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.
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!
“SILENCE”
Originally appeared in Sundays Quarterly 3 by Burn All Books in October 2019
“ALTERNATIVE FUTURES”
First published by @burn_all_books in Sundays Quarterly 5 in May 2020
That was a helluva week
What a week.
I can’t capture the totality of the current moment. In times like this I appreciate being able to read the thoughts of Mark Evanier. He’s a reliable attendee of San Diego Comic-Con. I remember seeing him host panels back when SDCC was held at the San Diego Civic Center at First and C Street. I remember even in the early 1980s him egging on Sergio Aragones, drawing on a big pad of paper during a panel called “QuickDraw.” Now they do it with overhead cameras and large screens and a huge hall with hundreds of seats. Then, it was a room with 50 people packed in like sardines. Evanier is a friendly and smart and kind fellow. I’ve had a lot of heroes over the years. And while it’s true all heroes have feet of clay, his voice is one I find comforting in its practicality and kindness. This week he posted The Morning After.
In times of despair — and for some of us, this morning is just such a time — I think the most important thing is this: Don’t be self-destructive. I know people, and it’s a mistake I have made myself, who deal with bad news by compounding it; by wallowing in it and letting it impede all the positive things they could otherwise be doing.
And that’s how I’m trying to do it. Yesterday I got my second shot of the shingles vaccine. Today I feel as though I fell out a moving car. I’ve never fallen out of a moving car, but as a respiratory therapist who worked in intensive care I took care of people ejected from moving cars. I feel like they looked. From what I understand it should last. Ibuprofen is my buddy and I’m taking it easy.
This week had me thinking about my pledge as a software developer 8 years ago not to do harm. I still think everything is actually healthcare.
It’s been a slow week for swimming. But I did go. Here’s a panorama from Election Day.
I’m hoping to get back to the ocean tomorrow.
In 2010 I wrote:
I respond to water–The Mighty Pacific–that way. I can get the same relief from swimming though, even with the big city about. I wonder if the past two decades has short circuited my sense of patriotism, and my psyche is compensating by becoming patriotic for the idea of California. It’s often said, usually by Californians, that if California were an independent nation, we’d be the the seventh largest economy in the world. I wonder if California is a suitable patriotism substitute.
I’m really appreciating using FreshRSS to keep up with the news. It was great to be able to move onto this better software. and I’m using ReadKit on my iPad. Sorting out information in our chaotic information landscape is hard. Good tools I control are good. In that light I found the determination to keep the “Gaza Genocide” wikipedia article oddly hopeful. That deliberative process for vetting what we can agree to be true based on evidence is ultimately one of our finest achievements.
I am so sick of people pronouncing why things happened this week the way they did. Certainties in life are few. In science we collect data carefully and dispassionately. We try to sort through it and create understanding. But data is seldom final. Perfect understanding too.
I hope to keep at it and live my life and comport myself as a human being, as a partner, as a citizen of California and of the United States with some decency. I also presume that there will be work to do to avert harms intended by the next administration. I wrote this week:
To anyone reading this today, I tell you: do not give up. Do not let the bastards grind you down. Be indigestible. We must speak the truth. We must do right by our fellow citizens. We must do right by the whole world.
We must honor all those who have worked to make the world better and continue that work.
I don’t believe that work will end.
from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DCIneGJpq6Z/ via IFTTT
Saw a doctor (good adjustments); drew a pickle (while talking to friends); crossed a river.
Revisiting neveragain.tech 8 years later.
If history is going to rhyme, then I’m going to remember the prior verses. One of them was http://neveragain.tech which I signed as a matter of conscience 8 years ago. I am still in strong agreement with the aims of that pledge I signed. And it is my duty to spread the word to my fellow technologists that such vows are still useful and necessary. Read writers like Sarah Kendzior and Timothy Snyder and Jamelle Bouie and many others. And pay attention, don’t look away, don’t give up.
We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.
We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others.
We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations
precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe:
the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past—among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes. Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.
We commit to the following actions:
- We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
- We will advocate within our organizations:
- to minimize the collection and retention of data
that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.- to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.
- to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.
- to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible.
- to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.
- If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical
in our organizations:
- We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.
- If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.
- If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.
- If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply.
- We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry.
DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE
GVSU Oral History: James Crawford and Vietnam
My father James Crawford was interviewed about his experiences in the service particularly during Vietnam and around the Battle of Firebase Ripcord. I am so proud of him sharing his oral history with the GVSU Veterans History Project. The video go his oral history is on YouTube and will be stored in the archives of GVSU as well as the Library of Congress.
It’s 90 minutes and if you’d like to hear some history, some of it funny, some of it horrific, some of it depressing, some of it hopeful. An honest and earnest oral history from his point of view.
Here’s the biography of my remarkable father on the website.
James Crawford was born in Corpus Christi, TX, in 1947. He enlisted in the Army and trained as a combat medic. He wanted to go to Vietnam, so of course was assigned to duty stations in the US, but eventually got to Vietnam in January, 1970. He served initially with A Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, and then transferred to the medical unit in the 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, and served with them through the latter part of the campaign around Firebase Ripcord. He returned to the US in December, 1970, and was discharged the following year. Drawing on his medical experience, he qualified as a nurse, and later became a doctor. He enlisted in the US Navy in 1979 and took a commission as an officer, and trained and served at several different bases and hospitals around the country. He served during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and returned to civilian life in 1993.