• they/she

wondering poet, codeweaver. systems have souls; souls have systems.

<3 @effinvicta


hackermatic
@hackermatic

I have 1080 vertical pixels and I probably know the page title from the link I clicked to get here. Why do you insist on hiding my content at least 1081 pixels down?

I used to build Web 1.0 websites with elaborate headers and jampacked sidebars and they still let you see the meat of the page on the first screen.

P.S. Welcome to some of my open tabs



hackermatic
@hackermatic

For some reason, news sites are inexcusably bad at this. Maybe they're just stretching out after a couple centuries of counting everything in column-inches.


xkeeper
@xkeeper
Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.

ireneista
@ireneista

scrolling is physically easier to do on mobile devices than it is on desktop. it turns out that ad revenue on mobile isn't nearly as tied to being above the fold (this is public knowledge these days but, alas, we don't have public sources for it that we can point you to - sorry about that). so everyone stopped worrying about it.

in the absence of a strong incentive to keep teaching web developers to keep things above the fold, everyone stopped doing that and nobody really has the skill set anymore. it was more work, after all.

like a lot of things where someone might be tempted to suggest a conspiracy, it's really more that there was a systemic incentive in play that isn't obvious unless you know about it. of course, it would still be correct to point out that that incentive is user-hostile, since it is focused on revenue, not on people's enjoyment of the site. it just coincidentally happens to be the case that revenue and enjoyment used to be aligned in a way that they no longer are, so everything got worse, and nobody on the production end noticed because that was never their priority in the first place.


atax1a
@atax1a

we don't even remember what we did to the CSS to make this block so huge, but it was intentionally hostile



mcc
@mcc

Joseph Ratzinger, the guy the Catholic church gave the title "Pope Benedict XVI", died yesterday. There's one thing I'll always remember Mr. Ratzinger for, his 2012 Christmas address. This was his final Christmas address, and since he did voluntarily retire he probably knew it would be so at the time. He decided to use this last precious opportunity to speak out against what he apparently viewed as the biggest and most pressing danger in the world, which was… transgenderism, and tolerance of transgenderism, which he called "gender ideology". The resulting tirade was bad-faith, eliminationist, and contains many intellectual errors from misreading Simone de Beauvoir on up, but I'll always remember it for this one accidentally incredible paragraph, in which Mr. Ratzinger attempts to summarize the position of his enemies (i.e.,us); and accidentally manages to make trans people seem both heroic and incredibly metal:

The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.

I do not think I could have written a more inspiring declaration for transhumanism, or rationalism, or my own inherent dignity if I had tried. For this, Mr. Ratzinger, thank you.


millenomi
@millenomi

that 'gender ideology' isn't just Pope Nazi's thing, it has been a constant cathofascist refrain in Italian and European politics for a long time (where the cathofascist and hard right have both been very keen on turning themselves into "the default", and thus can get away freely with 'ideology' as a pejorative for anything but the hard right status quo).

They're also using the word 'gender' in English, which is something that obviously does not translate, to indicate foreignness and thus alienness. (A thing that I see anglophone people being very blind to is that a lot of people have to import English and international terms to refer to themselves because that's the language of empire, and the one language where Western-resonant queer culture has been able to define itself in the last twenty years. The entire right seizes on this and marries it with protectionist isolationism in decrying queerness as a 'foreign' phenomenon.✶)

Please be careful with European politics. Especially Italy; there are actual avowed fascists in power there right now.

(✶ When I speak of myself in Italian I purposefully use non-wide-use, grammatically correct calques instead of English import terms because of this. I'm "transgenere", "non binariə", not "transgender" or "non-binary", even if other people use these terms for themselves.)


one last edit: I hope none of you has forgotten Pope Francis's comparing of trans people to nukes — which retreads and affirms much of the same arguments as his predecessor Pope Nazi. To be trans in Italy is to live in a place where the discourse is stuck in the late '80s, and the law earlier than that (it still uses standards from '73, including forced sterilization, and does not have provisions for updating from WPATH; I have done a full gender transition and the law will not recognize that as sufficient to change my ID, and even if I could, changing your ID changes your SSN equivalent, which is your primary key into all things tax related, including your identification to the government, inheritance, and dependency/obligation records in anagraphics — aka, the family registry. Change name, become an unperson.)


ireneista
@ireneista

as always it is super important for the queer community to tell and retell this history, to help bring younger people up to speed and to make sure we know how to fight effectively. thank you @mcc and @millenomi for your very detailed accounts, there was plenty of stuff in it we didn't know.



EffInvicta
@EffInvicta

Decided to do Dungeon 23 a bit late, so here's days 1, 2, and 3.

Room 1: This octagonal room was clearly once a solarium of some kind, with a great glass sunroof of many small pieces. These have almost all vanished since then, leaving an ornate frame behind. The walls are fired adobe.

Exits: A-D: Inward-opening doors in each cardinal direction. E: There's enough space in the frame for people to squeeze through if they can climb up, have a ladder, or some other means of getting up there.

Room 2/Room 3: This plaster-walled room was once a very large chamber, perhaps a reception hall or similar, but the floor has partially collapsed away to reveal the massive hypocaust heating system which lies beneath, with alternating brick support pillars and open firepits, which once must have allowed a fine control of heating.

Inhabitants: 1d4+3 fire elementals or salamanders keep the pits stocked with fuel as places of rest.

Treasure: 3d6x20 Lunars' worth of assorted coins and valuable trinkets that were brought in with fuel by the fire elementals/salamanders.

Exits: A: Wide, open archway. B: Four small stone doors that are stuck, requiring a roll on the Resistance Table against SIZ 25 to unstick them. C: A sloping ledge where the tiles have broken off, the concrete has partially crumbled, and then the ceiling tiles below have also fallen away, which allows movement between the upper and lower levels. Getting up or down is easy. D: Passageways deeper into the hypocaust under the intact floor of Room #2.

This week's theme is "ancient", and these three rooms are linked in that by being rooms which have lost their purpose through some part of their physical structure being missing, but this loss or decay opens a new pathway and the possibility of new meanings.