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I was not able to get Preview Night for myself or anyone else

San Diego Comic Con ticketing is famously difficult. But this year it was really tricky around Preview Night. I believe it used to be Preview Night just “came with” a 4 day pass. They made it an option this year, but it was nonetheless also limited. Now, I did get all 4 days in Returning Registration, but the instructions for getting Preview Night were these, sent to me in an email on November 14, 2023, which were not apparent in the user interface during the Returning Registration time period.

A real shame they didn’t sort out how to make it more straightforward.

I was able to purchase a badge for another person, but once I moved forward I was unable to figure out how to go back and do this.

Hi there!

First, we’d like to congratulate you on securing a 4-Day badge during Comic-Con 2024 Returning Registration! Because you have purchased all four days—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—you are still eligible to purchase a badge for Preview Night (Wednesday, July 24, 2024).

For an opportunity to purchase Preview Night, you will need to participate in our Open Registration badge sale this Saturday, November 18, 2023.

If you are selected for a registration session during the sale, and if inventory is available, please follow the steps below to add the Preview Night option to your cart once you’ve logged in.

Click “Buy Preview Night” from the top menu bar.

On the next page, click the “Yes, I’m eligible for Preview Night!” button. Your account information will be pre-populated under the “Registrants” tab on the next page.

If you wish to purchase a Preview Night badge for yourself, click “Add to Cart”.

If you’d like to purchase badges for others, click “Register Another Member” in the pop-up window. Or, if you’re ready to check out, click “Checkout”.

NOTE: Please do not proceed to check out until all desired badges—for yourself and for your friends—have been added to your cart.

Let’s review! When you are selected for a registration session, you will see the main registration page where badge selections for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are made if inventory is available.

If you are purchasing badges for friends who have not already purchased all four days, stay on the main registration page to add their desired badges to your cart.

If you or someone you are purchasing for already purchased all four days from Returning Registration and are just looking to add Preview Night, click “Buy Preview Night” from the top menu bar and follow the instructions above.

If at any time you’d like to return to the main registration page, simply click “Open Registration” from the top menu bar.

We hope this helps! If you participate in Open Registration this Saturday, we wish you luck!

Sincerely,
Comic-Con

In the moment I failed to follow these instructions, so I missed out. A bummer.

from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CzxsCF0O0zx/ via IFTTT

“Don’t lose sight / baby don’t lose sight”

from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CzvOFgHOvU5/ via IFTTT

“Just get away from the shady turf…”

CSS Battle. Again!

I posted the other day that I started playing CSSBattle.dev and mentioned it in some online communities. I think people dig it!

I love that gRegor took a shot. And I think there’s something to his reaction:

I enjoy CSS but most of my daily work with it is routine stuff like forms, nothing too fancy or creative.

To me, making little graphics in HTML+CSS is so amazing I am impressed I can even do it. I am old enough to remember when CSS was something not all browsers supported! It was just to make the repetitive work of formatting text easier. I remember using it in Windows Internet Explorer and thinking “this is not ready for prime time, I need to stick to graphics and font tags for a while yet.”

I underestimated the aspect of it that is competitive. I don’t really expect to win. And I don’t care to minify my code. I’d be more interested in competing for speed and accuracy. The code size “code golf” aspect doesn’t appeal to me as much. I also never really was impressed by things like Obfuscated Perl or certain Regular Expressions. I know very well that all the code I write ultimately gets transmogrified for computer parsing, I am a human, and am content to read things I can read.

Anyway today I used aspect-ratio in my solution. I must admit I liked it! I’ve not used it in code I’ve deployed for myself or a client, but maybe I will now.

<nav><div></div></nav>
<style>
  body, div {
    background: #7D4886;
  }
  body, nav {
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: center;
  }
  nav {
    width: 212px;
    clip-path: polygon(50% 0, 100% 50%,
      50% 100%, 0 50%);
    background: #670053;
  }
  nav, div {
    aspect-ratio: 1;
  }
  div {
    width: 100px;
    border-radius: 50%;
  }
</style>

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The birds, grounded by the rain, don’t care about the killer left today.

Torment Nexus, oi

This speech by Charlie Stross matches the painful assessments I’ve slowly come to in my decades reading SF and watching the tech boom. I didn’t *want* to go to a cyberpunk dystopia so much as thought it was inevitable we would end up there. But no destination is inevitable. Human beings can steer. We can change course.

We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus

It’s becoming increasingly unusual to read a report of a new technology or scientific discovery that doesn’t breathlessly use the phrase “it seems like science fiction”. The news cycle is currently dominated by hype about artificial intelligence (a gross mis-characterisation of machine learning algorithms and large language models). A couple of years ago it was breathless hype about cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies—which turned out to be a financial services bubble that drained a lot of small investors’ savings accounts into the pockets of people like convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.