A wonderful instance of a practical joke being taken way too far, only in a good way 😂 From SciShow episodes, to Time articles, to multiple hoax infomercials, references in video games, and full (fake) technical documentation, all spanning several decades, the tongue-in-cheek ribbing of techno-babble has clearly struck a nerve.

The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the panametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-deltoid type placed in panendermic semi-boloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible tremmie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the "up" end of the grammeters.

I largely agree with Peter's take on the loss of the slow, dusty web (and I mean that with the greatest admiration 😁). What I particularly enjoyed was the following dissection of the language used:

We used to have homepages. Homes on the Internet. Not profiles, no; profile is something the authorities make about you in dossier.

That, I can fully get behind.

A deep dive into the world of copyleft trolling and Creative Commons license abuse. I was unsurprised to see that automated systems are being used to target people with extortion rackets (similar to the old copyright trolling takes that seek damages via threats) but the honeypot schemes – photos being uploaded under CC licenses and then pinged for minor infringement – is a particular kind of vile.

The short answer is: only use images or material under CC 4.0 licenses, and if you share content under CC licenses update them to 4.0 ASAP. Really good to see Flickr are working on systems to make that as painless as possible 🙌

On how CC licenses can be abused:

The original version of the CC license stated that the license would “terminate automatically upon any breach.” That meant that if you failed to live up to the license terms in any substantial way, you were no longer a licensed user of the copyrighted work. Any uses you had made of that work were no longer permitted under the license, so unless you had another basis for using it (for example, if your use qualified as “fair use”), then you were now infringing copyright.

On the inherent evils of copyleft disputes:

The point of Creative Commons is to allow copyright holders to exercise their copyrights — specifically, to exercise their copyrights in a way that facilitates sharing and re-use. If you are a lawyer who responds to minor CC license errors with legal threats instead of requests for correction, then you are a predator in violation of your own code of professional ethics and you should be shunned by your peers for bringing the law into disrepute.

Shame on you.

There's a lot to love in this manifesto about the intersection of personal creativity and the web. I don't really subscribe to the nostalgia of the GeoCities era (I find these kinds of sites near impossible to look at, let alone read or navigate), but the Melon King (if that even is their real name 🤔) makes some good points, and makes them eloquently.

On the sanctuary afforded by personal websites:

Outside the storm of the web would rage, but within those walls it was always dusty and safe.

On the web everything is free and unlimited, but also independent and individual. On the web we all own infinite worlds, we are all kings and queens. It's an economy of creativity, the only limits are time and imagination.

All these social media and crypto people, they try to take that away from you because the only way they can make money is to put limits on infinity

On their driving philosophy and advice for new web creators:

Use your tools to make things, don't make things about your tools. Technology and the end result are in a dance, one can never lead the other too long.

Perfection is a flaw, consistency is a limitation and professionalism is a disaster. Everything should be an adventure and adventures start where the cracks in normality begin.

You never really own a site, they grow and change by their nature. As a webmaster, your job is to tend the site, you must never kill it or force it to be something it doesn't want to be.

New does not always mean better, sometimes old things remind us that there was a different path, and there still can be again.

You were never made to be in a bubble, and no one is self made.

I didn't know that people try to come up with "perfect New Yorker captions", sentences that can be added to any New Yorker cartoon and just work, but it's a fun idea. Frank's modern take is a particularly fun one, that captures a point in web history well (to think, when this all happened many still didn't know what LinkedIn was):

I'm also a general fan of this sentiment:

This went from a dumb idea I had on my commute to a real caption in the magazine in six days. Dumb fun moves fast

I saw Zach's poll on Twitter when they posted it, so I was intrigued to see what the results were. Most people agree with me, that URLs shouldn't have trailing slashes. It turns out that we're probably wrong, technically, but dammit it just looks better. A trailing slash implies additional content! I'm not even sure that I agree with Chris' take, though at least that distinction follows logic I can understand.

The important part, though, is what happened when Zach tested the different approaches:

Here’s what happens when a web browser makes a request to a URL representing this content:

/resource

✅ GitHub Pages, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages redirect to the trailing slash /resource/ as expected.

🟡 Warning: Vercel, Render, and Azure Static Web Apps: slashless /resource returns content but without redirects, resulting in multiple endpoints for the same content.

/resource/

✅ All hosts agree that /resource/ should return content from resource/index.html

💔 Warning: If you’re using relative resource URLs, the assets may be missing on Vercel, Render, and Azure Static Web Apps (depending on which duplicated endpoint you’ve visited).

<img src="image.avif"> on /resource/ resolves to /resource/image.avif

<img src="image.avif"> on /resource resolves to /image.avif

In other words, the greatest level of consistency for URLs, redirects, and relative paths is always a trailing slash. The impact (particularly for SEO) varies based on host, but it's always better to just accept that (for now) aesthetics have lost.

I also fully agree with this sentiment:

Ideally, (speaking as the maintainer of Eleventy) folks working on developer tooling should craft tools to create output that uses existing conventions and can be portable to as many hosts in as many different hosting environments as possible.

I've been enjoying They Can Talk for a while. It's a simple concept, executed extremely well: what would animals say if they could talk? Worth a read.

Several excellent tips on how to best setup, configure, or use Eleventy, all with excellent explanations. I particularly liked the breakdown of the data cascade model 👍

Daniel has created an extremely useful HTML template that includes most common elements, perfect for kickstarting a CSS design scheme, and all in a handy GitHub package.

What even is "whiteness". Is it skin colour? Not really. Genetics? Race precedes genetics or even evolution. A vague concept of "European" descent? What about Roma people, or (for a lot of history) Irish people. Or the reality that most "white identity" focuses on modern concepts that wouldn't have existed in pre-colonial Europe.

Or as Thought Slime puts it:

What is the one thing that all "white people" have in common that also excludes all people who aren't "white"?

NB: To caveat, these quotes are being taken wildly out of context and are normally prefaced or surrounded by very clear and fair couching. The video is in no way antagonistic and any potential problematic terminology or arguments are carefully discussed. I'm simply recording some of the core ideas that stuck with me, within that broader context. Nor is this making an argument that you cannot be proud of "white" culture, nor is it claiming that this isn't a thing. In other words, watch the video 😉

On the paradox of "white people" and the whole "why are white people like that", which is somehow something I (and many other white people) just agree with:

How come "white people" are a group that I somehow think I'm within, but also, seem to think that I'm entitled to judge from the outside. Something I'm inescapably a part of, but that I get to act like it doesn't define me or that I'm above it.

On genetic diversity and why it doesn't equate to race (certainly within the English language):

There is more genetic diversity in Africa than in any other part of the world, or between any other parts of the world combined.

On a useful definition of "whiteness":

Whiteness is the absence of racialisation, the process of attributing essential racial characteristics to groups of people. Whiteness is a category of exclusion and denotes nothing, but that the people who possess it are not part of one of the out groups that the white in-group has created. Essentially, to be white means to be not un-white, and also nothing else.

On white heritage and the paradox therein:

Sometimes [not great people] will claim that society if "biased against white people" because it's considered racist to be proud of being White, but not to be proud of being Black or Asian or what have you. And on the surface, that sounds like a double-standard, doesn't it... But you can be proud of being American without anyone giving you side-eye; you can be proud of being Canadian, or German, or Italian. Nobodies mad about your heritage.
But to be proud specifically of being part of the huge, vague assortment of cultures and peoples, whose only unifying connection is that none of them are part of the races we treated like dog shit historically, that's a little different, isn't it? The only thing that connects all white people, the only commonality between all of us, is racial privilege.

On what "white pride" really means:

So then, what common goals would a "white pride" movement works towards? If you believe White people must unify around our whiteness, what are we unifying against? Seems to me like we have it pretty good, actually. We already make the most money. We're less likely to be arrested for doing the same crimes, and if we are arrested we usually get a lighter sentence. What are we even fighting for?
The answer, whether or not these groups are willing to admit it, is the continuation of those privileges.

I had no idea that Tolkien ever considered a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, let alone one that had multiple revisions by the time of his death. This video into that potential book, with a draft title of The New Shadow, is a fascinating look into what could have been, but more so, it's a perfect example of why Tolkien's work is so timeless: as an author, he had a particularly impressive grasp of human nature, and a poetic turn of phrase that allowed him to express it in ways few others can manage.

It also hints at an inversion of one of the few criticisms often levied at LotR, which is that it is almost too optimistic about the goodness of men and too simplistic in its portrayal of good versus evil. I'm not sure I've ever fully agreed with that take (not with the books at least; the movies may warrant it), but the very fact that a sequel would have considered how "easily sated" Men are with peace and "good" (to paraphrase his comments), and imagined a world in which young Gondorians would have played at being Orcs or followed a (potentially) Black Numenorean into a new age of darkness, well, that's some pretty bleak and harrowing stuff. And a little too close-to-the-bone in modern times, with the rise of the Alt-Right and resurgence in Nazism and fascism more broadly. Honestly, there's a lot you can point to in Tolkien's work that can be explained by his lived experience with the Great War and WWII, but I think that this plot and the time in which it's set (within living memory, but only just, of the fall of Sauron) is too predictive to be anything other than genuine insight and understanding, which is cool, albeit terrifying.

I've always thought the utility of Tailwind was promising, but it bugged me that the way it worked was so counter to both best practices and the web stack's architecture. Well, introducing Open Props, a Tailwind-like set of importable design tokens that works entirely within CSS, using native functionality, and maintaining best practices 👏

I'm particularly impressed with the custom media queries. They only work with an additional plugin (I'm assuming a polyfill) for now, but they really highlight just how useful that spec will be once it's available. I'm particularly excited by the @media (--safariOnly) {...} syntax 😮