Colophon
Axoplasm.com has been an active domain since 1999.
This website is the direct descendent of my first-ever website, which I built during grad school in 1995–1996. Its content has been migrated a zillion times through static HTML → hand-rolled PHP+MySQL → WordPress → Blogger → Tumblr → Drupal → Django. So there are bound to be some dead links and broken images. 🤷🏼♂️
It delivers boring HTML that renders in every browser ever, with or without stylesheets or JavaScript. There is a primitive styleguide. This was either built from, or is the foundation for, my usual website boilerplate. It is hosted on a shared server somewhere in California, along with zillions of other wee projects I started then forgot about.
The fonts are IBM Plex.
This design isn’t minimalist so much as lazy.
My sigil ✳︎ is an eight-spoked sprocket, U+2733. Depending on your device’s character encoding scheme and adherence to CSS, it may render as a greenish emoji ✳️ or as a plain text character ✳︎. I was inspired to adopt it as my personal sigil by Kurt Vonnegut’s illustration of an asshole and/or as a reference to the Noble Eightfold Path.
The author, as signifiers
- late afternoon sunlight shining across a crisply made bed
- the first sip of your favorite beverage
- inscrutible aliens and/or robots
- country songs that make you cry
- birds hoarding shiny objects
- books about the sea
- steel bicycles
- kids in trees
- muddy dogs
- wool socks
- wood smoke
- sunburns
- burritos
- rain
“Oh, to have been a rider then. Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately.”
— Tim Krabbé, The Rider