A Strange Return
A reflection on personal sites, strange pages, and the pull to build again
I’ve been noticing something over the past while- people are building personal sites again. Blogs, notes, pages with no real structure. Some of it’s just tinkering, and it doesn’t feel coordinated, but it does feel familiar. Like something from 15 years ago resurfacing.
Chris Reynolds called it directly: keep the web weird. Not a trend, just a reminder. Something about that stuck with me.
🕳️ What I Fell Into
It reminded me of how I found the web in the first place. I used to spend hours on StumbleUpon- no plan, no productivity, just landing on random pages over and over. Flash games with no instructions, manifesto blogs, forums that felt like secret rooms. Places that didn’t explain themselves and didn’t need to.
I bookmarked a lot of them. Most are gone now. But the feeling stuck- falling into something unexpected and unfinished, and wanting to keep going.
I think the web back then didn’t feel like content. It felt more like a landscape. And somewhere in that wandering, I started wanting to build places like that- not polished platforms or branded spaces, just weird little pockets of something.
🌀 What I Wanted to Make
What I wanted to make wasn’t clean or cohesive. It was weird- not in the aesthetic sense, but in the way it resisted explanation.
Randomness, nonsense, pages that broke their own rules. Structures that didn’t quite add up. Layouts that felt more like puzzles than products. None of it was trying to be clever, and it didn’t ask to be understood right away.
I think the important part is that it was strange on purpose- not broken, not accidental. It invited friction, made you pause, asked you to stay with something a little longer. That’s probably the version of weird that stuck with me most.
🧩 How I’m Showing Up
I don’t think the weird web needs saving, but I do think it needs participants.
The structure of this site is how I’m showing up, I guess. Not everything is meant to resolve cleanly- some parts loop, some ideas might not make sense until later. I’m not sure that’s a problem to fix.
🪞 If You’ve Felt It Too
If you’ve felt that same pull toward something odd or unfinished or unnecessary- I think that’s probably worth paying attention to. That’s how this started, anyway.