AnalogCirc.us
A worker-owned co-op for artists, makers, and physical-media collectors.
What it is
AnalogCirc.us is a worker-owned cooperative for artists, makers, and physical-media collectors and sellers. The site is a room-OS: a CRT Navigator frames it, the room holds the shop's stock on its shelves and rails, and the AnalogCircus BBS is the member's board. The VHS Rotary Club is the membership. Featured artists get their own page and a booth in the room, starting with DeadMagats.
Why it matters
Every abstract piece on the map lands here in the concrete. TopSoil is the admin layer, PACT is the identity, the Cooperative is the legal wrapper, and TentCities is where it is meant to go next. AnalogCirc.us is where all of that stops being a diagram and becomes something you can visit.
It is also the first reference server for anyone wanting to see the whole ladder working end-to-end.
Current state
Where it is right now: open. It soft-launched on Oct 9, 2026, on infrastructure the cooperative runs. The room, the shop and the member board are open to everyone, and the shop takes real orders. You can join the VHS Rotary Club now; memberships begin in November, and members pay ahead for it. Joining the circus as a Circus Member is free.
What landed since the summer: the shop. Garments are made to order and sit on the room's shelves and rails, where you can pick them up and look at them. Sales tax shows before you press Pay. Coupon codes work at checkout, and none can sell an item at a loss. A member can skip a month, pay by bank or card, and fix a failed payment from the board. The Privacy Policy and Terms were published in September. DeadMagats opened as the first featured artist, with its own page and a booth in the room.
What is next: the first memberships in November, and the first Vendor-Member through the door.
Connections
Runs on cooperative infrastructure. Uses TopSoil as the admin layer. Member accounts run on PACT. Owned by the Cooperative. TentCities is the personal-site model it is meant to grow into.
Build log
The turn from "another WordPress site" to a real room-OS you can walk through, the go-live, and what came after.
-
Early years
The AnalogCirc.us idea, and a lot of prototypes
Long stretch of concept work: what a cooperative marketplace for physical-media collectors would even feel like, whether a room-OS metaphor could carry it, which parts of the InertSpace stack would need to exist first. A lot of throwaway builds before anything stabilized.
-
Late 2025
Bedrock staging site up
The real build starts on a proper Bedrock + WordPress + TopSoil foundation. From here everything is versioned.
-
Jun 26, 2026
Room engine off-Elementor Turn
DB-driven scenes with parallax. The front-of-house stops being an Elementor page and starts being its own render pipeline.
More
- Before this, the room was an Elementor layout: fine for pixels, wrong for a real place. Every scene was a static asset.
- The new engine builds scenes from database rows: layered slots, parallax depth, positional metadata. A scene becomes something you can edit as data.
- Elementor stayed installed on production for a while as a safety net. It has since been removed.
-
Jun 27, 2026
Screen OS + Navigator app
Desktop-OS shell over the room, Start menu, corner icons, windowing, and the InertSpace Navigator browser app (internet header + page router).
More
- A real windowing surface layered on top of the room, so tents, apps, and dialogs can open and stack like a proper CRT-era desktop.
- The Navigator is the first app that ships in that surface: a browser-inside-the-site that can route to any page on AnalogCirc.us without breaking the room metaphor.
- Start menu, corner icons, and a proper Z-order round out the shell. It stops being decoration and starts being a place you can do things.
-
Jun 28, 2026
DOS Terminal BBS easter egg + dial-up synth
First BBS-shaped surface inside the Screen OS. Synthesized dial-up tones as a bit of texture.
-
Jun 29, 2026
Email signup wired
Visitors can leave an email from inside the Navigator.
-
Jun 30, 2026
Social meta + OG image + deploy runbook
Open Graph + Twitter Card meta, a CRT-homepage-shot as the OG image, and a written runbook for the production cutover.
-
Jul 4 – 5, 2026
VHS Rotary Club chapter + vendor pages
Navigator gets /club (VHS Rotary Club pitch) and /circus. Chapter-site look and vendor copy shipped.
-
Jul 9, 2026
Launch: open the gate Public
Full site goes public. FAQ divider slowed for effect. This is the go-live.
More
- Before this day the site sat behind a coming-soon gate. From here on, anyone with the URL sees the actual room.
- Small tempo choices (like slowing the FAQ divider animation) get treated as part of the launch. The atmosphere is part of the product.
- Everything after this is iteration in public: dues, BBS, Elementor retirement, Rotary Club rollout. All of it happens while people can watch.
-
Jul 10, 2026
Deep-linking
Real shareable URLs for room pages.
-
Jul 13 – 14, 2026
Navigator can browse the real web
Bookmarks dropdown + iframe browsing of inertspace.com, framed sites rendered to scale (desktop layout shrunk to fit the CRT), shareable /framed/<host>/ URLs, owned-network frame swap.
-
Jul 16, 2026
Dues on Stripe + PACT · the member board v1 · WooCommerce retired
Member billing gets built on Stripe with PACT behind it for identity. The AnalogCircus BBS ships as the member's billing terminal. WooCommerce is retired the same day.
More
- Dues: subscription plumbing on Stripe, with PACT providing the identity underneath. The first cooperative flow that uses PACT for real.
- The member board v1: a BBS-styled terminal where members check dues, change plans, and manage their affiliation. Retro presentation over modern payment rails.
- WooCommerce out: the placeholder store that had been in place since the scaffolding, pulled entirely once dues and the board could carry the actual load.
-
Jul 17 – 18, 2026
Elementor deactivated · patronage terminal in-flight
The theme is now confident enough to render its own header without Elementor holding its hand. Active area of work: the patronage loyalty system and the BBS Founders' Room.
-
Aug 17, 2026
Moved to cooperative infrastructure, in a day Turn
The site was migrated onto different infrastructure and came back up on its real domain the same evening. The largest single piece of operations work the project has done.
More
- Site, database, certificates and mail all had to move together, and the database rewrite touched a few thousand rows carrying the old hostnames.
- Mail was the thing nobody had exercised. A real signup produced no email, and the reason was two layers down from where anyone was looking. The lesson generalized: a send function that returns success is not evidence a message arrived. Only the receiving end can tell you that.
- Payment webhooks were being blocked before they reached the new host, which is a different fault with a similar shape: something upstream was refusing delivery and the site had no way to know. Fixing both meant the money path was finally proven rather than assumed.
-
Aug 18 – 25, 2026
The room gets a shop that holds real things
Shelves and rails stopped being scenery. They now hold actual catalogue items, arranged in space, that you can pick up and look at.
More
- An item on a shelf is a real product, not a picture of one. Picking it up, turning it over, and putting it in a basket are the same gesture you would make in a room.
- Placement had to become data the site owns rather than something one browser remembered, so what one person arranges is what every visitor sees.
- Getting a garment to hang, fold, and take light correctly is most of the work. A shop that renders its goods badly reads as a shop with nothing worth buying.
-
Aug 25 – 29, 2026
The phone is not a narrow desktop Turn
Making the room-OS work on a phone turned out to be a rebuild rather than a breakpoint. On a small screen the room becomes scenery and the BBS becomes the interface.
More
- The honest version: a 3D room you walk through is a desktop idea. Shrinking it produces something that is neither a room nor a phone app.
- So the phone stopped pretending to be a PC. The BBS was already the member's real interface, and on mobile it becomes the whole thing, presented as the device rather than as a nostalgia skin.
- Sizing was tuned against real handsets rather than a browser window, because the two disagree in ways that only show up on actual hardware.
-
Aug 31, 2026
Items carry their own behaviour into the room
A product now describes how it should be presented, and the room reads that instead of being told item by item. Hang it, fold it, lay it flat: the item knows, so the room does not have to be taught each time.
-
Sep 2026
Made to order, rendered honestly
The shop's garments are made to order. A design can carry more than one piece of art per side, a product can be sold as a set of its colours at one price, and you can pick stock up off a rail or shelf and look at it before it goes in the basket.
-
Sep 15 – Oct 7, 2026
Paying, said plainly
Sales tax shows before you press Pay, on both the shop and the membership screens. A member can skip a month, pay by bank or card, and fix a failed payment from the member board. The Privacy Policy and Terms of Service were published on Sep 15. The free tier is now called Circus Member: joining the circus is free, and you pay only to support it.
-
Oct 7 – 8, 2026
A featured artist gets a booth
DeadMagats has its own page inside the Navigator and its own booth in the room, open to visitors from Oct 8. It shares the one basket and checkout with the rest of the circus. The site's own description widened the same week: a co-op for artists, makers, and physical-media collectors.
-
Oct 9, 2026
Coupon codes that cannot sell at a loss
Coupon codes work at checkout. Every code is checked when it is made, so no code can push an item below what it has to earn.
-
Oct 9, 2026
The doors open Open
AnalogCirc.us soft-launched. The room, the shop and the member board are open to everyone, and the shop takes real orders. You can join the VHS Rotary Club now; memberships begin in November. Opening quietly first means the first people through the door find what is broken before a crowd does.
-
Oct 9 – 18, 2026
Every product gets a hang tag
Every product in the room now carries a hang tag, like a shirt on a shop rail. Click the tag to turn it over: one side has the price, size and colour, the other the name and description, and either side can be shared as a link. A design that comes in several versions keeps one tag, with the other versions one click away. In the Center Ring, tap a garment to zoom in and drag to look around it.
-
Oct 12 – 19, 2026
The phone and the PC keep one place
In the room you carry a phone and sit at a PC, and now the two keep one place. Browse on the phone, put it away, sit down, and the PC opens the page you were on. The phone's Back button walks back through pages, and Space stands you up or sits you down, even while you're at the PC.
-
Oct 10 – 20, 2026
The room gets its own builder v1.0
The room is now arranged with its own builder, version 1.0. Walls, floors, shelves, decor and the words on them are set up on a test copy of the site, then sent live in one step. Every save is kept, so any earlier layout can be put back, and if the test copy and the live site both changed the same thing, it stops and asks which to keep. A Layers list shows everything in the place you're standing in, even things that draw nothing, and a click picks any of them up. It builds one tent on one server for now. Saving a tent to a portable identity is still the next step.
-
Oct 10 – 20, 2026
The shop, rebuilt for the phone
Three in four visitors arrive on a phone, most of them from Instagram, so the product page was rebuilt phone first. The photo only turns to sides that carry a design, the label inside each garment shows as a big tag beside the photo, and a design's other versions are a choice in the colour list. Buy shows the price and goes straight to checkout. Links opened inside Instagram or Facebook on an iPhone now open in Safari, and every product shares with its own picture.
-
Oct 21, 2026 You are here
The shop notices a stalled order
If a paid order stalls on its way to being made or shipped, the shop now notices within a day and tells us the one thing to do: approve it, chase it, refund it, or tell the buyer. It never changes an order by itself.
-
Next
VHS Rotary Club memberships
The first memberships begin in November. Members join the cooperative through this door.