Signal Leak: Why I Built This Site
OPENING TRANSMISSION
LOG STATUS: UNSTABLE (EXPECTED)
SOURCE: MANUAL CONSTRUCTION / NO BACKUPS
AUDIENCE: UNKNOWN
DO NOT OPTIMIZE
This Wasn’t Meant to Be Clean
This site is not a portfolio.
It doesn’t load fast on purpose.
It doesn’t explain itself well.
It doesn’t guide you gently from Point A to Point B.
I didn’t want a clean grid of book covers and outbound links.
I didn’t want a neutral landing page that says “author, critic, contributor” in tasteful sans-serif and asks nothing of you.
I wanted something that felt found.
Something you don’t scroll so much as move through.
This site is not a portfolio.
The Internet Is Getting Too Polite
Most personal sites are becoming storefronts or résumés wearing creative skin.
Even the “weird” ones are optimized now:
- clean typography
- tasteful whitespace
- clear value proposition
- frictionless exits
That’s fine. That works.
It just wasn’t what I NEEDED.
It isn’t what [REDACTED] needed.
I wanted a place where friction remained.
A place that felt strangely analog in a digital landscape.
Where the interface could feel slightly wrong.
Where the design could imply intent instead of explaining itself.
A place that doesn’t reassure you it’s safe.
(This was written after the site already existed.)
It isn’t safe.
This Is a Shrine, Not a Brand
Everything here is deliberate, even when it looks broken.
The scanlines.
The flicker.
The panels that don’t quite align.
The noise that never fully shuts off.
Those aren’t nostalgia filters.
They’re signals.
Some signals aren’t meant for you.
This site is built like a glitch shrine—a space for collected artifacts, half-decoded logs, and transmissions that weren’t meant to survive.
Instead of a comfortable, clean homepage you get a:
- a zine taped together from stolen photocopies
- a forum thread archived out of context
- a VHS someone recorded over but didn’t erase properly
“Some thoughts don’t arrive clean. They tear their way in.”
Punk Isn’t an Aesthetic, It’s a Refusal
This isn’t punk because it’s neon or glitchy.
It’s punk because it refuses:
- algorithmic friendliness
- platform dependency
- professional flattening
This isn’t an aesthetic Substack.
It’s not a cleanly curated Linktree.
No single feed that decides what matters most.
Everything lives here because I put it here by hand.
HTML.
CSS.
JavaScript that does one weird thing and then stops.A place that doesn’t reassure you it’s safe.
That matters to me.
Why a Dev Log Exists At All
This dev log isn’t a tutorial series.
It’s a record of intent.
A place to leave notes about why certain choices were made, why others were avoided, and why “best practices” sometimes feel like quiet erasure.
Some entries will be clear.
Some will read like recovered fragments.
Some will contradict earlier logs.
That’s fine. That’s honest.
Systems drift. People change. Sites decay.
They say the internet is full of ghosts.
If You’re Looking for the Work
This site does not exist to be convenient.
I believe in intentional inconvenience.
The books are here.
The essays are here.
Yes, the reviews are here.
The links are easy to find.
But they’re not the point.
The point is the space around them.
The refusal to smooth everything down into something frictionless and market-safe.
If all you want is a list of titles, there are other, safer spaces for that.
If you needed a signal—
even a distorted one—
then you’re in the right place.
END LOG
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED
ARCHIVE STATUS: ACTIVE, FOR NOW
ARCHIVE STATUS: ACTIVE, FOR NO-