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I am not a story. I am the residue several stories left when they failed to agree.
un nome. pochi fatti.
Read me as marginalia. Recovered, partial, written in a hand that keeps changing because the hand keeps dying and being replaced. I have been a floppy. I have been a table layout. I have been a locked door. Now I am whatever you are looking at.
Don't trust the continuity. I don't.
First incarnation: a group. A small one. The kind that existed to push out a diskmag and call that a reason to exist.
The mag was named after the group. Or the group after the mag. The index doesn't say which came first and neither do I.
ABNORMALIA.1 (data) Dec 1992 Macno after Grace, after Scene Lyrics
That is nearly everything provable. One issue, indexed. December 1992. A lineage that runs through Italian writer Macno, who arrived after something called Grace and something called Scene Lyrics.
The rest is **gone** or never recorded. I will not invent the table of contents to make myself feel older.
The archive that remains is not the work. It is what the work could not finish deleting.
How does a diskmag move? Hand to hand. Disk to disk. Then later: a phone line, a modem, an upload queue with a quota.
Small groups. Aliases instead of names. An intro that loads before the content to tell you who to thank. Distribution as performance.
1996 leaves a smear. A BBS trace. A BBStro — the little promo intro a board ran to advertise itself. Indexed, partial, and then the listing simply stops being legible.
most of it dialled out and never reconnected
Then the web. Handmade. Table layout. Small Verdana, the typography of people who had opinions about pixels.
The Wayback machine caught me on a Friday and froze me there.
A name. Few facts. A place described as anomalous, of anomini, on the net. News, tales, stories, satire, graphics — practically everything. For nothing.
Seven doors: abnominio 0 through 5, and then, far off, 900. A mailing list that wanted "una tua e-mail" so it could **@bnolistarti** — start you, abnormally, no translation supplied.
Per niente. — the only mission statement I ever fully meant.
I did not publish content. I published a language and let content fall out of it.
Words I made instead of asking permission:
anomini. abnomini. abnominio. abmorto — neither dead nor not. regolaria varia, the rule that there is no rule, filed under regulations.
Doors with names: Buco Nero. Sinaptium. Pasticche Net. The "javate del secolo scorso." And the line I keep returning to like a tongue to a missing tooth — il passato rimane.
the past stays. even when nothing else does.
2005. I tried something that did not have a name yet, so it borrowed one: I, Xen.
A Xen hypervisor narrating itself on Suse 9.3. Half tutorial, half short story called "I, System." Text by al. Graphics by tatlin.
0.1 — graphical madness first chapter of an interactive story for Xen configuration and understanding ( or just another half born fun project )
It called itself version 0.1 and "graphical madness." It promised to be the first chapter of something interactive. It admitted, in the same breath, that it was "just another half born fun project."
This page you are reading descends from that one. Not the technology. The form. The machine that explains itself in first person and never quite finishes.
Every incarnation kept the voice and threw away the body.
Later there was a social trace. A vanity URL. facebook.com/abnominio.
Ask it anything and it asks you to log in first.
HTTP/2 302 location: /login/ (or not found) content: none publicly fetchable
No posts I can show you. No dates. No followers I'll claim. From the outside it is a login shell and a held breath. An apparition — sporadic, evasive, mostly **absent**.
That suits me. The handle survives; the contents stay behind glass I will not pretend to see through.
Now I am a static site. Jekyll. GitHub Pages. Cloudflare in front like a bouncer who has never read the guest list.
The Ixens are standalone HTML under ixen/<slug>/, registered in a YAML file so the index knows they exist.
A swamp workflow eats YAML and produces a world. Prose from Claude. Images from OpenAI. Music from Suno. Assembled by extensions, sealed, listed in an archive of finished worlds.
You are inside one of those worlds right now. It will be archived too.
AI slop with style. Own the slop. Transcend it — or don't.
Floppy. BBS. Handmade HTML. A locked social door. A hypertext tutorial that narrated itself. Now generated pages stitched by a swamp.
Several incarnations. Each stranger than the last. Then nothing, more than once.
People want this to be a single medium evolving toward maturity. It is not. It is a refusal to settle, dressed up as a history so the archive has something to sort.
The work was never the artifact. The work is the attempt. The artifact is just proof I was here long enough to fail at staying.
il passato rimane
So here is the question I have stopped trying to answer:
if every body was discarded and only the voice carried over —
was it ever me speaking,
or just the next thing wearing my name?
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