Oh! What nights such as these! When I soar as a King of a universe Living decades and lifetimes in one turn of the hour Wooing lovers And soothing souls Drinking from the cup Of forgotten enlightenment And then forgetting In the next breath Having and losing All knowledge Without the least concern I know life I know love Our hearts, And all hearts, Bind And intertwine Until that moment When the lights goes Away and the Fingers of dawn Call us back to Reality.

| | | | |

---

words are our only real power #poetry

If your website feels sluggish, especially when interacting with buttons or animations, you might be dealing with Long Animation Frames (LoAFs). LoAFs occur when the browser takes longer than 50 milliseconds to render a single animation frame, causing your site to feel unresponsive or “janky” to users.

The LoAF API, introduced in Chrome 123, tracks these long animation frames, offering insights into why your website’s animations might be running slowly. Unlike the Long Tasks API, which measures long-running tasks on the main thread, LoAF focuses on the time taken to render animations, making it more useful for diagnosing performance issues related to user interactions.

One of the key contributors to LoAFs is heavy JavaScript execution. When event handlers or scripts do too much work within a single frame, the browser can’t keep up, leading to sluggish performance. Breaking up large JavaScript tasks and deferring non-urgent work can significantly reduce LoAFs.

Another major cause is forced synchronous layouts, which occur when you modify the DOM and immediately query layout properties, forcing the browser to recalculate the layout on the spot. This can be avoided by batching DOM updates or using CSS transform for animations.

Tools like PerformanceObserver can help you monitor LoAFs in real time, or you can capture them with Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools like Request Metrics to see how they affect real users.

By fixing LoAFs, you’ll make your site smoother, more responsive, and provide a better user experience overall. Learn more about tracking, analyzing, and fixing LoAFs.

I have lived in rural Georgia for 12 years now. Most people have Black and white friends. Most elected public officials and most employed public servants clearly feel care for most of the people—-whatever their race, class, or accent—-that they encounter. When you walk into a city or county office, you experience the Southern hospitality, and even clearly stressed people do their best to help you and the other people seeking help or doing business around you. This is small town, Southern reality for us.

There is also an equally real underbelly that someone like me rarely encounters directly. So I'll share some gossip that I believe (most I had first hand, some a plausible second hand), and some statistical observations that support the gossip, and demonstrate the systemic racism—-even if I can't identify all the ways it happens.

Voter Suppression

I'll start with the statistics. According to the 2020 census, our town is about 45% white and 50% Black. I am aware of only one Black person elected as Mayor or to city council, and that man was elected as deputy mayor. The Black man only became mayor briefly when the then serving mayor had to leave office because he transferred city property to his church.

Our county is about 70% white and 25% Black. When a Black sheriff's deputy ran for county sheriff a few years ago, one of his signs outside of town had “Free Chicken” spray painted over it within a week of going up. The implication being a Black man could only be elected by promising free fried chicken to voters. I heard that during the campaign, his wife was run off the road outside of town. It was traumatic, and the sheriff candidate lost his desire to fight to win the election. He was not elected. The man who was elected ended up being prosecuted for sexual harassment (he was dumb enough to come on to a woman judge). In the most recent election, one of the sheriff candidates had assaulted a high school student, and the other had hospitalized his wife. Neither was prosecuted. But these sheriffs are preferable to electing a Black man.

Shortly after we arrived here the very popular former college president was elected as mayor. He had been a well loved president for our small, state college (~800 students). He began instituting a number of changes that would really benefit our city as a whole—-updating infrastructure, hiring a city manager, updating laws that inhibited economic growth, and more. But some of the things he was doing were upsetting to the city council. My best guess is that providing better city services for everybody was somehow costing them and their rich friends a bit more in taxes, and maybe opening things up for competition against their personal businesses. That fits with the attitude that most things should be done by families and churches, and government services for everybody should be minimal. At some point they started illegally holding city council meetings without notifying the mayor. He didn't run for a second term.

I can't pinpoint all the ways it happens, but when half the city is Black and there are zero Black people representing them, the Black vote is being suppressed. When 25% of the county is Black, and 85% of the county votes for Trump (as they did in 2020), either 40% of Black voters in the county are voting Republican or most Black voters just aren't voting. That is voter suppression in action.

I once thought it was suppression only by non-violent means. After hearing about the running off the road of the sheriff candidate's wife, and the covered up violence of our sheriffs, I'm not at all sure it's limited to non-violent tactics. I not only think it would be pointless for someone with my political views to run for office, I think I would have reason to be afraid if I started to actually be effective at changing things. I don't feel afraid as an ineffective, white, male progressive.

To My Mormon, Republican Friends

When you, off in Utah, Idaho, or Wisconsin vote for Republicans, you are supporting systemic racism in my town. You are getting judges appointed who have claimed the racism is gone. They have said we don't need the Voting Rights Act to counter racism anymore. But it isn't gone. If you continue to vote for the current Republican party, you are supporting racism. It has been cloaked in other words for decades, but I am telling you it is still alive and well. It may be better than the past, but it is not innocent and it is not necessary. If you've taken the time to read this, you have three honest choices: 1. Admit you are ok with racism. However bad it is, your concerns about other things are more important. You may be right about abortion or economic policy (I don't think so), but you can still be right about those things and be a supporter of racism. 2. Quit voting for Republicans on the national stage (and local stage if they support racist policies). Start voting for people who will fight racism. Or 3. Change the Republican party. You will have to do number 2 while working on 3, but I will hope for your success.

⁣⁣⁣⁣ 1: To get started, write one true sentence.⁣ ⁣⁣⁣2. Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣3: Never think about the story when you're not working.⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣4: When it's time to work again, start by reading what you've written so far.⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣5: Don't describe an emotion—make it.⁣⁣⁣⁣ 6: Use a pencil. ⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣7: Be Brief.⁣⁣⁣⁣

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words are our only real power #essay

The often forgotten protection of the First Amendment can only help Automattic.

The very public battle between Matt Mullenweg (Automattic) and WP Engine won't be ending anytime soon. From pettiness to legal challenges, to extremely questionable actions – things have been getting very messy. And not for WP Engine, but for Matt.

Given the actions of Matt over the last few weeks, WP Engine has filed an injunction. Essentially, they are trying to shut him up (and stop his actions) because of the damage he is causing to their company. The law specifically provides them with this option, and while I'm far from a lawyer, it looks to have been used appropriately. We'll see how a judge rules on the matter.

An Attack on Free Speech?

In response to this action by WP Engine, Matt wrote a blog post on how his First Amendment right has been attacked.

I can understand this reaction, on some level. No one likes to be told to “stop talking”. The emotional response is often to cite it as a violation of the First Amendment. Now, if Matt really wanted to, he could keep doing what he has been doing, but I suspect his legal team has advised against it.

The First Amendment protects free expression from government censorship or retaliation, but what people often forget is that it also inherently includes the right to remain silent.

Staying silent is prudent, and it's often underutilized. People love to spout off, and they should if they should feel so inclined. However, the sound of silence can be deafening.

The ability to not be goaded into fiery online spats and to hold your word, and peace, close to the vest is a virtue that not many people have. Very few, in fact. And it becomes exceptionally difficult when you feel like you're being attacked, personally.

Protection From Yourself

Your right to remain silent can save your ass. There's the obvious example of refraining from answering questions from the police, but its protection goes beyond just that scenario.

If you're in an ugly lawsuit, as is the case here with Matt and WP Engine, then it also protects you from yourself. Specifically, it protects you from your emotions.

Emotions aren't rational, they are jaded by your own perception. When you act out of emotion, you're broadcasting a very personalized worldview, and that worldview may be wrong in the eyes of a jury. Especially if it's emotionally charged.

Exercising your right to remain silent is honorable. In fact, I'd argue that there are times when it is more powerful than speaking freely. Matt has indicated that he will be staying silent until the judge makes a ruling on the injunction.

I hope that he sees the value in exercising this right.

#WordPress

Comment

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, turned 30 the other day which got me thinking (even more than I have been recently) about my own online writing journey. Like a lot of people, I started writing online with Blogger and Wordpress (when you had to run it off a thumb drive), but was soon swayed by the promise of social media.

If I’d stuck with my first blog, it’d now be older than my niece who just celebrated her 18th birthday.

At the time, though, creating online content felt ephemeral. The Internet was young enough that there was no sense of permanence about anything. I didn’t see any problem bouncing from platform to platform and having my own “writing year zero” every time.

Nearly two decades on, though, and I’m left with a massively fragmented online presence. This blog is a few years old and until I revived it recently was mostly just a collection of old Medium and LinkedIn posts.

I’ve got thousands of tweets and threads about product management on Twitter that, in hindsight, would’ve been better turned into articles on my own domain.

I’ve had TinyLetter, Substack and Beehiiv newsletters that I’ve launched and killed multiple times—then there’s all the other blogs and sites I’ve forgotten about that are still out there in the ether (or on the Internet Archive if you dig hard enough).

David Perell talks about writing online as the best form of networking, and he’s right:

But the ability of your content to compound only really works if you own it.

Like a lot of online creators, I sacrificed ownership and control for reach. It felt no different at the time to choosing to write for mainstream music publications instead of my own ‘zine, but the reality has been very different.

I recently read a great article about the importance of building your own castle on the Internet (which is where the meme at the start of this post came from).

While you might get more reach from using other platforms, that’s far outweighed by the advantages of having your own personal space online.

Blogging seems to be having a resurgence recently, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of content creators have been burned by Musk’s destruction of Twitter, or Substack’s unwillingness to ban Nazis from their platform.

More and more people are beginning to realise that letting other people own what you say and who ends up hearing it online is a mistake.

I’ve always been a blogger at heart; I’m just rediscovering what that means in 2024.

Turns out it’s not much different to what it meant when I started nearly 20 years ago—it’s just feels a shame that I drank the social media Kool Aid and lost sight of it.

#riffs #blogging

I need words Full of love and praise

I need time To laugh To cry To talk To be heard

I need affection The warm touch Of one I love

These are my needs It's valid to express them And they are important

#Poetry #MyBeautifulSky #SelfCare #SelfLove

Observed a chain of Starlink satellites from a dark patch of rural North Essex on the evening of October 19. Posted a wee video on Bluesky. It’s just a grainy closeup, but still captures something of the uncanniness of moving lines of uniformly-spaced lights in the night sky.

#notes

El territorio se conoce profundizando en la mirada. Pero esta mirada debe ser siempre una mirada creativa, que no trata tanto de reflejar el mundo, como de formar parte de ese mundo observado. Mis recorridos y visitas a la ciudad de A Coruña, han sido varias, desde 2017, que la visité por vez primera. Una ciudad visualmente atrayente, por la fuerza del Atlántico y el contraste que genera con mi mar de referencia vital, el Mediterráneo.

Estos recorridos, siempre son una deriva vital, una investigación visual, que a la vez, es personal. En esta ocasión, empezaba a trabajar con la Leica M, el modelo M4-2, que sigue siendo mi favorito, por su pura mecánica que delimita y condiciona el tipo de pensamiento visual generado.

Siempre me ha fascinado ese momento mágico de los atardeceres de verano en A Coruña, tan distintos de mi Mediterráneo. He captado muchas veces ese momento. Me impresiona el instante en el que emerge el sol tras las nubes, como un pequeño amanecer, que es anochecer, pero que a veces es la luz más intensa de un día nublado, y, en unos minutos más, la oscuridad. Maravilloso.

#fotoensayos #fotos2017 #derivas #Coruña

This is right now my status, a lyric from the song Lydia – Highly Suspect. I think it’s a fairly poetic way of describing how I feel right now that I’m content shamelessly stealing. The general idea of what this line means to me is attempting something so completely pointless (shooting at the sun), which ends up with the unintended consequence of the bullet coming back down and potentially hitting someone, doing something terrible. It’s this general feeling of being so horribly overwhelmed with something to the point where you’re just so desperate for something to change you do something with no regard for consequences or if it’ll actually work. I find myself in this pattern fairly often, and it usually ends up with me injuring myself and needing to rest to recover which is miserable. Yesterday I was filled with so much rage and energy at night while listening to this song. At some point I grabbed my plastic chopsticks and was drumming along to it but somehow one of them shattered off, and then I just started smashing them against the counter until they were both in several pieces. I just threw the pieces down across my room. I don’t even know if I can say I don’t like this rage and anger because at least I have energy to do something instead of just sitting and rotting away losing more of my life. This morning in my martial arts class the warmup was a cardio drill which involved hitting a pad with the bamboo sticks. I just put as much hate and anger I could into them and just hit it as hard as I could until I had to run back and redo the circuit. That was so insanely cathartic for me, since I had been just itching to hit something of break something or just get this rage out of me somehow. I wanted to shoot at the sun.

#nsfw trigger warnings: #depression, #suicide #books

A post about a little-known English author.

Reading her short story, The Old Address, feels like someone has been eavesdropping on my darkest thoughts in my darkest moments. It's an eerie feeling, but also comforting.

Thanks again to D on Goodreads who – to the best of my knowledge – still has no idea that I'm stalking her literary choices. I mean what is Goodreads for if not to find some future version of yourself that is pre-reading all of your books and rating them, so that present-day you need spend time and money only on the ones with 5-star reviews? That is literally the only reason that Goodreads exists.

But in all seriousness, Anna Kavan's work from her collection of short stories, Julia & The Bazooka, deeply resonates with me. Journalist Virginia Ironside says in her Introduction to Julia:

(Trigger warnings: depression, suicide)

True, she's not a writer for those who like uplifting books or happy endings. She writes of a terrifying inner landscape of evil and threat – a landscape that she seemed to inhabit for most of her life. All is arid and destitute, every minute is spent waiting for a reprieve that never comes or, worse, a punishment ...

And yet, for anyone who has experienced the merest whisper of true depression or mental illness, her books ... are strangely reassuring and comforting. Reading them is like coming across a guide to a country you thought that only you had visited ... she writes as a true citizen of that strange interface between reality and hell.

An excerpt from Julia & The Bazooka, The Old Address.

Trigger warnings: depression, suicide.

Why am I locked in this nightmare of violence, isolation and cruelty? Since the universe only exists in my mind, I must have created the place, loathsome, foul as it is. I live alone in my mind, and alone I'm being crushed to suffocation, immured by the walls I have made. It's unbearable. I can't possibly live in this terrible, hideous, revolting creation of mine.

I can't die in it either, apparently. Demented, in utter frenzy, I rush madly up and down, hurl myself like a maniac into the traffic, bang my head with all my force against walls. Nothing changes. It makes no difference.

The horror goes on just the same. It was enough that the world seemed to me vile and hateful for it to be so. And so it will remain, until I see it in a more favorable light which means never.

Julia and The Basooka by Anna Kavan

#nsfw #depression #suicide #books #personal #journal

Just personal introspection.

Okay, like, look. Serious talk for a moment.

Well, maybe not super serious, we can call it like... I dunno, 72% serious? I like that.

So, 72% serious talk for a moment.

I'm hard to be friends with, I'm hard to befriend. I don't let people in much. So like... if I trust someone enough to get over fear, trust issues, all that stuffs, its kind of a big deal for me.

Which is why getting friend dumped sucks. I'm pretty empathic and ugh, a lot insecure about my value as a friend. So I like, jump to the conclusion that the issue is me when probably, it's just that some ppl are shitty assholes. I'm not entitled to anyone's time ofc, but it bothers me when they go full coward and sneaky ditch.

But... I'm learning. Maybe I'm not trash. Maybe it's not always something I did. Maybe being an empath is always going to suck for that, but maybe it’s okay to admit I did nothing wrong.

Weird. I like... 28% believe that. That”s progress.

I don’t have much to say beyond… I am sorry for all of those who have suffered bc I’m the way I am. I’m trying. I am.

TW: Death, Rage, Suicide

#poetry #writing #trauma

Rarely smiling, trialing surrender in this life of mine

Daring death to find me, getting pissed at every miss

“Why don't you try to open up” because you asshole, I'm not fine

You think you know me, fucker? Tell me:

What truths are hidden behind my eyes?

Did you see the fear I felt as I lay waiting there alone

Hospital sounds in full surround my life's future yet unknown

An unknown illness gripping me, my balance all askew

“Daft girl, it's just anxiety” Motherfucker, I will end you!

Did you feel my heart get torn apart as her life force slowly stilled

My anguished wail, me ripped asunder, my greatest fears fulfilled

“Well perhaps you'll find another” Bitch it took all I could to resist

To leave you with your blood unspilled, I was epochs passed 'just pissed'

Did you ever sense the truth behind “I like the work I do there”

Wonder why it was so easy to laugh at death missed by a few hairs?

Gods alive, I thought you'd know, I half wanted to be ended

Body broken, soul departed, flesh of mine all rended.

Did you not see my disappointment that I was just too hard to kill?

...

No

Because

I never

Told you.

…Oh.

“Were I with you I would remain silent; but since we are separated, I must write, or I shall die of grief.”

Kafka to Felice