The Colophon

What this is for

The question behind this site is why the things that would be good for people have not been made. It asks why people have been steered toward accepting less and why money came before feeling. The large companies grew with people without caring about them, and they grew because there was no alternative. This site goes the other way. It grows by caring about the people who come to it.

Every change has to answer to these rules.

• Give the reader something, and take nothing they did not choose to give. Add no tracking or engagement tricks that pull a reader back or hold them longer than they meant to stay. What a reader keeps stays with them. The drawer lives in their own browser. The one thing the site asks for, an email address for new pieces, waits at the end of an essay and is theirs to give. The one exception is a visit counter. GoatCounter (_layouts/default.html) counts visits to the pages that carry the site’s header; the Farm House, the pictures and the instruments are not counted. It sets no cookies and keeps only totals. These include visits per page, the pages and sites visitors came from, and their country, language, browser, system and screen width. The author looks at it once a week. It is not loaded on the search page, so what a reader searches for stays with them. Add no other counter or analytics.
• Never ask a reader to settle for less. A half-made page or a drawing that does not work tells the reader they were not worth the care. A description that is not true does the same. If something cannot be made well, it waits.
• The test is the reader’s first look. Someone who opens a page should be drawn into it. A page that leaves them wondering what this nonsense is has failed that test.

The Farm House

The Farm House is a growing fictional world where visitors can spend time and feel close to nature. Its existing family story unfolds gradually. Wandering and observing should be worthwhile on their own.

• The visual set is fixed. The seven loose watercolor illustrations restored on 1 October 2026 are the canonical set: exterior-watercolor.webp, hall-watercolor.webp, kitchen-watercolor.webp, garden-watercolor.webp, stable-yard-watercolor.webp, stable-watercolor.webp and upstairs-watercolor.webp, all in farm-house/assets/. These are the exact images from commit d48a4fc; the upstairs image also appears at the story’s ending. Keep their finish and style unless the author explicitly requests a change. The original upstairs watercolor is the style reference for new scenes: broad brush marks, transparent washes, a limited value range, visible pencil, occasional unfinished edges and exposed white paper. Use existing scenes for objects, placement, relative scale and camera angle; paint new scenes from scratch in this language. Preserve important objects and avoid inventing decoration or copying a former render’s surface detail.
• Let the story develop through occasional discoveries and small traces in the rooms. Give each addition time to settle. Preserve the unanswered questions in the existing story, including why the grandmother kept the letter and remained silent about it.
• Grow the house and its surroundings as connected places. The garden can lead to woodland paths and a river; rooms can hold traces of the past. Introduce the animals kept on the farm as well as wildlife in the forest. Plants and birds are part of the world visitors can learn to recognize.
• Complete the spring/summer setting first. For now, keep new scenes sunlit and suggestive of spring or summer. Autumn and winter views can follow. Keep the light natural in the watercolor scenes. Preserve believable differences between direct sun, veranda shade and window-lit interiors; avoid exaggerated yellow casts and glowing highlights. Shadows should retain differences in brightness.
• Let the natural world change with the seasons, including which birds are present. Keep species and seasonal appearances plausible for the setting, and verify natural-history information with reliable sources.
• Visual continuity is a primary requirement. Use established images as spatial references for every new view. Preserve the layout of rooms and the positions of doors, windows and furniture. Keep exterior landmarks and paths in consistent locations, with views that agree across scenes. A kitchen glimpsed from the hall must remain that kitchen when entered.
• The window beside the grandmother’s bed looks across the grounds on the house’s left, toward the stable and field. Its view includes part of the stable roof among olive trees, with cultivated land beyond.
• Compare connected scenes side by side and inspect the transition in the browser. Check recognizable objects as well as the overall architecture. Keep lighting and seasonal details consistent within a visit. Resolve contradictions before extending that part of the world.
• Expand in small, coherent steps. Write plain prose with correct punctuation, following the editorial rules below. Fictional details should fit the established story.

Sound

The Farm House has an optional sound layer. It is off until the visitor turns it on with “listen to the farm” in the footer. The choice is kept in their browser (olae-farm-sound); sound left on waits for their first click, because browsers start audio only from one. Every start and stop fades over a second or two, and a hidden tab fades out and suspends the audio until it returns.

• The sound changes through the day. Morning has sparse birdsong and a collared dove. At midday, soft wind accompanies cicadas in waves, with the dove heard now and then. Crickets sound in the evening. At night they are fewer, slower and quieter, with a scops owl also heard. The small birds and the crickets are not any one species. The dove, the owl and the cicadas represent particular species; the author asked for them in October 2026. Nothing on the page names a species.
• The sound follows the scenes’ summer season. The time of day is the visitor’s. The season is the picture’s, which is summer in these scenes. The scops owl and the cicadas are summer sounds, and they go when autumn or winter scenes come.
• The rooms soften the outdoor sound. Outdoors the sound is low. In the rooms it is lower still and low-passed, as if heard through the walls. The rooms are the hall, the kitchen, upstairs and the stable aisle, listed in the page’s indoors set; a new room must be added there.
• The horses are heard only near them, at the author’s request: faintly from the left in the garden, close by in the stable yard, and in the stable, where they share the room and are not muffled. They snort, blow and shift a hoof now and then, each from where it stands in the picture. A whinny made from oscillators was tried first and taken out in October 2026; it did not sound like a horse. Bees cross the garden in the morning and at midday; they belong to the garden’s own sound, which is told when the part of the day changes.
• Keep the floorboard creaks out. Synthesized floorboard creaks were tried in October 2026 and taken out at the author’s request. Do not add them back unless the author asks.
• The farm’s sound follows the visitor’s own sky. The House stays in İstanbul. For the farm, the browser’s time zone gives a city through window.OLAE_SKY (_includes/sky-ramp.html), as Follow the sky does, and the sun’s height decides. Night begins when the sun is below −12°, or climbing but still below −6°. Morning lasts while it climbs to half its noon height. Evening starts once it sinks below 10° (or below 30% of the noon height on a short day). No location is ever asked for. Without OLAE_SKY, the clock assigns morning to 05–10, midday to 10–18 and evening to 18–22. Night follows.
• The sound can be tested at any hour. ?hour=19 (any value from 0 to 23.99) stands the clock at that time today, so each part of the day can be heard at any moment. The sky still decides, so which hour is evening moves with the season. In İstanbul in early October, 8 is morning, 13 is midday, 19 is evening and 23 is night. It works only on the live site, so a change is heard there after merging; before that, publish a private preview of the built page. Never link to it.
• Two scripts control the sound. js/farm-sound-engine.js makes the sounds and nothing else, like js/rain-engine.js, whose pink noise it borrows for the wind. js/farm-sound.js holds the toggle and the scheduling, and near its top are the levels. LEVEL sets indoors, outdoors and a place’s own sound (near); HOUR_LEVEL sets each part of the day. The birds were raised a little and the wind lowered after the author listened. The balance inside a part, such as one cricket against another, is set in the engine; so are the places that have a sound of their own and where each horse stands, in its PLACES. Bump the ?v= on a script’s tag in farm-house/index.html when it changes. scripts/test-farm-sound.cjs checks the behavior; only listening can check the sound, so listen on a phone before changing a level or a voice. Neither script is precached by sw.js; if that changes, bump its CACHE.

Working on the site

This repository is a Jekyll 4 static site called “On Life & Everything”, a personal blog deployed to GitHub Pages through .github/workflows/pages.yml. Ruby, RubyGems and Bundler 4.0.13 are preinstalled in the Cloud VM. The startup update script runs bundle install. Gems go into the git-ignored vendor/bundle/, as configured by .bundle/config.

Running the site (dev)

• Serve the site with live reload using bundle exec jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 4000, and open http://localhost:4000/. Run it in a long-lived tmux session.
• Build the site with bundle exec jekyll build. Output goes to the git-ignored _site/.
• Run python3 scripts/vendor_pdfjs.py once to restore the bundled PDF.js assets needed by the PDF checks. Then run bundle exec jekyll build, followed by npm ci && npm test. CI runs the same checks on every pull request. Several checks read the built _site/. scripts/test-content.cjs checks the editorial rules that can be tested in code. These cover quiz-bank structure and rounds, word-story footnotes numbered in first-cited order, closed-up em dashes and links within the site. It reports every problem it finds in one run.
• npm run links fetches every cited source address. It runs weekly from .github/workflows/links.yml. Because it depends on other sites being up, it is kept out of pull-request checks. Only a page that is gone fails it.

Non-obvious notes

• URLs use the “pretty” format. Source files such as about.html and archive.html are served at /about/ and /archive/, with trailing slashes. Posts use the permalink pattern /pieces/:slug.html, set in _config.yml.
• _config.yml sets future: true, so posts dated in the future render as intended.
• The production Pages workflow uses Ruby 3.3. The VM’s apt-provided Ruby 3.2 also builds the site.
• style.css and palettes.css are linked once in _includes/head.html for every page that uses the default layout. Bump the ?v= there when either changes.
• The published stylesheets carry no comments. After the checks, deployment runs scripts/strip-css-comments.cjs on _site/css and fails if any rule would change. Keep writing comments in css/, where a local build keeps them. Styles inside a page’s own <style> remain untouched.
• This file is published. Every deployment builds /colophon/ from it, beneath the author’s introduction in colophon.html. _plugins/agents_md.rb reads it without processing Liquid. Follow the site’s prose and punctuation rules here because visitors read it too. scripts/test-content.cjs checks its dashes and words split across line breaks. A split word would appear on the page as two (hand- balancing).

Starting a session

Every session starts cold and remembers nothing of the last one, so what was learned the hard way is written down here instead.

• Build the working branch from main, before writing anything. Branch names are reused across sessions here, so a branch that looks ready to continue may be carrying a pull request that was merged days ago. New commits stacked on merged history produce a pull request nobody can read. Start with git fetch origin main && git checkout -B <branch> origin/main.
• A merge can land while you are still pushing, and nothing will say so. This happened twice in one session: a prose fix was pushed after its pull request had already been merged, so it sat on the branch and never reached the site—and it was only caught later, by chance. Before opening anything new, check that the last commit you pushed is an ancestor of origin/main (git merge-base --is-ancestor <sha> origin/main) and carry over whatever is not. Ask to be told when a pull request is merged; it is cheaper than finding out.
• This site is read as pages. Its author reviews a change by looking at it, which for a long time meant merging first and looking after. Build the site and hand over the rendered pages that changed and the index they sit in before asking for a merge. The author needs to read the actual paragraph in its page.
• Say what changed. A pull request description names the work and its shape; the line-by-line reasoning behind an edit belongs in the conversation. The public description outlives it. “The prose was simplified” is the right altitude.

Before showing anything

These rules record what went wrong on the day The House opened, so that it does not go wrong again.

• Look at it before anyone else does. Passing checks say a page works. Its appearance still has to be judged. Build the site, open the page in a browser and look at every state it has: each hour of The House, a phone, the dark themes. A drawing can only be judged by looking at it. A Moris drawn from coordinates and never rendered reached the author, and it was not a cat.
• Say “I can’t” at the start. Some things cannot be done well from here, and a likeness drawn by writing SVG coordinates is one of them. Say so before trying. The author should hear it before seeing the attempt.
• Describe a photograph from the photograph. Look at it before writing its alt text or a line under it, and ask the author about whatever the picture cannot settle, including where he is and what he is looking at. A line written for the drawn room was put under a photograph of somewhere else.
• Report only what you have reproduced. A problem named before it is confirmed costs trust twice, once when it is said and again when it is taken back. That day a header “covering” the room turned out to be a scrolled page, and “broken” photographs were only missing from a local build.
• /images/480/ and /images/960/ are made at deploy by scripts/generate_image_variants.py in .github/workflows/pages.yml. A local build has only the variants that are committed, so an image missing locally may be fine on the site. Check the live address before calling it broken.

Time, place and sky

The site has two deliberate ideas of place. Do not collapse them into one.

• The general site follows the visitor’s sky. The Follow the Sky theme, /twilight/, /sun/, /stars/ and the homepage’s Tonight read the browser-reported IANA time zone and resolve it through _data/cities.yml. No location permission is requested. If the zone is unknown, keep the existing nominal-equatorial fallback rather than pretending to know the visitor’s latitude.
• The House is in İstanbul. Its calendar day, light, sunrise and sunset, moon visibility, room period, Moris’s movement, wall clock, and any future outdoor space such as the balcony all use İstanbul time and coordinates (Europe/Istanbul, 41.015, 28.979). A visitor enters that place; the House does not move to the visitor.
• A link from The House to Twilight must preserve that place explicitly: /twilight/?city=istanbul. A normal site link to /twilight/ should stay visitor-local and should not be labeled “İstanbul’s Twilight.”
• Keep labels honest about which clock they describe. General site copy may say “today’s twilight” or name the resolved city. House copy may say “İstanbul’s Twilight” because the House deliberately stays there.
• The moon’s phase itself is global at a given instant, but whether the moon is above the House’s horizon is an İstanbul calculation. Do not confuse phase with local visibility.
• For an unknown zone, Tonight gives only the sun’s times and the moon’s phase. A map or a compass direction would claim a place the site does not know.

The Sun, The Stars and Tonight

• js/bright-stars.js is generated. Change scripts/build_sky_data.py and run it with the three pinned sources named at its top: the Bright Star Catalogue, the IAU’s catalogue of star names and d3-celestial’s constellation lines. Do not edit the data by hand. T Coronae Borealis is left out, because the catalogue gives it the brightness of its 1866 outburst, and Mira and chi Cygni are not drawn, because their brightness on a given night is unknown. The notes on /stars/ say so.
• One sky calculation serves three places. js/sky-map.js works out and draws the sky for /stars/, the homepage’s Tonight and the window in The House, so they never disagree. Its scripts and their ?v= are listed once, in _data/sky_scripts.yml. The homepage fetches them when Tonight comes near; The House only when its window is opened after dark.
• The moon’s phase name and percentage come from js/astronomy.js everywhere, so The Moon, The House, Tonight and The Stars give the same moon. Positions of the moon and planets come from Astronomy Engine.
• scripts/test-window-sky.cjs checks the star data, both instruments and Tonight.

Reading options

• “Original” is the published page. Text size and line spacing change a piece only after a reader picks something else: js/reading-settings.js sets data-reading-size and data-reading-spacing on <html> for a choice, and every rule in css/reading.css that changes the prose waits for one. The fixed sizes of headings, quotations and the piece note in style.css are multiplied by --reading-scale, so a larger setting keeps them in proportion. scripts/test-reading.cjs fails on an ungated rule.
• “read with rain” stays under the title. Rain that is falling has to show where it can be stopped.
• A printed piece opens with its kind (Essay or Short fiction) on the left and HAKANALTUN.IO on the right, then the title and date, centered, and ends with the footer’s two lines, centered. Word pages have no print layout of their own: The House’s cards are how a word is printed or shared.
• Puzzle mode waits at the foot of a piece and opens at its head. Its panel is sticky, so the scroll aims at the article beneath it.
• Listening and offline saving were tried and taken out in October 2026. Device voices are not on every device, and offline copies put the service worker in front of every page. “Print or save as PDF” is the way to keep a piece. Do not add them back unless the author asks; listening that works for everyone would need recorded audio.

Punctuation

• Write complete sentences. Use fragments only when they serve a clear purpose, including short interface labels and section headings.
• State the intended point directly. Avoid the not X, but Y pattern and unnecessary negative examples.
• Use a rhetorical group of three only when every part is needed. Keep necessary lists of technical items or factual details intact.
• Keep the prose plain and use correct punctuation. Avoid ornate phrasing and polished endings written mainly to sound quotable. Use em dashes and colons only when needed.
• Close up em dashes. When a dash is needed, write word—word. Essays and new text in quizzes, word stories and notes follow this convention. Keep the spaced separator in page titles, including Feeds — On Life & Everything and instrument names. That separator is deliberate and explained in _includes/head.html.

Words with Stories editorial standard

Words with Stories is a deliberately small, curated collection. A term should be added only when its story earns its place.

• Prefer words or expressions in which an older meaning, image, object, belief, or event still leaves a visible trace in the modern term. Examples include bosh retaining Turkish boş, quarantine retaining forty, nightmare retaining the old mare, influence carrying the old idea of something flowing in from the stars, and Rosetta stone turning a historical object into a metaphor for a key to understanding.
• The story should change how the reader sees the term. A merely correct etymology is not enough.
• There should be a clear one-sentence answer to: “Why this term rather than hundreds of other interesting etymologies?” If there is not, leave it out.
• Myth, folklore, historical belief, and legend are allowed when they genuinely explain the term’s development or continuing image. Mere association with mythology is not enough; otherwise the collection would expand without a meaningful boundary.
• Every story must be sourced. Prefer museums, universities, academic publications, dictionaries with etymological scholarship, archives, or official institutions. Use multiple sources for historical claims when useful.
• If a popular story is disputed or cannot be confirmed, say so explicitly or do not use it. Do not preserve a neat story at the expense of accuracy.
• Treat nightmare and quarantine as roughly the lower editorial threshold. Candidates with a weaker transformation, residue, surprise, or narrative reason should normally be rejected.
• Words, idioms, and fixed expressions may all qualify in future; the same editorial threshold applies.
• Keep the prose plain and unshowy. Sentences should carry the content rather than compete with it. Avoid polished, aphoristic endings or lines written mainly to sound quotable. The reader should remember the story more than the sentence.
• The part-of-speech label must match the specific sense being explained on the page. Do not list every part of speech the spelling can have; label the entry as the reader encounters it in that story and example.

Pictures with Stories editorial standard

Pictures with Stories uses detailed, realistic watercolor illustrations whose areas can be opened to learn about what is shown. Apply the Words with Stories standards for curation, sourcing, accuracy and plain prose to this section as well.

• Keep the current catalogue structure for now. The future direction is to group pictures into subject sections: astronomy or cosmology (nebulae, quasars and black holes), birds (individual species), cats, and other subjects as the collection grows. These are examples; the final grouping can be settled later. Leave the current page layout and navigation in place until that reorganization. Every group follows the same drawing, storytelling and sourcing standards.

• Follow The Farm House’s watercolor language: broad brush strokes, transparent washes, a limited value range, visible pencil, occasional unfinished edges and exposed paper. Paint from scientific or historical references when the subject calls for them; preserve the forms that an explanation relies on. The Farm House’s fixed scenes remain its own set.
• Use The Farm House’s way of exploring: quiet areas on the picture, optional labels, numbered choices on a small screen, and a closer view alongside each explanation. Provide keyboard access and a way back to the picture. Sources sit below the explanation as links, with the full source list below the picture.
• Every clickable explanation must be sourced. Verify its factual claims before writing, and link to sources that support those claims. Prefer museums, universities, academic publications, archives and official institutions; use multiple sources when useful.
• The clickable details carry the picture’s stories. Every picture must have sourced details with stories worth telling. Each explanation should help the reader understand the part they opened and change how they see it. Let the subject determine the number of areas.
• Choose the subject through its details first. Ask whether there are enough story-worthy details to earn the picture’s place; this is required. Then ask whether there is an interesting account of how we came to know what it shows. Such an account gives a candidate priority, but remains optional. Give a clear one-sentence answer to: “Why this picture rather than hundreds of others?” If the details cannot justify it, let it wait.
• Keep the illustration accurate enough to support its explanations. Distinguish observed features from reconstructions and artistic choices where that distinction matters.
• If a claim is disputed or cannot be confirmed, explain the uncertainty or leave it out. Keep the prose plain and unshowy, following the same writing rules as Words with Stories.
• A separate story below the picture is optional. Include it only when there is a worthwhile account to tell. Never add a long passage merely to fill the page; leaving it out is better than forcing it. Something that cannot be made well waits. Source each part as carefully as the clickable explanations. For scientific subjects, identify speculative ideas as such and distinguish mathematical predictions from observations. A sourced account of a theory is evidence that it was proposed. Its confirmation still requires evidence. If an anecdote is retained without a verifiable source, say that explicitly and do not present it as an established fact.
• The reader should see more when they return to the picture. Judge every explanation and separate story by asking, “After reading it, does the reader notice or understand more in the picture?” Clickable explanations open its details; a separate story connects them. Let the subject determine the story’s length.

• Let the subject choose its story and its opening. “How do we know this?” is one useful way in: the observations, evidence and interpretations that let us understand what is shown. The history of its first drawing may belong here when it helps. Possible openings include the seismic evidence for Earth’s interior, early microscope observations of cells, or changing fossil reconstructions of Iguanodon. The black-hole story already follows this approach. Other subjects may carry their stories through their lives or relationships. The following are possible examples:

  • A bird may have a migration journey, a story behind its name, or a meaning people have given it.
  • A nebula may be understood through its formation and the changes ahead of it, with the picture’s details opening parts of that process.
  • A cat may lead to its history of living with people, or to the reason behind a behavior shown in the picture.

  Verify and source the particular claims before using any example. Keep observation, inference and artistic reconstruction clear; speculation follows the evidence, marked as such.

• The painting stands as a sheet on a light, quiet page. --picture-paper in css/pictures.css is #f8f7f2, a shade under the site’s own light paper; the image keeps its edges, as it does on the section’s index and the homepage. The painting’s warm paper was tried as the page color in October 2026 and taken out at the author’s request: over a whole page it was too loud.
• Places show as faint dots from the first look. This applies on every screen. A label sits on its place unless that covers the thing it names, such as a thin line; label_side: right in the picture’s front matter puts it beside it. A label that shows opens its detail as the dot does; a hidden one takes no clicks.
• A close view opens at the top of its dialog. Reset the scroll after showModal(). A closed dialog cannot be scrolled. Open every detail on a phone as well as a desk, one after another, and check that each close view shows what its text names.
• The homepage shows one picture, chosen at random, under Words with Stories (_includes/pictures-with-stories-home.html).
• Full screen is optional. Each picture offers it through its own control and keeps the whole sheet visible, with its proportions and clickable places intact. Explanations remain available in full screen. Keep an explicit exit and keyboard access; Escape closes an explanation before leaving the picture, and exit returns focus and the page position. If the browser cannot enter native full screen, fill its window instead. Check both paths on a desk and a phone, including a change of orientation.

The homepage

• Slate and green take turns down the page. Every homepage section is named in one of the two accent lists in css/style.css (“Homepage accent rhythm”). A new section takes the color its place calls for, and every section after it moves to the other list. scripts/test-pictures.cjs fails when a section is missing from the lists or two neighbors share a color.

The site’s header and footer

• Every page that is read or browsed carries them. This includes the homepage, The House, the writing, the word pages, the section indexes (Words, Pictures, Trivia, Instruments), Moris and About. They come from _layouts/default.html, and a new page of this kind uses it. The House is entered like a room, but it keeps them: it does not fill the window, what it holds (the shelf, the desk, the drawer) is read, and it is first in the site’s menu.
• A place that fills the window has its own quiet frame. This applies to the Farm House, each picture in Pictures with Stories and each instrument. The frame gives a way back and the place’s own controls, and leaves the rest of the window to the picture or the tool. The author settled this in October 2026: do not add the site’s header and footer to these places. Each frame keeps its own design; do not merge them into one. Fixing a fault in a frame is fine.
• A new place takes its family’s frame. A new instrument takes the instruments’ bar and a new picture the picture layout. Woodland paths or a river reached from the farm’s garden are scenes of the Farm House and keep its frame; they do not become pages of their own.
• The way back leads to the place’s own section. An instrument leads to the instruments and a picture to Pictures with Stories. The clock, the reader and the desk can also be opened from The House’s study, and they still lead to the instruments: a link back to The House would not make sense on them, and the browser’s back button already returns there.
• The Farm House belongs to The House. It is entered only from there, through the Polaroid on a shelf in the study, so its “← The House” returns to the study (/house/#study). Do not give its frame the site’s name as a link to the homepage; the visitor leaves the farm by the room they came from.

Interface details

• A disclosure uses the site’s chevron. It is the one in the drawer and on a piece’s reading options. Its words sit where the layout puts them; the chevron hangs beside them and does not pull them off their line.

Trivia editorial standard

Trivia contains quizzes. Adding one requires three files, as described in _data/trivia.yml. These rules govern what belongs inside them.

• A question earns its place through its note. Difficulty is worth little on its own. The note is the only part a reader keeps, so it has to hand them something the question withheld: that Big Ben cracked in its first months and the crack is what gives the chime its tone; that the Romans knew Bath as Aquae Sulis, after a local goddess they folded into their own Minerva. Two or three sentences is the usual length. A note that says the answer again in other words should be rewritten, and a question that cannot carry one should be dropped.
• Every claim must be sourced before it is written down. Prefer museums, universities, dictionaries with etymological scholarship, archives, national institutions, and the governing body of a sport for its own rules. Where a popular version is disputed, say so in the note or leave the question out.
• Leave out questions whose answers go stale. Current holders, standing records and living people’s roles can all change. The bank is not revisited on a schedule, so a question that needs one is a question that will become wrong.
• The answer must not stand inside its own question. Naming the bear names the station; ask it another way or ask something else.
• All four choices must be real candidates to somebody who does not know. Three obviously wrong ones turn the question into an inventory check. Distractors should be the same kind of thing as the answer—four monarchs, four counties, four novelists—and of roughly the same length.
• Write the right answer wherever it belongs in the list and think no further about it. The quiz shuffles both the questions and the choices for every game, so a pattern in the file is not a pattern a reader can see, and hand-balancing the positions only makes the file harder to read. This is worth saying because the first bank drifted badly—29 of its 50 answers were written second—which is why the shuffle exists.
• A negative question (“least typical”, “not”) is allowed but should stay rare, and the negative must be unmissable in the wording.
• Every question carries a category, and a category is a round: the bank is stored grouped, in the order the rounds should run, and the quiz reads the round count from that rather than from anything written down. Aim for six to fourteen questions in a round. A subject too thin for six belongs inside a neighboring round.
• Order the rounds so the quiz opens on the easiest ground and does not end on the narrowest.
• Every question also carries an id, unique in its bank. Readers keep questions in their drawer in The House by it, so it stays put when a question is reworded or moved; a new question gets a new id.
• Keep the prose plain, as everywhere else here, and let the content do the work.