Ethan Willingham

The truth lasts forever; this is a website.

Welcome to my woodshop. I build things for fun and write articles I want to read; it's my reference shelf, fully open on the web.

1,535 commits ↗
  • Painted detail from 1514 of a moneylender's hand holding a small balance over scattered gold coins while his wife turns the page of an illuminated book. 10 Jun 2026

    The Number

    there is a dollar amount above which work becomes optional, roughly 25 times your yearly spending. the math, the climb out of ordinary american debt, the 0% tax bracket waiting on the far side, a find-your-number calculator, and every catch the brochure leaves out.

  • The Emir of Bukhara photographed in full color in 1911: a bearded man in a brilliant blue silk robe seated before a carved wooden door. 10 Jun 2026

    Photography's Greatest Hits

    muybridge's flying horse, a mars selfie, an erased thumb, a galaxy you can drag: eleven dark rooms of photography's greatest pictures, every image free-licensed, every story sourced.

  • The words Big Enough in large serif type over a gold curve that rises then flattens toward a dashed ceiling marked about 90 percent, on dark green. 10 Jun 2026

    Big Enough

    building muscle the natural way, on one supplement, real food, and sunlight, and knowing where to stop. the last 10% can cost twice the work, for muscle almost no one will notice.

  • A 1625 engraving of an ouroboros: a winged dragon curled into a circle, biting its own tail. 9 Jun 2026

    Sure Things

    eighteen things we measure to impossible precision, or rely on every day, and still cannot explain. we photographed a black hole and still can't say what gravity is.

  • The eight planets and Pluto in a row across a deep field of distant galaxies, from Mercury to Pluto, with ringed Saturn near the center. 9 Jun 2026

    How Old Are You in Space?

    enter your birthday and see your age on every planet, counted in each world's own years, with a countdown to your next birthday on each.

  • A field-guide cover on dark forest green reading The First Year, a calm guide to a baby's first year. 2 Jun 2026

    The First Year

    a calm, exhaustively sourced field guide to a baby's first year: feeding, sleep, health, development, safety, and the parent. every claim cited, every chart on real data, and the places the experts disagree shown honestly.

  • A small ochre octopus covered in glowing electric-blue rings on dark ground. 30 May 2026

    The Living Ocean

    a mostly wordless dive through the ocean in three dozen high-resolution photographs, from tide pools and coral reefs to the deep sea, hydrothermal vents, and creatures named only last year.

  • An overhead grid of brightly colored stacked shipping container ends, yellow, rust red, and teal, packed in orderly rows. 30 May 2026

    The Brain Behind the Warehouse

    behind every "your order has shipped" is a building you have probably never seen and a piece of software that knows where every item inside it is. how that software runs the warehouse and the factory beside it, from the dock door to the assembly line.

  • The words All In in large serif type over a rising gold curve that climbs above a flat dashed line, on dark green. 29 May 2026

    All In

    the work that makes people valuable changed; the way we manage them mostly did not. a field guide to managing professionals, and to getting them all in.

  • Three side-by-side columns of the actual source code behind this site, in warm syntax highlighting on a dark background: the game engine, the galaxy visualizer, and the stylesheet. 24 May 2026

    Every Change This Website Ever Made

    every commit to this site as a point of light on a three-year timeline. three near-silent years, then a 1,535-change spring eruption, fed by 13.3 billion tokens and counting.

  • A glowing vortex of gold and teal points, a strange attractor rendered on the GPU. 21 May 2026

    Obi Juan Algorithm

    a million points of math you fly through in 3D: strange attractors, fractals, the prime numbers, and the shadow of a four-dimensional shape.

  • A Gray's Anatomy engraving of the teeth set in the jaw. 21 May 2026

    The Optional Body

    an interactive descent through the parts of the body you can live without, from a spare foot bone to a heart on a machine.

  • Daubigny's painting The Hamlet of Optevoz: cottages by a stream at dusk. 1 May 2026

    The Old Masters

    a small private gallery. Storms and saints, harvest fields and harbour scenes.

  • The Ghost in the Swarm: teal and gold particles spiraling into concentric bands around a dark vortex eye. 26 Apr 2026

    The Ghost in the Swarm

    100,000 particles obey three lines of math on the GPU, while an invisible field steers the swarm through sacred geometry.

  • Sluice: a jet-powered drill rig flying over the surface, with a freshly dug shaft below. 25 Apr 2026

    Sluice

    my own 2D mining game. This free v15.89 build is the last public version; development is now private, coming to Steam, Summer 2027.

  • Earth from space at the day/night terminator, city lights glowing across nighttime South America. 23 Apr 2026

    Daylight Globe

    a small WebGL globe for the day/night line, daylight hours, and sunrise/set.

  • A scatter of colorful dots, particles rendered with nothing but CSS box-shadow. 23 Apr 2026

    Rendering Particles Without a Canvas

    three physics demos with no canvas, no WebGL, no SVG. The whole renderer is one CSS property on a 1px div.

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