diff --git a/index.html b/index.html
index 99294f3..015b751 100644
--- a/index.html
+++ b/index.html
@@ -21,72 +21,72 @@
     <section class="section" id="cipherdolls">
       <div class="section-head">
         <h2 class="section-title">CipherDolls — AI companion platform</h2>
-        <p class="section-desc">An AI companion platform spanning cloud, web, and physical IoT devices.</p>
-        <a class="section-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls" rel="noopener" target="_blank">github.com/cipherdolls ↗</a>
+        <p class="section-lede">What if an AI companion wasn't just an app, but something physical in your room? CipherDolls is my biggest project: an AI companion platform where characters can talk, listen — and live inside real devices.</p>
+        <a class="section-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">github.com/cipherdolls ↗</a>
       </div>
       <div class="cards">
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">core</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Backend API for the CipherDolls platform: wallet-signature auth, AI chat completions, TTS/STT, embeddings (pgvector), USDC payments on Base, and IoT device management over MQTT.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">The brain of the platform: one backend that handles chat, voice, memory, payments and the connection to the physical dolls.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Bun</li><li>Elysia</li><li>Prisma</li><li>PostgreSQL</li><li>Redis</li><li>MQTT</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/core" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/core" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">server</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Minimal chat backend derived from core, stripped to the essentials: chat with a Character, optional TTS/STT — same architecture, no payments or IoT.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">A slimmed-down core for anyone who just wants to chat with a character — the same architecture, none of the complexity.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Bun</li><li>Elysia</li><li>Prisma</li><li>PostgreSQL</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/server" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/server" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">webapp</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Web frontend for the platform.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">The web face of CipherDolls — where you meet the characters.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>React Router</li><li>TypeScript</li><li>Tailwind</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/webapp" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/webapp" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">stream-player</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">TTS audio streaming proxy — subscribes to Redis Pub/Sub and forwards audio chunks to WebSocket clients with a compact binary protocol.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">Voices need to arrive instantly. This streams the AI's speech to your browser the moment it is generated.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>TypeScript</li><li>Redis</li><li>WebSocket</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/stream-player" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/stream-player" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">stream-recorder</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">WebSocket audio ingestion microservice — accepts raw WAV streams, converts to MP3 in-memory via ffmpeg, forwards to the backend.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">The listening half: your voice streams in, gets converted on the fly, and lands with the AI.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>TypeScript</li><li>WebSocket</li><li>ffmpeg</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/stream-recorder" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/stream-recorder" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">firmware-watcher</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">ESP-IDF firmware for the SenseCAP Watcher companion device: BLE WiFi provisioning, MQTT events, MP3 playback through the onboard codec, LVGL UI on a 412×412 display, deep sleep.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">The magic moment: a real device on your desk wakes up, connects, and speaks with the character's voice.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>C</li><li>ESP-IDF</li><li>ESP32-S3</li><li>LVGL</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/firmware-watcher" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/firmware-watcher" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">firmware-m5sticks3</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">ESP-IDF firmware for the M5StickS3 (ESP32-S3) pocket companion device with display, audio codec, and IMU.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">The pocket version: the same companion on a tiny stick with a display and a microphone.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>C</li><li>ESP-IDF</li><li>ESP32-S3</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/firmware-m5sticks3" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/cipherdolls/firmware-m5sticks3" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
       </div>
@@ -96,62 +96,62 @@
     <section class="section" id="dapps">
       <div class="section-head">
         <h2 class="section-title">Decentralized apps — Gnosis Chain + Ethereum Swarm</h2>
-        <p class="section-desc">dApps with on-chain logic and censorship-resistant Swarm storage/hosting.</p>
+        <p class="section-lede">Can the web run without servers? These apps are my experiments in building things that nobody can switch off.</p>
       </div>
       <div class="cards">
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">SwarmChat</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Decentralized 1:1 messenger and WebRTC video calling: wallet identity, on-chain contact registry, encrypted messages over Swarm PSS with feeds as offline outbox. Live at swarmchat.eth.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">I was thinking about how cool it would be to have a web3-based chat system. Is it possible to communicate without any servers? With Swarm, a decentralised technology, this is now possible — messages travel encrypted through the network itself, and your wallet is your identity.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Solidity</li><li>React</li><li>Swarm PSS</li><li>WebRTC</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/SwarmChat" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/SwarmChat" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">Pink Chainsaw</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Decentralized imageboard: post images, comment, and vote with xBZZ; fees auto-top-up the poster's Swarm postage stamp so good content stays alive. A social-score system prices posting by reputation.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">I wanted an imageboard where content can't just disappear. Images live on Swarm, and every post pays a little to keep them alive — good content earns you cheaper posting, bad content gets expensive.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Solidity</li><li>Foundry</li><li>React</li><li>Swarm</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/pinkchainsaw" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/pinkchainsaw" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">FreeeMarket</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Multi-vendor marketplace where anyone runs their own shop and gets paid in stablecoins through on-chain escrow — deliberately fee-free and VAT-free.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">Can you run a marketplace with no company behind it? Anyone opens a shop, buyers pay in stablecoins, and on-chain escrow replaces the middleman. Deliberately fee-free — a farmers' market for the internet.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Solidity</li><li>Gnosis Chain</li><li>Swarm</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/freeemarket" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/freeemarket" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">WalletMatrix</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Pivot-table view of a crypto wallet across every EVM chain — tokens as rows, chains as columns; drag one cell onto another to bridge or cross-chain swap. Static SPA deployable to Swarm.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">My tokens were scattered across a dozen chains and I could never see the whole picture. So I built a pivot table for your wallet: tokens as rows, chains as columns — drag a cell from one chain to another to bridge.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>React</li><li>TypeScript</li><li>Vite</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/walletmatrix" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/walletmatrix" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">swarm-connect</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">React connect-button + wizard for Swarm on Gnosis: wallet → network → balances → Bee node → postage stamp, in one modal. Published on npm; demo hosted on Swarm itself.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">Every Swarm dApp I built needed the same onboarding dance: wallet, network, Bee node, postage stamp. So I packaged it once — a single React button that walks users through all of it.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>React</li><li>wagmi</li><li>npm package</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/swarm-connect" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/swarm-connect" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">opentab</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Onchain app bootstrapped with create-onchain (Base).</p>
+          <p class="card-story">An experiment with onchain apps on Base.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Next.js</li><li>TypeScript</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/opentab" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/opentab" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
       </div>
@@ -161,35 +161,35 @@
     <section class="section" id="ai-gpu">
       <div class="section-head">
         <h2 class="section-title">AI on GPU — self-hosted speech services</h2>
-        <p class="section-desc">Dockerized speech AI for NVIDIA GPUs, tuned for the RTX 5090 / Blackwell generation.</p>
+        <p class="section-lede">I wanted my projects to hear and speak without sending a single word to the cloud — so these run on my own GPU.</p>
       </div>
       <div class="cards">
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">whisper-cuda</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">OpenAI-Whisper-compatible ASR web service built for RTX 5090 (sm_120) — faster-whisper on CTranslate2/CUDA 12.8, no PyTorch.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">Speech-to-text on my own GPU: no cloud, no per-minute pricing. Whisper packaged for the RTX 5090 so anything in my homelab can transcribe audio locally.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Python</li><li>FastAPI</li><li>CUDA</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/whisper-cuda" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/whisper-cuda" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">kokoro-cuda</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Minimal Kokoro TTS API with CUDA: 49 voices in 9 languages, streaming WAV/PCM plus MP3/Opus/FLAC, web UI included.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">Giving my projects a voice: a small self-hosted TTS service with 49 voices in 9 languages, fast enough to stream. Type text, hear it instantly.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Python</li><li>FastAPI</li><li>CUDA</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/kokoro-cuda" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/kokoro-cuda" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">voxtral-cuda</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Text-to-speech service running Mistral's Voxtral-4B-TTS with CUDA acceleration via vLLM-Omni.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">The newest open speech models are amazing but heavy. This runs Mistral's Voxtral on a local GPU, so state-of-the-art speech stays in my own house.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>Python</li><li>vLLM</li><li>CUDA</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/voxtral-cuda" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/voxtral-cuda" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
       </div>
@@ -204,11 +204,11 @@
 
         <article class="card">
           <h3 class="card-name">stakingtracker</h3>
-          <p class="card-desc">Self-hosted ETH staking rewards tracker and tax-report generator — reads from your own beacon node, persists daily history to SQLite, no external APIs or keys.</p>
+          <p class="card-story">Tax season with an ETH validator used to mean paid APIs and spreadsheets. Now my own beacon node does the work: a small self-hosted app that records rewards daily and prints the tax report.</p>
           <ul class="tags">
             <li>TypeScript</li><li>Fastify</li><li>SQLite</li>
           </ul>
-          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/stakingtracker" rel="noopener" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
+          <a class="card-link" href="https://github.com/ffaerber/stakingtracker" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">View on GitHub ↗</a>
         </article>
 
       </div>
@@ -219,8 +219,8 @@
   <footer class="site-footer">
     <div class="container">
       <nav class="footer-links">
-        <a href="https://github.com/ffaerber" rel="noopener" target="_blank">github.com/ffaerber ↗</a>
-        <a href="https://github.com/cipherdolls" rel="noopener" target="_blank">github.com/cipherdolls ↗</a>
+        <a href="https://github.com/ffaerber" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">github.com/ffaerber ↗</a>
+        <a href="https://github.com/cipherdolls" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">github.com/cipherdolls ↗</a>
       </nav>
       <p class="footer-meta">Served from a container built in <a href="https://git.ffaerber.duckdns.org/ffaerber/homepage" rel="noopener">ffaerber/homepage</a>.</p>
     </div>
diff --git a/styles.css b/styles.css
index 4643f63..4acb9d6 100644
--- a/styles.css
+++ b/styles.css
@@ -6,7 +6,8 @@
   --accent: #58a6ff;
   --border: #30363d;
   --tag-bg: #1f2630;
-  --radius: 10px;
+  --tag-fg: #8a929e;
+  --radius: 12px;
   --maxw: 64rem;
 }
 
@@ -19,6 +20,7 @@
     --accent: #0969da;
     --border: #d0d7de;
     --tag-bg: #eaeef2;
+    --tag-fg: #57606a;
   }
 }
 
@@ -29,7 +31,7 @@ body {
   font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
   color: var(--fg);
   background: var(--bg);
-  line-height: 1.6;
+  line-height: 1.7;
   -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
   text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
 }
@@ -43,7 +45,7 @@ body {
 
 /* Header */
 .site-header {
-  padding: 2.5rem 0 1.5rem;
+  padding: 3rem 0 2rem;
   border-bottom: 1px solid var(--border);
 }
 .site-title {
@@ -61,21 +63,24 @@ body {
 
 /* Sections */
 .section {
-  padding: 2rem 0 0.5rem;
+  padding: 2.75rem 0 1rem;
   scroll-margin-top: 1rem;
 }
-.section-head { margin-bottom: 1.25rem; }
+.section-head { margin-bottom: 1.75rem; }
 .section-title {
-  font-size: clamp(1.15rem, 2.5vw, 1.5rem);
-  margin: 0 0 0.35rem;
+  font-size: clamp(1.2rem, 2.5vw, 1.6rem);
+  margin: 0 0 0.6rem;
   letter-spacing: -0.01em;
   font-weight: 700;
 }
-.section-desc {
-  margin: 0 0 0.4rem;
+.section-lede {
+  display: block;
+  max-width: 60ch;
+  margin: 0 0 0.6rem;
   color: var(--muted);
-  font-size: 0.95rem;
-  max-width: 48rem;
+  font-size: 1.05rem;
+  font-style: italic;
+  line-height: 1.65;
 }
 .section-link {
   color: var(--accent);
@@ -88,8 +93,8 @@ body {
 /* Cards grid */
 .cards {
   display: grid;
-  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(17rem, 1fr));
-  gap: 1rem;
+  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(18rem, 1fr));
+  gap: 1.25rem;
 }
 
 .card {
@@ -98,59 +103,61 @@ body {
   background: var(--bg-elev);
   border: 1px solid var(--border);
   border-radius: var(--radius);
-  padding: 1.1rem 1.15rem 1.15rem;
-  transition: border-color 0.15s ease, transform 0.15s ease;
+  padding: 1.5rem 1.4rem 1.4rem;
+  transition: border-color 0.15s ease;
 }
 .card:hover { border-color: var(--accent); }
 .card:focus-within { border-color: var(--accent); }
 
 .card-name {
-  margin: 0 0 0.5rem;
+  margin: 0 0 0.75rem;
   font-size: 1.1rem;
   font-weight: 700;
   letter-spacing: -0.01em;
 }
-.card-desc {
-  margin: 0 0 0.85rem;
-  color: var(--muted);
-  font-size: 0.92rem;
+.card-story {
+  margin: 0.5rem 0 1.1rem;
+  color: var(--fg);
+  font-size: 1.02rem;
+  line-height: 1.65;
   flex: 1 1 auto;
 }
 
-/* Tags */
+/* Tags — small, muted detail */
 .tags {
   list-style: none;
-  margin: 0 0 0.9rem;
+  margin: 0 0 0.85rem;
   padding: 0;
   display: flex;
   flex-wrap: wrap;
   gap: 0.35rem;
 }
 .tags li {
-  font-size: 0.75rem;
+  font-size: 0.7rem;
   line-height: 1.4;
-  color: var(--muted);
+  color: var(--tag-fg);
   background: var(--tag-bg);
   border: 1px solid var(--border);
   border-radius: 999px;
-  padding: 0.12rem 0.55rem;
+  padding: 0.1rem 0.5rem;
   white-space: nowrap;
+  opacity: 0.95;
 }
 
-/* Card link */
+/* Card link — subtle, sits below the story */
 .card-link {
   align-self: flex-start;
-  color: var(--accent);
+  color: var(--muted);
   text-decoration: none;
-  font-size: 0.9rem;
-  font-weight: 600;
+  font-size: 0.82rem;
+  font-weight: 500;
 }
-.card-link:hover { text-decoration: underline; }
+.card-link:hover { color: var(--accent); text-decoration: underline; }
 
 /* Footer */
 .site-footer {
-  margin-top: 2.5rem;
-  padding: 1.5rem 0 2rem;
+  margin-top: 3rem;
+  padding: 1.75rem 0 2.25rem;
   border-top: 1px solid var(--border);
 }
 .footer-links {
@@ -185,6 +192,6 @@ a:focus-visible {
   .cards {
     grid-template-columns: 1fr;
   }
-  .site-header { padding: 1.75rem 0 1rem; }
-  .section { padding: 1.5rem 0 0.25rem; }
+  .site-header { padding: 2rem 0 1.25rem; }
+  .section { padding: 2rem 0 0.5rem; }
 }
\ No newline at end of file