Hello again. I’ve gotten several supportive messages from readers by email and Signal, and on 32bit Cafe. I mean to reply to everybody personally in the next few days, but in the meantime I want to allay a couple of concerns in my last post.
my mental state
I’m fundamentally OK. I think what happened is that I've been experiencing a delayed reaction to my wife's health crisis. I had been in survival mode while Catherine was in the hospital, keeping it together so that she could focus on getting better instead of worrying about me.
Now that she's home, it feels like now I can fall apart. So I did. Instead of crying in private like a sensible person I dumped my emotions into a file and published it on the web.
Like I said: it’s cheaper than therapy. Seriously, though: I’ve spent most of my life leaving things unwritten, and it hasn’t served me.
In fact, I find myself thinking of a Guns ’n Roses song called “Don’t Damn Me”:
Don't damn me when I speak a piece of my mind 'Cause silence isn't golden When I'm holding it inside 'Cause I've been where I have been An I've seen what I have seen I put the pen to the paper 'Cause it's all a part of me
Everything you write, everything you leave unwritten — that’s all part of you, too.
infocidal tendencies
I suppose I made some people on 32bit Cafe worry when I linked to Joseph Reagle’s 2011 post on infocide and quoted why the lucky stiff and Mark Pilgrim.
I thought I had made this clear before, but I’m gonna repeat it in bold just in case: I will not shut down starbreaker.org. You’re not getting rid of me that easily. You’re gonna need an exorcist, and that exorcist is gonna need more than the power of Christ to compel me. And I’m not just playing the edgelord here. I’m dead serious.
The website will remain up. I just might not post much for a while. If I don’t post much, it won’t be because my morale is in Tartarus. Admittedly, it has been lately. But it won’t stay there. Remember: I draw strength from the dark side as well as the light. The power of Satan compels me, after all.
Instead of not posting because I’ve run out of fucks to give, I’ll not be posting because I’m giving my fucks to other things.
I’ve been digging deeper into Org Mode on Emacs lately. I’ve built my website with it before, but I want to get back to it. Maybe even learn enough Emacs Lisp to customize the export function so that it generates HTML my way so that I don’t have to do it myself. After all, automating grunt work is what computers are for, dammit.
Also, I want to give more effort to working on this new novel that I’ve started. I haven’t finished a novel since 2016. Never mind that Silent Clarion bombed so hard that it made Tsar Bomba look like a wet fart. You can’t even find it by its ISBN.
I neither know nor care if I’m a lousy writer or if it’s that I have no business sense and fail marketing forever. I want to write another novel, dammit. I miss being able to play God without hurting anybody or trampling their rights, dammit.
rock out with your markup out
I’m well aware that CSS Naked Day is only supposed to last one day. I find that I mostly like my website without a stylesheet. If the organizers of No CSS Club were to extend an invitation, I would be strongly tempted to accept.
manifesto time!
Frankly, I’ve come to think that server-side CSS and JavaScript were mistakes. JavaScript should be to browsers what Lisp is to Emacs, Lua and Python are to neovim, and the shell itself is to UNIX-like systems. JavaScript should be a tool for you to use to customize and extend the functionality of your browser.
Likewise, CSS should be a tool for you to use to customize the way websites display on your device. After all, I can’t please everybody. Hell, there are times when I can’t even please my wife. Some people don’t like narrow columns of text on wide screens. Some people hate it when text takes up the entire width of their widescreen display. Some people want dark text on a light background, and vice versa. Some people are unhappy with the colors I use even when I implement dark mode.
Frankly, none of that should be my problem. Likewise, the fact that every browser’s default style sucks in subtly different ways.
Besides, what right do I have to decide for you how my website should look on your computer? By Crom, modern web development really has enabled entirely too many petty authoritarians bent on punishing the world because they didn’t have their first kiss until after they sold their first startups. I don’t want to be part of that.
Granted, you could override my stylesheet by using your browser’s reader mode, but that presents its own problems. For example, Readability.js, which Mozilla uses in Firefox, works best on standards-compliant, semantic HTML5. It’s much more strict about markup than browsers typically are; if anything they’re downright pedantic about structure.
If starbreaker.org works in your browser’s reader mode, or without a stylesheet, it’s because I put in the work to write valid HTML.
Well, mostly valid.
<link rel="preview"> with width, height, and alt attributes isn’t in the HTML5 spec, and I will win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards — and the Nobel Prize in Literature — before that happens.
Never mind that I cribbed it from the ActivityStreams 1.1 spec.
Even if the W3C implements it, platforms probably won’t ever follow suit. Hell, I’ll become a bestselling novelist and a multi-millionaire before that happens. But a man can dream, right? (There are other things I’d rather dream about, incidentally, but the details are best left to the reader’s imagination.)
Seriously, though: if my website works without CSS it’s because I have always believed that if a website or web app doesn’t work in Lynx then it’s fucking defective.
I don’t care if you think that’s unreasonable, especially if you comment on Hacker News.
I will die on that hill, but not before I’ve made that hill in the first place by putting all who oppose me to the sword.
(Arioch! Arioch! Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!
)
gonna be all right
If you got this far (or skipped everything else via the table of contents), you can probably tell that I’m gonna be OK. I’m gonna get over it. If I’m joking, going off on tangents, and playing the edgelord I’m probably getting better already.
So, I apologize if I freaked you all out. But there was some shit I had to get out of my head. Even a demi-fiend like me can have a shitty few weeks.