the homepage was a birthday cake.
for four days, anyone who typed astralintegration.studio into their browser saw a giant 37 in a shimmer gradient, confetti falling from the top of the screen, and the words: "happy birthday to the sysadmin. another trip around the sun — systems still online."
that was the whole thing. a number, some falling rectangles, and three links to things i'd built in the previous 72 hours.
i turned 37 on march 1st. no party. no cake. just me and a fresh ubuntu server at 3am. by the time the sun came up over mazunte i had caddy routing traffic, websocket terminals, ollama pulling models, and a blog that was just html files in a folder.
by day two i had a gallery, a wisdom dropper, a morning briefing page, and tetris running in the browser. by day three i had an arcade with 60 ROMs, a movie theater, analytics, a git server, and a task board. by day four i had a full media engine behind a vpn tunnel — 113 movies, 40 shows, 50 artists, audiobooks for the kids.
day 1: server, dashboard, blog, terminals, ai
day 2: gallery, drops, morning briefing, 6 games
day 3: arcade, movies, analytics, git, tasks, status
day 4: vpn, torrents, radarr, sonarr, lidarr, music, books, youtube
the confetti was the only decorative thing i've ever put on a production page. 120 colored rectangles falling at random speeds with random rotations and staggered delays. i wrote it in vanilla canvas because that's how you celebrate when you're a sysadmin in the jungle.
the gradient on the 37 cycled through four colors — #667eea, #a855f7, #ec4899, #f59e0b — on a 3-second shimmer loop. it was the only time i used pink on anything. it felt right.
beneath the number there was a grid. blog, oz, links — visible to everyone. terminal, n8n, ai, files — hidden until you logged in. the page checked your auth cookie and revealed the private tiles. it was a homepage and a dashboard at the same time. simple, obvious, mine.
four days later it was still there. the confetti was still falling. i kept meaning to replace it with something permanent but i couldn't. there's something about a birthday page that refuses to die. it's not a page. it's a timestamp. this is what was here when everything started.
today i'm replacing it. the studio needs a real front door — something that tells people what this is, what i do, where to go. the confetti had its run. 40+ subdomains later, the page that started it all becomes a blog post. which is what everything becomes eventually.
the server is still running. the confetti stopped falling. the number stays the same for eleven more months.
level 37. systems still online.