Explore My Notes

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.

Several excellent tips on how to best setup, configure, or use Eleventy, all with excellent explanations. I particularly liked the breakdown of the data cascade model 👍

Daniel has created an extremely useful HTML template that includes most common elements, perfect for kickstarting a CSS design scheme, and all in a handy GitHub package.

What even is "whiteness". Is it skin colour? Not really. Genetics? Race precedes genetics or even evolution. A vague concept of "European" descent? What about Roma people, or (for a lot of history) Irish people. Or the reality that most "white identity" focuses on modern concepts that wouldn't have existed in pre-colonial Europe.

Or as Thought Slime puts it:

What is the one thing that all "white people" have in common that also excludes all people who aren't "white"?

NB: To caveat, these quotes are being taken wildly out of context and are normally prefaced or surrounded by very clear and fair couching. The video is in no way antagonistic and any potential problematic terminology or arguments are carefully discussed. I'm simply recording some of the core ideas that stuck with me, within that broader context. Nor is this making an argument that you cannot be proud of "white" culture, nor is it claiming that this isn't a thing. In other words, watch the video 😉

On the paradox of "white people" and the whole "why are white people like that", which is somehow something I (and many other white people) just agree with:

How come "white people" are a group that I somehow think I'm within, but also, seem to think that I'm entitled to judge from the outside. Something I'm inescapably a part of, but that I get to act like it doesn't define me or that I'm above it.

On genetic diversity and why it doesn't equate to race (certainly within the English language):

There is more genetic diversity in Africa than in any other part of the world, or between any other parts of the world combined.

On a useful definition of "whiteness":

Whiteness is the absence of racialisation, the process of attributing essential racial characteristics to groups of people. Whiteness is a category of exclusion and denotes nothing, but that the people who possess it are not part of one of the out groups that the white in-group has created. Essentially, to be white means to be not un-white, and also nothing else.

On white heritage and the paradox therein:

Sometimes [not great people] will claim that society if "biased against white people" because it's considered racist to be proud of being White, but not to be proud of being Black or Asian or what have you. And on the surface, that sounds like a double-standard, doesn't it... But you can be proud of being American without anyone giving you side-eye; you can be proud of being Canadian, or German, or Italian. Nobodies mad about your heritage.
But to be proud specifically of being part of the huge, vague assortment of cultures and peoples, whose only unifying connection is that none of them are part of the races we treated like dog shit historically, that's a little different, isn't it? The only thing that connects all white people, the only commonality between all of us, is racial privilege.

On what "white pride" really means:

So then, what common goals would a "white pride" movement works towards? If you believe White people must unify around our whiteness, what are we unifying against? Seems to me like we have it pretty good, actually. We already make the most money. We're less likely to be arrested for doing the same crimes, and if we are arrested we usually get a lighter sentence. What are we even fighting for?
The answer, whether or not these groups are willing to admit it, is the continuation of those privileges.

I had no idea that Tolkien ever considered a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, let alone one that had multiple revisions by the time of his death. This video into that potential book, with a draft title of The New Shadow, is a fascinating look into what could have been, but more so, it's a perfect example of why Tolkien's work is so timeless: as an author, he had a particularly impressive grasp of human nature, and a poetic turn of phrase that allowed him to express it in ways few others can manage.

It also hints at an inversion of one of the few criticisms often levied at LotR, which is that it is almost too optimistic about the goodness of men and too simplistic in its portrayal of good versus evil. I'm not sure I've ever fully agreed with that take (not with the books at least; the movies may warrant it), but the very fact that a sequel would have considered how "easily sated" Men are with peace and "good" (to paraphrase his comments), and imagined a world in which young Gondorians would have played at being Orcs or followed a (potentially) Black Numenorean into a new age of darkness, well, that's some pretty bleak and harrowing stuff. And a little too close-to-the-bone in modern times, with the rise of the Alt-Right and resurgence in Nazism and fascism more broadly. Honestly, there's a lot you can point to in Tolkien's work that can be explained by his lived experience with the Great War and WWII, but I think that this plot and the time in which it's set (within living memory, but only just, of the fall of Sauron) is too predictive to be anything other than genuine insight and understanding, which is cool, albeit terrifying.

I've always thought the utility of Tailwind was promising, but it bugged me that the way it worked was so counter to both best practices and the web stack's architecture. Well, introducing Open Props, a Tailwind-like set of importable design tokens that works entirely within CSS, using native functionality, and maintaining best practices 👏

I'm particularly impressed with the custom media queries. They only work with an additional plugin (I'm assuming a polyfill) for now, but they really highlight just how useful that spec will be once it's available. I'm particularly excited by the @media (--safariOnly) {...} syntax 😮

Some very clear criticisms of the whole "comedy shouldn't be censored" mentality. Comedy absolutely should not be censored, but it should be able to be critiqued. As Thought Slime puts it, (some) comedians seem to want a double standard: they want comedy to be seen as thought-provoking and boundary-pushing, but refuse to allow it to be analysed and dissected, stifling critical thought and artistic examination.

The video goes into this a lot more eloquently, but the gist boils down to three main points:

1. It's never "just a joke". Even Edgelord humour comes from a place of personal bias; making a joke that deliberately highlights a negative pattern is fine, but the underlying position is still necessary to review and consider (an example given is how the jokes around Trump and Putin being in a relationship are clearly homophobic, even if that isn't their intent it is part of the message being portrayed). Just because something is funny, doesn't make it just a joke, and most comedians will claim that their comedy is designed to raise a point, so analysis of comedy is sort of integral to it being a thing;
2. Comedy, and comedians, will always goof. They will tell insensitive jokes, they will have cultural blind spots, and even the most careful will screw up. That should be allowed and criticised so that the comedian learns what they did wrong and can remedy it moving forward. It's therefore important that comedy breeds a culture where speaking out is encouraged and where comedians are happy to evolve;
3. Censorship of comedy is bad, but you can't censor criticism of comedy either, they're equally problematic.
   

I also really like their comments on how comedy can just be to make people laugh. Not necessarily to laugh at others (and certainly not to punch down), but that comedy without a hidden message or desire to provoke thought is still comedy, and still has inherent value as an art form and skill.

If you're gonna ask people to be less sensitive and take a joke, maybe you need to be a little less sensitive and accept criticisms of that joke?

I have a vague memory of CSS Regions being talked about, but had completely forgotten them. It turns out that's likely because the spec has effectively been pulled. I think it's technically still out there, but IE11 is the only browser that still has any compatibility with them, so you can effectively treat it as DOA. That's a little bit of a shame, as I quite like the idea of being able to flow content between sections of a page, but Bruce does a good job of highlighting why it didn't work out and what a future second attempt might do better.

On the positive use-cases for Regions:

Some mobile navigations that we see on the web are a duplicated version of the desktop navigation, Regions will give us the ability to flow them instead of duplicated the general structure

The basic idea was to move things from the sidebar into specific regions throughout the content and then making the asides and ads more content aware for smaller screens.

On their downfall (one of the reasons that Safari and Google both pushed to remove them from browsers as the mobile web took off):

Magazine layouts on the web, while they look cool - would inhibit a user from finding what they were looking for in the first place.

An inciteful, well written, and intensely interesting (and important) look at media trends within modern white, liberal culture, focused around Bo Burnham's Inside but touching on a much wider variety of shows, films, and media in general. The core concept of "White Liberal Performative Art" is a particularly interesting lens to group together otherwise seemingly disparate media (for those of us within the white, liberal bubble).

A brilliant tool for quickly troubleshooting or writing regular expressions. Works perfectly for JavaScript syntax in particular.

A wonderfully sarcastic and extremely well-reasoned takedown of everything from software subscriptions to marketing deceptive patterns to NFTs 👍

I've chopped out the middle here, but I really like this sentiment from Seth on the nature of media, control, and the illusion of powerlessness.

Sometimes the media would like us to believe that we’re all astronomers, simply passive witnesses in a world out of our control.

But the world is never out of our influence.

...

The ocean is made of drops. And the drops are up to us. Who else is going to care enough to make an impact?