My website is ugly because I made it

Summary

If my mom wanted good art on her fridge, she could’ve purchased reprints of works by Vermeer, Lichtenstein, Wyeth, etc. But she didn’t want good art – she wanted my art.Somebody with good taste could’ve made my website, but then it wouldn’t be mine.To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks.That’s okay. Your “mine” is not my "mine."Some folks run self-hosted websites on solar power. Others share wisdom on Substack. This guy posts manufacturing deep-dives to YouTube. Gwern doeswhatever this is.It’s an itch – a feeling that something is really important, and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can possibly do it except you.I am not compelled to bake bread, nor provision servers, nor build chips. Yet that itch pervades, and it pulls me toward humor and systems and life and software and structure. And when emotion becomes unbearable, it erupts out of me: fiction, HTML/CSS, crappy robots, sad songs, and so on.My website is my website.In the past, I just wanted simplicity and friendliness: remove noise, boost contrast, flatten menu depth, boring HTML, reduce CSS, avoid JS, etc.My website looked like this:taylor.town in 2023But things started going sour when I decided to occupy as much horizontal space as possible.The plan was simple: slap flex-wrap on a ul. Unfortunately, text wraps too. It was unclear where one link ended and the other began. Some folks read inline and others perceive inline-block.More whitespace? Yikes. Borders around each link? No way. Dots between the links? Yuck.So, let’s vary the links! The chaos you see on my homepage comes from a few simple rules:li:nth-child(4n + 0) { transform: rotate(1deg); } li:nth-child(4n + 1) { transform: rotate(-0.6deg); } li:nth-child(4n + 2) { transform: rotate(0.5deg); } li:nth-child(4n + 3) { transform: rotate(-0.75deg); } li:nth-child(6n + 0) { font-family: Times; } li:nth-child(6n + 1) { font-...