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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • People don’t like to admit that we are ants. We are valuable and important. Each one of us is unique and deserves a full, good, life. But we are also ants. We are susceptible to group think, mob behavior, and we tend to follow the scent trail most of the time. It’s not a bad thing. It’s tied to our evolutionary desire to be a part of a community; to fit in and blend in.

    But it also means individuals are likely to do what keeps them alive. We are likely all bad in some way or another.

    But as long as you aren’t, actively, willfully, or gleefully harming people, you’re probably ok.




  • Laughter helps a lot. But if I’m consuming a ton of media, it’s sometimes better to just take a break and drink water while doing nothing else. I also have mantras about life like: “if I have my family, I’m ok”, “home can be anywhere”, “nothing in life is more important that food, shelter, water”, etc. Sometimes I worry about bills, future costs, etc. But worrying doesn’t always make it easier. A little bit of worry keeps me from ignoring finances all together. But too much worry isn’t helping. If you can free yourself from worrying about money, you’d be surprised how much weight gets lifted. I’m privileged because I have family and friends that I love. If I ever hit hard times, I know I have a home with them. Reminding myself of that keeps me from staying up all night with worry.



  • I just picture you floating in an endless void 100 billion years after entropy has moved every single subatomic particle away from each other. Somehow you have been sustained. The last sophisticated entity in the universe. Your billions of years of loneliness have already driven you to the point of insanity, enlightenment, insanity again, and finally a state of which no one could imagine. Because you don’t consume food or water, you’re in a perpetual state of hunger and thirst. You don’t feel harmed, but you do feel peckish all the time. You could do with a draught. Your wish didn’t allow for pain “thank God”, you think.





  • Display and layout rules aren’t difficult at all. Maybe I’m just not experienced enough. I’ve been a web dev for nearly a decade now and I feel like I’ve got the hang of it. That being said, I don’t work on projects that have to work on everything from a Nokia to an ultra wide monitor. We shoot for a few common sizes and hope it clears between edge cases nicely. What is an example of something that wraps randomly?


  • Genuinely, though, CSS is fairly clear cut about the rules of positioning and space. Relative positioning is one of the most important concepts to master since it allows things to flow via the HTML structure and not extra CSS. Fixed positioning is as if you had no relative container other than the window itself. Absolute positioning is a little weird, but it’s just like fixed positioning except within the nearest parent with relative positioning.

    Everything else is incredibly straight forward. Padding adds space within a container. Margins add space outside a container. Color changes text color. Background-color changes the background color of an element.

    Top, left, right, and bottom dictate where the element should be positioned after the default rules are applied. So if you have a relative div inside a parent which is half way down the page, top/right/left/bottom would move the element relative to it’s position within the parent. If you made the div fixed, it would be moved relative to the window.

    Lastly, if you’re designing a webpage just think in boxes or rows and columns. HTML can define 75% of the webpage structure. Then with just a bit of CSS you can organize the content into rows/columns. That’s pretty much it. Most web pages boil down to simple boxes within boxes. It just requires reading and understanding but most people don’t want to do that to use CSS since it feels like it should just “know”.

    As someone who has built QT, Swing, and JavaFx applications, I way prefer the separation of concerns that is afforded us via HTML JS and CSS.


  • If we spent half the energy on improving our lives that we spend on fucking people over, we’d have a utopia by now. Or at least less lead in our pipes.

    America is a global superpower which - apparently - spends some of its most secretive efforts on petty lashbacks to Chinese propaganda. And I’ll be damned if our most secretive efforts don’t also end up costing us the most taxes (relative to their effective output). I know that Twitter opens its firehouse of data to government programs to support social media analysis. I’m sure Google and Meta do as well. They are aiding these psychological campaigns.








  • I was talking about meat replacements but I put tofu in that category as well because I don’t have a lot of experience with tofu outside of “we have this instead of meat”.

    Vegan food is cheaper in America, for sure. Beans, veg (some) and rice are cheap. However fruit is expensive.

    But the alternatives to meat are not cheap: tofu is like $5/lb compared to chicken which can be as low as $2.99/lb. Steak is expensive in America, but it can be close to the cost of tofu. It’s definitely cheaper than the steak-alternatives like beyond meat.

    While you might find meat replacements to be unnecessary, most Americans (myself included) struggle. 90% of the meals I used to eat were some variation of: protein (meat/chicken/fish), plus a veggie, plus a carb (rice/bread). That was the basic dinner. It has a nice ratio of protein to carb. It was tasty (to me at least) and the cost wasn’t too bad.

    I’m guessing I’m not alone, culturally. It’s not like you can fry up two slabs of tofu and just call it a day. Tofu is just different. It doesn’t cook the same and it doesn’t taste the same. I cook tofu at least once a week, but I treat it very differently.

    It’s just not easy for Americans to justify going vegan. It’s culturally very different and - if you want to stay within the culture - it’s expensive.

    But that’s why I always advocate for meat reduction, not replacement. Eat more vegetables. Try other dinners. Etc. But most Americans are remiss to be told what to do.


  • There in lies the rub, though. Most vegans are vegan for a moral reason that they believe applies to you:

    • Animals deserve life / don’t deserve livestock conditions
    • “Growing” meat is speeding up global warming compared to growing crop

    There are more fringe reasons for veganism such as: diet, health, etc. But those aren’t relevant to the point I’m making.

    “Live and let live” doesn’t apply to situations where we’re talking about global warming or the abuse of animals. Most vegans are trying to educate others and - yeah - they probably vote for things that would result in more expensive meat or less meat being available in your local markets. I believe most vegans are hoping their efforts will slow global warming and provide better living conditions for livestock.

    I’m not trying to sit on a moral podium here and judge. I eat meat too. I’m not vegan. Though I’ve tried to reduce how much meat I eat in yet another small, feckless, civilian effort to slow global warming. All I’m saying is: I sympathize with people who want to improve the world and I understand why they spend time and effort talking about being vegan.

    But meat in america is cheaper than the vegan stuff and definitely tastier. So it’s hard for us to meaningfully change.