About

There is a moment, somewhere in childhood, when you realise that the world is held together by addresses.

Streets have numbers. Houses have numbers. And inside a building that smelled of paper and old ink, my father had his own — number forty — a small brass-fronted box at the post office that he opened a few times a week with a key the size of his thumbnail. He would turn it slowly, almost ceremoniously. Sometimes the box was empty. Sometimes a letter was waiting. Either way, he would close it again and walk home.

He used to say that the post office was the first network. A grid of boxes, each one a person, each one reachable by anyone who knew the number. Letters travelled across borders the way packets do now, only slower, and with more handwriting. He believed there was something quietly miraculous about it. I think he was right.

Why this site exists

For a long time I have been buying and keeping domain names — the way some people keep stamps, or postcards, or matchbooks. Each one was an address I thought was worth holding on to. A few became real places. Most stayed empty. Some I let go. A handful are still here, waiting.

They lived scattered across registrars and old hard drives, with no door connecting them. PK40.net is that door. It is the front desk of a small, quiet building, where each room is one of the things I have made or kept or remembered.

Calling the site after my father's mailbox is the most natural thing I could have done. He liked the idea that an address was a kind of promise — a place you could be found. The internet has not always made it easy to keep that promise. This is my small attempt.

How to read it

There is no feed. No algorithm. No notifications. No reason to keep scrolling.

The directory lists domains and projects, with a short story attached to each. The archive — when it exists — will hold older writing, links worth keeping, photographs of small things. None of it is on a schedule. The site grows when something is worth adding, and stays still otherwise.

If you are reading this, you have already done the only thing the site asks of you, which is to come looking. Thank you for that. Come back when you feel like it. Something will have changed. Something will have been added. That is enough.

— The keeper of mailbox 40