Update theme

Signed-off-by: Danila Fedorin <danila.fedorin@gmail.com>

content/blog/llm_personal_software/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,190 @@
+---
+title: "Personal Software with the Help of LLMs"
+date: 2026-04-05T16:03:00-07:00
+tags: ["LLMs"]
+series: ["LLM-Assisted Flashcard Generator"]
+description: "In this post, I describe an inherently individual and outcome-focused class of LLM-generated software"
+---
+
+In [the previous post in this series]({{< relref "pdf_flashcards_llm" >}}),
+I wrote about a little utility I created for detecting underlined words
+in a book and creating vocabulary study material for them.
+Like I mentioned earlier, this was one of my earliest experiences with
+LLM-driven development, and I think it shaped my outlook on the technology
+quite a bit. For me, the bottom line is this: _with LLMs, I was able to
+rapidly solve a problem that was holding me back in another area of my life_.
+My goal was never to "produce software", but to "acquire vocabulary",
+and, viewed from this perspective, I think the experience has been a
+colossal success.
+
+As someone who works on software, I am always reminded that end-users rarely
+care about the technology as much as we technologists; they care about
+having their problems solved. I find taking that perspective to be challenging
+(though valuable) because software is my craft, and because in thinking
+about the solution, I have to think about the elements that bring it to life.
+
+With LLMs, I was able --- allowed? --- to view things more from the
+end-user perspective. I didn't know, and didn't need to know, the API
+for `PyMuPDF`, `argostranslate`, or `spaCy`. I didn't need to understand
+the PDF format. I could move one step away from the nitty-gritty and focus
+on the 'why' and the 'what', on the challenge of what I wanted to accomplish.
+I wrestled with the inherent complexity and
+avoided altogether the unrelated difficulties that merely happened to be
+there (downloading language modules; learning translation APIs; etc.)
+
+By enabling me to do this, the LLM let me make rapid progress, and to produce
+solutions to problems I would've previously deemed "too hard" or "too tedious".
+This did, however, markedly reduce the care with which I was examining
+the output. I don't think I've _ever_ read the code that produces the
+pretty colored boxes in my program's debug output. This shift, I think,
+has been a divisive element of AI discourse in technical communities.
+I think that this has to do, at least in part, with different views
+on code as a medium.
+
+#### The Builders and the Craftsmen
+There are two perspectives through which one may view software:
+as a craft in and of itself, and as a means to some end.
+My flashcard extractor can be viewed in vastly different ways when faced
+from these two perspectives. In terms of craft, I think that it is at best
+mediocre; most of the code is generated, slightly verbose and somewhat
+tedious. The codebase is far from inspiring, and if I had written it by hand,
+I would not be particularly proud of it. In terms of product, though,
+I think it tells an exciting story: here I am, reading Camus again, because
+I was able to improve the workflow around said reading. In a day, I was able
+to achieve what I couldn't muster in a year or two on my own.
+
+The truth is, the "builder vs. craftsman" distinction is a simplifying one,
+another in the long line of "us vs. them" classifications. Any one person is
+capable of being any combination of these two camps at any given time. Indeed,
+different sorts of software demand to be viewed through different lenses.
+I will _still_ treat work on my long-term projects as a craft, because
+I will come back to it again and again, and because our craft has evolved
+to engender stability and maintainability.
+
+However, I am more than happy to settle for 'underwhelming' when it means an
+individual need of mine can be addressed in record time. I think this
+gives rise to a new sort of software: highly individual, explicitly
+non-robust, and treated differently from software crafted with
+deliberate thought and foresight.
+
+#### Personal Software
+
+I think as time goes on, I am becoming more and more convinced by the idea
+of "personal software". One might argue that much of the complexity in many
+pieces of software is driven by the need of that software to accommodate
+the diverse needs of many users. Still, software remains somewhat inflexible and
+unable to accommodate individual needs. Features or uses that demand
+changes at the software level move at a slower pace: finite developer time
+needs to be spent analyzing what users need, determining the costs of this new
+functionality, choosing which of the many possible requests to fulfill.
+On the other hand, software that enables the users to build their customizations
+for themselves, by exposing numerous configuration options and abstractions,
+becomes, over time, very complicated to grasp.
+
+Now, suppose that the complexity of such software scales superlinearly with
+the number of features it provides. Suppose also that individual users
+leverage only a small subset of the software's functionality. From these
+assumptions it would follow that individual programs, made to serve a single
+user's need, would be significantly less complicated than the "whole".
+By definition, these programs would also be better tailored to the users'
+needs. With LLMs, we're getting to a future where this might be possible.
+
+I think that my flashcard generator is an early instance of such software.
+It doesn't worry about various book formats, or various languages, or
+various page layouts. The heuristic was tweaked to fit my use case, and
+now works 100% of the time. I understand the software in its entirety.
+I thought about sharing it --- and, in a way, I did, since it's
+[open source](https://dev.danilafe.com/DanilaFe/vocab-builder) --- but realized
+that outside of the constraints of my own problem, it likely will not be
+of that much use. I _could_ experiment with more varied constraints, but
+that would turn it back into the sort of software I discussed above:
+general, robust, and complex.
+
+Today, I think that there is a whole class of software that is amenable to
+being "personal". My flashcard generator is one such piece of software;
+I imagine file-organization (as served by many "bulk rename and move" pieces
+of software out there), video wrangling (possible today with `ffmpeg`'s
+myriad of flags and switches), and data visualization to be other
+instances of problems in that class. I am merely intuiting here, but
+if I had to give a rough heuristic, it would be problems that:
+
+* __fulfill a short-frequency need__, because availability, deployment,
+  etc. significantly raises the bar for quality.
+  * e.g., I collect flashcards once every two weeks;
+    I organize my filesystem once a month; I don't spend nearly enough money
+    to want to regenerate cash flow charts very often
+* __have an "answer" that's relatively easy to assess__, because
+  LLMs are not perfect and iteration must be possible and easy.
+  * e.g., I can see that all the underlined words are listed in my web app;
+    I know that my files are in the right folders, named appropriately,
+    by inspection; my charts seem to track with reality
+* __have a relatively complex technical implementation__, because
+  why would you bother invoking an LLM if you can "just" click a button somewhere?
+  * e.g., extracting data from PDFs requires some wrangling;
+    bulk-renaming files requires some tedious and possibly case-specific
+    pattern matching; cash flow between N accounts requires some graph
+    analysis
+* __have relatively low stakes__, again, because LLMs are not perfect,
+  and nor is (necessarily) one's understanding of the problem.
+  * e.g., it's OK if I miss some words I underlined; my cash flow
+    charts only give me an impression of my spending;
+  * I recognize that moving files is a potentially destructive operation.
+
+I dream of a world in which, to make use of my hardware, I just _ask_,
+and don't worry much about languages, frameworks, or sharing my solution
+with others --- that last one because they can just ask as well.
+
+#### The Unfair Advantage of Being Technical
+I recognize that my success described here did not come for free. There
+were numerous parts of the process where my software background helped
+me get the most out of Codex.
+
+For one thing, writing software trains us to think precisely about problems.
+We learn to state exactly what we want, to decompose tasks into steps,
+and to intuit the exact size of these steps; to know what's hard and what's
+easy for the machine. When working with an LLM, these skills make it possible
+to hit the ground running, to know what to ask and to help pluck out a particular
+solution from the space of various approaches. I think that this greatly
+accelerates the effectiveness of using LLMs compared to non-technical experts.
+
+For another, the boundary between 'manual' and 'automatic' is not always consistent.
+Though I didn't touch any of the `PyMuPDF` code, I did need to look fairly
+closely at the logic that classified my squiggles as "underlines" and found
+associated words. It was not enough to treat LLM-generated code as a black box.
+
+Another advantage software folks have when leveraging LLMs is the established
+rigor of software development. LLMs can and do make mistakes, but so do people.
+Our field has been built around reducing these mistakes' impact and frequency.
+Knowing to use version control helps turn the pathological downward spiral
+of accumulating incorrect tweaks into monotonic, step-wise improvements.
+Knowing how to construct a test suite and thinking about edge cases can
+provide an agent LLM the grounding it needs to iterate rapidly and safely.
+
+In this way, I think the dream of personal software is far from being realized
+for the general public. Without the foundation of experience and rigor,
+LLM-driven development can easily devolve into a frustrating and endless
+back-and-forth, or worse, successfully build software that is subtly and
+convincingly wrong.
+
+#### The Shoulders of Giants
+
+The only reason all of this was possible is that the authors of `PyMuPDF`,
+`genanki`, `spaCy`, and `argos-translate` made them available for me to use from
+my code. These libraries provided the bulk of the functionality that Codex and I
+were able to glue into a final product. It would be a mistake to forget this,
+and to confuse the sustained, thoughtful efforts of the people behind these
+projects for the one-off, hyper-specific software I've been talking about.
+
+We need these packages, and others like them, to provide a foundation for the
+things we build. They bring stability, reuse, and the sort of cohesion that
+is not possible through an amalgamation of home-grown personal scripts.
+In my view, something like `spaCy` is to my flashcard script as a brick is to
+grout. There is a fundamental difference.
+
+I don't know how LLMs will integrate into the future of large-scale software
+development. The discipline becomes something else entirely when the
+constraints of "personal software" I floated above cease to apply. Though
+LLMs can still enable doing what was previously too difficult, tedious,
+or time consuming (like my little 'underline visualizer'), it remains
+to be seen how to integrate this new ease into the software lifecycle
+without threatening its future.

content/blog/pdf_flashcards_llm/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,239 @@
+---
+title: "Generating Flashcards from PDF Underlines"
+date: 2026-04-05T16:02:00-07:00
+tags: ["LLMs", "Python"]
+series: ["LLM-Assisted Flashcard Generator"]
+description: "In this post, I describe my personal PDF-to-vocab-flashcards pipeline"
+---
+
+__TL;DR__: I, with the help of ChatGPT, wrote [a program](https://dev.danilafe.com/DanilaFe/vocab-builder)
+that helps me extract vocabulary words from PDFs. Scroll just a bit further down
+to see what it looks like.
+
+Sometime in 2020 or 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I overheard from some
+source that Albert Camus, in his book _La Peste_ (The Plague), had quite
+accurately described the experience that many of us were going through
+at the time. Having studied French for several years, I decided that the
+best way to see for myself what _La Peste_ is all about was to read it
+in its original, untranslated form.
+
+I made good progress, but I certainly did not know every word. At the surface,
+I was faced with two choices: guess the words from context and read without
+stopping, or interrupt my reading to look up unfamiliar terms. The former
+seemed unfortunate since it stunted my ability to acquire new vocabulary;
+the latter was unpleasant, making me constantly break from the prose
+(and the e-ink screen of my tablet) to consult a dictionary.
+
+In the end, I decided to underline the words, and come back to them later.
+However, even then, the task is fairly arduous. For one, words I don't recognize
+aren't always in their canonical form (they can be conjugated, plural, compound,
+and more): I have to spend some time deciphering what I should add to a
+flashcard. For another, I had to bounce between a PDF of my book
+(from where, fortunately, I can copy-paste) and my computer. Often, a word
+confused the translation software out of context, so I had to copy more of the
+surrounding text. Finally, I learned that given these limitations, the pace of
+my reading far exceeds the rate of my translation. This led me to underline
+fewer words.
+
+I thought,
+
+> Perhaps I can just have some software automatically extract the underlined
+> portions of the words, find the canonical forms, and generate flashcards?
+
+Even thinking this thought was a mistake. From then on, as I read and went
+about underlining my words, I thought about how much manual effort I will
+be taking on that could be automated. However, I didn't know how to start
+the automation. In the end, I switched to reading books in English.
+
+Then, LLMs got good at writing code. With the help of
+Codex, I finally got the tools that I was dreaming about. Here's what it looks
+like.
+
+{{< figure src="./underlines.png" caption="Detected underlined words on a page" label="Detected underlined words on a page" >}}
+
+{{< figure src="./result.png" caption="Auto-flashcard application" label="Auto-flashcard application" class="fullwide" >}}
+
+This was my first foray into LLM-driven development. My commentary about that
+experience (as if there isn't enough of such content out there!) will be
+interleaved with the technical details.
+
+### The Core Solution
+The core idea has always been:
+
+1. Find things that look like underlines
+2. See which words they correspond to
+3. Perform {{< sidenote "right" "lemmatization-node" "lemmatization" >}}
+Lemmatization (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmatization">Wikipedia</a>) is the
+process of turning non-canonical forms of words (like <code>am</code> (eng) /
+<code>suis</code> (fr)) into their canonical form which might be found in the
+dictionary (<code>to be</code> / <code>être</code>).
+{{< /sidenote >}} and translate.
+
+My initial direction was shaped by the impressive demonstrations of OCR
+models, which could follow instructions at the same time as reading a document.
+For these models, a prompt like "extract all the text in the red box"
+constituted the entire targeted OCR pipeline. My hope was that a similar
+prompt, "extract all underlined words", would be sufficient to accomplish
+steps 1 and 2. However, I was never to find out: as it turns out,
+OCR models are large and very expensive to run. In addition, the model
+that I was looking at was specifically tailored for NVIDIA hardware which
+I, with my MacBook, simply didn't have access to.
+
+In the end, I came to the conclusion that a VLM is overkill for the problem
+I'm tackling. This took me down the route of analyzing the PDFs. The
+problem, of course, is that I know nothing of the Python landscape
+of PDF analysis tools, and that I also know nothing about the PDF format
+itself. This is where a Codex v1 came in. Codex opted (from its training
+data, I presume) to use the [`PyMuPDF`](https://pymupdf.readthedocs.io) package.
+It also guessed (correctly) that the PDFs exported by my tablet used
+the 'drawings' part of the PDF spec to encode what I penned. I was instantly
+able to see (on the console) the individual drawings.
+
+The LLM also chose to approach the problem by treating each drawing as just
+a "cloud of points", discarding the individual line segment data. This
+seemed like a nice enough simplification, and it worked well in the long run.
+
+#### Iterating on the Heuristic
+The trouble with the LLM agent was that it had no good way of verifying
+whether the lines it detected (and indeed, the words it considered underlined)
+were actually lines (and underlined words). Its initial algorithm missed
+many words, and misidentified others. I had to resort to visual inspection
+to see what was being missed, and for the likely cause.
+
+The exact process of the iteration is not particularly interesting. I'd
+tweak a threshold, re-run the code, and see the new list of words.
+I'd then cross-reference the list with the page in question, to see
+if things were being over- or under-included. Rinse, repeat.
+
+This got tedious fast. In some cases, letters or words I penned would get picked
+up as underlines, and slightly diagonal strokes would get missed. I ended up
+requesting Codex to generate a debugging utility that highlighted (in a box)
+all the segments that it flagged, and the corresponding words. This
+is the first picture I showed in the post. Here it is again:
+
+{{< figure src="./underlines.png" caption="Detected underlined words on a page" label="Detected underlined words on a page" >}}
+
+In the end, the rough algorithm was as follows:
+
+1. __Identify all "cloud points" that are not too tall__. Lines that
+   vertically span too many lines of text are likely not underlines.
+   * The 'height threshold' ended up being larger than I anticipated:
+     turns out I don't draw very straight horizontal lines.
+
+     {{< figure src="tallmarks.png" caption="My angled underlines" label="My angled underlines" >}}
+2. __Create a bounding box for the line,__ with some padding.
+   I don't draw the lines _directly_ underneath the text, but a bit below.
+   * Sometimes, I draw the line quite a bit below; the upward padding
+     had to be sizeable.
+
+     {{< figure src="lowmarks.png" caption="My too-low underlines" label="My too-low underlines" >}}
+3. __Intersect `PyMuPDF` bounding boxes with the line__. Fortunately,
+   `PyMuPDF` provides word rectangles out of the box.
+   * I required the intersection to overlap with at least 60% of the word's
+     horizontal width, so accidental overlaps don't count.
+
+     {{< figure src="widemarks.png" caption="My too-wide underline hitting `Cela`" label="My too-wide underline hitting `Cela`" >}}
+   * The smallest underlines are roughly the same size as the biggest strokes
+     in my handwriting. The 60% requirement filtered out the latter, while
+     keeping the former.
+
+     {{< figure src="flaggedmarks.png" caption="Letters of a hand-writing word detected as lines" label="Letters of a hand-writing word detected as lines" >}}
+4. __Reject underlines that overlap from the top__. Since, as I mentioned,
+   my underlines are often so low that they touch the next line.
+
+#### Lemmatization and Translation
+
+I don't recall now how I arrived at [`spaCy`](https://github.com/explosion/spaCy),
+but that's what I ended up using for my lemmatization. There was only
+one main catch: sometimes, instead of underlining words I didn't know,
+I underlined whole phrases. Lemmatization did not work well in those
+contexts; I had to specifically restrict my lemmatization to single-word
+underlines, and to strip punctuation which occasionally got tacked on.
+With lemmatization in hand, I moved on to the next step: translation.
+
+I wanted my entire tool to work completely offline. As a result, I had to
+search for "python offline translation", to learn about
+[`argos-translate`](https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate).
+Frankly, the translation piece is almost entirely uninteresting:
+it boils down to invoking a single function. I might add that
+`argos-translate` requires one to download language packages --- they
+do not ship with the Python package. Codex knew to write a script to do
+so, which saved a little bit of documentation-reading and typing.
+
+The net result is a program that could produce:
+
+```
+Page 95: fougueuse -> fougueux -> fiery
+```
+
+Pretty good!
+
+### Manual Intervention
+That "pretty good" breaks down very fast. There are several points of failure:
+the lemmatization can often get confused, and the offline translation
+fails for some of the more flowery Camus language.
+
+In the end, for somewhere on the order of 70% of the words I underlined,
+the automatic translation was insufficient, and required small tweaks
+(changing the tense of the lemma, adding "to" to infinitive English verbs, etc.)
+
+I thought --- why not just make this interactive? Fortunately, there are
+plenty of Flask applications in Codex's training dataset. In one shot,
+it generated a little web application that enabled me to tweak the source word
+and final translation. It also enabled me to throw away certain underlines.
+This was useful when, across different sessions, I forgot and underlined
+the same word, or when I underlined a word but later decided it was not worth
+including in my studying. This application produced an Anki deck, using
+the Python library [`genanki`](https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki).
+Anki has a nice mechanism to de-duplicate decks, which meant that every
+time I exported a new batch of words, I could add them to my running
+collection.
+
+Even then, however, cleaning up the auto-translation was not always easy.
+The OCR copy of the book had strange idiosyncrasies: the letters 'fi' together
+would OCR to '=' or '/'. Sometimes, I would underline a compound phrase
+that spanned two lines; though I knew the individual words (and would be surprised
+to find them in my list), I did not know their interaction.
+
+In the end, I added (had Codex add) both a text-based context and a visual
+capture of the word in question to the web application. This led to the final
+version, whose screenshot I included above. Here it is again:
+
+{{< figure src="./result.png" caption="Auto-flashcard application" label="Auto-flashcard application" class="fullwide" >}}
+
+The net result was that, for many words, I could naively accept the
+automatically-generated suggestion. For those where this was not possible,
+in most cases I only had to tweak a few letters, which still saved me time.
+Finally, I was able to automatically include the context of the word in
+my flashcards, which often helps reinforce the translation and remember
+the exact sense in which the word was used.
+
+To this day, I haven't found a single word that was underlined and missed,
+nor one that was mis-identified as underlined.
+
+### Future Direction
+
+In many ways, this software is more than good enough for my needs.
+I add a new batch of vocabulary roughly every two weeks, during which time
+I manually export a PDF of _La Peste_ from my tablet and plug it into
+my software.
+
+In my ideal world, I wouldn't have to do that. I would just underline some
+words, and come back to my laptop a few days later to find a set of draft
+flashcards for me to review and edit. In an even more ideal world, words
+I underline get "magically" translated, and the translations appear somewhere
+in the margins of my text (while also being placed in my list of flashcards).
+
+I suspect LLMs --- local ones --- might be a decent alternative technology
+to "conventional" translation. By automatically feeding them the context
+and underlined portion, it might be possible to automatically get a more
+robust translation and flashcard. I experimented with this briefly
+early on, but did not have much success. Perhaps better prompting or newer
+models would improve the outcomes.
+
+That said, I think that those features are way beyond the 80:20 transition:
+it would be much harder for me to get to that point, and the benefit would
+be relatively small. Today, I'm happy to stick with what I already have.
+
+In the [next part of this series]({{< relref "llm_personal_software" >}}),
+I will talk more about how this project influenced my views on LLMs.

content/series/llm-assisted-flashcard-generator/_index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
++++
+title = "LLM-Assisted Flashcard Generator"
+summary = """
+  In this series, I write up a little program I wrote for myself,
+  which detects vocabulary words I underline in a book and turns them
+  into flashcards. I view this through the lens of a first foray into
+  development that heavily relies on LLMs.
+  """
+status = "complete"
+donotunique = true
++++

content/writing/onspiders/index.md

@@ -1,7 +1,11 @@
 ---
 title: "On Spiders"
 date: 2026-03-22T01:03:00-05:00
-type: onspiders
+type: writing
+description: "Whenever I stay still, I feel the spiders weave their webs around me."
+custom_css:
+- style.scss
+body_start_partial: "spiderweb.html"
 ---
 
 ```

content/writing/spirits/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
+---
+title: "Persistence of Vision"
+date: 2026-04-18T23:26:00-07:00
+type: writing
+description: "Humid air swirls with colorful spirits."
+custom_css:
+- style.scss
+---
+
+Humid air swirls with colorful spirits. They trace its invisible currents
+in spirals through open spaces, cling to branches, drip down stone faces
+and, awakened by the first beams of the rising sun, ooze newly out of trees
+like sap. Lulls of wind leave them gliding gently downward to be picked up
+again. From a distance, eddies of the spirits' malleable confetti travel
+along plains. With translucent jellylike hands and fingers they wave at
+each other in passing or hold each other in breeze-perturbed waltzes. Big
+luminescent white eyes take in with wonder and awe the only day they are
+ever to see.
+
+Among them, Hex. An exception within the colorful milieu, he remembers, if
+vaguely, the mornings that precede this one. He feels an unbroken thread
+of identity dissolved somewhere within his red-pink body.
+
+Spirits disappear at
+dusk, bursting like soap bubbles while the last rays of the setting sun
+still caress from behind horizon-clouds the darkening sky. They are born
+each day, leaping with passing fish out of streams and accumulating in
+drops of dew. An apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and a spirit from
+its genitive landscape. Again and again Hex encounters similar motifs.
+
+Take Molly, who hangs now with Hex from a grapevine, the both of them agitated
+by the wind resembling pennants on some carnival string. The
+first Molly he met, who serves now for him as a departure point for a whole
+lineage of kindred spirits, was a deep red: she was born during a Fire.
+That day, overburdened clouds covered the sky like dense wool and
+unleashed after much unwanted loitering their promised downpour and
+lightning. Flames spread quickly through the birch forest beneath. The
+Fire raged for days, sucking in the surrounding atmosphere its gluttony
+and spewing it upwards mingled with ash. A haze of purple, pink, orange
+and yellow replaced the thunderclouds.
+
+Hex was swept then by the Fire's incessant breath towards the birches.
+Flames danced among charred silhouettes that used to be trees.
+A great many spirits were being born, sizzling out of ember-glowing
+stumps and erupting in geysers above the flickering dance to drift upwards
+like hot-air balloons. Molly was among them.
+
+They sat together on a ledge. His pink hand held hers. By some trick of
+their geometry, the surrounding cliffs gave them refuge from the wind. Hex
+sensed for what felt like the first time the weight of his body, a sort of
+agency. He wanted Molly to understand. He kept stumbling, espousing one
+flawed analogy after another, sketches of a painting that he didn't know
+how to finish, unable to get across the _feeling_, no, "comfort" isn't
+quite right, nor is "boldness", nor... She might have vaguely understood.
+
+Molly herself wanted weightlessness; he saw the spark in
+her eye when she talked of waking up in the arms of a great column of air,
+carried up towards the ash-filled sky, one of the first that day to glimpse
+the whole ball of the sun. She spoke heatedly of the warmth and excitement,
+but also of the danger, of the many ways in which the Fire was capable of
+reclaiming the lives it just spawned. That's what she was doing, her face
+lit from behind him by the setting sun, when the first Molly popped out
+of existence.
+
+For days the Fire and its remnants precipitated reddish spirits among whom
+Hex often heard tales of burning, rising, destruction. Thoughts
+of the Fire were in the air, exchanged by passerby spirits carried in
+currents for brief moments along similar trajectories. He found a Molly
+and reminded her of the day before, and saw that same spark in her
+eyes. They spent that day rolling like tumbleweeds through a nearby valley,
+talking in voices oscillating with their rotation.
+
+Recent days replaced the dying Fire with anxious winds. Though the sun at times
+still paints fields white-gold and turns trees' leaves to verdant haloes,
+the air feels heavy. Newborn spirits are a deep blue. Molly's latest iteration
+is an iridescent cornflower-cyan. Words that used to evoke in her a subtle smile,
+imagery that resonated with her, things that Hex has long since learned to
+sprinkle into their chats to see her light up --- all this seems now to have lost
+its potency. A knot forms in his stomach at the swelling thought that soon he
+will have nothing to say at all.
+
+It's the wind. It strengthens even now, augmented with dust, fragments
+of bark, torn leaves, fireflies. Dark clouds in the distance turn in circles
+on a pillow of rain-streak straw. Colored spirit-dots rush with helpless
+violence on the horizon. The storm draws nearer.
+
+They talk --- Hex still clumsily searching for words --- but it is becoming
+harder and harder to hear. The sky is polluted at first by pioneering clouds,
+then enveloped completely. The sun is shut out. The rain, not straw anymore
+but billowing sheets, beats against their faces. There is no way to see
+and speak except by facing away from this relentless onslaught. Water runs
+in miniature rivers down their faces. Their hands tightly grip their
+anchor-vine.
+
+Hex goes first. Slapped in the face with surprising force by a flying branch,
+he loses his grip and is carried immediately downwind. Molly grabs him
+with dexterity but halves thereby her own hold on the branch and mere
+seconds later is dislodged herself. The two cling to each other for a few
+moments before impacting rock and bouncing in different directions.
+
+Having joined the assembly of dislodged detritus Hex tumbles upwards.
+Ground alternates with sky in his vision, interspersed occasionally with
+glimpses of Molly's cyan. In a customary spirit gesture he reaches out his
+hands for something to grab but finds nothing but raindrops and hail. All
+the while he accelerates towards the clouds, his gravity bizarrely
+inverted; precipitation and debris increasingly obscure ground. At
+breakneck speed a yellow spirit beaten to foam whizzes past him to collide
+into a wind-blue byflyer in a pine explosion spewing polychrome droplets.
+The newly-acquainted pair exchange introductions that Hex can't make out
+over a deafening howling.
+
+With each crazed revolution around his axis he glances heavier objects in
+his vicinity. An entire birch, a survivor of the Fire unceremoniously
+uprooted by the Wind, scoops him with its willowy fingers and finally
+dilutes his momentum. The act of moving his head reacquires its familiar
+meaning. Hex dares to look around. Searchlight sunbeams pierce blackened
+clouds in rapid sweeps; lightning retaliates against the incursions in
+blinding, sprawling nets. Glimpses of brown flicker behind dense clouds
+and curtains of rain. Its orderly guidance of gravity and sunlight
+replaced by disagreeing gusts, a new forest orbiting an unseen center
+points in all directions at once. There is no sign of Molly.
+
+Above is indistinguishable now from below, and left from right. Directions
+other than _inward_ lose their meanings. Inward too flies Hex's
+birch-mount, and he with it. Lightning-lit glimpses of brown stretch
+finally into a continuous window.
+
+A vast beige clot levitates among the clouds, its colossal mass allowing
+it the luxury of unshakeable inertia. Dozens of armlike appendages
+protrude from its core, enormous in size compared to a single spirit's but
+spindly relative to the whole. A meteor of pine still engaged in
+conversation impacts the planetoid, sending a ripple through its body and
+forming a crown that is pulled as if by surface tension into a crater that
+rapidly narrows into nothing. A green band lingers on the giant's surface,
+then assimilates into the whole.
+
+The colossus endlessly speaks. Its low voice rumbles in competition with
+thunder. Hex is shaking either in feverish terror or in resonance
+with the creature's speech. "`nonlinear turbulence approximated with
+a third-order term,`" it espouses in a choral superposition of
+spirit-voices, "`a butterfly with no wing scales climbs yet towards the
+cosmos`". Then suddenly a flash of lucidity: "`selena, the wind, the
+wind's everywhere...`". In the pauses between its phrases and words,
+a rebellious mutter of overlapping conversations reasserts itself only to
+drown again in the giant's estimation of language. Its arm grasp the air
+in that same customary gesture but there is an uncanniness to their
+movement; Hex can't help but suspect that the intent behind them is
+entirely alien.
+
+With a sluggish wave "hello" towards no-one in particular, the giant sends
+Hex's tree into a new spiral just as the cycles of sunbeams all arrive at
+their individual troughs. The darkness drops again. The world spins
+dizzyingly around him while he clutches desperately for stability. When
+his vessel rights itself again, veering through some aerodynamic mystery
+into a semblance of stability, he listens once more to the colossus'
+endless tirade. At some point it must have given way to thunder. Specks of
+brown flicker in the distance. A spot of cornflower bobs nearby.
+
+Molly rides unsteadily on her own arborous steed. She has already spotted
+him, and waves excitedly, then reaches out her hand. It is now or never.
+Hex plants his feet on his birch, having finally found his sea legs in the
+atmospheric ocean. He feels his outwards-directed weight, tries to stand,
+wobbles, tries again. At last he musters whatever spring his sloshing body
+is capable of, and leaps.
+
+The spring turns out more than sufficient; he arrives with momentum to
+spare, grabbing Molly but dealing the final blow to her tentative hold on
+her tree and setting them both once again at the storm's mercy. She smiles
+and tries to speak, but he still can't hear. Hex wonders if she is
+remembering the Fire's column that lifted her that first day above the
+clouds. During his own birth, the flames had already cooled, but the hot
+air's purposeful ascent was not unlike the storm's lateral tug. But wait,
+he was born before Molly...
+
+Their eternity suspended in the directionless void gives way. Features of
+the landscape drift into view. Rain abates; clouds part. Lightning turns
+to distant flashes in the corners of their eyes and thunder's rumble
+fades. Still nearly weightless they remain swirling in the air until by
+some trick of their geometry familiar cliffs cut off the wind altogether
+and leave them to splash with their remaining speed into their ledge.
+
+They sit together in silence. His red-pink hand holds hers. For some time,
+they watch the landscape. Water drops from trees disturbed by wind as if
+from green straggler clouds. The setting sun colors the clearing horizon
+peach. The air is cool and crisp. Spirits form from pools of rainwater,
+flow along streams, and point luminescent eyes in wonder at the departing
+hurricane. An umber newborn's first words: "Magnificent! I just hope the
+butterflies are safe." Another responds, "I'm glad the turbulence is dying
+down".
+
+Molly and Hex have not moved from where they were deposited by the last of
+the storm's force, and this time he squints against sunlight that streams
+from behind her.
+
+"That was the strongest wind we've ever had! I'm glad I found you," Molly
+says. "There was so much chaos, but you seemed _at ease_ in the end.
+I guess it turned out pretty fun, but after all that floating, isn't it
+good to have some _weight_ again?" He can tell she's hinting at something,
+but he has no idea what that might be. Instead, he brings up the colossus
+in the clouds. What is it like to think the melange of thoughts of all
+spirits, each life enveloping the next like onion layers and tinting the
+final image? When it speaks its words, does it know what it means?
+
+Hex still can't find the right words. Molly saw the giant, but didn't
+think too much of it. He wants her to feel the mystery, the awe, the
+unease at its incomprehensible gestures. This is what he is doing, his
+face lit from behind her by the setting sun, when Hex pops again out of
+existence, leaving behind a gentle scent of soap.

content/writing/spirits/style.scss

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+$color-muted-plum: #3d2b3d;
+$color-ashy-orange: #4a3428;
+$color-storm: darken(#1e2a3d, 5%);
+
+html {
+  background-color: $color-storm;
+}
+
+body {
+  background-image: linear-gradient(
+    180deg,
+    $color-storm  0%,
+    $color-muted-plum  5%,
+    $color-ashy-orange 15%,
+    $color-storm 100%,
+  );
+}
+
+code {
+  background: none;
+  border: none;
+  padding: 0;
+  font-family: serif;
+  font-variant-caps: small-caps;
+}

content/writing/thevoid/index.md

@@ -1,7 +1,10 @@
 ---
 title: "Untitled Short Story"
 date: 2024-08-01T20:31:18-07:00
-type: thevoid
+type: writing
+description: "The Everpresent Void was first discovered at a children's birthday party."
+custom_css:
+- style.scss
 ---
 
 > I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and\

layouts/onspiders/baseof.html

@@ -1,25 +0,0 @@
-{{- /* Note: changing the baseof template because the title, tags, etc. of a regular post are still valid. */ -}}
-<!DOCTYPE html>
-<html lang="{{ .Site.Language.Lang }}">
-    {{- partial "head.html" . -}}
-    <body>
-        {{ $writingcss := resources.Get "scss/writing.scss" | css.Sass | resources.Minify }}
-        <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $writingcss.Permalink }}">
-        {{ $spidercss := resources.Get "scss/onspiders.scss" | css.Sass | resources.Minify }}
-        <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $spidercss.Permalink }}">
-        <svg class="spiderweb" viewBox="0 0 197.21727 106.16592">
-            <use href="{{ (resources.Get "svg/spiderweb.svg").Permalink }}#mainlayer"></use>
-        </svg>
-        {{- partial "header.html" . -}}
-        <div class="container"><hr class="header-divider"></div>
-        <main class="container">
-
-        {{- if .Draft -}}
-        {{- partial "warning.html" (i18n "postDraft") -}}
-        {{- end -}}
-
-        {{- block "main" . }}{{- end }}
-        </main>
-        {{- block "after" . }}{{- end }}
-    </body>
-</html>

layouts/partials/spiderweb.html

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+<svg class="spiderweb" viewBox="0 0 197.21727 106.16592">
+    <use href="{{ (resources.Get "svg/spiderweb.svg").Permalink }}#mainlayer"></use>
+</svg>

layouts/thevoid/baseof.html

@@ -1,22 +0,0 @@
-{{- /* Note: changing the baseof template because the title, tags, etc. of a regular post are still valid. */ -}}
-<!DOCTYPE html>
-<html lang="{{ .Site.Language.Lang }}">
-    {{- partial "head.html" . -}}
-    <body>
-        {{ $writingcss := resources.Get "scss/writing.scss" | css.Sass | resources.Minify }}
-        <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $writingcss.Permalink }}">
-        {{ $voidcss := resources.Get "scss/thevoid.scss" | css.Sass | resources.Minify }}
-        <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $voidcss.Permalink }}">
-        {{- partial "header.html" . -}}
-        <div class="container"><hr class="header-divider"></div>
-        <main class="container">
-
-        {{- if .Draft -}}
-        {{- partial "warning.html" (i18n "postDraft") -}}
-        {{- end -}}
-
-        {{- block "main" . }}{{- end }}
-        </main>
-        {{- block "after" . }}{{- end }}
-    </body>
-</html>