Slow is a feature

There’s a species of personal website that’s optimized like a landing page: conversion-tested hero copy, a newsletter modal that pounces after eight seconds, a blog that’s really a content-marketing funnel. This site is not that, on purpose.

The mascot here is a slug. Slugs are not fast. Slugs are, by most metrics that matter to a growth team, a disaster. But a slug always gets where it’s going, and it leaves a visible trail showing exactly how it got there. That is the whole editorial strategy of this website.

What slow buys you

Slow means finished. The games section has one game in it as I write this. It’s a small game, but you can play it start to end, and it feels good. I’d rather grow a shelf of small finished things than a backlog of ambitious abandoned ones.

Slow means legible. Every strip in the comic archive, every post here, was made by hand at a pace where I understood what I was doing. When something on this site is broken, it’s broken in a way I can find.

Slow means mine. Nothing here is A/B tested. The color scheme is warm because I like warm colors. The fonts are a little wonky because comics are a little wonky. If a design choice makes the site worse but funnier, I will usually keep it.

None of this is an argument against craft — the slow part is the craft. It’s an argument against urgency as a default setting. The internet does not need this website to ship faster. It arrives when it arrives, trail and all.