13th of April, 2026
First new page on Bookwove

I'm back to blogging.

Look, I've set up a blog for the same reasons as most people these days—corporate social media is dogshit and non-corporate social media doesn't really support long-form writing unless it's basically a blog platform anyway. Threads are a necessity in microblogging, but they warp long-form writing into chains of bite-sized, hyper-clarified, quote-able chunks (god that's a lotta hyphens). People can then annotate these chunks through replies and quotes, adding to the flood of like/repost notifications without necessarily adding anything to the conversation. And so to blog.

There's no set theme here. I've imported solo analog game playthroughs and dice/card mechanic simulations from my first blog (2022–23) and font design and programming tips converted from a small personal docs site (2023–25). Among my many drafts there's a few longer-form game reviews waiting in the wings and a bunch of more personal and/or opinionated things. What I'm not gonna post is a lot of “blogging about blogging” shit, which I did a lot of on my first blog (I made a new post every time I added or changed a feature of my custom Zonelets setup). I'm posting because I've got something to share (I hope), not because I want to show off some low-tech blogging platform.

Another thing I want to avoid is posting things to a blog that should really be their own bit of the site. There's a reason why my site's currently a lesser myriad of different sections with their own organisations and features. The poetry notebook lists all poems by type, one type per page. The movie caption docs are up-to-date documentation split by film (well, there's only one film so far). The mini-review collections have their own filters and styles and can be sorted in eight different ways. I could've lathed all these square pegs for the round hole of the blog format, but I'd lose so much in function and style. This does mean I need to maintain two feeds, one for Bookwove and one for my site in general, but that's a small price to pay.

The code for this section of my site is a bit basic right now. Basically it's built from HTML content and templates using a perl-based static site generator and the CSS is cribbed from the Seaglass section of my site but with a more print-prose style (hence the justified paragraphs and so on).

(Side note: some of the posts use Dicier, my typeface for analog game randomisers like dice and cards. It's a tiny custom subset. You can look in the blog's source code on Codeberg or root around in the local files here if you want to use these fonts yourself.)

I dunno how much more I'll develop Bookwove. Originally I had all these plans to go hard on the print style, a bit like my transcript of Man, Lord of Machinery only way more so: filtering all video and images into a two-tone palette; representing charts using CSS so they'd share the blog's colour scheme; floating images left/right like old-school book illustrations; and so on. I might still do some of that. For now, I just want to get the blog up and running, and all these cool plans stood in the way.

Here's a few upcoming posts:

There's no hard schedule, but I tend to get in my own head when editing and I do wanna get over that and Just Post if I have an idea (with at least a bare minimum check-over). It's important to be comfortable with maybe being wrong on the internet! Being wrong, even a little, is the first step on the road to being right. I hope.

(And what does “bookwove” mean? It's the name of the slightly-rough, matte, normally off-white type of paper used in many books but especially common in paperback novels.)