let there be light

30 Dec, 2025

I remember creating a blog on here about four years ago. I had been following a Pan-Africanist scholar while writing my first few blog posts, which were peppered with combative language and self-governing frameworks. I was desperate to identify with a struggle that felt palpable and far gone simultaneously. I had moved out of Chicago, started a job in what felt like a different planet, and didn't know what I was doing. I was angry, and I felt alone. But I gave myself permission to be in denial about my heartbreak so that I could put on a brave face in public.

Back then, the words I wrote seemed to flow effortlessly. I knew how to articulate thoughts and expressions that left enough of an impression to register with who I thought I was and what I thought I knew. The truth is, I knew nothing, but I couldn't openly admit that to myself, let alone others, without suffering a hazy loss. I had to be resilient, even if I felt worn out and let down. I had to be firm.

I'm having trouble finding the right words to describe myself back then, but I vividly remember how much I enjoyed tweaking the CSS styles of my first Bearblog. I used Georgia for most of the text elements and paired it with Arial for the datelines. I treated the hyperlinks and datelines in shades of green, I think in reference to the green that's used in the first Sudanese flag (post-British colonialism). I spent a lot of time styling the paragraph text, which I also do when working on print books. I embedded images of cakes, shoes, shrubs, and my childhood in specific posts. I worked with a lot of typographic constraints.

For this blog, I'm using a font that is the default monospaced treatment on my Android phone's Chrome browser. I like that this font appears crunchy and smudgy; mechanical and a little flawed. I'm a fan of the original IBM typewriter fonts (to which this font is in reference), perhaps because I'm nostalgic for my childhood interactions with thick mechanical keyboards, beveled and embossed interfaces, and cascading windows that flood a square, grainy monitor. Typewriters embody the physicality that personal computing was born out of, and typewriter fonts restore tactility to our sleek, lightweight devices and retina screens.

Nostalgia aside, I'm also a fan of typographic forms that are charming and awkward. I like how this font looks on screen, because the smudges soften the reading experience and the ligatures surprise me.

I don't typically write code or design websites, but I grew up on the Internet and enjoy toggling between print and web design. I design books for a living, and the process is similar to designing websites, because each text element is tagged using a markup language that functions like HTML. The books I work on are simultaneously released as print books and epubs, so each manuscript must be structured like a website, with paragraph tags, header tags, image tags, etc. The main difference between print and web is that printed objects are essentially carved in stone while websites are supposed to be reflowable, fluid, and "responsive" to different browser viewports and devices. For this and other reasons, epubs tend to be much more accessible than print books.

I don't know how to close out this post, so I will test out and tweak the styling of a few generic elements from Bearblog's markdown cheatsheet (below). As I do this, I will continue thinking about what life looked like for me four years ago. It feels like a lot longer ago than it is.

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Bear Blog®© is a Good Blog™ that took ±3 years to perfect.

I drink H₂O at the 6^th and 12^th hours of the day.

Light finds its way through the cracks. It bends around edges and slips through narrow openings. This is diffraction. The wave spreads, creating patterns of light and dark, ripples of energy beyond simple lines. It reveals light's true nature: a wave that cannot be confined. Diffraction is light's gentle bending, a reminder of its fluid form.¹

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