I had shoes once, sneakers, which I had thought were red when I bought them online, but they were pink. No, not pink. Those shoes were piiiiiiiink. So pink they seemed to make a noise when you looked at them. Not (pink) demurely spoken just between the two of us, but a honking hot marching-band donnybrook of color. A hue that came out swinging, that looked like it wanted to rub off and stain things.
It was my friend Autumn who nailed it: “Those are pank.”
This is pank.
And pank it has been, my web site, since 2015. For Lyza.com, I think it’s still the right color. For now, at least. I may change my mind within the fortnight. It’s the perfect color because it makes me uncomfortable; it fits because it doesn’t fit me well. It’s simultaneously unserious and vengeful-feeling, visceral, a little bit rageful, and more than mildly feminine (for which quality I have, at best, ambivalent feelings). It nods to the printer’s-red-and-monochrome of where I was coming from. It is neither welcoming nor off-putting, and can play, again, like printer’s red alongside the no-curves-thanks hard grid of my web site, circa 2015 and today. The color itself is a curve.
I built a new site, finally, in the summer of 2015, motivated not by a desire to make content once again, but instead a hot-breathing urge to hack, to create the personal-ultimate static-site generator and personal publishing workflow that kept my source content, whatever that might be, who cares, really, pristine, portable, human-readable, sacrosanct. I got that part, the content-separation thing, right. And the site was battened down tight and outrageously, as we said then, performant, with new-at-the-time Service Worker-based optimization and obsessive tuning.
Lyza.com during the peak-pank years.
But some other choices I made were less admirable: dependency-heavy, invent-my-own wheel JavaScript written at the height of the odd industry obsession with JS streams (e.g. GulpJS metaphors); I had no real plan for what was going to go on the site, just an eye toward how impeccable its bona fides would be to other web nerds.
It was a fun, feverish hobby of implementation for a couple of months, and I launched it and then I — neglected it entirely. What little content I did produce was...kind of boring? I listlessly popped out a few non-technical posts just to fill the blog page with something.
I’d built a ravenous pank content machine and given it nothing to devour.
Then I got distracted, the kind of distracted — writing another book, this time entirely solo; moving suddenly across the country to the woods of Vermont; facing down re-surgings of poor health and new chronic ailments — that didn’t lift for years.