In Which Google Discovers Crowdecks and Immediately Finds Fault
Crowdecks has a functioning website. Unfortunately, Google was unconvinced. The sitemap is by the door.
Read more →Crowdecks
CURRENT OBSESSIONThe first shiny new obsession? Building the place to put all the others.
Crowdecks is becoming a home for paintings, writing, coding and whatever catches my attention next. A place where unfinished things can exist without apologising. And where Death has a surprisingly demanding administrative role.
Development Log
In Which Sol Adds Some Springtails and Deletes the Internet
Today the springtails arrived. This should not have affected the internet. And yet.
Read more →In Which I Accidentally Publish a Scientific Paper
Crowdecks was basically finished. Again. This is becoming a recurring theme. There were projects. There was a graveyard for projects that had met unfortunate ends. There were writings. There was a development diary. Everything had somewhere to live. Except, apparently, the things that didn't. Because I have quite a lot of ideas that aren't actually projects. Some are things I might make one day. Some are observations that have sent me wandering down completely unnecessary intellectual rabbit holes. Some are solutions to problems nobody has asked me to solve. They weren't dead, so I couldn't bury them. They weren't really projects, because in many cases I had absolutely no intention of doing anything about them. They were just... There. So we made another book. Concepts. A nice ethereal-looking thing where all the strange little thoughts floating around my brain could finally be deposited somewhere other than my brain. Excellent. This should clear out the backlog nicely. Unfortunately, giving my ideas somewhere to live had roughly the same effect as opening a cupboard you haven't looked inside for three years. Things started falling out. Roibot Accessories. Social Synchronisation. Shoulder Bastard, the judgemental AI food auditor who notices that I ate the crisps I mysteriously forgot to log. And then there was the thing about summer sleep. I'd noticed for years that I sleep differently in summer. Lighter. More fragmented. More easily disturbed. Daylight was the obvious explanation. Except I started wondering whether pollen might be involved. Not because I have hay fever. Because histamine is involved in wakefulness. This was originally supposed to be another Concepts entry. A mildly interesting hypothesis. Write it down. Add it to the book. Move on. Instead, Roi and I started looking at the science. Then we looked at some more science. Then considerably more science. Then we started trying to break the idea. And annoyingly, it wouldn't entirely break. There were gaps. There were assumptions. There were things that absolutely needed testing. But the underlying biological pathway was plausible enough that what had begun as: "Huh. I wonder if pollen keeps me awake?" turned into a properly researched scientific hypothesis. At which point there was really only one sensible thing to do. Publish it. So we did. On Zenodo. With a DOI. Crowdecks had somehow progressed from a website documenting my tendency to enthusiastically start things and then wander off... ...to generating an actual scientific paper. This was not in the original specification. Still, the hypothesis now exists somewhere considerably more respectable than inside my head, which is probably for the best. And the Concepts book works beautifully. Everything has somewhere to go. No more loose ideas floating around demanding that I remember them. Excellent. We must surely be nearly finished now.
Read more →In Which Death Learns to Glide
Having spent several days enthusiastically adding things to the website, I reached the inevitable stage of actually looking at what I’d built. There were bugs. Not catastrophic bugs. Nothing was on fire. Mostly. Just the sort of small inconsistencies that become impossible to unsee once you’ve noticed them. The project pages had accumulated slightly different behaviours as the site evolved, navigation needed tidying, duplicated bits had appeared, and several animations contained characters apparently governed by entirely different laws of physics. So we started fixing things. The little project-status animations got another pass. The crow representing an Active project was persuaded to stop celebrating on one leg like an overexcited Disney sidekick and behave more like an actual crow. The Dying animation was completely reconsidered: rather than wrestling Death for possession of a project, the crow now simply puts one possessive foot on the disputed shiny and stares at him. Death, recognising a pointless argument when he sees one, gets out his book and starts the paperwork. This led to another discovery. Death could walk. Technically, he could walk extremely well. His little skeletal feet moved properly. His robes responded. His knees worked. It was all very impressive. Unfortunately, the more convincingly he walked, the less he looked like Death and the more he looked like a slightly stooped bloke in a robe going somewhere. In one of the animations, however, he glided. Much better. So Death no longer walks. He turns. He pauses. He handles his book. He can even struggle backwards across a cemetery dragging the surprisingly heavy corpse of an abandoned project. But when Death himself wishes to travel from A to B, he simply moves. This rule was subsequently applied to the Graveyard animation, where his excellent laborious sack-dragging entrance was preserved but his frantic little bony shuffle around the grave was quietly removed. After depositing the body and giving his customary shrug, he now glides serenely away. Death has become considerably more otherworldly. The crows, meanwhile, remain subject to rather more conventional physics, although two of them are currently experiencing an unexplained increase in body mass whenever they land. That’s tomorrow’s problem. We also fixed diary navigation, removed a few duplicated bits from the homepage, tidied links and project pages, and continued correcting the small archaeological layers left behind by repeatedly changing my mind about how the website should work. Which, increasingly, appears to be the actual Crowdecks development methodology: Have idea. Build idea. Have better idea. Fix consequences of previous idea. Repeat. The website is getting better. I’m not entirely convinced this means it’s getting closer to finished.
Read more →In Which I Hire Death
It’s been about 20 years since I built a website. On Dreamweaver. Which, at the time, was cutting-edge stuff! It took a lot of the hassle out of the process. Which I now realise wasn’t really that much of a hassle to begin with. Now? I barely have a clue what’s going on. Everything has evolved and I need an English-to-Tech dictionary before I even get started. So I turned to my trusty AI for assistance. Assistance? Pfft. I can do the whole thing for you. Just tell me what you want and I’ll sketch it out. So I gave it the ideas. I watched it working. And ten minutes later, the bones of a website appeared. OMG. That was easy. Home page. Projects. Writings. Art. Then I thought for a moment. It’s a shame there are so few current projects. Because my wardrobe is littered with the remains of old ones. Things that were used obsessively for a couple of months before being consigned to an old shoebox or carrier bag, never to see the light of day again. They deserved acknowledgement. So I requested an additional page. A sort of project graveyard. This is where things got slightly out of hand. What began as a simple addition to the website turned into a mammoth task, because every time we improved something, I had another idea. And then a better idea. And then an idea about the previous idea. By teatime we’d commissioned a cemetery, dug and then removed six numbered graves, hired an animated Grim Reaper, made him drag the corpse of an abandoned project into an open grave, discovered he wasn’t turning up for work on my phone, burned 84% of an AI agent allowance trying to locate him, eventually found him, then built an idyllic Cornish meadow so crows could bring us shiny objects to turn into even more projects for Death eventually to bury. Good job my weekly usage allowance resets tomorrow. Checking how many tokens I've used has become somewhat of a new obsession....
Read more →In Which I Remember I Own a Domain
Somewhere back in 2025, I bought a domain. My obsessions at the time were crows and my fledgling DJing. I wanted a brand that encompassed both — writing and DJ decks. In my crow writings, I often reference the crows’ own ‘bible’: the Crowdex. Nice play on words! Crowdecks it is. I created an Instagram account by that name but didn’t really get much of a following. My interests and output are perhaps a little too… niche, shall we say? So I decided what I needed was a website, and off I went to track down the right domain. It existed! And it became mine. And, as usual, I got distracted by another shiny thing and forgot all about it. Until a year later when, annoyed that Google wanted me to pay actual money for storage, I realised I needed to clear out some of the cyber clutter and went on a massive cull. That’s when I came across an ancient email congratulating me on my new domain. My what? Oh hell. I’d totally forgotten about that. Erm… resurrected? I wasn’t aware that project had died. I mean, was it ever alive? I did the thing. I bought the domain. The website, unfortunately, remained in limbo. Therefore it had never been born. Therefore it could never appear on Death’s radar. Right? But it deserves to live, even if it’s only as testament to my fickle brain and its appalling habit of getting bored too quickly. And so, one year after acquiring a domain for a website that didn’t exist… Crowdecks finally got born.
Read more →STATUS HISTORY
- CURRENT OBSESSION
- ACTIVE