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Comics from my journal.

In this article, we uncover how PageSpeed calculates its critical speed score.

Ten days after calling off her engagement, CJ Hauser travels to the Gulf Coast to live among scientists and whooping cranes. --- I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way. I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs.

For a brief moment, Tumblr played host to a tight-knit, but open-minded, community of music lovers who were thinking and writing deeply about music and its place in the world. --- In some ways, we were naïve. When Music Tumblr was humming, few people stopped to think that what we were really doing was providing free content to a large company that was trying to figure out how to turn that content into money. Just about everyone I can think of from the Music Tumblr days is now on Twitter, and just about all of them seem miserable there. You go to Twitter expecting the worst, and it rarely disappoints. As crazy as it sounds now, for a short while, in this time and place, social media seemed like a good idea. But there's always hope.

Once upon a time, my Tumblr Dashboard was full of writing about music.

Oregon’s particularly lax regulation combined with the expanded economic opportunity attracted an influx of bad actors. And, as a result, the state’s cannabis community, in particular the growers in the southern part of the state, changed. For a long time before the legalization of recreational marijuana, growers were operating on a small scale as family businesses. Some were compliant with state laws regarding medical marijuana, and others sold cannabis into in-state and out-of-state illicit markets, but in both cases most of these growers were part of the local community. Many of these small growers are beginning to get out of the business now, due to the overproduction of cannabis in the state since the passage of Measure 91, driven by both licensed and unlicensed moneyed interests who are developing large-scale cannabis farms, and who often do not live or participate in the local community, and thus have less investment in the care of the land and community.

There is no accurate Map of the Territory. That we can’t see the Territory as it is is not the only reason for impossible accuracy. We would also fail in creating the perfect Map because the most accurate Map of the Territory can only be the Territory itself.

Alienation is not only a feeling of detachment from the world, in Marxism it is a condition of literal theft. Workers exit the day with less than they had when they entered — Americans know this instinctively if not explicitly, which is why our national dream is to “work for myself” before a company “uses me up.” A reality show about the line cooks at a moderately expensive brunch place wouldn’t feel anything like Nosrat’s slow-food explorations; there’s nothing calming or even appetizing about the corner-cutting necessary to cook for someone else’s profit. When it comes to food, industrial efficiency is often gross. Contrariwise, unalienated labor is sublime. This is virtuosity performed for its own sake, and it’s the truth behind the saying “the best things in life are free.” For example, hallowed above all on fine-dining TV from Top Chef to Chef’s Table is the concept of the “family meal” — the pre-service food that chefs cook for their restaurant staff. Unlike the alienated dinners they’ll serve later, family meal is a place for experimentation and risk. You can’t buy your way in, it’s the workers’ privilege alone. Most creative professions have their version of the family meal, and those of us who work in those jobs are willing to trade a lot for the occasional unalienated moment when we can give and/or receive work directly.

People say, “I don’t play the politics game, I don’t pay attention to politics” — well, the environment is getting poisoned, families are getting pulled apart and deported, prisons are privatized, real-life Nazis live happily among us, Native Americans are so disenfranchised our country is basically still colonizing them, Puerto Rico has been abandoned, the American education system has been turned into a business, and every day 96 people get shot and killed. You might not be a big fan of politics, but you can still participate. All you need to do is vote for people you believe will work on these issues, and if they don’t work the way they should, then it is your responsibility to call them, organize a town hall and demand that they show up — hold them accountable. It’s their job to make our world better.

The left’s rallying cry is a repudiation of Trump’s immigration policy — and a challenge to Democrats. --- Objectively, the Trump immigration agenda — “unshackling” ICE agents and reiterating that every unauthorized immigrant “should be worried” about getting deported — is a reinstatement of the status quo during Obama’s first term. But because it’s a change from a period of relative safety — deportations did go down in the final years of the Obama administration — and because of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, it feels like something new. Trump sees rank-and-file law enforcement officers as his natural allies in a culture war. Progressives have responded in kind: by targeting not just the Trump administration officials appointed to run immigration enforcement but ICE agents themselves, whom they have cast as moral monsters whose power needs to be drastically curtailed or destroyed.

Viewed from one angle, the rise of get-girls-to-code initiatives is progressive and feminist. Many people involved in the movement are certainly progressive feminists themselves, and many women have benefited from these initiatives. But there are other ways to look at it too. Women are generally cheaper, to other workers’ dismay. “Introducing women into a discipline can be seen as empowerment for women,” says Ensmenger. “But it is often seen by men as a reduction of their status. Because, historically speaking, the more women in a profession, the lower-paid it is.” Hicks, the computing historian, can’t stand it when people tout coding camps as a solution to technology’s gender problem. “I think these initiatives are well-meaning, but they totally misunderstand the problem. The pipeline is not the problem; the meritocracy is the problem. The idea that we’ll just stuff people into the pipeline assumes a meritocracy that does not exist.” Ironically, says Hicks, these coding initiatives are, consciously or not, betting on their graduates’ failure. If boot camp graduates succeed, they’ll flood the market, devaluing the entire profession. “If you can be the exception who becomes successful, then you can take advantage of all the gatekeeping mechanisms,” says Hicks. “But if you aren’t the exception, and the gatekeeping starts to fall away, then the profession becomes less prestigious.”

What’s played over the speakers at Logan originates in a room in a yellow house in North Providence. --- This question of how to please everyone is something that many large public spaces — and small private spaces — deal with on a daily basis. This desire to please the largest crowd — or not to offend — drove the popularity of “elevator music.” On some level, this challenge continues to drive companies like Spotify to create better and better algorithms. And it drives Dalzell to continually add and delete, listen and select.

Abortion is health care, of course. But attempting to depoliticize abortion or insist that the procedure is categorically identical to other health care procedures downplays the implications of abortion in a way that removes it from any honest analysis of its political salience. Because the anti-abortion movement has long dominated the conversation with the assertion that abortion is murder, the impulse to remove abortion from a murky moral debate and frame it as a simple matter of health is understandable. But it is not simply a medical choice with no repercussions beyond the realm of the personal; abortion affects everyone. One in four women will have at least one abortion in their lives. Our communities have been shaped in a million invisible ways by people having abortions—abortions that allowed them to build their lives and careers and families with intention. Abortion has shaped families who live comfortably at the top, and lack of access to abortion has denied many poor families the ability to shape their own futures. Deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a personal choice. But suggesting that abortion is a private matter between doctor and patient mistakenly characterizes it as an individual issue, as opposed to a fundamental human rights issue and a matter of justice. Abortion bans are one of many strategies the right is employing in a much larger project to disenfranchise poor people and people of color. This is also about controlling women and their bodies, of course, though ultimately wealthy women will always be able to buy their freedom. The question of when life begins is deeply personal, and there will never be anything approaching consensus on the matter. But the abortion debate isn’t about when life begins: It’s about how much money a pregnant person needs in order to purchase their own self-determination, and about who our society deems worthy of freedom. The people fighting to ban abortion aren’t trying to eliminate abortion—if they were, they’d be advocating for medically accurate sex education, insurance plans that cover birth control, and widely accessible emergency contraception. If abortion opponents truly believed that abortions become increasingly evil as pregnancy progresses, they wouldn’t be trying to ban abortions at six weeks and implement waiting periods designed to make it impossible for those without means to terminate their pregnancies as soon as possible. The most compelling argument that abortion is health care is the fact that the lack of abortion access is a rapidly escalating public health crisis, one that will only continue to deepen existing contours of inequality. Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are the highest in the developed world, and in some places that rate is four times higher for black women. Abortion is health care, but we do not live in a country that frames health care as an inalienable human right. The fight for abortion rights is a structural power struggle, with clear winners and losers.

There are an awful lot of libraries that want to help you animate things on the web. These aren't really libraries that help you with the syntax or the technology of animations, but rather are grab-and-use as-is libraries. Want to apply a class like "animate-flip-up" and watch an element, uhhh, flip up? These are the kind of libraries to look at. I wholeheartedly think you should both 1) learn how to animate things in CSS by learning the syntax yourself and 2) customize animations to tailor the feel to your site. Still, poking around libraries like this helps foster ideas, gets you started with code examples, and might form a foundation for your own projects.

Hundreds of high resolution images added weekly. Free from copyright restrictions.

simpleParallax is a simple and tiny JavaScript library which adds parallax animations on any images.

Total costs are lower under single-payer systems for several reasons. One is that administrative costs average only about 2 percent of total expenses under a single-payer program like Medicare, less than one-sixth the corresponding percentage for many private insurers. Single-payer systems also spend virtually nothing on competitive advertising, which can account for more than 15 percent of total expenses for private insurers. The most important source of cost savings under single-payer is that large government entities are able to negotiate much more favorable terms with service providers. In 2012, for example, the average cost of coronary bypass surgery was more than $73,000 in the United States but less than $23,000 in France.

F. Nephi and Golden Grigg were two determined young Mormon entrepreneurs, willing to do anything to get their shot of the American Dream. Born in 1914, Nephi came of age during the Great Depression and was the leader of the two. He was a high school dropout prone to hyperbolic business proverbs. “Bite off more than you can chew,” he wrote, “then chew it.” “You can never go broke by taking a profit,” he relentlessly repeats in his letters to colleagues and his own “History of the Tot,” all found in his personal archive, currently housed at the J. Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah. (In 1989, an employee of Ore-Ida foods reached out to Nephi Grigg desperate for the story of Tater Tots, noting there was no historical record of how the item came to be. Griggs responded with a five-and-a-half-page personal account that starts with the line, “The Tater Tot is the hero in the history of the saga of Ore-Idea Foods, Inc.” Since his death in 1995, Nephi’s response has

On the controversy over Awkwafina’s blaccent in Crazy Rich Asians. While Awkwafina successfully imitates something in the film, it’s not black language. --- What can explain the ease with which the knowledge and creations of close-knit communities become circulated as profitable products in the arms of others, if not a deliberate and concentrated pickpocketing from one person to another to another? The flow of money and celebrity and canonicity supports the deduction, which is why the true observation that “everybody appropriates” can never and will never hold water (until, like, the end of white capitalism, a.k.a. the world). It is not by accident that people in power acquire cachet and adoration (and more power) when they don facsimile costumes of the people kept from power. And yet, power doesn’t often propagate itself so plainly in popular culture. We see its influence in what ends up valued and not valued, but more often, appropriation goes undetected. A white person may be just as likely to learn black lexicon from another white person who learned it from a Twitter user who often retweets Rihanna-related content. In the year 2018, it’s hardly, if ever, a straightforward route from A to B. [...] Is a “blaccent” an evocation of blackness, or of something else — power, imperialism, commerce, the digital age? Maybe blaccent shouldn’t function so metonymically, and maybe it shouldn’t imply blackness at all (blackness has enough to contend with), but that something else instead, indicting not an individual instance of theft but a global phenomenon that makes it impossible to know whether a nonblack millennial from Forest Hills studied black culture like a textbook or grew up with the same media as most of us, where blaccents in the mouths of white, snappy performers has been autonomous and apart from the actual speech patterns of black people since America had a theater tradition to call its own. Consider the many adolescents, now men, who’ve forged a personality around Pineapple Express and adore Post Malone, the way some young women have developed a shtick around Broad City’s fictional “Yas Kween” Ilana — there are blaccents built from blaccents, but maybe not from blackness itself. A certain millennial cool-kid identity is already predicated on basic appropriations that get overlooked when every case becomes exemplary, instead of evidentiary. It’s all very messy, and power makes it messy, but treating the blaccent as something authentically black and stolen doesn’t make it any clearer.

This article offers three reasons and three solutions: “thinking about the consequences of failure, ignoring your feelings, and engaging in detailed planning.” Summarized in edited excerpts here: 1. Reason: You are putting something off because you are afraid you will screw it up. Solution: Adopt a “prevention focus.” Instead of thinking about how you can end up better off, you see the task as a way to hang on to what you’ve already got—to avoid loss. 2. Reason: You are putting something off because you don’t “feel” like doing it. Solution: Ignore your feelings. They’re getting in your way. If you are sitting there, putting something off because you don’t feel like it, remember that you don’t actually need to feel like it. There is nothing stopping you. 3. Reason: You are putting something off because it’s hard, boring, or otherwise unpleasant. Solution: Use if-then planning. Making an if-then plan is more than just deciding what specific steps you need to take to complete a project – it’s also deciding where and when you will take them. By deciding in advance exactly what you’re going to do, and when and where you’re going to do it, there’s no deliberating when the time comes. It’s when we deliberate that willpower becomes necessary to make the tough choice. But if-then plans dramatically reduce the demands placed on your willpower, by ensuring that you’ve made the right decision way ahead of the critical moment. In fact, if-then planning has been shown in over 200 studies to increase rates of goal attainment and productivity by 200%-300% on average.

What I miss about my "90s internet" wasn't it specifically, with its slow data links, tiny JPEGs, buffering RealPlayer, or the tag. It did not have the tiniest fraction of the wonderful content the internet has today. What I miss is that I could "go on the internet" and be in a creative corner of the human experience. Today if you "go on the internet", that means you pulled your phone out of your pocket, dismissed some notification spam and start reading click-bait shared by people you have met on social media. Today you have to choke your way through the money-making miasma to find the joy. I wish the internet of creative people and their works had a front page and a search engine. Something that made finding the blog about the search for planet 9 easy to find, and the New Yorker article on it hard to find. [...] What is not clear to me yet is how those tools should work. How do we build a search engine that penalizes media outlets and promotes blogs and podcasts? How do we distinguish between a research paper or an article written by someone about their daily life aboard ISS on nasa.gov from their useless press releases?

We know that the state will not protect you -- especially not when the head of state promises to target populations vulnerable to its violence, and sanctions citizens to do the same. For these reasons, we collect here resources for bystander intervention and deescalation for those who wish to protect one other. Be aware that bystander intervention and deescalation strategies do not necessarily require physical force. Intervention and deescalation are first and foremost about securing a targeted person's safety as well as your own.

Summarized: • Be alert. • Be attuned to body language and how it changes. • Trust your gut. • Act confident, and try to react with your head, not your heart. If you come up assertive (but not mutually aggressive), confident, and as calm as you can, that’s the first step toward defusing a situation. Practice saying “No,” calmly and firmly, alone, to a mirror in your house, or to a helpful friend (you can practice together). Staying centered and calm, focusing on your intake and exhalation of breath for five counts if you feel yourself getting too emotionally carried away, will help you act rather than react. • Take a self-defense class. • Don’t white-knight. I cannot count the number of times I’ve walked up to someone who looked like they were in trouble in a club, or at a train station, and pretended cheerfully that I knew them. “Hey! It’s so good to see you! How are you doing?” If the person needed my help, they’d be able to respond in kind, and I could say “Excuse me, I haven’t seen my friend in a while here,” to the aggressor, and we could walk off together. That works far more often than you’d think it would. If the person didn’t need my help, they’d be able to stare at me blankly, and I could say, “Sorry, thought you were someone else. Excuse me for interrupting!” and walk off. • There are all kinds of different situations, and all kinds of different situations call for all kinds of different solutions. The basic four strategies come down to Direct (respond directly to the aggressor, as in the street harassment example in this paragraph; this works best when you’re working from a known and trusted position, and it does not generally work well when drugs or alcohol are involved), Distract (as in the stranger harassment club/train platform example above—distracting either person in the situation, really), Delegate (bringing in another person or people to help get a person in trouble to safety, pulling one party to one side and the other to another and thus defusing the situation), and Delay (use a distraction technique—whether it be in-person or via text/another messaging service—to pull a person who appears to be in trouble to the side to ask if they’re ok and they need any other assistance from you). You’ll mix and match and alter these strategies as necessary. [...] In a lot of situations, when you notice something is wrong, just sticking around and serving as a witness can keep something worse from happening.

When migrant children manage to survive days and sometimes weeks in CBP holding cells, their nightmares are far from over. CBP hands processed children over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which either places them with relatives in the U.S. or sends them to one of many privately operated child shelters. In 2018, the Trump administration instituted new, strict qualification requirements for adults seeking to sponsor immigrant kids, causing the shelters to burst at the seams. After months of public pressure, the administration returned to the previous rules for sponsorship, but many shelters are still too crowded. A Sludge review of contract data as of June 30 has found that the federal government has spent nearly $3.8 billion on ongoing grants and on contracts initiated since Donald Trump became president related to “unaccompanied alien children” (UACs), or undocumented immigrant kids who crossed into the U.S. alone or were separated from adults—family or otherwise—after entering the country.

Hundreds of for-profit and nonprofit corporations have pulled in billions of dollars worth of ICE contracts in recent years. See where these ICE operations take place and where the corporations are headquartered.

When to get up if you go to bed now and need to wake up not groggy. Sleepyti.me bedtime calculator helps you wake up refreshed by finding the best time to go to sleep. Please keep in mind that you should be *falling asleep* at these times. The average human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep, so plan accordingly! sleepyti.me works by counting backwards in sleep cycles. Waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle leaves you feeling tired and groggy, but waking up in between cycles wakes you up feeling refreshed and alert!

This is from a freelancer writer, not a web developer, but most of the principles still apply. • DO: Wake up early • DO: Cultivate multiple interests so you are widely hirable • DO: Build a good network of friends doing the same thing as you • DO: Read the comments and grow a thick skin (I don't know about this one…) • DO: Respect your editor • DO: Stand up for yourself; the people who hire you are not right by default • DO: Ask for your money • DO: Buy business cards • DO: Be positive and supportive • DON'T: Push yourself to do too much or something you're not ready for • DON'T: Read the comments (enough to build confidence, then never again) • DON'T: Pitch stories to your friends who are editors, it'll make it weird • DON'T: Be jealous

Basically: • Be reliable • Communicate when things are going wrong • Be ‘a generalist who specializes’ • Don’t diversify—you can't handle that much work at once • Build a network from home: talk yourself up, have a website, use LinkedIn • Don’t be afraid to ask for a lot of money and negotiate down from there • Save *at least* six months of reserve funds • Take breaks and leave the house • Create projects that are rewarding and challenging to teach yourself things and stay motivated

The encampment isn’t marked on any maps, but even on Google’s Street View, if you zoom in you will find a human being on a corner nearby standing next to a plastic crate and holding a cardboard sign. If you are here, or in almost any city, it takes effort to avoid seeing this: people doing what they can to survive in a place that is actively hostile to them. Sometimes the divide between who gets to camp as a vacation and who has to do it because they have nowhere else to go is as literal as a wall of spikes.

Sometimes the more insidious part of alcoholism is how we become addicted to the way other people make us feel.