Sunday morning in Whitby, 1am, raining sideways as the small hours here often do. I was meant to be looking at a kernel panic log and instead I was thinking about what the homepage looked like to a first-time visitor. The phrase “security researcher” is a kind of door, and the door is heavy. People knock politely and leave.

I am not, on reflection, that intimidating. Most of my work happens in front of a Mac Mini with a cup of tea cooling beside me. The blog is honest about that. The homepage was not.

So: a snake. And a small text adventure walking from the West Cliff at dusk down to the lighthouse. About thirty kilobytes of inline JavaScript between them. No audio files; the 8-bit sounds are synthesised in the browser when you press a button. The adventure has 16 rooms, one puzzle, and no game-over — hit a wall in the snake and you just shrink back to four segments. Low stakes. Low bandwidth. Low ceremony.

I do not think this changes who reads the blog. But it changes the room they walk into. Someone who came for the disclosure timeline finds, instead, a small calming canvas and an invitation. They are allowed to stay or to leave through any door they like.

Most things that matter on a website do so briefly. The snake will probably do its work in the first thirty seconds.