Limitations

medienbaecker.com has become my personal site, domain unchanged ^❶. It’s a place where I talk about topics that are important to me, not strictly limited to web stuff.

Writing

I grew to really enjoy writing these articles and I want to do so without limitations in terms of topics. This has been in my mind for some time now and with the launch of poyo.studio it finally became possible.

Writing articles, and especially publishing them, really helps me in confronting my perfectionism. Sure, I can update articles ^❷ but they are out there at some point. Scary!

I have regrettably used LLMs for proof reading in the past, sometimes even generating a whole paragraph. I hate reading such texts myself, so I stopped doing that altogether ^❸.

Talking about writing articles, I really wanted to write one about the Kirby Konf.

Inspiration

This sounds like an excuse but the, for lack of a better word, inspiration overload I received in Mainz was keeping me busy.

I (finally) built the aforementioned poyo.studio, I tinkered with lots of Kirby-related stuff, I worked on this website you’re on right now, and, of course, client work didn’t stop either.

I did find the time to post this on Mastodon:

Thomas Günther on Mastodon, 2026/09/28

Had the most amazing time at the first #KirbyKonf. On the train back home I thought about how to articulate the feeling and I came up with: I found my people.

Big groups of people aren't exactly my comfort zone, but Mainz felt like a small #btconf, just with people who all get it when I nerd out about Kirby.

My wife @yoshie and I got to talk about accessibility on the stage and it greatly exceeded our expectations how many people approached us afterwards with questions ❤️

Photos by @presprog

In our talk r12y we briefly mentioned the positive limitation of making a website accessible to everyone. Or more concretely, I showed a quote by Orson Welles:

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations

I overlaid it with a Gameboy because that’s closer to my heart than old movies (sorry!). On the stage I already noticed how someone was audibly delighted about the mention of this topic and sure enough, Jonathan Muth approached me afterwards. He used to tour Europe making chiptune music with a Gameboy. How cool is that? I love video game music, especially the one that had to be made with the great limitations ^❹ of the early devices.

This site

This site you’re looking at right now got made with a lot of limitations in mind. I completely rely on your browser settings for font size and family, I try to use a little carbon as possible, I religiously follow a vertical grid (press Ctrl + G or click here to toggle the guides), and of course I want to make it accessible to everyone.

And it’s a fun challenge! It’s hard to make something look good in any font, Times New fuckingfucking Roman for most people. I haven’t fully cracked this yet, of course. But it’s so much fun having to find creative solutions, like checking the x-height of fonts and increasing sizes for fonts with tiny lowercase letters, giving code the same x-height as the text around it, or using container instead of media queries to make breakpoints respect custom font sizes. I enjoy that a lot.

By the way, it seems like you’ve read this without changing the font. Maybe Times isn’t even that bad?