This site.

Ideas were going into notes apps, voice memos and the backs of envelopes, which is a reliable way to lose them. So: one place they all go, markdown in a repo, built out to plain static files with nothing running at request time.

A public working notebook rather than a portfolio. Things half-formed on purpose, in whatever state they are actually in, with the status stamped on the top of each one.

Publishing it is the point. A private list applies no pressure at all.

the apparatus

It used to be a feed. Cards fell down the page, and what you got was whatever the scroll position made of them — an idea arrived, drifted past and was gone, and how many of them there were was never on screen at once.

It is now one frame with the works index down the side of it and a carrier beside that holding a single idea. Everything in the place is listed at once, in whatever state it is in, and you pick. Twelve things is a short enough list to read in full, and reading it in full is the point: this is an inventory of unfinished work, and an inventory that hides its own length is flattering itself.

The card in the carrier is the same card it always was. Same material, same colours, same arrival — the block still resolves out of a bad signal rather than fading in — and the whole of it is the link into the idea. The frame around it is warmer and lighter than anything in it, because a bench and the instrument standing on it are not made of the same stuff, and pretending otherwise is how both end up looking like neither.

what a line means now

A line was the look of a card. It is now the look of a card and the language its own page is written in, named separately in content/lines.json, so the two can be tuned without disturbing each other.

A real thing gets a drawing sheet, and its page holds the plans open beside the notes rather than under them, because that is how a brief is actually read. A film or a book gets the frame it was already wearing, and its parts arrive as a running order with a line of billing on each. Everything else gets the screen, or the printed band. Add a line, name a material and a language, and it has a card and a page without anything in src/ changing.

what went

The map, the ticker, the big wordmark hero, the deliberate empty spaces between cards, and the footer. The index does the map's job for twelve things, and the strip along the foot of the frame does the footer's. Less to look at, more to read.