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Crystal Pier’s Christmas tree is up. And I found a 5 inch tall turban shell. I through it back when I realized it was a live. Thanksgiving with Kelly with family and family dogs. And killer veggies.
Thread of the Day
From Derek Powazek, from over on Bluesky:
If you want to own your name and everything you post under it in a way nobody can take away from you, register a domain and start uploading html.
If you post to someone else’s social media thing, you are playing on someone else’s server, and they always hold the keys.
Yes, even here
Amen.
Design is a verb I verb.
Today I went through the code I wrote to put my comics collection online in 2000. In 2004 I posted to my blog, using Blogger, that they were for sale. Here’s the post. The PHP code was about as good as one could imagine it might be by a person whose primary skillset was implementing in HTML fancy designs.
I have added that page to my archive. It’s got old designs, links to the Internet Archive, various ephemeral experiments, splash pages, and the like. The page tells the story of my whole site over the decades. Moving things there has me considering ways to have it be even more dynamic and visual.
It’s very much a work in progress.
I feel very pleased to be experimenting with design. It’s another of the positive outgrowths of Front End Study Hall. I think during the last one I started a sentence with “As designers we are obliged to think about…”
I have not thought of myself as a web designer in a long time, but out came that thought from my mouth.
It might be catching because James gave FrESH a great compliment in his post Confidence when he said:
I felt the same way about front-end web development, too. Earlier this year, I knew the basics of HTML and CSS, but I had no understanding of many of the modern technologies I could use. I knew grid existed, but I had no experience with its use. Then came Front End Study Hall, in which I learned about many technologies and how to think about them.
Refactoring PHP code and programming things invisible to users has been lucrative, but I’ve always been conscious about how my work works and looks and what impressions I give. So why not be a designer or call myself one?
Whether I call myself a designer, I design.
Design is also verb.
And so, I’ll verb design.
“spite swimming | sanity swimming” (one-sheet)
First shown at The Apartment Art Show curated by Raquelle Jac in July 2022 in Downtown San Diego, California.
Things what you ought to read and look at
Tracy Durnell’s travelogue of California is a delight. “Eat the rich” indeed. Kelly and I loved the Monterey Aquarium but we’d neither of us been there before.
Yarn bomb that is also a temperature visualization? That perfectly aligns with my interests.
Mark Evanier is going to write about Pink Lady and Jeff someday. I look forward to that!
Anil Dash writes Don’t call it a Substack.
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Amen.
Andrew Crawford collected the usages of his XOXO stamp. His post includes mine and mine is in fine company.
Dan Hon says people don’t go to websites because their architecture is correct. They go for the people. And this, 100%. I remain convinced if the IndieWeb is to be the place people do their “social media” it must be radically simpler to use. Because owning your own website is ultimately better than EVERY OTHER OPTION.
Prohibition (of alcohol) warped all kinds of things. Among them, bowling alleys: Historical Oddities:
Post-Prohibition, Michigan, like many states, had dry counties everywhere. Bars and restaurants couldn’t serve alcohol. Bowling alleys, however, had a carve out as “recreational” facilities, and they could serve alcohol if they fulfilled certain minor conditions. It was basically a massive loophole which was exploited to the hilt.
Nick wrote about a song that is significant to him last week and it was beautiful.
I’m reminded of something I quoted in 2010. Two months after my mother died.
Significantly, people experiencing (or caretakers observing) the stages should not force the process. The grief process is highly personal and should not be rushed, nor lengthened, on the basis of an individual’s imposed time frame or opinion. One should merely be aware that the stages will be worked through and the ultimate stage of “Acceptance” will be reached.
To quote Moneyball (2011):
Billy Beane: Everyone wants to attack. Quit trying to attack. Let the game come to you, man. There’s no clock on this thing. This is a war of attrition.
Larry Welz is a comics creator with a certain notability. Mostly for underground, dirty, or underground and dirty comics. I think he’s great. He wrote about a friend of his who passed away. A fellow painter. He talks about painting murals on amusement rides. Larry Todd:
The paint jobs on these things would last up to ten years of being folded up, hauled down thousands of miles of highway & popped up at hundreds of shopping mall parking lots near you, after which they were painted over, or sometimes the front would be reskinned & the old panels would be pulled off & thrown onto a pile of scrap metal. There are no surviving pieces being preserved & displayed, this was folk art, it lived & died out in the World.
Larry Todd, rest in peace.
Alas, nothing is permanent.
Henry Barajas is doing a comics Kickstarter for a comic about the Zoot Suit Riots. Hell yes. The Zoot Suit riots were about white boys–soldiers and sailors–deciding to pick fights with young “Mexicans” across Southern California. And when I say “Mexicans” I mean Americans who were a bit darker in complexion. I get intensely angry when I think about them. I hate a bully. As a fat kid, I met plenty of them. And as a kid of mixed ancestry, a true mestizo, I am just a chance-of-genetics away from having been a bit more brown. I feel the weight of how much having whiter skin has been a benefit to me and the unfairness. I hate a system that is bully, too. And I hate that people walking around out there feel like the system tells them they ought to go enforce bullying. I think about this when I think about how we treat trans people. How we treat immigrants. How we treat everybody. If you see this shit happening you have a moral obligation to shut the bullies down.
While I’m seething I’ll also share Field Negro’s Post-Mortem on the election.
Kelly and I watched Lost a few months back. Alan Sepinwall’s wrap ups are still out there on blogs and various spots. They were useful to me during the watch to get a sense of some of the reactions. The show is an infuriating but watchable mess. It makes perfect sense that it was popular. My high level take is it’s about feeling the world is a bloody violent mess with a grand design, but that design is stacked against us and we are all obliged to play along. That we might need to have gunfights and torture and attack each other is all part of it. And ultimately things sort of work out and good people are preventing an apocalypse. This is not a reasonable philosophy or a reasonable fictional lens to look at existence through. I don’t care how funny and sweet it was in parts. It seems to me much of it is a response to the post-9/11 moment and the wrongful invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. And torture and cruelty–Abu Ghraib–looms so large. To know that the show was shitty to its minority staff and the only master plan for the tv show was to make more tv shows was disappointing and unsurprising to me.
But I am an art critic, sometimes. Lost was fascinating and I’m glad I watched it.
To quote my man Walter Sobchak:
Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
Fuck nihilism. And Fuck Nazis too, Walter. And the National Front.
As dril said:
issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”
In that spirit, let’s get to something that’s both angry AND joyful. I think combining anger and action with joy and righteousness and a multicultural antiracist stance is the way through the next few years. I think of ska first.
Watch BBC’s 2 Tone The Sound of Coventry documentary
Watch “Ghost Town” by The Specials: The Sound of Impending Doom · New British Canon
Watch Under The Influence: 2 Tone Ska, a terrific documentary about the history of ska.
Join the forever fight against the world of pure enshittification. And dance.
I ❤️ Conic Gradients
I’ve been fascinated with how many different ways there are to do things since I was a kid.
When I was 11 I did a series of drawings on newsprint paper that I had been gifted by someone. On each one I wrote my name, “Joe” in a different way. In one, the letters were on fire. In another, the letters were formed by the shapes of sports equipment: I think the “O” was a basketball. In another inflated balloons. All in pen, and marker, colored.
There was no real point to it. I loved getting news ideas for themes. I think there was one with the powers of the Fantastic Four, with one stretching, one in Ben Grimm’s stone, one on fire, one fading away invisibly.
And here’s a page on my “lab” where I show different ways to markup a simple square block with a border. (Somehow the typo in that page has lasted 24 years). It uses font tags and tables and blank GIFs and is all kinds of markup that today would be a bad idea. That said, it kind of still works. Yay me from 25 years ago.
ConicGradient vs LinearGradient vs ClipPath vs MaskImage is a CodePen which demonstrates the creation of a shape, too. It’s a more complicated shape! It’s the kind of shape that you could put om a web page as an image or as a Flash movie in 1999.
Why replicate the same thing multiple times in different ways?
I guess it’s to learn.
It might just be because I find it fun.
Like a puzzle.
Like a game.
There’s this principle I read about many years ago. I think the first time I encountered it was in Perl documentation which had been printed out.
“There’s more than one way to do it”
The Perl Wikipedia page has a subsection named “Philosophy”.
Yes, programming can contain philosophy! Everything does.
TMTOWTDI is deep in my bones. It applies to everything. I like to think it helps me change my mind. Changing ones mind is not “flip-flopping”. It might be the only thing that enables positive change in the world.
Here’s a screenshot of that CodePen I mentioned before (GitHub gist link). This screenshot highlights the four conic-gradients that make up the background. A very satisfying solution to the puzzle of how to make that shape.
I can replicate the shape with the code. I can add a input to let you set the color. Unless you’re reading in RSS maybe not though.
If you liked this, you might enjoy my YouTube channel, where I’ve been doing the CSS Battle pretty much daily. I do it fast, and don’t think about it too much. I try to say smart things as I do it. Try.
I love making web stuff. Thanks for reading, thanks for looking, thanks for watching!
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