Port Angeles, day 1

Today I drove out to Port Angeles, which was pretty uneventful. I’d been deliberating whether to deal with the stress of driving South on I-5 through Tacoma or the stress of dealing with the ferry to Bainbridge, and decided to just go whichever route Siri put me on. She ended up doing a third option, using the Kingston ferry, which ended up being both a very pleasant drive to the terminal (aside from a couple of near misses due to construction changing the lanes in unanticipated ways) and a much faster option. I guess Apple Maps knows the ferry schedule and is able to just like… figure out what’s the best at any given time? Neat.

The Kingston ferry is also a lot shorter than the Bainbridge one, and I got lucky enough to have a very good view of the trip from my car; the whole thing got recorded on my dashcam, as well, which is perfect for a music video (and cover song) I’m going to be making over the next few days for Song Fight!.

Anyway I guess it turns out that it’s not that I’m bad with driving, I just don’t do well in downtown or South Seattle.

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Template refactoring

I’ve done a bunch of refactoring/simplification on my website templates. I think everything still works but if you see something funky, please let me know.

There’s also a lot more I need to fix, especially redoing the CSS to be cleaner and on the comics subsection (which has an entirely different set of templates that aren’t built on HTML5 semantic containers at all), but that can definitely wait.

(I also really want to redo novembeat at some point since I have a better idea of how to structure it now, but that also will wait.)

Still a ways to go

Things are definitely looking up right now, but we certainly aren’t out of the woods, and the fight is still to come.

Note: I am going to be discussing American politics here, which butts up against the comment policy. Keep in mind that this is my own personal site and not a public platform (so the first amendment doesn’t apply), and neither bigotry nor conspiracy theories will be tolerated, regardless of which “side” you’re on.

Also I’m just some random software engineer with a blog and a tendency to ramble and no real background or credentials in politics. Take this for what it’s worth.

Read more… (CW: US politics)

💬 (no title) Notes

In reply to: IWC East invite

Fluffy, I’m curious if you have time to do us all the kindness to deliver a 15-20 minute keynote on the topic of your choosing for the upcoming IndieWebCamp East 2020 on Saturday, November 14, 2020 some time between 10 and 11 am Eastern? Given the online nature of the camp it will take place via Zoom to an international audience and, as usual, will be recorded for posterity.

Oh, wow, thank you for the invitation, but I’ll have to decline, as the timing doesn’t really work for me, between traveling that week and also being in Pacific time.

I could possibly record something in advance instead, if that’s okay, although I’m spread a bit thin right now and I don’t think I could commit to that either.

Ugh no I need to get off nortriptyline

Nortriptyline helps me with pain and brain stuff but it also has been making my blood pressure steadily go up. These problems I’m having are a repeat of why I tried getting off of it the last time around. Constant dizziness and headaches and tinnitus and feeling like crap.

I appreciate how much it helps me with my anxiety and my insomnia and pain, but I need something else.

Nortriptyline updates

I’ve been at 30mg of nortriptyline for 6 days now, and I’m trying to figure out if this is how I felt on it before. Going through my nortriptyline tag I see that I actually was up to 40mg on my initial tapering, and after sitting there for a while I decided it wasn’t doing enough for my pain and that’s when I tapered down to 20. In one entry I complained that it wasn’t helping my sleep at all, and how it was making me constantly dizzy and tired and headachey.

This time around it’s definitely helping my sleep, and I’m not dizzy, although I am quite tired (despite actually getting a full 8 hours of sleep every night, for once!) and today I had a headache all day. Also plenty of nausea. But at least I got a nice long walk in.

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💬 Re: What if a website were only accessible by assistive technology? Notes

In reply to: Re: What if a website were only accessible by assistive technology?

Manuel Matuzović shares a thought-provoking experiment: the sample page accompanying his article “Accessible to some” has been optimized for screenreader software only, making it a hellish experience for users using the visual interface with a mouse.

The example website would be a clever illustration, except that it doesn’t actually work with VoiceOver on macOS (on Safari it just reads the visible text, and while Firefox does a bit better it stops after reading the first chunk of text and doesn’t proceed), nor with the built-in screen reader in macOS Safari.

Using aria labels to override the text is a poor approach to making plain text documents screen-readable; a better approach would have been to do all of the obnoxious stuff purely through CSS, which would also allow this page to work in, say, lynx | say or the like.

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Season 3

So, this isn’t a spoilers post at all, it’s just some gushing about how amazing the final season of Kipo was. It’s a perfect ending to the series, and I’m glad that Kipo was able to tie everything up so well.

What’s frustrating about it was apparently the showrunners had to guess about Netflix’s intentions and, as such, they decided to make the first three seasons as a self-contained arc rather than risk cancellation in the middle. Which Netflix ended up doing anyway.

If Netflix would just like say “Hey, your show is great but we’re not going to keep it going past this next season, so please wrap it up,” like, okay, that still sucks, but at least it lets the shows end properly. Unlike so many of their other shows where they take a wait-and-see approach and then cancel it after leading the show creators along about whether there’s a future for it.

Anyway. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is not a show that’s going to disappoint by being cut off before it gets a chance to end. So, if you were enjoying it, please finish enjoying it.

Meanwhile, tthe creators' hope is that if the show gets enough attention, Netflix will bring it back for a second arc because they have many ideas for future stories in the setting, and that would be fabulous.

Also, I had no idea it was originally a webcomic; from the archive.org mirror it looks like it originally got two chapters before it was picked up by Dreamworks. And it was also rather different! I hope Sechrist picks it up again.