Weeknotes 29

I had grand plans for this post, involving intricate artwork, interesting layouts, and bold colours, but—I lack the willpower to execute on them, this time around. Instead, here we shall have: several straight-forward lists, covering the events of the last month or so, which is a period of time universally acknowledged to be basically the same as “a week,” hence this qualifies as “a weeknote.” Thank you.

Today (recently) I learned

CSS counter-style

Apparently, we can use CSS counter-style and symbols to style unordered lists—wow technology!! I’ve been styling my <ul> list markers with pseudo elements for years, but no longer!!

For example, instead of:

ul {
  list-style-type: none;
}
li::before {
  content: '→';
}

I can now do:

@counter-style ul-primary {
  system: cyclic;
  symbols: '→';
  suffix: '';
}
ul {
  list-style-type: ul-primary;
}

Very cool!!!

CSS round()

I realized that having decimal places in some of my font sizes can render weirdly on Windows:

But I can use round() (which is baseline 2024!) to round it to the nearest whole pixel:

p { 
  --font-size-sm: 0.85em;
  font-size: round(var(--font-size-sm), 1px); 
}

GSAP

I always feel like such a fucking idiot who doesn’t know how to web development—do I look like I know what a java script is?—and I feel especially embarrassed about being late to cobbling together some GSAP basics. It’s cool! I enjoy it! One of these days, surely, I will use it to make something interesting.

Works in progress (forever until I die)

Weeknotes concept

I feel hesitant to share early WIPs because there’s a good chance I’ll never finish them and it’s kind of embarrassing (hey, remember that things I’m working on post from last summer? lol?), but I was excited about this so I posted it on Mastodon anyway—

The idea is: weeknotes, but it’s fashion. Recapping stuff within the framing of outfits and style: what was I wearing at this time? What was my character wearing? What was the fashion of [insert media here]?

I’ve been looking at a lot of fashion illustration lately and I’ve been wanting to do some kind of fashion/OOTD thing for a long time. Hopefully this will go somewhere! I had planned it to be the basis of this weeknotes post (this is the aforementioned “grand plans”), but alas, it’ll be a future thing.

Podcasts page

I’m starting to listen to podcasts, which means of course I have to build a new page for it.

Site redesign

I’m still chugging along with my site’s version 7 redesign. It’s very slow going, because I have so many dang pages and also aspirations for writing better CSS, which is kind of an obstacle when I’m not particularly good at CSS. But we’ll get there! Lol!

Visiting the Bay

I visited the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time! It was a mostly spontaneous trip and I met up with a bunch of internet friends.

I got to eat good food, visit some pretty museums, and sit in highway traffic. I saw a cybertruck for the first time. (Cringe, gross, fuck that.) I saw all sorts of other cringe AI ads. I went to In-n-Out! I took a bunch of pictures, which I would like to compile into a future blog post, but as we all know, I said that last year about Portland and here I am, sans blog post.

Here are a few photos:

Links for u

• Atkinson Hyperlegible Font by Braille Institute
• Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when we treat the past like a stock library in It’s Nice That
• Moving on from 18F. by Ethan Marcotte — there are innumerable sad and angering things going on in the US government right now. Ethan writes about his experience with it here:

  In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.

• The Natural System of Colours recreation by Nicholas Rougeux
• Oh No Type fonts are now on Adobe Fonts!! I’m using some here: Swear Text and Display (the serif body font), and Covik Sans and Mono (the sans serif and monospace fonts).
• On Making a Book #2: How to make anything ever by Madeleine Jubilee Saito — I adore this. It’s a short comic about how constraints can help free you to do the work (whatever it may be), because the horror of the infinite abyss can be paralyzing. I relate to it a lot.
• Pokémon Type Calculator updates by Sage (wavebeem) — Sage makes such cool things and they’re always writing about those cool things!!
• Using Figma to design perfect gallery walls by Henry From Online
• StreamOf.me by Fractal Kitty

  What is the mathematics of self and how does observing, hypothesizing, and experimenting change you?

• 365 Projects, compiled by Florian Ziegler — nice to see them all compiled here! I need some kind of regularly scheduled creative habit…

Media for me

• I listened to my first audio dramas: Batman Unburied, and its spin-off series The Riddler: Secrets in the Dark. I also rewatched The Batman.
  • Both feature the Riddler, and while I wasn’t terribly interested in his character in The Batman, I found him really compelling in Batman Unburied.
  • Batman Unburied starts off quite spooky and I couldn’t listen to it at night, so I also started Batman: The Audio Adventures, which is much more comedic. I’m slowly getting through it.
  • I enjoyed The Batman a lot more this time around, now that I’m invested in the character and world. I adore this version of weird, awkward Bruce.
• I’ve been listening to a bunch of Japanese music lately—some recent favourites are Elf (エルフ) by Ado, Otonoke by Creepy Nuts (DAN DA DAN opening), and Pathfinder (先駆者) by Hoshimachi Suisei.
• I also like the new Lady Gaga music video, and drew one of the frames:

I’m not watching Severance (never seen any of it) but every single person in the world has told me to, so. Eventually. Though I feel irrationally resistant to it now that I’ve been recommended it so much. I have tried to mute the hell out of it though so I don’t get spoiled for whatever is going on for when I do get around to it.

Destiny 2

I regret to inform you that, once again, Destiny is good, which is great news for sickos (like me) but also terrible news for people who need to touch grass (like me).

But actually—Nether, the current seasonal activity, is fantastic, and the Sundered Doctrine dungeon is cool! The Barrow-Dyad exotic mission is interesting but also the most horrible environment I’ve ever seen in the game (it is…hole…) and I never want to do it again. I got jumpscared by a giant stabby knife! Fuck that!!!

Hourly Comic Day

Another year, another Hourly Comic Day on February 1! I think this is the first year I’ve broken out of a uniform, boxy panel structure—not that this new paneling is particularly interesting, but I’ve been doing hourlies for some ten-odd years (!) and I haven’t tried to deviate until now.

(Read: 2024)

A birthday

Say happy birthday to the first Tumblr theme I ever published, ten years ago on February 13, 2015. She’s part of what kickstarted me into my current career, as one of the first times I took web design seriously as more than just a hobby for myself.