colophon
Why this place looks the way it does.
A personal site is one of the last places on the web where a person can decide everything. So I did.
the paper
By day the page is warm paper with ink-blue words. By night it is the blue of a Himalayan evening, with a warm vermilion glow. Each visit draws one colour — crimson most often, then vermilion, rust, amber, saffron, clay — and that colour finds its way into the rules, the links and the small lights that follow your pointer. There are no cool blues and no greens. Just paper and firelight. The only texture is a grain so faint that you have to look for it.
the mark
The seal is made of letters, not a badge: सौरभ sits across it like a ghost, with a heavy SB over it and a thin ring holding the two together. It carries no colour of its own — it borrows the colour of the words around it, so it is dark ink by day and pale cream at night. Click the name and it turns into the other script. Click the portrait and it turns over to a thought about the self.
the letters
There are two layers of letters here. The machine is monoline: Mona Sans, a variable grotesk, carries the interface, the titles and the long writing, and Martian Mono carries the labels, the terminal and the code. A title is the same grotesk run wide and tight, not a new typeface. The quotes are the other layer. Every quoted line is set in a face drawn for its own script — Instrument Serif for English, Anek Devanagari for Devanagari, Gulzar's Nastaliq for Urdu and Persian, M PLUS 1 for Japanese — so a couplet reads as something placed inside the machine, not something it printed. Each script is sized and spaced on its own, so they look the same size on the page and nothing clips. The signature is handwriting, because a signature should be. There is a specimen of all of them on a page of its own.
the scripts
Every line stays in the language and script it was written in: Ghalib's Urdu, a Japanese face for Bashō, Devanagari for Kabir, the original Greek for Heraclitus. Each script has a face of its own, chosen so the quotes stand apart from the interface on purpose. Beneath each line sit a pronunciation, an English rendering written for this site, and one line in my own voice about why I kept it. Published translations are usually someone's property, so I wrote my own. Film lines were left out for the same reason — apart from a few short, credited ones from a tea-making uncle.
the visitors
Nothing here announces itself. After twenty-five seconds a bird may carry a line across the screen — gliding, or now and then diving; hover and it waits for you, wings still going. At night a bat zigzags past and another hangs upside down until you wake it. A cat trots along the bottom with opinions about your learning rate. A cloud has a joke. They come rarely, they leave on their own, and if you would rather things kept still, they never appear at all. Their small sounds are made on the spot, only when you click.
the shell
The line at the top of the home page used to be a piece of typing and nothing more. Now it opens a real terminal. You can look back at what you typed, finish a word with the tab key, read a short manual for any command, and open a note without leaving the keyboard. There is nothing behind it but this site: no server, no account, no one listening. The list of commands is written once, and the terminal, the search palette and the help text all read from it.
the games
Five small arguments you can play in that terminal. The cartographer lets you look at eight squares of a hidden world and then asks for your map: you will be right about everything you saw, and wrong about everything you did not. Ten levers tell you more about your temperament than your score. A cave ends on a question about shadows. A tiny universe runs out of ways to continue. And an oracle, with no model behind it at all, answers every question with a better one. Each one ends by opening a line from the collection.
the lines
There are five collections: day, night, air, self, and the map — lines about models, about what we can know, and about the distance between a thing and our picture of it. From "not this, not this" to the empire that drew a map the size of the empire. Press q for one, or ask for the line of the day, which is chosen by the date and is therefore the same for everyone. The lines you have met are remembered only in your own browser.
nothing about you
This is a stack of finished pages. There is no database, no account, and nothing that handles what you type except your own browser. A cookieless counter tells me roughly how many people came; the terminal, the games and the cabinet remember a few things on your device and tell no one. If you want them gone, clear this site's data and the cabinet is empty again.
the short version
Made in Kathmandu, under the Himalaya. Press ~ for the terminal, ? for what you have found, and q whenever you want a line. Or start with the cabinet, which is only ever yours. The letters are on a page of their own.
What I cannot create, I do not understand.