Go Make Things

I made another unhoused friend today. Jon is a tattoo artist who suffered a chronic injury his thumb a year ago and can’t do his work anymore as a result. He only recently became homeless. He told me the same thing I’ve heard from so many unhoused folks I’ve talked to over the last year. It’s embarrassing. And I always tell them some version of the same thing. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. You’re still a person with worthy and deserving of kindness and love. You didn’t fail. The…

This weekend, I finished tending my guide on AI that I had planted a seed for in my digital garden. It includes links to various articles on it’s roles in environmental destruction, labor exploitation, economic failure, degrading critical thinking skills, and fascist empowerment. I’ve also included my own personal thoughts, and links to various other thought pieces from other people that I’ve found useful or informative. You can find the guide here.

I don’t particularly care for Dolly Parton’s music, but I loved Dolly Parton. She was literally the best of us. Unapologetically herself whether people liked it or not. Did not give a single fuck about what was “expected” of her based on her age, gender, career aspirations, and so on. Could have been a billionaire, but chose to invest tremendous amounts of money in communities that were underserved instead. A highly visible counter-argument to the idea that older white cishetero folks can’t…

There’s a rather popular flavor of social media content focused on helping unhoused people. The creator will give out sleeping bags, socks, and care kits; sit down and have a meal; or take the unhoused person shopping. Sometimes they help them find work or start a GoFundMe to get them off the streets. It does a lot of good. But it’s also gross AF! Imagine you’re cold, hungry, and desperate, and someone offers to get you all the things you need… if you consent to having a camera shoved in your…

This week, I had to write CSS for a design where a list of elements got a bit of extra design treatment if there were at least three nested items inside it. <!-- Base design --> <ul class="magic-list"> <li>Item 1</li> <li>Item 2</li> </ul> <!-- Extra design --> <ul class="magic-list"> <li>Item 1</li> <li>Item 2</li> <li>Item 3</li> <li>Item 4</li> <!-- ... --> </ul> I really wanted to avoid using JavaScript to add/remove an extra class, and the the :has() pseudo-class a

Back in March, I shared a bit of a sad update on my unhoused friends. Cops raided their camp and took everything they owned. Within the week… Mike had relapsed Manny got arrested for stealing copper Ron was all by himself But last Friday, I got an amazing phone call from Mike! Sometime over the winter, he checked himself into rehab. He’s several months clean now. He’s doing therapy to address the trauma that’s caused him to use. He’s in the process of getting a job helping other addicts get…

I’m a huge fan of the Buy Nothing Project, a movement that promotes the sharing and giving economy over one where people buy ever more shit. The spirit of Buy Nothing is sharing with your neighbors. It’s wonderful. But as it’s popularity in my area has grown, I’ve noticed that some folks have started using it as a way to just offload shit they’re too lazy to drive to a donation spot or throw away. It’s nearly always people who sign up just to give away a bunch of stuff, but are otherwise never…

The album Let’s Get Free by Dead Prez came out 26 years ago. As a teen, it spoke to my angst. As a whole ass adult, its wild to look back on it and realize just how much nuance and bigger picture I missed in their lyrics. Yesterday, their song “Propaganda” came on a random playlist I was listening to… You can’t fool all the people all of the time But if you fool the right ones, then the rest will fall behind Tell me who’s got control of your mind? Your world view? Is it the news or the movie…

The video Constructing the Revolution talks about how to start prefiguring the future you want today. (Heads up: the middle section of the video gets into some pretty heavy territory near the middle.) Early on, there’s some important conversation about rebuilding and repairing communities that have been shattered by a system that deliberately pits us against one another. All hierarchies of power desire to keep us separate, competing, and individualistic, because because we’re easier to exploit…

A major part of anarchy and socialism is the concept of anti-work. An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement—a focus on working less overall and sharing labor more equally—is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. A common criticism of this is that reducing the amount everyone works to something like 20 hours a week instead of 40+ means we would have to give up a lot of conveniences. No more 24/7…

Last winter, I wrote about prefiguration: building the future you want within the shell of existing structures. Rather than focusing solely on tearing down systems you don’t like or pointing out what’s wrong with how things are, prefiguration aims to start laying the foundation for what you’d like instead… right here, right now, with the tools you have available. One of the frustrating things about the approach is that while it allows you to take immediate action, it never really feels like…

Lately, I’ve been binging the back catalog of videos from my internet friend Willow on their YouTube channel: Questing Refuge. Willow is an autistic transgender parent who explores being different and finding belonging as portrayed in popular media. I’ve previously shared their fantastic video on disabled representation in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. More recently, I’ve very much enjoy their videos on the portrayal of disability in the show Hawkeye, how neurodivergence is dismissed in…

If you’ve ever been to a really good museum or botanical garden or an IKEA, they typically have a maze-like layout. Rather than a central hub with clear in-and-out spokes, they encourage you to wander and meander. They have small little side paths, sometimes unlabelled on the map, where you can often find surprises or hidden gems (metaphorical, not literal). Websites of days past were like this, too! Before blogs and UX-as-a-discipline and every-ecommerce-site-looks-like-a-Shopify-template,…

My friend Evan recently wrote a very well documented article on how AI isn’t inevitable, it just feels that way because it’s constantly foist upon us. He lays out the many many ways that it is, to be blunt, objectively immoral and unethical to use these tools, regardless of “how good” you think they are. In it, he notes… Except in cases where your boss forces you to use “AI” or be fired, it is entirely possible to eschew the use of these tools today. We have not yet reached the point with “AI”…

I’m so continually disappointed by how many people have absolutely no standards if it means being inconvenienced or “standing out” in any way. Yea, Elon sucks, but the Tesla is just suck a good car. Or… Yea, Twitter is a Nazi party, but I get more reach there. Or… Yea, AI is using all the drinking water and causing coal plants to reopen and taking peoples jobs, but I don’t have to write those reports anymore. Or… Yea, {thought leader} makes women and minorities uncomfortable, but he said some…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve made a lot of updates to my digital garden… All of the old guides have been harvested and replanted as new ones. I added a fully updated guide on Web Components that reflects how I build them today. I completely rewrote my guides around testing, with a detailed guide on Playwright, and stubbed out guides on TDD, Biome, and Typescript. I added some new guides on gardening topics. I created some guides on books and shows I really enjoy. I added a list of tags to the…

You didn’t “have a conversation” with ChatGPT. It doesn’t “think you should…” It doesn’t think. It didn’t “tell you that…” It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel. AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided. It’s like when a psychic says some bullshit like this, “I see a feeling of regret looming over you.” The psychic doesn’t know shit, but it’s pretty fucking…

Today, I wanted to show you how to detect when an element’s visibility changes using the JavaScript IntersectionObserver API. Let’s dig in! The Use Case I was recently working on a Web Component that calculates how much of the viewport it occupies, and automatically resizes itself to make sure it never overflows. As a standalone component, it worked fine. But in real-world use, it was nested inside Kelp’s toggle tabs component. When it ran it’s calculations, it was inside a [hidden] parent…

Nearly every day, I hear someone say… Like it or not, AI is here to stay. This is self-fulfilling. The same thing has been said about numerous social ills throughout history, from monarchies to smoking. It’s only inevitable if we allow it to be. Don’t let the big techno-fascists tell you what is or is not inevitable.

A few years ago, one of my big goals for the year was to watch less TV and read more books. I like a lot of nerdy sci-fi, dark fantasy, and dystopian media that my wife doesn’t particularly enjoy, which means I’d typically end up watching my shows after we watched our shows together and she went to bed. TV shows keep me awake in a way that reading does not (even when I read ebooks on the glowing screen of my iPad). This led to me staying up far too late most nights, waking up tired, and…

Yesterday, I ran into a weird bug in Chrome and Webkit (but not Firefox) using the .visually-hidden class inside an element that had overflow set to anything other than auto. The visually hidden elements would create a gap at the end of the overflow element, compounding the more of them there were. I wanted to document the details of the bug, and how I fixed it, because I’m sure I’ll run into this again. The .visually-hidden class A .visually-hidden class is used to hide content visually while…

Over a decade ago, I decided I wanted my article URLs to live at my site’s root path / instead of a subpath (like /blog or /articles) “for SEO purposes.” That made sense when I had a few dozen articles and hosted with WordPress. Today, I have nearly 3,000 articles generated as a flat HTML files with Hugo, and navigating my file system on the server is an unruly mess! I finally decided to fix this, moving all of my articles to the /articles subdirectory. But I also wanted to sure that all of the…

As part of my ongoing updates to my personal site, I decided to add icons after all external links. Today, I wanted to show you how I did it. Let’s dig in! Why? I do a lot of linking on my site, and it’s not always obvious when a link will keep you on-site vs. take you somewhere else. Using [target="_blank"] forces links to open in a new tab or window, but this is considered an anti-pattern for accessibility reasons. It can be confusing, and it robs users or choice and agency. An icon lets them…

As part of my ongoing updates to my personal site, I decided to add icons after all external links. Today, I wanted to show you how I did it. Let’s dig in! Why? I do a lot of linking on my site, and it’s not always obvious when a link will keep you on-site vs. take you somewhere else. Using [target="_blank"] forces links to open in a new tab or window, but this is considered an anti-pattern for accessibility reasons. It can be confusing, and it robs users or choice and agency. An icon lets them…

This morning while I was taking my dog to the groomers, the song Violence by Rise Against came on my playlist. And I started crying. Are we not good enough? Are we not brave enough? Is the violence in our nature just the image of our maker? Are we not good enough? Are we not brave enough? To become something greater than the violence in our nature? Are we not good, good enough? Or is it all a dream? The violence I’ve been listening to punk music for 30 fucking years. I grew up during a time…

This morning while I was taking my dog to the groomers, the song Violence by Rise Against came on my playlist. And I started crying. Are we not good enough? Are we not brave enough? Is the violence in our nature just the image of our maker? Are we not good enough? Are we not brave enough? To become something greater than the violence in our nature? Are we not good, good enough? Or is it all a dream? The violence I’ve been listening to punk music for 30 fucking years. I grew up during a time…

Last week, I learned that the punk band Rise Against has an acoustic symphony album called Ghost Note Symphonies. We’ve had rainy acoustic music weather here the last few days, and one song on the album really stood out to me: Miracle. (Here’s the original punk version if you’d prefer it.) It’s a song about not waiting for the change you want to happen. About getting out there and making your dent in the universe. But we don’t need miracles To tumble from the sky To part the seas around us Or…

I’ve been doing a lot of work on my digital garden over the last few weeks, and wanted to briefly mention some updates. I completely replanted the Reference Guides. Rather than being “recreated MDN,” it’s now big bucket of notes and how-to articles, filterable with tags. I’m harvesting content from the old guides, cleaning it up, and planting it anew. I’ve added new garden sections. I now have dedicate planters for my favorite media, places I’ve been to, info about my D&D characters and MtG…

The Which Side Are You On? (remix) by Rebel Diaz came out 11 years ago, and it’s more relevant than ever… Gave the money to suckas while our community’s still poor Withdrew the troops but started another war Colonized and terrorized and created an oil crisis So they could make a killin’ on food and gas prices Prisons is fillin’, they tryna lock up the future Militarize borders and control of computers While the stupid bumping music that ain’t healthy for the shawties Povertize the schools and…

I just updated the CSS for my website to use a fork of Kelp UI, which includes a much more consistent and easy-to-maintain class system than I had before. Quick aside: if you see any bugs in your travels, please let me know! While it mostly looks the same as before, the biggest change was to the color palette. I’m now taking advantage of relative colors with the oklch() CSS function to dynamically generate all of the colors used on this site from just six hex codes defined as CSS variables.…