The fact that there is a fully-staffed museum on South Georgia makes me so incredibly happy 😊 This is an island without any permanent inhabitants (unless you count the penguins), no hotels, no eateries, no shops; in fact, there are barely any buildings at all. A few lodges and houses exist for researchers, there's a storehouse, a small chapel, the remnants of a whaling station and, of course, the museum.

The museum doesn't charge an entrance fee and the staff's commute to the island for the summer season (the only time of year that South Georgia is occasionally accessible to the cruise liners that stop by) can take months, relying on borrowed passage onboard coastguard patrol vessels, fishing boats, and the local navy. Once on the island, there's no real chance to leave, very little contact with the outside world, and a general feeling of just having to get stuck into whatever island life throws at you.

Unsurprisingly, jobs at the museum are targeted at those who are "happy with intense solitude" and "are able to wear whatever hat is needed for the day". Possible tasks include graveyard maintenance, petrol tank pumping, aiding scientific research, and, of course, manning the gift shop. Because even at the end of the world, a museum isn't truly a museum without a gift shop.

It's utterly mad and completely wonderful. I desperately want to visit!

I have read this article half a dozen times since I first discovered it a couple of months ago. Each time, it angers me, saddens me, and reminds me that people are inherently, well, just people. That's all. Devon has written a beautifully empathetic treatise targeted at educators, but applicable to anyone and everyone.

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.

On the idiocy of grandstanding over those without a home:

Kim is the person who taught me that judging a homeless person for wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes is utter folly. When you’re homeless, the nights are cold, the world is unfriendly, and everything is painfully uncomfortable... In that chronically uncomfortable, over-stimulating context, needing a drink or some cigarettes makes fucking sense. As Kim explained to me, if you’re laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep. If you’re under-nourished, a few smokes may be the only thing that kills the hunger pangs. And if you’re dealing with all this while also fighting an addiction, then yes, sometimes you just need to score whatever will make the withdrawal symptoms go away, so you can survive.

On procrastination being misunderstood:

In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.

On why the concept of "laziness" is almost always incorrect:

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.

Generate your own surreal landscapes and posters. Pick a style, give the algorithm a prompt, and just let it create something bizarre or wonderful. A great way to quickly iterate some ideas for concept design. I've even seen people in the Planet Zoo community use it for inspiration.

I've basically ignored this "rule" for years because I've never been able to replicate it myself. I test with a handful of screen readers, and none of them have ever cut alternative text short, but I still see the old "125 character limit" knocking about. It's nice to know that someone has taken the time to properly test this, and has firmly debunked it. Maybe, at some point, alt text had a limit; maybe it's just a misunderstanding about how JAWS splits large text chunks up. Either way, a better rule of thumb is: keep alt text concise, but don't worry about length so long as what you're writing is meaningful 😉

No screen reader cut off text altogether. JAWS – and I have tested this with a more recent version of it as well – will split up the alternative text into multiple graphics with shorter alternative text.

A handy little tool for exporting GreenSock animations as videos, with a wealth of customisation options. Perfect for sharing animation work on social media or dropping examples into case studies 👏

A wonderful instance of a practical joke being taken way too far, only in a good way 😂 From SciShow episodes, to Time articles, to multiple hoax infomercials, references in video games, and full (fake) technical documentation, all spanning several decades, the tongue-in-cheek ribbing of techno-babble has clearly struck a nerve.

The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-deltoid type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible tremmie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the "up" end of the grammeters.

I largely agree with Peter's take on the loss of the slow, dusty web (and I mean that with the greatest admiration 😁). What I particularly enjoyed was the following dissection of the language used:

We used to have homepages. Homes on the Internet. Not profiles, no; profile is something the authorities make about you in dossier.

That, I can fully get behind.

A deep dive into the world of copyleft trolling and Creative Commons license abuse. I was unsurprised to see that automated systems are being used to target people with extortion rackets (similar to the old copyright trolling takes that seek damages via threats) but the honeypot schemes – photos being uploaded under CC licenses and then pinged for minor infringement – is a particular kind of vile.

The short answer is: only use images or material under CC 4.0 licenses, and if you share content under CC licenses update them to 4.0 ASAP. Really good to see Flickr are working on systems to make that as painless as possible 🙌

On how CC licenses can be abused:

The original version of the CC license stated that the license would “terminate automatically upon any breach.” That meant that if you failed to live up to the license terms in any substantial way, you were no longer a licensed user of the copyrighted work. Any uses you had made of that work were no longer permitted under the license, so unless you had another basis for using it (for example, if your use qualified as “fair use”), then you were now infringing copyright.

On the inherent evils of copyleft disputes:

The point of Creative Commons is to allow copyright holders to exercise their copyrights — specifically, to exercise their copyrights in a way that facilitates sharing and re-use. If you are a lawyer who responds to minor CC license errors with legal threats instead of requests for correction, then you are a predator in violation of your own code of professional ethics and you should be shunned by your peers for bringing the law into disrepute.

Shame on you.

There's a lot to love in this manifesto about the intersection of personal creativity and the web. I don't really subscribe to the nostalgia of the GeoCities era (I find these kinds of sites near impossible to look at, let alone read or navigate), but the Melon King (if that even is their real name 🤔) makes some good points, and makes them eloquently.

On the sanctuary afforded by personal websites:

Outside the storm of the web would rage, but within those walls it was always dusty and safe.

On the web everything is free and unlimited, but also independent and individual. On the web we all own infinite worlds, we are all kings and queens. It's an economy of creativity, the only limits are time and imagination.

All these social media and crypto people, they try to take that away from you because the only way they can make money is to put limits on infinity

On their driving philosophy and advice for new web creators:

Use your tools to make things, don't make things about your tools. Technology and the end result are in a dance, one can never lead the other too long.

Perfection is a flaw, consistency is a limitation and professionalism is a disaster. Everything should be an adventure and adventures start where the cracks in normality begin.

You never really own a site, they grow and change by their nature. As a webmaster, your job is to tend the site, you must never kill it or force it to be something it doesn't want to be.

New does not always mean better, sometimes old things remind us that there was a different path, and there still can be again.

You were never made to be in a bubble, and no one is self made.

I didn't know that people try to come up with "perfect New Yorker captions", sentences that can be added to any New Yorker cartoon and just work, but it's a fun idea. Frank's modern take is a particularly fun one, that captures a point in web history well (to think, when this all happened many still didn't know what LinkedIn was):

I'm also a general fan of this sentiment:

This went from a dumb idea I had on my commute to a real caption in the magazine in six days. Dumb fun moves fast

I saw Zach's poll on Twitter when they posted it, so I was intrigued to see what the results were. Most people agree with me, that URLs shouldn't have trailing slashes. It turns out that we're probably wrong, technically, but dammit it just looks better. A trailing slash implies additional content! I'm not even sure that I agree with Chris' take, though at least that distinction follows logic I can understand.

The important part, though, is what happened when Zach tested the different approaches:

Here’s what happens when a web browser makes a request to a URL representing this content:

/resource

✅ GitHub Pages, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages redirect to the trailing slash /resource/ as expected.

🟡 Warning: Vercel, Render, and Azure Static Web Apps: slashless /resource returns content but without redirects, resulting in multiple endpoints for the same content.

/resource/

✅ All hosts agree that /resource/ should return content from resource/index.html

💔 Warning: If you’re using relative resource URLs, the assets may be missing on Vercel, Render, and Azure Static Web Apps (depending on which duplicated endpoint you’ve visited).

<img src="image.avif"> on /resource/ resolves to /resource/image.avif

<img src="image.avif"> on /resource resolves to /image.avif

In other words, the greatest level of consistency for URLs, redirects, and relative paths is always a trailing slash. The impact (particularly for SEO) varies based on host, but it's always better to just accept that (for now) aesthetics have lost.

I also fully agree with this sentiment:

Ideally, (speaking as the maintainer of Eleventy) folks working on developer tooling should craft tools to create output that uses existing conventions and can be portable to as many hosts in as many different hosting environments as possible.

I've been enjoying They Can Talk for a while. It's a simple concept, executed extremely well: what would animals say if they could talk? Worth a read.