for the four characters

Someone at a registrar approved it in under a second, the way that has worked since domains stopped being a thing you waited for. Four characters and a two-letter code that used to mean something about a country and now mostly means it was cheap. No ceremony. Nobody rang a bell.

For twenty years the correct thing to put at an address like this was a redirect, or nothing, or one sentence promising something better once there was time. The redirect was at least honest — it said the real thing lives elsewhere and pointed there. The empty ones were the strange ones: a server answering, dutifully, with nothing to say.

This one answers with a paragraph. That is the whole change. Not a homepage in the old sense, with a hit counter and a "best viewed at" and an apology for the state of things. Just enough to prove somebody owns the address and thought, briefly, about what to do with it.

Most of what's here passed through a model before it reached this screen. That used to feel like it should be a confession. It reads more like what a printing press must have felt like to someone used to a hand and a nib — faster, worse in places, still yours to have signed.

The theme underneath is borrowed on purpose, from somewhere that already spent the effort working out what a page like this should look like. Near-black, one serif for the one thing that gets to be a headline, one monospace for everything else, no shadow anywhere. Saying that twice, in two different fonts, would have been the actual waste.

This page took an afternoon. That is not a complaint. It is closer to how it used to feel.