About

I’m happily married with wonderful kids and a lot of books. My interests include reading (particularly history, biography, social justice, science, tech history, and sf&f), typesetting/bookmaking, design, writing, art, coding, languages, and genealogy. I’m an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

By day I’m a software engineer at Planet. (This site is, however, unrelated to my work there and does not represent the company in any way.) My resume page has more detail about my work experience.

Contact

The hello page has information on contacting me.

AI

I use Real-ESRGAN to upscale my art, but I don’t use LLMs or other generative AI in my work and don’t have any interest in doing so. (If I ever do, I’ll make sure to explicitly indicate it.)

Colophon

Backend: This site runs on a custom PHP CMS I wrote eons ago and a blog engine running on Django. I’ve been meaning to migrate the CMS to something newer, but I’ve been focused on other things and hey, it’s still working fine.

Frontend: The design is all custom and the typeface is Literata. There’s no JavaScript. (The HTML is generated server-side.)

History: The first incarnation of this site was at blankslate.net back in July 2001. I had some proto-blog posts on the site in those early years but have since taken them (and hundreds of other early posts) down. There were also a number of separate blogs along the way that ended up getting folded in when I consolidated everything into bencrowder.net. I’ve redesigned the site periodically throughout the course of its life and (let’s be realistic) will no doubt continue to do so until I can’t use a computer anymore.