June 2022

This is the home for the collected projects & works of Julia Hayden. For more than 28 years, this website (and its predecessor) has been many things to one person - sounding board, receptacle for nattering, grounds for experiments, a base for silliness, not to mention grandstanding, dabbling, publishing, sharing, expounding, organizing, declaiming, reviewing, assorted mongering, and a thousand other things. My life has shifted one way and then the other, sending me down all sorts of weird paths, working alternately like a pendulum and rocket. At times, it has been many things to other people, which I consider to be a big gleaming bonus.

I'm an artist and writer, a mostly-retired treasure hunter, an unretired UX designer, a teammate to and a manager of awesome people, a small town girl, a traveler, impossibly old school with one jaundiced side eye on the newly innovative, a reader, a listener, a decided cat person, and someone whose first email was a bitnet account. I've designed everything from MUDs to complex software applications, tattoos to typefaces, ephemera to interiors.

Over the years, some projects and pages have dropped out of (the) site; please pardon any links that end up in a black hole. 28+ years of experimentation plus several site restorations and mutations have led to inadvertent site contortions and disappearing files. In the vast majority of cases, the loss wasn't that great; I'm going through decades-old archives looking for the odd bit of missing awesomeness.

I recently moved hosting providers, too, which doesn't help. I also thought "Hey! I'll just finish implementing one of the 3 site designs I've worked on since the last time I made a public update to this site." and actually got a fair way down that path before I realized I really hated those designs. I don't love this one right now, but it's done, and it is more readable than the last one I abandoned. I'd rather spend my limited time updating the content and not the design, anyway. This would be less of an issue if I wasn't in a phase where I has handrolling my own site the last time I updated. I think I'm the last person in the world to be slinging HTML without the benefit of a contact management system. (I've seen your looks of pity when I've mentioned this other webfolk in person/video call; I'm used to it.)