Design Note
The stack
Astro, prerendered to static files, served by Cloudflare Pages. No client framework, no analytics, no trackers, no third-party requests: three typefaces and every image are self-hosted. The JavaScript is hand-written — the homepage engine, the index filters, the contact form.
The design system is called Declassified Modern. Flat paper, hairline rules, Courier apparatus, one oxblood accent from the classification stamps of the source material. First law: no fabricated metadata. Every date, venue, and caption is real, or absent. Built in long sessions with Claude.
The viz
The homepage is a desk. The engine lays down prints from a corpus of 191 artifacts — telegraph maps, missile concept art, propaganda leaflets, early-web ephemera, screen recordings — each matted and captioned with its true source. New prints bury old ones. Buried clips fall silent. A print is culled only once fully covered. Hover lifts; click pins.
Sliders weight the draw on three hand-coded axes — old/new, war/peace, based/cringe — and the speed control's slow end is a full stop. Reduced motion, data saver, or a narrow screen gets a fixed collage from the same corpus; RESHUFFLE deals again. The engine is open source: github.com/etbrooking/ambient-hero.
The punchcards
Every indexed record carries a punched card: four rows, nine registers, computed from the document's true metadata and nothing else. Punches stop at the record's honest resolution — a piece dated to the month takes no day punch; empty registers mean absence, not decoration. Same document, same card, forever.
R1 — CLASS REGISTER (OXBLOOD) · AUTHOR PUNCH · COAUTHOR TALLY
R2 — YEAR, 5 BITS FROM 2010 · CATALOG BIT · OFF-SITE BIT
R3 — MONTH, 4 BITS · DAY, 5 BITS
R4 — SLUG HASH. IDENTITY, NOT INFORMATION.
THE CARD FOR “THE HERITAGE IS HATE!” — FEATURE · 27 JAN 2014 · SOLE AUTHOR · FULL TEXT ON-SITE.