Saved (Public Feed)

“Anyone can threaten to sue anyone at any time,” Rich explained. “I could threaten to sue the guy at the bodega for making bad coffee. You can’t live your life in fear of lawyers. If someone sends us an angry legal letter, I’ll just call them on the phone and talk about how to resolve it.” Then Rich said three things that have been lodged in my brain ever since — the Three Rules of Contracts. 1. “The relationship is all that matters.” 2. “A contract is just an instruction manual for what to do when things go wrong with a relationship.” 3. “Our goal is to build the relationship so that the client never feels the need to go back to the contract.” This might sound obvious, but it’s a subtle reframing that robs the contract of its magical powers and puts the focus back where it should be, on keeping an open line between parties. “The law” is just another gigantic human construct that everyone has agreed makes sense, like democracy, the World Wide Web, or Bitcoin. Software development is ambiguous work. You agree on one result, but three months in, it’s clear that a different result will be needed. Even with the best, most efficiently run projects, direction can change many times. It might feel like the smartest, most cautious path is to attempt to document everything in a contract and a statement of work, but it’s frankly a fool’s errand. You can’t. Everyone tries, even though it’s pointless and it all changes. We just decided to stop pretending. […] The relationship is all that matters. You can’t fix a relationship with a contract. You can’t make a great software product by editing a contract, either. You have to have a relationship that works.

So led by Mitch McConnell—who said afterward that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack—the Republicans chose to pretend that they had no power to do anything. Rubio, who’d called the violence around Trump rallies “frightening, grotesque, and disturbing” during the 2016 primary campaign, cast the 34th vote to acquit, sealing the result. In regretful tones, when it was over, McConnell repeated the same message he’d issued in a statement in the morning, preempting the closing arguments, that he read the constitution to mean that impeachment could only apply to current officeholders. Apparently if the coup had succeeded, and Trump had held onto office through mob violence, then he could have been impeached for it. But since the attempt failed, there was no way to stop him from trying it in the future, if he runs in the future. Yet again—one more time, if not one last time—the Trump presidency had demonstrated that the United States Constitution is a failure. Its fundamental mechanisms do not work. A president may not be investigated, if he refuses a congressional subpoena. A president may take bribes and misappropriate funds, if he does it all in the open. Five dead bodies and a Congress put to flight are not enough to convict and disqualify a president from seeking power again, if that president’s party wants to protect him.

Here’s the short version: I’ve made a Creative Commons licensed version of the Galaxy Brain meme images. I’m releasing these images under the CC-0 license, which means you can use them in just about anything, including commercial works. I’ve made versions with both a masculine and feminine figure. More notes below!

See what the internet looked like on February 19th, 2011. See what it looked like ten years today for a handful of popular sites (CNN, NYT, Amazon, Apple, IMDb, GoodReads, etc.).

Fraidycat is a desktop app or browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose - Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki. There is no news feed. Rather than showing you a massive inbox of new posts to sort through, you see a list of recently active individuals. No one can noisily take over this page, since every follow has a summary that takes up a mere two lines. You can certainly expand this 'line' to see a list of recent titles (or excerpts) from the individual - or click the name of the follow to read the individual on their network.

FREE Vintage Illustrations for your creative projects! Heritage Library collects beautiful illustrations from the past which are 100% free to use. Get inspired by our free illustration bundles and create gorgeous packaging, postcards and more.

I can’t seem to find any mention of this in the Media Queries Module specification, but apparently it’s allowed to nest media queries. E.g.: @media not print { @media (min-width: 0) { p { background: yellow; } } }

Joshua Stanley. Karen McClure. Douglas Rosling II. All three died using Portland roads over the weekend. Since Jean Gerich was hit and killed in an intentional act of car violence on January 25th, four people have died in what has already been a terrible year for road safety. So far in 2021 our Fatality Tracker shows 11 deaths, that’s nearly twice as many as this time last year and three times the amount in 2019. […] The victims are new, but the circumstances are achingly familiar. Unfortunately it feels like Portland continues to lack the urgency and leadership to transform our approach to traffic safety and street management in a way that rises to the crisis in front of us. I just feel so deflated and frustrated. I’ve written so many op-eds and have heard so many promises about safe streets for so many years. Yet here we are. To all my friends at City Hall and the Portland Bureau of Transportation who are annoyed with my “bias and negativity” (the exact words used by former PBOT Commissioner Chloe Eudaly who revealed her opinion of my work at the end of her tenure back in December): Where is the positive news here? You can dismiss me and continue to act like everything you read here are just rantings from a biased blogger. But you cannot ignore the tragic truths our streets continue to tell day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

An organized collection of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives compiled by Valery Marier.

A tale of two years: In 2019, I received multiple texts from out-of-town relatives and friends begging to visit me in Portland. But then 2020 rolled around, and these are the type of texts I received: “When are you moving back home? Stay safe!!” “What is going on in Portland? I hear it’s a battle zone!” “Riots in Portland? Are you okay? Call me now!” Portland—once thought of as a whimsical doughnut-land filled with jolly weirdos on bikes—now has an absolutely terrible national reputation that’s less of a Portlandia episode, and more like one of Dante’s various levels of hell. […] How did we get here? Well, zooming out, you can largely thank the national media (particularly FOX News) who often parroted willfully misleading police reports from last summer’s protests, and depicted events that were often confined to a few blocks as if the entire city was a war zone. This spawned a slate of absolutely ludicrous headlines, most recently culminating in a commentary published last week in Forbes, "Death of a City: The Portland Story?" which compared our economic troubles—those shared by every. single. major. city. in. America.—to a fate reminiscent of the lava-buried victims of Pompeii. So who's behind these wildly exaggerated visions of Portland reflected in the national media? Well, for one, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), who between May 29 and November 15, 2020 declared 30 demonstrations as “riots." Apparently all it takes to declare "a riot" these days is a very small percentage of a crowd throwing plastic water bottles and shaking fences. […] Parsing out why the cops (or specifically the police union) want to spread this false narrative is easy: They don't want their budget cut, or to make any substantial changes—especially those connected to systemic racism or brutality. They rely on your continuing fear for their existence.

The ’80s that Kelly remembered wasn’t bright or fun. It was teenage kids getting into dumb arguments over the sex habits of the Smurfs. It was authorities falling for the shallow charm of a motivational speaker — ’80s icon Patrick Swayze, still beautiful. In 2000, there wasn’t a lot of cool-kid cachet in Echo & The Bunnymen or Tears For Fears or Duran Duran. They weren’t influences that bands mentioned in interviews, and they hadn’t yet become parts of a lucrative nostalgia circuit. They were just songs that sometimes got played on alt-rock stations’ flashback-brunch shows. Only Duran Duran’s “Notorious” was fresh in the cultural memory, and that was just because of a posthumous Biggie single. Kelly made them fresh. Later, in a director’s-cut DVD, Kelly swapped out “The Killing Moon” for INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” and made it even more tingly. Richard Kelly built beautiful little fantasias around those songs, and those scenes hit like a drug. The songs were key to the cult of Donnie Darko. Eventually, one of those songs even became a strange new kind of hit. The film ended with a montage of its characters pondering the imponderable, and Michael Andrews, composer of the film’s plinky-piano score, set that montage to a new version of “Mad World,” the Tears For Fears song from 1982. Andrews’ friend Gary Jules sang the angelic vocal, and Jules and Andrews replaced the drum-machine boom of the original song with shivery pianos and cellos, turning it into an eerie meditation. As Donnie Darko slowly became a word-of-mouth cult hit, Jules and Andrews released their version of “Mad World” as a single. Michel Gondry directed a dreamlike video. In the UK, the “Mad World” cover exploded. Nearly three years after Donnie Darko had its Sundance premiere, the “Mad World” cover had become an out-of-nowhere smash, earning the coveted position of Christmas #1. All the movie trailers set to moody orchestral versions of pop songs are a direct result of “Mad World” doing what it did.

Between 1945 and 1955, 1.5 million immigrants of innumerable nationalities came to Canada; historians estimate between 2000 and 5000 of those arrivals were secret Nazis. (This was in addition to the Nazis invited deliberately by Americans and Canadians.) The Canadian government’s tepid attempts to pursue war criminals had ended by 1948, when the Allies decided that efforts should focus on “discouraging future generations” rather than prosecuting escaped Nazis, or in the words of the British Commonwealth Relations Office, “meting out retribution to every guilty individual.” Later attempts to prosecute Nazis hiding in Canada were unsuccessful. So it was that thousands of Nazis, who had been fighting the Allied advance a few years before, found themselves in a prospering Canada, where they could reinvent themselves and start anew—or simply paper over who they had been and what they had done and settle into a new life, some of them full of secrets and hatred swirling like magma below the surface of a burgeoning suburbia.

The most glaring artistic error in “Soul” is its misprision—its elision, really—of what soul means for black culture. --- Twenty-two’s fumbled attempts to puppeteer Joe’s body are excused as the ineptitude of any newbie soul, but they’re still played for laughs along a racial register. […] Inexplicably, all of Twenty-two’s attempts at being black at first disconcert but then enchant others—including Joe, who takes Twenty-two’s innocence for granted, despite her long history of soul counselling. She means well. […] Pixar’s “Soul” is, in fact, the latest in a long tradition of American race-transformation tales, each of which finds a pretext—a potion, a spell, a medical treatment, or simply makeup—to put a white person in a black body (or vice versa). […] The white desire to get inside black flesh is absolved as an empathy exercise. Blackface gets a moral makeover. It’s telling that, in most race-transformation tales, the ideal is presented as a white soul in a black body. Well-meaning or no, that’s still slumming. “Soul” calls it “jazzing,” which would depress me were it not for the unwitting pun on, uh, jouissance. […] As in NBC’s “The Good Place,” the dirtbag, depressive white woman teaches the neurotic, brilliant black man how to stop fussing about ambition, cultivate gratitude for what you have, and just be. Not only does Twenty-two use Joe as a vehicle but the movie must also make the grandiose and grotesque claim that he has learned to live through her. […] “Soul” takes as its premise the idea that a soul, branded with a personality, might be swapped in and out of different kinds of bodies. Even if we ignore the problem that unborn souls seem already to have races and genders—it’s a kids’ movie, not Plato!—we have to swallow the still more fundamental premise that the soul is individual, is sole. This idea is built into how we generally use the word, in Standard English: He has a soul. Black English says, He’s got soul. The most glaring artistic error in “Soul” is its misprision—its elision, really—of what soul means for black culture. The word is used to signify not just an individual unit but also an indivisible substrate, a communal energy, a vibe. For all of the creators’ efforts to thread the needle of racial representation, their desperate wish to be authentic without being stereotypical, “Soul” never utters a sentence like “She’s got soul,” never says “soul brother” or “soul sister” or “soul music.” Perhaps those terms are too antiquated, but there isn’t even a mention of the still popular “soul food”; the film’s universal delicacy is pepperoni pizza, not fried chicken, and we all know why.

is a hypnotising puzzle game that turns satellite images taken from the NASA database into a mesmerising journey around the Planet.

What we should look at is the clinical outcomes of these trials, including against the variant. That’s something we should care about and we can interpret. And there, it’s been non-stop good news if you look at the right metric. For most of these trials, our “endpoint” has been things like any disease, however minor, even sniffles. Even when we look at “severe” disease, it isn’t what most of us think of as severe: hospitalization, ICU, ventilation and such. So what’s the news there? Since the beginning of the trials, all trials, there has not been a single death or hospitalization among people vaccinated. Not one. Zero. Not for Moderna, not for Pfizer/BioNTech, not for Oxford/AstraZeneca, not for Sputnik, not for J&J, not for Novavax.

Thirteen ways to include an HTML file in another HTML file.

The dreaded chore of putting a comforter inside a duvet cover is now as easy as rolling up a burrito. Here's a step-by-step tutorial that will change your (and your bedding's) life.

Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower. Please explore the menu links to learn more.

Beautiful hand-crafted SVG icons, by the makers of Tailwind CSS.

This casual acceptance of vehicular violence and recklessness as a random occurrence we can’t do anything about is unacceptable and must change. I’m afraid more people will die if we don’t. Our enforcement policies need to be better at flagging high-risk drivers. Our mental and public health services need to find at-risk people and give them more support. Our transportation agencies need to fortify our streets by adding more concrete and protected spaces wherever and whenever possible. Our community needs to call out traffic violence in every form, every time; whether it’s spoken, typed, or acted upon. I’m afraid of how we’re handling this issue; but I refuse to be afraid of our streets. So many times this past year we saw the power streets have to unite us. “Whose streets? Our streets!” isn’t just a chant, it’s an acknowledgment that we all own a piece of the responsibility to keep them safe.

With over 350 materials and 100,000+ listings, we maintain one of North America's most extensive recycling databases. Simply dial 1-800-CLEANUP, or simply enter in the material you are trying to recycle along with your zip code and click search.

Create a WordPress test site with one click. FREE and no login required. Ideal for testing things out before you do it on your real site.

By publicly identifying and discussing unlicensed samples, hip-hop fans on websites like WhoSampled and YouTube may be unwittingly putting their favorite producers at risk.

The great white whine continues --- It’s tempting to say, “We made it.” But so many have not. 400,000 Americans are dead from a virus that is preventable with a face mask. A little cloth covering. 545 children have lost their families because of the Trump administration’s family separation policy that forced them apart. Heather Heyer isn’t here. Five people died in the violent insurrection. So many of us are alive, yes, but we are ghosts of ourselves. Hollowed out by loss and harassment and illness. How many more people were terrorized and are dead because white nationalism was catalyzed by the highest office in the land? So, no. We didn’t make it. And it’s not over. White grievance is one of the few renewable natural resources that Americans are willing to invest in. And why not? It’s good business. Fox News has made an empire of it. Look at all the journalists who have made a lot of money writing books about Donald Trump. Think about all the people who have made money writing about their time in the White House. We are a country and an economy built on white grievance. Even after slavery as a practice was ended in 1865, it’s never really gone away. Segregationist policies and politicians, Jim Crow laws, redlining practices and suburban white flight have set the boundaries and borders of our country. During the 2016 election, writers like Dave Eggers and George Saunders bent over backward to describe the anger and pain of the white voter, going to Trump rallies and writing about the slavering hordes in a way that othered and fetishized them. This narrative allowed white grievance to flourish; after a takedown in the “liberal media”, white voters could crucify themselves on the cross of culture, claiming to be the victims and misunderstood, the poor forgotten minority.

It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.” One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.

An easy to implement technique for fading in a page with CSS & JavaScript, useful for pages that have a slight delay when loading.

Hello! Here are some examples of weird things that can happen with CSS. This site goes with the zine Hell Yes, CSS!.

Most of these other civilizations that still exist in the galaxy today are likely young, due to the probability that intelligent life is fairly likely to eradicate itself over long timescales. Even if the galaxy reached its civilizational peak more than 5 billion years ago, most of the civilizations that were around then have likely self-annihilated, the researchers found. This last bit is the most uncertain variable in the paper; how often do civilizations kill themselves? But it's also the most important in determining how widespread civilization is, the researchers found. Even an extraordinarily low chance of a given civilization wiping itself out in any given century — say, via nuclear holocaust or runaway climate change — would mean that the overwhelming majority of peak Milky Way civilizations are already gone

The community-driven resource library of CSS Houdini worklets. Learn about CSS Houdini, its APIs, usage, polyfills, and browser status, to take advantage of the Houdini APIs today. “Houdini is a set of low-level APIs that exposes parts of the CSS engine, giving developers the power to extend CSS by hooking into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine. Houdini is a group of APIs that give developers direct access to the CSS Object Model (CSSOM), enabling developers to write code the browser can parse as CSS, thereby creating new CSS features without waiting for them to be implemented natively in browsers.” —MDN