About

I’m Ben Crowder, and this site (or one of its earlier incarnations) has been my home on the web since July 2000. I chronically overuse parentheses and em dashes, and I am not an LLM. I love reading. A lot. So, so much. Making things makes me happy. (Most recently, “things” has meant minimalist symbolic religious art and some fiction.) I’m an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I live in Utah with my wife (only one!) and kids and a house full of books. Feel free to say hi, especially if you want to talk about books.

Work

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.)

I’m a former designer and have leaned toward frontend for most of my career, though I’ve also been a backend engineer. My resume page has more detail about my work experience.

Slash pages

I have a number of slash pages on this site, because it’s fun and I can’t seem to stop adding them:

• Guestbook — leave a comment
• Hello — ways to contact me
• Interests — things that currently interest me
• Now — what I’m working on now
• Reading — a list of books I’ve read
• Subscribe — links to feeds
• Timeline — a timeline of the types of projects I’ve worked on
• Uses — software I use

AI

I use Real-ESRGAN to upscale my art, but I don’t use LLMs or other generative AI and I do not see that ever changing.

My strongly held views: generative AI is a net negative for humanity, a pestilence that hurts people in many ways, and the meager benefits are not worth those costs. The companies pushing AI are deeply unethical. This bubble of insanity that has covered the world of software with slime will one day pop, and for me it cannot happen soon enough. My list of objections to AI — moral, ethical, environmental, cognitive, and more — is long and perhaps someday I’ll write it up and post it here, but to be honest I try to spend each day thinking about AI as little as possible.

Colophon

Backend: This site is built via Cast, a Node-based static site generator I wrote in early 2025.

Frontend: The design is all custom, with the most recent redesign in January 2025. The font is EBC Garamond, my customized variation of EBGaramond08. There’s no site-wide JavaScript.

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.