A Strange Return
A reflection on personal sites, strange pages, and the pull to build again
There’s something stirring. It’s subtle, but not silent.
People are building again. Blogs. Notes. Pages without structure. Some of it’s just tinkering. It doesn’t feel coordinated. But it does feel familiar. Like something old is resurfacing.
I’ve been feeling it too.
Not optimized. Not branded. More… weird.
That feeling’s been surfacing more often. Chris Reynolds called it directly: keep the web weird. Not a trend. 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 would spend hours on StumbleUpon. No plan, no productivity. Just dive after dive into strange corners: 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 plenty. Most are gone. But the feeling stuck: falling into something unexpected and unfinished, and wanting to keep going.
The web wasn’t content. It was a landscape. And in that wandering, something started to take root. The urge to build places like that. Not polished platforms. Not branded spaces. Just little pockets of strange.
🌀 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.
Weird meant randomness. Nonsense. Pages that broke their own rules. Structures that didn’t quite add up. Layouts that felt more like puzzles than products. It wasn’t trying to be clever; it didn’t ask to be understood right away.
It was strange on purpose. Not broken. Not accidental. It invited friction. It made you pause. It asked you to stay with something a little longer.
That’s the kind of weird that stuck with me. Not a gimmick. A pattern worth repeating.
🧩 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, and the way it unfolds, is how I’m showing up. Not everything is meant to resolve cleanly. Some parts loop. Some ideas might not make sense until later.
That’s not a problem to fix. That’s part of the design.
🪞 If You’ve Felt It Too
If you’ve felt that same tug toward something odd, unfinished, or unnecessary, maybe this is your sign.
That’s how this started, anyway.
Maybe this is where something else begins.