Things I Like
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With custom properties, we don’t need to compile a different stylesheet; we only need to update the value of properties according to the user’s preferences. Since they are inherited values, if we do this on the root element they can be used anywhere in our application.
I don't often link to articles that are directly related to what I do all day, writing CSS and HTML, but this article blew my mind this week. And I realize it's older, I'm late to this game, as usual. At work there is a new project going on and a team of folks are working through how to do some very tough things, and this came up. I can't wait to see where they end up (I'm watching from the side as I'm on a different team) and it's nice to be excited about a work thing, it's been quite a while for me.
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A like can’t go anywhere, but a compliment can go a long way. Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed to counterbalance whatever sort of collective conversations and attention we point at social media. Otherwise, we are left with the skewed, inaccurate, and dangerous nature of what’s been built: an environment where most positivity is small, vague, and immobile, and negativity is large, precise, and spreadable.
A good reminder about how social media distorts and skews our behavior, often into meaningless actions.
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Rather than a prediction, I’d like to offer a plausible wish: that more people opt to leave their phones behind and use smaller, more integrated devices that exist inside the everyday rather than eclipsing it. Small screens, like the watch’s, are incompatible (or at least hostile) homes for social media in its current form.
This is the first piece I've read that made an argument for the watch that resonated with me.
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The key in marriage is to try to change together. Couples don’t have to change at the same time, it’s more a question of getting there if you want to have that connection and commitment. There are different paces, and you have to realize that, and accommodate each other.
I read a lot about Cokie Roberts when she died, but I particularly enjoyed this piece, especially as we approach our fifteen year wedding anniversary.
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By now, God-and-Country Believers are so accustomed to voting Republican—and to being disdained or mocked by Democrats—that few of them can remember doing anything else. And God-and-Country Believers are what most Americans, whether religious or not, now think that evangelicals are.
I really enjoy Alan Jacobs writing, I get his newsletter, and having been inside the evangelical world for much of my late teens and twenties, I resonate so much with how he talks about how its become meaningless and, unfortunately, a political word more than anything else.
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To address the sort of everyday issues that can lead to bad health, workers might look to the West Virginia teacher strikes for motivation. Nicole McCormick is a teacher in Mercer County, West Virginia, and the president of her local union. She says that once her colleagues saw that their health activities were being tracked, they were strongly motivated to join together and, eventually, strike, saying, “We’re not trained dogs that you can click a dog clicker at and give us a treat and we’ll roll over and do what you want.” When it comes to health and safety, unions speak often of focusing on the hazard, not the worker: eliminate the hazard (say, by providing ergonomic office equipment) and the potential harm (repetitive stress injury) goes away. Through organizing, workers can force their employers to make changes at work that will help them stay healthy.
I've long been wary of the wellness programs workplaces offer, mostly because I think they're an invasion of privacy, the information they're seeking should be between you and your doctor. In addition, the metrics are fuzzy and aren't truly how you measure if a person is healthy. But as the article said, as long as we tie healthcare to employers and it's all about cost, of course they're going to try and pass off costs on to employees.
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But what if, to combat this anxiety, designers were in the business of revealing seams? Tired of his industry’s race toward seamless design, computer scientist and theorist Matthew Chalmers proposed the idea of seamful design. In his paper titled “Seamful Design and Ubicomp Infrastructure,” Matthew Chalmers defines seamful design: “Some features that we designers usually categorize as infrastructure problems may, to users, be useful interactional features. Examples include the edges and gaps.. .Seamfulness is about taking account of these reminders of the finite and physical nature of digital media.”
I love the idea of seams, of finding the edges, and of using that in design to help with the continual sense of being overwhelmed by all the things.
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How are you even supposed to talk about that? More than 30 years after climate change first became a political issue, it feels like we are still figuring it out. This report gets us closer. It makes clear that climate change isn’t only about coal-fired power plants, or gas-guzzling cars; and it’s definitely not about littering or—God help us—recycling. It’s about the profound chemical and physical specificity of human life. You and I are not free-floating minds that move around the world through text messages, apologetic emails, and bank deposits. We are carbon-based creatures so pathetic that we need a lot of silent plants to make carbon for us.
The best article, by far, that I've read about the report by the IPCC about climate change, it's well worth your time and thinking about it, because I think very quickly some of this shit is gonna get even realer and we are far from ready for that.
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So, to come full circle, the best place to be is actually where you are right now, not somewhere else. If you’re fully present in the situation (Tim Ferriss suggests taking three breaths), then ask yourself some hard questions about what success looks like for you, and perhaps whether what you say, what you think, and what you do are in harmony.
Following up on reading How to Do Nothing I've been continuing my journey of thinking about how I use tech, how I spend time, and what I value. This is a quick read with some interesting thoughts and I love that it talks about Kathy Sierra and how capitalism is affecting all of this.
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Right, and it’s not about theology. And that’s the other thing that I think people don’t understand. You can really see this in the conversation about what’s happening on the border. People keep saying, well, if you’re really Christian you should believe in giving to the orphan and the refugee. Freedom for all. But it’s about the term that people have been using a lot, “Christian nationalism.” It’s less about the actual words in the Bible, because Jesus never was like, “Yo, y’all should really have a lot of guns right now.”
Most folks who know me now don't know that I've studied theology and that I spent a lot of my early adulthood hanging out with Christians, so I come to interviews like this and books like this with a bit of a different perspective and background. But what I find fascinating about this (and I'll be adding this book to my list) is how many people don't realize how much variety there is within Christian traditions. The problem is that the media only portrays what is one small sliver of that community; Lenz, in this interview, offers a glimpse into the fact that there is so much more.
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From that point, I slowly began to understand that people in consumption-based societies assemble their identities via stuff, and become very emotional when those identities – and that stuff- is discarded in ways that don’t match their values. Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that consumers actually care more about how their stuff is discarded, than how it is manufactured.
Really interesting interview with an author who looks at how we discard and get rid of things and I've put his new book on my list. Stuff is such a powder keg of a topic with people, and as someone who's dealing with aging parents and how they feel about their things, it's fascinating to think of how our consumption and how much we care about what happens to things is linked.
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Thus, rather than cheering when many people manage to do something well, we’re likely to dismiss that result as meaningless and maybe even mutter darkly about “falling standards” or “being content with mediocrity.” Success seems to matter only if it is attained by a few, and one way to ensure that outcome is to evaluate people (or schools, or companies, or countries) relative to each other. That way, even if everyone has done quite well, or improved over time, half will always fall below the median — and look like failures.
A thought provoking essay about how we frame things when everyone does well, constantly push for competition, and how we'd rather rank things than strive for everyone to do well.
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If we come to these places where we say, “This is hard,” that means that we have got to get back to the details of the work. That’s it. You don’t have to stop in despair. What you finally know is that when you start compartmentalizing, you’re wrong. The study of agriculture, for example, is not different from the study of ecology. How it all coheres finally is a mystery, and it’s easy to reduce that. People assume that I’m just thinking about my writing while I’m farming. Which of course reduces the farming to kind of a rote thing that doesn’t take any intelligence.
Wendell Berry is one of my favorite writers, I love his novels, and own many of them and have read most of them. And I enjoyed this rambling interview with him about life and how we live and how he writes and thinks.
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Instead of merely accommodating some people’s desire to drive, our laws essentially force driving on all of us—by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions. To page through the law books today is to stumble again and again upon evidence of automobile supremacy. The range and depth of legal supports for driving is bewildering. But these laws, which are everywhere we look, are also opportunities.
For our last two years in Portland, we didn't have a car and I really enjoyed not owning a vehicle and not having to drive very often. In our small town we lucked out by finding a part of town where we can still walk into the main business districts. But we do have a car again, and I drive more than I would like to, because most of the US is set up to make it impossible not to drive.
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Washing dishes by hand, I give myself the chance to remember that this is wrong — that most of life is ordinary; that ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows.
I spend a lot of time doing dishes, cooking, the ordinary of life that needs to get done day in and day out. And I often like it, there is a finality to getting the task done and having either a meal to eat or a clean kitchen that I can see and appreciate it. Much different than what I do for work where it's not as physical or as easy to call it done.