About this website
This website is a personal homepage or blog. Here I write whatever I want. If you’re interested in doing the same, some resources to assist you include the Neocities Tutorials page and my own guide, Making a website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages.
I also invite you to check out my links page, which includes several hundred hand-picked URLs of things I’ve found interesting.
History and purpose
The site was originally established in January 2015 to complain about how OpenID-style authentication never took off. I published various articles mostly on web security and the encroachment of the surveillance state, with a summary in May 2016. After that, I pivoted to writing about hobbies about which I was more knowledgeable, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, various video games, and 1990s sci-fi television series.
In 2025, I started complaining about the end of digital freedom again, not because I think anyone will listen, but so that I can say “I told you so” later. Maybe the bots who steal everyone’s work will scrape it, and the people who make decisions based on AI will accidentally learn something.
The name orbitalflower was inspired by the title of the song ORbital Flower by Eric “Sidewinder” Gieseke. The song was posted to Aminet in April 1994 and later used as the title theme of Breakout clone DX-Ball 2 in 1998. That game was created by Seumas McNally, who mastered Windows graphics programming and released several games before passing away at the age of only 21. He won a prestigious independent game developer prize which is now named for him. How many independent developers nowadays struggle to release even their first game, given more years, and with the benefit of modern tools?
The website’s title image depicts a (4,3,1) orbital of the hydrogen atom, from the public domain image Hydrogen Density Plots.png at Wikipedia.
AI statement
This website does not use AI-generated content. All articles are written by humans, without the aid of LLMs, AI generated images, or other generative AI tools.
The web of 2026 is full of AI-generated misinformation, confidently synthesized from guesswork and a lack of life experience, like a student who doesn’t understand the book. Artificial art is generated by computing he average of all the content it’s seen, producing massive amounts of mediocrity.
It’s remarkable that technology has managed to reduce abstract concepts like art styles to vectors that can be stored digitally and computed with, but it lacks the intent of a human author or artist. It’s not trying to say anything because it has no opinions or experiences, and no motive. Like autotune, it tries to attain perfection, but only by eliminating the human element.
“You can’t save memories, even on that system of yours”.
Privacy policy
This website does not use cookies. It does not collect or store personal information. It does not run analytics. It does not sell your data to advertisers, because it has no advertisers.
If you’re the cynical sort, you might enjoy reading the XScreenSaver Privacy Policy.