Colophon

Style guide

Some conventions and pretensions:

• The em dash—I refuse to forfeit the mark to LLMs; sometimes I've used them with spaces; lately I don't
• Whilst—is proper English
• Oxford commas—are proper English
• Consistency—a priority in formal writing, not on this site

Typefaces

Long-form prose and titles are set in Newsreader, an open source font from Production Type that is optimized for on-screen, long-form reading and designed for Google Fonts.

UI chrome, eyebrows, dates, and short-form metadata are set in Rosario, a humanist sans by Héctor Gatti / Omnibus-Type.

The ampersand on the homepage is set in Fraunces, which offers a delightful flourish. Designed by Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi at Undercase Type.

On the mark

The mark on this site is Orion's Belt—the three blue-white supergiants Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak, sized and shaded by their stellar magnitudes.

The dimmest star, Mintaka, has an opacity of about 0.61 against Alnilam's 1.0 because in the sky it is about 0.61 times as bright. The mark twinkles on the masthead in three staggered cycles to mimic the way stars flicker against atmospheric turbulence at slightly different rates.

Did you know, that of all the named asterisms in the night sky, the Belt is the only one visible from every inhabited latitude on earth? TIL.

Why did I choose it?

• Orion has always been my favorite constellation
• I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt as a kid; the Belt is/was the resting place for the soul of Osiris
• It has names across continents and cultures
• It can be used as an em dash, supra
• It is a trinity...
• ...yet it contains multitudes (two of the 'stars' are actually groups of stars)

Stack

• Astro 6, static output
• pnpm workspaces (monorepo)
• MDX content collections for essays
• Pagefind for in-browser search
• @astrojs/rss for the feed
• Deployment: Cloudflare

Source

Source code lives in a private repository.

License

Essays © Mike Casey · CC BY-NC 4.0.