Cleaning House: Refactoring My Eleventy Config Into Modules
How I decomposed an 866-line .eleventy.js monolith into four focused modules, fixed some lurking bugs, and eliminated dead CSS and dead dependencies along the way.
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How I decomposed an 866-line .eleventy.js monolith into four focused modules, fixed some lurking bugs, and eliminated dead CSS and dead dependencies along the way.
Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels run inside each of us, more than twice around the Earth. 330 billion cells are replaced every single day. Humanity has always built civilization beside rivers because we are rivers. Always in motion, never stepping into the same current twice, carrying cells that live only days alongside neurons that will last precisely as long as we do.
In 1995, China abducted six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima—the recognized 11th Panchen Lama—severing the chain of mutual recognition at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist succession. Meanwhile, Michif, a language born from Cree verbs and French nouns that belonged to no one but the Métis People, has nearly vanished within living memory. Both losses are the same act: colonialism's weaponization of continuity. On the extinction of languages, the cutting of red threads, and what it means to inherit a chain with links already missing.
A walkthrough of how I audited my 11ty build benchmarks and cut cold-start time from 14 seconds down to 2.6 seconds by caching two custom filters and swapping out a bare network fetch.
You visit your parent's house and find your white Xbox 360 in your childhood bedroom. A friends list full of gamertags that haven't booted up their own console in hundreds of weeks. On the heartbreak of digital disappearance, and why I'm committed to staying findable.
A hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius in the South Atlantic has sent thirty passengers home across twenty-three countries before a single test was run. What does the WHO's 'low risk' framing mean? The institutional failure of January 2020, and what honest communication about uncertainty actually requires. The incubation window is open. We are watching.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's 'The Undercommons' describes a space of collective refusal beneath the institutions of the master. On why Black American cultural revolution was possible, why Indigenous cultural revolution is structurally different, and where the Indigenous undercommons already is. The potlatch went underground for sixty-six years. The drum broke out in a shopping mall. The land is the undercommons. We were always already here.
Scientists working in classified American aerospace and nuclear research have died and disappeared. The story has migrated from UFO forums to the White House briefing room. A conspiracy requires a conspirator. On grief, and the brain's furious, irrepressible need for meaning. Nuno Loureiro wanted to trap a small star. Carl Grillmair watched stellar streams from a self-built desert observatory. Monica Reza invented an alloy that does not burn. This is not me trying to figure anything out, this is me trying to remember the human beings.
From Shaw Community Television on Channel 10 to Paper Tiger Television and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access was original community media. Anybody, any channel, no notes from the network. In that spirit, I'm starting a self-hosted radio station built on AzuraCast, automated with a Python cron job pulling public domain recordings from the Internet Archive, and I'm going to try to show up and broadcast.
I am a compulsive archivist, terrified of losing my words, but many of history's greatest writers asked for theirs to be burned. Kafka, Dickinson, Plath, Virgil all had their reasons. A meditation on self-erasure, ego, and the difference between the writing and the written thing, with an interview with Bix Frankonis, a contemporary writer who one day decided he needed to be smaller online, not bigger.
The sonder and vertigo I feel about people's interior lives. Corporate social media fails to offer genuine witnessing. So, I look to Dreamwidth, a fork of LiveJournal, and fifteen years of unbroken communities. On digital gentrification and the difference between syndication and participation.
A love letter to the mathematics hiding inside video games, and a protest against the expression 'I'm just not a math person'. From parallel universes in Super Mario 64 to the technical exegetes mapping Animal Crossing, The Sims 2, Pokémon, and Paper Mario. Then Balatro and the IEEE 754 double-precision ceiling, tetration, Knuth's up-arrows, Conway chained arrows, Graham's number, TREE(3). A history of notation catching up to the infinite.
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur le jeu de mots derrière «Brenjour», l'insécurité linguistique, et l'idée qu'apprendre une nouvelle langue nous donne une nouvelle âme. Sur la recherche en code-switching et en cultural frame switching chez les bilingues, le binaire rigide du genre grammatical en français, le pronom «iel» reconnu par Le Petit Robert en 2021, l'interdiction de l'écriture inclusive par le gouvernement du Québec en septembre 2025, mon apathie face à mon propre genre, le commérage, et la platitude honnête qui émerge quand j'écris dans une langue que je maîtrise mal.