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WaniKani is a Japanese radicals, kanji, and vocabulary learning web app that uses mnemonics and SRS to make kanji learning simple.

Your daily dose of pixelated skies and 8-bit clouds, from vintage and retro video games.

It seems as though every year, the congregating crows catch people off guard.

Me: *throws you down a pit* You: my leg's broken Me: I'm sure you have proof. I'll wait You: YOU THREW ME DOWN A PIT Me: so sick of people always bringing up pits You: YOU THREW ME DOWN ONE Me: wow victim card much You: A PIT Me: that talk's exactly why you got thrown down a pit

Full liner notes for the Laurie Spiegel album.

Interactive music-making. Build synths & sounds all in the browser, and share your creations.

Mostly it all worked!

This is a great list. There are plenty of weather numbers. There is even Dial a Buoy. Toronto Public Library has Dial-a-Story. What else is out there? This is not for pranking people.

Moss graffiti, also called eco-graffiti or green graffiti, replaces spray paint, paint-markers or other such toxic chemicals and paints with a paintbrush and a moss "paint" that can grow on its own. As people become more eco-friendly and environmentally aware, the idea of making living, breathing graffiti has become a more green and creative outlet for graffiti artists. It can also be considered another form of guerrilla gardening.

How can we, as individuals and as an industry, do a better job of supporting, including and welcoming people who choose not to drink at our events? As a Community Manager in the tech world, I regularly navigate conferences and parties searching for something delicious and non-alcoholic to drink. Including non-alcoholic options is about much more than “hey, we had Coke available!” Here are five guidelines that help balance alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks at events, make events more inclusive, and enable attendees to better choose for themselves what they’d prefer to be drinking.

As I mention in my book Demystifying Public Speaking, humans are mostly bad at giving feedback. We’re also really bad at preparing ourselves to receive feedback. 1. Make observation 2. Explain impact 3. Ask a question or make a request

And they are: Obviously (obvious to whom?) Basically (use fewer words and be clearer Simply (simple for whom? just omit this word) Of course (show why it's clear, don't say it is) Clearly (see above) Just (meant to be casual but not a good word for casual) Everyone knows/As we all know (do we _all_ know it?) However (don't start sentences or paragraphs with it) So (new paragraph needed?) Easy (don't assume so)

In the fallout from Tuesday’s midterm elections, many political analysts have concluded that blue America and red America are ever more divided, ever more at each other’s throats. But calling this “tribalism” is misleading, because only one side of this divide remotely resembles a coalition based on ethnic and religious lines, and only one side has committed itself to a political strategy that relies on stoking hatred and fear of the other. By diagnosing America’s problem as tribalism, chin-stroking pundits and their sorrowful semi-Trumpist counterparts in Congress have hidden the actual problem in American politics behind a weird euphemism. [...] The urgency of the Republican strategy stems in part from the recognition that the core of the GOP agenda—slashing the social safety net and reducing taxes on the wealthy—is deeply unpopular. Progressive ballot initiatives, including the expansion of Medicaid, anti-gerrymandering measures, and the restoration of voting rights for formerly incarcerated people, succeeded even in red states. If Republicans ran on their policy agenda alone, they would be at a disadvantage. So they have turned to a destructive politics of white identity, one that seeks a path to power by deliberately dividing the country along racial and sectarian lines. They portray the nation as the birthright of white, heterosexual Christians, and label the growing population of those who don’t fit that mold or reject that moral framework as dangerous usurpers. [...] In the Trump era, America finds itself with two political parties: one that’s growing more reliant on the nation’s diversity, and one that sees its path to power in stoking fear and rage toward those who are different. America doesn’t have a “tribalism” problem. It has a racism problem. And the parties are not equally responsible.

Enterprising Angolans have used two free services—Facebook Free Basics and Wikipedia Zero—to share pirated movies, music, television shows, anime, and games on Wikipedia. And no one knows what to do about it. Because the data is completely free, Angolans are hiding large files in Wikipedia articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia site (Angola is a former Portuguese colony)—sometimes concealing movies in JPEG or PDF files. They're then using a Facebook group to direct people to those files, creating a robust, completely free file sharing network.

Discussing the CSS-Tricks article ‘The Great Divide’ (https://css-tricks.com/the-great-divide/) that discusses the difference between ‘full-stack’ and ‘front-end’ developers. I think my main problem with this article might be that its core premise is accurate -- the job market for frontend developers undervalues skills around markup, a11y, UX -- but it _reinforces_ the divide, rather than challenging it

Inter is a typeface carefully crafted & designed for computer screens. Inter features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.

Chronic, passive suicidal ideation is like living in the ocean. Let’s start talking about how to tread water. [...] What if we acknowledged the possibility of suicidality all around us, normalized asking and checking in? If people talked about feeling suicidal — not joked, as we’ve all started to do online, but really talked — as much as they talked about feeling depressed or anxious, would we finally be forced to see how common it is and start creating space for these conversations? Would it be the worst thing in the world if we started talking about not wanting to be alive, and what might help keep us here? Of course, even that doesn’t have a straight answer. “We really don’t know [the impact of] having more casual conversation about suicide,” April Foreman, licensed psychologist and executive board member at the American Association of Suicidology, told me. “Stigma is lower than it’s ever been and suicide rates are as high as they were during the Great Depression. If reducing stigma alone saves lives, the suicide rates should be going down.” [...] In the absence of good science, one of the most helpful things you can do for chronic suicidality is curate your collection of flotation devices. According to Foreman, if mental health care can only do so much to reduce our feelings of suicidality and equip us with the tools we need to tread water, then it’s crucial to nourish a life full of things we want to stay afloat for.

Perhaps we need to ask our patients how they would design their ideal emergency department. Has anyone thought to do that? I know they would like caring, kind, compassionate staff. Staff who are not carrying serious emotional damage with them to work and back every day. It would be good for all of us to get this right. And soon.

Software engineering principles, from Robert C. Martin's book Clean Code, adapted for JavaScript. This is not a style guide. It's a guide to producing readable, reusable, and refactorable software in JavaScript. Not every principle herein has to be strictly followed, and even fewer will be universally agreed upon. These are guidelines and nothing more, but they are ones codified over many years of collective experience by the authors of Clean Code.

A curated list of shell commands and tools specific to OS X.

Simon Green details seven techniques that led to the creation of his latest album, 'Migration.'

This is an attempt to categorise different APIs scoured from the web which make their resources available for consumption.

The migrant children will still be dead and the public funds will still be in the Trump Organization’s bank accounts and the whole cavalcade of corruption will still be as corrupt as ever, but it won’t matter. If the Democratic leadership chooses to stall for the next 16 months, so it can turn the question of Trump’s fitness for office over to the voters, the voters should logically conclude that the opposition party doesn’t believe he’s done anything seriously wrong. It’s the message on which Trump and the Trumpists hang all their hopes for reelection: there is no alternative.

As long as white people continue to see ourselves as the norm and the neutral, we haven’t replaced as much as we might imagine. We continue to act as racial managers, clinging to the job of setting the culture’s terms and measuring everyone else’s otherness against those terms.

China doesn’t want to sort your trash anymore. If the world of recycling is to move forwrd, the emphasis should be on re-educating the public and holding corporations responsible for creating affordable, accessible, eco-friendly products. NOTE: This entire comic strip is inaccessible because there is no alt text or transcription. 🙄

Demonstrations of ‘illusory sound texture’—basically, your brain continuing to ‘hear’ a sound texture that doesn't exist while it is interrupted by another sound. From the paper abstract: Sound sources in the world are experienced as stable even when intermittently obscured, implying perceptual completion mechanisms that “fill in” missing sensory information. We demonstrate a filling-in phenomenon in which the brain extrapolates the statistics of background sounds (textures) over periods of several seconds when they are interrupted by another sound, producing vivid percepts of illusory texture.

Ableism is not a list of bad words. Language is *one* tool of an oppressive system. Being aware of language -- for those of us who have the privilege of being able to change our language -- can help us understand how pervasive ableism is. Ableism is systematic, institutional devaluing of bodies and minds deemed deviant, abnormal, defective, subhuman, less than. Ableism is *violence.* This list has been compiled and changed over time with input from many different disabled people, people with disabilities, self-advocates, d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, people with chronic illnesses, sick people, mad people, neurodivergent people, etc. -- and I am always responsive to suggestions from folks who are directly impacted.

"Using that kind of language sends the message that it's OK to trivialize mental illness and lazily substitute real people's lived experiences for 'wild,' 'silly,' 'dangerous' or 'out of control,'" Lydia X. Z. Brown, an activist, writer and speaker focused on disability justice, said in an email. "For people able to change their everyday language, becoming conscious of how often they use ableist words like 'crazy' or 'insane' is one small way of reducing the stigmatizing effects of casually ableist expressions," Brown said.

It’s useful to have naked misogyny out in the open. It is now clear, and no exaggeration at all, that a significant percentage of men—most of them Republicans—believe that a guy’s right to a few minutes of “action” justifies causing people who happen to be women physical pain, lifelong trauma, or any combination of the two. They’ve decided—at a moment when they could easily have accepted Kavanaugh’s denial—that something larger was at stake: namely, the right to do as they please, freely, regardless of who gets hurt. Rather than deny male malfeasance, they’ll defend it. Their logic could not be more naked or more self-serving: Men should get to escape consequences for youthful “indiscretions” like assault, but women should not—especially if the consequence is a pregnancy. And this perspective extends 100 percent to the way they wish the legal system to work: Harms suffered by women do not rate consideration, much less punishment. (I recommend Googling the mortality rate for women when abortion was illegal.)

A map and list of the Portland electronic music scene. Venues, labels, collectives, recurring performances, Facebook Groups, and live music listings.