For years, this blog wore the clothes of an old newspaper. Slightly cluttered, slightly pompous, faintly smelling of dust, printer’s ink and coffee stains from some forgotten editor in 1973. Exactly the sort of thing I like. Then, at some point, I had to abandon the theme. I cannot even remember why anymore. Probably a plugin stopped working, WordPress changed something fundamental for the seventeenth time that year, or a software update decided that aesthetics from before 2021 constituted a security risk to civilisation. Such is modern computing: a vast global machine dedicated to ensuring that nothing remains where you left it.
Ever since, the blog has looked acceptable rather than right. Functional rather than inhabited. I missed the old atmosphere. A general blog like this should not look like a corporate landing page for a cryptocurrency startup or a wellness app aimed at exhausted middle managers in Amsterdam. It should feel like a place where essays, fragments, travel notes, political thoughts, odd linguistic observations and half-finished ideas can quietly accumulate over decades. An old harbour where strange ships still dock, as the new tagline now puts it.
The strange thing is that the solution came from precisely the technology one might expect to destroy such aesthetics. I gave an AI a screenshot of the old design and asked it to recreate the feeling of it in a modern form. Not a perfect copy, but something spiritually related. To my considerable surprise, it succeeded remarkably well. The current theme is therefore neither entirely old nor entirely new. It is, in a sense, a remembered version of the old blog, reconstructed from traces. Like an archaeologist rebuilding a Roman villa from a few broken tiles and a bit of wall foundation, except the archaeologist is a probability engine running in a datacentre somewhere in Oregon.
What fascinates me is that the AI did not merely imitate the layout mechanically. It seemed to understand the mood I was after: the subdued colours, the sense of columns and printed matter, the slightly literary atmosphere, the impression that one has stumbled across a publication that has existed quietly for a very long time. There is something oddly moving about that. Human beings have spent years training machines on the entire visual history of humanity, and one of the results is apparently that middle-aged bloggers can once again have pleasantly old-fashioned websites. Progress moves in mysterious ways.
So Denseman on the Rattis now has a new skin, though in truth it feels more like recovering an old one. The blog itself remains what it has always been: a somewhat unruly collection of thoughts about language, politics, technology, Scotland, Denmark, Europe, cooking, history and whatever else happens to drift past my desk or my garden. The ships are still arriving. The harbour has merely been repaired a little. Humanity may yet survive after all, if only because even the machines seem to appreciate good typography.