Hi! I’m Rob, and I’m a multi-class creative.

My writing includes speculative short stories and critical essays and over a hundred pieces of microfiction; I take photos of nature and landscapes and my wonderful cat Poppy, and explore videogame spaces through their visual design. I dabble in 3D art, I’m an amateur pianist, and once in a while I try my hand at composing.

This site is a single destination for all my creative works. If you like the things I make, whatever I work on next will be posted here for you to enjoy. If you’re only interested in my writing, well, there’s an RSS feed for that; same for my visual art, or any of the other categories of creativity on here.

I believe in a vision of the internet which doesn’t rely on advertising and manipulative patterns. I store none of your data on this site; there are no tracking cookies, no visit counters, no metrics of how long you spend in the galleries and enjoying my words. This is a safe harbour, an attempt to do things differently.

If that’s all you need to know, go ahead and have a browse. I hope you enjoy what you find here, and I’d be delighted to know what resonates with you!

But if you’re curious why I built this site, read on.

It’s 2024, and the internet is broken.

It probably has been for some time, but it’s really been brought into sharp focus in the past couple of years. We’ve been through two decades of Web 2.0, of vitriolic comment sections and increasingly-aggressive SEO, only to arrive at a point where a single company is responsible for 92% of global web traffic, but can’t provide legitimate, truthful answers to simple questions. Now the only way to circumvent the keyword-dense plagiarism of the Google top ranked websites is to trust your misinformation to one of the multitude of ethically-dubious and factually-obtuse machine learning networks being desperately pushed by the tech corporations at enormous societal cost.

I’m not much of an evangelist, but there has to be a better way. We’ve spent too many years looking to the techbros for answers, for a vision of how the world could be; but that was never supposed to be their role. It’s the job of creatives to offer that vision, to provide a way forward that’s better than the late-stage capitalist hellscape that the early promise of the web has turned into.

This site is part of my attempt at an answer.

Fundamentally, a lot of the issues with the modern internet come down to curation. Because curation is hard, and any solutions we come up with are inherently imperfect.

At first, we tried to solve the curation issue through webrings and pages of links to sites we enjoyed. Then algorithmic search came along and said “Let us handle that!”, and we let them. And for a while, it worked, until the perpetual arms race between content mills and search engines escalated and we ended up with dense codices of SEO summoning rituals that no solo creative could ever hope to keep up with.

Then along came corporate social media and their promises that if we built our communities within their walled gardens, we would never have to search. They would provide us an endless stream of relevant content, and they would keep the trolls and the nazis from our door. And maybe, if we were really lucky, we’d win the virality lottery and everyone would know our names, and that would be a good thing.

Our homes have been burned so many times, our communities scattered to the winds. And we’ve rebuilt, found new peers, learned the culture and customs of each new home we’ve found. Our web presences have existed on centralised servers, on Livejournal and Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, and each time some CEO turns out to be an asshole, each time techbros invite bigots to the table, each time they leap to incorporate the next new extractive technology in their product, we pack up our things and move on.

And each time, a little more is lost.

I’ve had enough of staying ahead of the flames as the forest burns.

I want somewhere that I own, a curated space devoid of opaque algorithms and unscrupulous scripts, where I can show off my creative work. Anyone who likes my work can be assured that this is where I will remain, a rock amidst the torrent.

And I’m not naive. I recognise that by choosing not to engage with SEO or corporate social media, I’m limiting my reach. Or maybe small creative sites are going to struggle in the current state of algorithmic search anyway, so all I’m gaining is a sense of peace. A quiet space, where those folks who find me can enjoy my work as they see fit.

I hope you stay a while, read a little, engage with the way I see the world. And maybe if you do, you’ll tell your friends about this Creative Space.