Misc Notes And Recent Updates

Last night I posted my 2020 piece for Burn All Books’ Riso anthology Sundays Quarterly 5 with the theme of “ALTERNATIVE FUTURES.” My comic predates the Marvel and DC cinematic multiverses by mere months. It’s 60 years later than the comics multiverses.

In this timeline.

And this morning I just posted my comic “Silence”. I had been avoiding posting it, thinking I needed to reformat it for the web in some manner. I also had thought that the right venue for some comics was in Gumroad or print. No no no. The idea is to make comics and put them up. Just the same way I do with CSS illustrations, and web pages, and blog posts, and Flash movies and videos of me playing CSS Battle.

I’m quite happy now with my Comics page now. It’s whatever header is current, plus the comics I’ve made (that I’ve tagged with whole-comic in reverse chronological order). It’s plain but elegant. Like other pages that roll up lists of posts into some different format, it uses WordPress’ wp_cache_set to stash the results of the WP_Query so that MySQL doesn’t get tired. Precomputation! I appreciate the malleability and flexibility of the system despite the way current WordPress political and legal shenanigans appall me.

Regarding some possible migration away from WordPress, I see folks in IndieWeb circles checking ClassicPress out and so I have it on my radar. I also see links to commentary on the shenanigans at mullenweg dot wtf and hope I am never quite notable enough to get a website dedicated to the extent I’m alienating the planet. May all legal conflicts resolve peacefully. And I with for them to resolve with dignity.

I was pleased to have contributed some CSS to Matt Lee‘s Libre.fm and he’s adapted it as a stopgap basic CSS file. Very pleased to see code I’ve written get to production. My profile is here. It’s spartan and simple and I wrote the code with the idea to make it super-configurable for whoever would have to adapt it. You can see the code I submitted in this Gist.

Listen to fIREHOSE. Brave Captain.

This is what the 80s sounded like. Of course all the music you think of as “EIGHTIES” is also the 80s. But I learned on San Diego’s AM radio that the 20 songs you know can’t possibly exemplify a whole decade. Stereotype songs are never the whole story.

MY ENGAGEMENTS LET ME SHOW U THEM

I’ve been making videos of me doing CSS Battles and there are a handful of people watching. I don’t know what it adds up to but I’m doing it. Check out my channel, I guess? The current mediasphere makes no sense to me. Videos are a pain to do, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, so because of my fear and ignorance about video, I am doing video. No TikTok yet.

Speaking of links and video, here’s a great one: Jeremy Keith – Building Blocks of the Indie Web. It’s IndieWeb stuff and not new but still something I wholeheartedly agree with.

Jo went to IndieWeb Camp Berlin this past weekend. Her post is well-worth a read. Go do that. Also, I tuned into some of the presentations and I learned about image-rendering: pixelated. Pixel art is something I enjoy, as evidenced in my Blog Headers over the years. I made one this week that relies on pixel resizing of images and I’m very happy with it. I will write more about that in the future. It’s my sincere hope that San Diego IndieWebCamp, which I am an organizer for and will be next month, can inspire people. gRegor has put in excellent work crafting a solid Health and Safety Policy in these COVID times. See the wiki page for 2024/SD to see that.

I have added Office Hours as a thing people can book. I am adapting this idea from Matt Webb: Unoffice Hours. Maybe you’re interested in working with me? Maybe you want to hire me for a short or long term engagement? Maybe the way to do that is to just talk to me first.

I mentioned last week I got my second shingles vaccine and it put me down. I’m back, baby. It’s so good to feel good again.

Thanks for reading!