Every story, one dial. Find the signal on Spectrum.
I was out Friday night for my birthday. We were taking a break from the drinks and the music and got to talking with some folks. I tend to talk about AI a lot, and sooner or later that leads to the newsletter. They thought it sounded interesting. I gave them the link.
Then I pictured their first look. Thirty-four stories, one every Tuesday since March 17, stacked newest first. The Shamrock. The Chaos Test. Totaling the Prius. Montana, which has nothing to do with the state. That was the name of our dog, and we said goodbye to her in August.
I name them that way on purpose. I like a title that doesn’t mean anything until you’ve read the story. For someone who has been here every Tuesday, that’s a payoff. For someone I met an hour ago, it’s thirty-four locked doors and no way to tell which one they came looking to open.
Substack gives you an archive, and an archive is a list. I wanted a real front door.
Saturday night I sat down with Holden, the Claude chat I do my thinking with, and started throwing names around. Library. Corpus. Archive. Then Cartographer, a name I’ve been kicking around for a while. Maybe I have Halo on the brain. He pushed back. A cartographer is the person who draws the map, he said, and readers go to the map.
Then he came back with names of his own, and his favorite was Marrow. Pulse and Marrow. The newsletter lives at an address that starts with Pulse, and he’d heard a heartbeat and gone looking for a body.
I told him, “Pulse in my mind is like a signal pulse, not a body.” It was always a signal, the kind you send out once a week and hope someone is listening.
That changed everything he offered next. Radio words now: Scope, Dial, Beacon, Spectrum. He leaned Scope. I picked Spectrum. Pulse is the signal. Spectrum is the whole band.
That one correction did more design work than anything else all weekend. The page where you find stories became the Story Locator, because Locator sounds like it came off the same instrument panel. Finder sounds like a Mac. The page of books became Source Material, and then I pointed out that not everything I’ve listened to is source material. Now it opens on the 23 that shaped a story or gave something in my house its name: Holden, Skippy, Tycho, Bob. Everything else I’ve read is one tap away.
The name kept deciding what belonged.
We shipped it that same night. A script walks every story I’ve published, a single page searches them, and a job rebuilds it every Tuesday once the new one publishes.
Then I tried a search. I typed “pet,” expecting my dogs.
I got stories that had nothing to do with pets. It was matching the middle of “competence.” I tried “dogs” and it missed the dog stories completely. A search box that can’t find Montana is a list with extra steps. The fix was whole words, and the full text of every story.
The books were worse. I exported my Audible library, 200 titles, unchecked the 49 that weren’t mine, since Erin and Fiona share the account, and let Holden link the rest to the stories they shaped. On the way in I could see summaries cut off mid-word. I spot-checked a few of the links and they were wrong.
I asked him, “Did you look back over past chat to ensure linkages? Or the repo?”
No. He’d worked from memory. He went back and fixed five.
I didn’t read most of what got built this weekend. I had ChatGPT and Grok review behind Holden, and they agreed on the real problems: 111 tags for 34 stories, 33 book summaries chopped off by the export, and The Three-Body Problem credited to the wrong author. It’s down to 38 now. The summaries are whole.
Monday evening I was in the garage gym with the dogs, Cayde and Saint, about to start my workout, and decided to test it as a reader. Ferb, one of my bots, had added a button to the end of The Scale. It said “Find the next story.”
One tap, and it opened the card for The Scale. The story I had just finished.
Nothing was broken. Every check had passed. It took a person tapping a button before a workout to notice that the words promised one thing and the link did another. We split it in two that night: one link to the whole dial, one to what sits behind the story in front of you. Then Ferb walked back through all thirty-four and added both, without changing a word of any story.
It’s live now at spectrum.itesydht.com, and every story I’ve published now ends on a door. Type a word, a name, or a feeling, and the full band narrows to the stories that match. Each one has a short synopsis so you can decide before you read. The sources will grow past books, and when I have time I’ll add my own commentary on the ones that matter most.
If you’ve been making anything for a while, stories, recipes, photos, notes to your kids, it might be worth opening it as a stranger. You know what every title means. They are guessing. The pile gets more valuable every week you add to it and harder to walk into, and the fix probably isn’t better titles. Mine are staying cryptic. What a newcomer needs is one place to type what they’re looking to find.
One story is a signal. Thirty-five is a full spectrum.
Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.
Find the next story.
Spectrum is the dial for the rest. Type a word, a name, or a feeling, and it finds the stories that match, plus the source material behind them.
Behind this story: what it builds on and the source material.