Colophon
A note on the form of the work, the code that holds it up, and everything the reader is free to do with it.
Troy is a static site: a handful of HTML pages with their stylesheets, two typefaces, and a small script to enlarge the photos. There's no database behind it, no platform, no profiling of readers. Once loaded, the work runs even with the browser disconnected from the network. It will run — credibly — thirty years from now, because HTML from 2026 will still be readable in 2056. This is an editorial choice before a technical one: every added layer is one more layer that can break, and a literary work ought to outlive its own tools.
The source is readable straight from the browser (Cmd/Ctrl + U). Anyone who wants to can save it, archive it, modify it, redistribute it. Leaving it open was a small editorial gesture: the curious reader can open the manuscript behind the manuscript and see how it's stitched together. There's nothing magic in there — only HTML and CSS, a few classes with Italian names, some working comments left in out of honest untidiness.
The work is set in Source Serif 4 by Frank Grießhammer for Adobe and Inter by Rasmus Andersson, both free (SIL Open Font License) and served directly from the work's own server, not from outside services that would use them to track who's reading. The first is the typeface of the reading body — the wire dispatches, the voices from below, the monologues. The second serves the interface: account names, statistics, push notifications. The typographic grammar of the work rests on these two voices, one literary and one social, in constant counterpoint.
Troy is published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. It can be read, shared, quoted, archived, modified. It can be translated. It can be used in education. It cannot be sold, and any derivative work must be redistributed under the same freedom.
The only measurement running is the reading of the server logs — the same logs any web server has always kept, for every request. They serve only to know, in aggregate, how many people arrive and which pages they read. No cookies, no beacon, no profiling, no third-party service. The data stays on a server I administer personally. There is no way, and no intention, to know who you are.
For anyone who wants to know how the feed is built: each fictional outlet (Anatolia Wire, The Achaean, Aegean Daily) has its own distinct typographic register, and the characters' personal feeds follow a convention of Latin-root handles with a geographic suffix (@rexpriamus, @anon_phthia_007) designed to stay unchanged across all future translations. The feed's time runs backward between events and forward within each event. The voices from below — anonymous, without avatars, isolated in the stream — are the counterpoint to the noise of the official outlets, and they are the emotional heart of the piece. Every image carries a descriptive report in its alt text: if the images are lost or removed, their content survives in the code as a textual archive.
The work was written over a few weeks in 2026, after years of silent gestation.
The twenty-one images that accompany the dispatches are not photographs. They were generated with OpenAI's DALL·E 3, in a style that recalls the daguerreotype: the first photographic technique in history, the one behind the still, silvery portraits of nearly two centuries ago. In a work made of photos contested, removed, leaked, credited to the wrong outlet, none of these images documents anything. It is the only honest photography possible, of a war that never happened.
For Gaby, for not trying to understand me.
If the work stirred something, there's also a coffee.