.com still exists? I suppose I could visit it to check, or set up automated alerting. But those actions deal with correction, not with prevention. While it is unlikely that my web site will disappear, it is still possible. Forgetting to pay the hosting bills and forgetting to renew domains are just two ways in which sites go away.

Personal web sites are all fated to disappear — soon after the proprietor’s passing, if not sooner. I wish there were easy ways to prevent web sites from disappearing in such cases. WordPress’ 100-Year Plan comes to mind, but I’m skeptical.³³³ WordPress’ 100-year plan costs $ 38 000, which is a lot of money. That’s $ 380 per year, or over $ 30 per month, which to me seems excessive for a web site which is primarily static. 

You could argue that books can also disappear: a book dropped in a river will get water-logged and unusable, for instance. But then we’re talking about a single copy of a book, not the book as a concept: I could purchase a new copy if I wanted.

With books on one side of the spectrum of longevity, the other side has the transient. Live performances are an example of a transient experience; they are primarily intended to be enjoyed in the moment.

The problem with web sites is that they are much more transient than they pretend to be. A book on your living room table will be there tomorrow. A web site that you visit today will likely be around tomorrow — but that is so much less likely.

The disappearance of a personal web site feels like a little death. It is like a home that is not just abandoned, but lying in complete ruin, or perhaps even fully demolished. The house is gone, and there is no forwarding address. There is nowhere to go but to turn back and leave, unsatisfied and powerless, taking with you the sadness of loss.

The Squarespace “Website Expired” message makes it worse. It is the landlord showing up when you visit, only to tell you that this property has been seized and unceremoniously destroyed. You, as a visitor, aren’t really mean to be here. The landlord tells you that you are not welcome, and that the old tenants, well, they had it coming.

Most people don’t have personal web sites. For many people that I know, the closest they get to that is having an Instagram profile. There is little you can do to customize an Instagram profile to really make it yours. An Instagram profile won’t ever be all that customizable, because that’s not in Instagram’s interest. An Instagram profile is a mechanism for getting likes and driving engagement, not in your best interest, but in Instagram’s. Your Instagram profile is not yours; it’s Instagram’s.

The combination of rarity and expressivity is what makes personal web sites so special and so powerful.

So, it is no surprise to me that I feel the loss. A web site that no longer is, is like a destroyed home, except the force of destruction is minimal.

All right, that’s enough being emotional about the loss of Zendaya’s web site. (Would still love to have it back, though. Anyone got her number?)

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On Monday, I got nearly run over by the police. A police car stood in a side street to the right, and accelerated when I cycled past. I braked and evaded, but my wheels slipped on the street which was sandy from nearby construction projects, and I crashed on the asphalt.

Physically I am fine, with just a few scrapes and bruises, but the police called an ambulance anyway, which I assume they did to cover their asses. Mentally though, it required some processing time — this incident could have transpired far worse.

How does one handle incidents that involve the police where you’re in the right?

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Entertainment:

• I finished Baldur’s Gate 3!⁴⁴⁴ Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023), published by Larian Studios.  The game had been slowly ramping up its intensity, and near the end I had to deal with the consequences of the choices that I have made — not the ideal story choices, but the best I could do. I might load up an older save and make different choices to a better ending — not that I’m not happy with the one I chose, but I can do better!

• Good progress on Attack Surface.⁵⁵⁵ Cory Doctorow, Attack surface (New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021).  This book is making me a bit paranoid.

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Links

• No more forever projects (Diana Kimball Berlin)

• Accepting AI’s Weirdness (Aboard)

• Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2023 refresh (Lynn Fisher): So cool!

• Dakota Johnson on ‘Madame Web’ Blowback: “I’ll Never Do Anything Like It Again”. Dakota Johnson hits the nail on the head: You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.