FLIGHT RECORDER — DO NOT PAINT OVER

Black-box

Flight recorders are painted international orange so they can be found after the fact. This page is the same idea: how the site is built, what it refuses to do, and what broke on the way.

01Stack

FrameworkNext.js 16 — App Router, TypeScript, static-first

ContentMDX in-repo, gray-matter + next-mdx-remote, compiled at build

AnimationGSAP 3.13 — ScrollTrigger, SplitText, Flip, Draggable, Inertia, CustomEase

Smooth scrollLenis (lerp 0.08; 0.11 in articles), driven by GSAP's ticker — one rAF

TransitionsCustom manager — not the View Transitions API. Deterministic timing, Flip morphs

Render tierTier B by choice: DOM + CSS filters + SVG. The GL layer remains bolt-on-able

02Type

DisplayClash Display 500–700 — Fontshare, self-hosted woff2

Body / confessionalZodiak 400 + 700 + italics — Fontshare, self-hosted

InstrumentationFragment Mono — Google Fonts (OFL), self-hosted

Subsettingpyftsubset to the used character set; preloaded set 94KB (budget 120)

03Motion spec

--t-micro / ui / reveal / scene0.22s / 0.45s / 0.9s / 1.4s

--e-outcubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1) — default reveal

--e-settlecubic-bezier(0.22, 1, 0.36, 1) — media; the flare

--e-thrustcubic-bezier(0.83, 0, 0.17, 1) — transitions and wipes

LawsNothing bounces · entrances decelerate · exits anticipate · velocity is visible · articles are a no-fly zone

04Performance — recorded

Lighthouse (desktop)Performance 100 · Accessibility 100 — home and article

LCP0.7s (budget ≤ 2.0s)

CLS0.014 home · 0.000 article (budget ≤ 0.02)

Total blocking time0ms

JS, home route252KB gz (budget ≤ 300KB)

Fonts, preloaded94KB woff2 (budget ≤ 120KB)

Morph frame rate60fps sustained through the full transition (rAF-metered)

MeasuredAug 2026, production build, this hardware — not estimated

05What broke during the build — recovered from the recorder

Fragment Mono is not on Fontshare, despite the spec insisting it was. It lives on Google Fonts under the OFL. The prototypes rendered a fallback mono for two days and nobody noticed, which is its own lesson about fallback stacks.
Next 16 intercepts history traversal through the Navigation API, so popstate never fires. Scroll restoration now detects back/forward by whether our own link component initiated the navigation.
A stale scrollend listener kept saving the next page's zero scroll under the previous page's key. Restoration read 0 forever. Keys are now taken from location at event time.
The shared-element morph animated the page container out — and the container lives in the persistent layout, so every morph destination arrived invisible. The entrance now clears it before anything measures.
mix-blend-mode: difference turns paper-on-orange into cyan. Real runway thresholds are white, which fixed the physics and the palette in one move.

End of recorder data. The site remains in service.