I publish my fiction and run a blog at starbreaker.org. The blog doesn't have a fixed theme, just a lot of rants. My most recent post was about finally getting the Kindle edition for my first novel removed almost five years after the publisher went out of business.

I just bashed out a post about how it sucks that HTML doesn't have an element for loading snippets of HTML containing commonly used shit like nav menus, footers, etc..

You might be thinking of HTML imports, which had only ever been implemented in Chrome and was kinda worthless on its own; you needed to use JS to take full advantage of it. It was removed from Chrome in 2020 because other browsers didn't adopt it and it didn't become part of the standard.

That's how HTML imports were implemented, at least according to Google's documentation.

I'm OK with blaming the JS Mafia. They're no friends of mine.

I think so too, but the reason I'm not using PHP myself isn't that I want to do things client-side. It's because I want to do everything before uploading to the server in the first place. Shell scripts and CLI tools like sed, awk, hxincl, and hxtoc make that possible. I have a lot of variables in my pages, and populating them with sed lets me do it once before uploading instead of once every request with PHP.

As elitist as this sounds, a lot of web developers don't know anything but JavaScript. It's their hammer, so everything looks like a nail to them. They might not know how to do anything server-side. Many of them have no clue how much they can do with just HTML and CSS. They still haven't gotten the memo about how HTML5 gives you form validation for free.

And I just got an email from somebody who can't understand why none of my links use JS. Uhm, because that's been basic HTML since 1989? You kinda can't have hypertext without hyperlinks?

I think that's just part of the "party like it's 1999" aesthetic. Frame/iframe abuse was rampant on the original Geocities, too. Not to mention Tripod, Angelfire, and theglobe.com. I was there.

You're welcome. BTW, I've got a little JS to automatically open details boxes on desktop machines.

window.addEventListener("load", windowLoadEventHandler);

function windowLoadEventHandler() {
  openDetailsOnDesktop();
}

function openDetailsOnDesktop() {
  var isFinePointer = window.matchMedia("(pointer:fine)").matches;

  if (isFinePointer) {
    const details = document.querySelector("details");
    details.setAttribute("open", "");
  }
}

This is progressive enhancement; if JS isn't available on a desktop machine the details boxes use their default behavior.

These are your major semantic tags:

• header

• main

• section

• nav

• aside

• article

• footer

On browsers that don't support HTML5, these tend to be treated as divs, and you can still apply ids and CSS classes to them. There's nothing stopping you from using divs inside them, either.

If you want to do responsive multi-column layouts, you might want to look into using CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid. Or you can party like it's 1999 and use table-based layouts. They still work OK. The cool kids might not like it, but it's your website. Do it your way.

They want everything and everybody to be as boring and banal as they themselves are. That way they won't have to accept that they're a bunch of fucking losers.

Speaking of which, I've talked to quite a few of these clowns at my day job, and the ones closest to being WASPs tend to agree with statements like, "This is America; we speak English here." They don't get that if cultures blend into one in the melting pot, that means whatever distinct culture they possess gets assimilated into the mix, too.

And I'm going to stop there because this forum isn't the place for a diatribe about how whiteness is self-inflicted cultural erasure.

I've got to admit that I don't think much of Star Wars, but I first read Dune as a kid, after seeing the David Lynch movie. Didn't quite get it at first, but it rewarded multiple readings.

I'm gonna have to see if that's available via streaming. If not, maybe I can find a copy at Port Royal.

More pretentious than Yngwie Malmsteen?

Also, it looks like I can watch this on Apple TV or Prime Video, but only if I pay an additional rental fee on top of the existing subscription. Guess I'll bootleg it.

I pay for shit on the internet all the time. But if I want to get nickeled and dimed I'll go to the doctor. If you're charging me a monthly fee for a streaming video service, and want to paywall certain videos or insert ads, I'm not going to put up with it. Why should I?

Everything on my blog is Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, so you don't need my permission to link, quote, or even reproduce posts there as long as you provide attribution, aren't making money off it, and are releasing under the same terms; I granted permission in advance by using a CC license.

So, I bashed this out on my lunch break today: Digital Relationships; or, How I Met My Wife and Why I Might Not Try That Again

Well, it took me all fugging month to get around to writing mine.

It's the sort of procrastination that occasionally served me well in school.

I have some things to say about this in a post called "Storming Heaven". I tried to go easy on the Romantic Satanism, but the older I get the more I realize that that's my fundamental vibe.

I'm glad you liked it. I just kinda started ranting on my lunch break. It got a bit spicy, but so was my lunch.

Done. I CC'ed you on the email. Hope you don't mind.

I'm not part of the Lainchan webring, and TBH I've been avoiding Agora Road and adjacent-spaces; they remind me more of 4chan than I find comfortable since I never particularly liked chan culture.

I'd love to see what you think of these nuances either in this post or a follow-up. No obligation, though.

I try not to be dogmatic, and try not to impose my preferences on others as prescriptions. But this popular attitude that tech is somehow separating us from human nature and from Nature has been bugging me for a long time.

It was definitely different. For one thing, no such thing as Tinder, etc. I think OKCupid was around back then, but I never used it. And it certainly wasn't respectable. I'm not sure it's really respectable today, either; it's just more common. It seems more superficial, though. When I did it, my wife and I actually got to know each other a bit before exchanging pictures.

Yes, we're definitely opposed on these points. For one thing, I don't believe in salvation at least as defined by Christians. To me, that means being forgiven for being human, since no human is inherently good enough for God. Well, fuck God. We're the potter's clay, and if the potter isn't pleased for his work that's his problem.

As for overstaying one's welcome, I think I never had a welcome to overstay. I never felt wanted or welcomed, or like I belonged anywhere. If anything, I am the price of my parents' selfishness. They just had to have intercourse instead of making do with sodomy.

I didn't ask to be here, but now that I am here I'm going to make the most of it. While I might have done most of what I thought I wanted to do as a young man, I am not ready to reach my conclusion yet, or go gently into the night. If we can't go together, I'd rather outlive my wife than leave her to grieve over me. There's always another book to read, another band to discover, another movie to watch, another lover to kiss, and another mountain to climb. If that means fighting to the bitter end, or for as long as I can still muster the strength and orneriness to do so, then that's what I'll do. And if I could gain limited physical immortality and not be subject to further aging or degenerative disease, I'd do it without a moment's hesitation and be damned to anybody who objects.

I'm good at ranting, evidently, and I can bullshit with the best of any Ivy League liberal arts major. It's been a while since I've been able to belt out fiction this quickly or easily, though. But maybe I should write blog posts, emails, etc from my characters' viewpoints and go hypertextual and epistolary. It's not like I don't write in a setting where almost everybody is computer-literate, by which I mean they can cope with a UNIX login prompt and know how to access and read man pages.

My understanding is that it is not necessarily love but attachment (to people, to material possessions, to one's place in the world) that hinders one's journey toward moksha/nirvana/enlightenment. Maybe I'm thinking of Buddhism rather than Hinduism, but one of the central characteristics of both the Buddha and the bodhisattvas is love, or at least compassion.

All the time. Patience is not a virtue that comes naturally to any of us. Some of us just have an easier time cultivating it.

Even I would not suggest that one can have a digital marriage. I got married because that was the easiest way for me to be with her, for us to live together on a permanent basis instead of having to make do with a week or two together whenever we can save up some money and get time off of work.

If my wife had left me and stayed away long enough, trying to maintain a marriage over the internet, I would demand that she either return home or let me go. I agreed to monogamy. I didn't sign up for celibacy or solitude. I could have stayed single if either appealed. Likewise, if I had to live apart from my wife for work, and never came home, I'd have no right to expect her to stick around. She didn't sign up for celibacy or solitude, either.

//quote#10//

You might recall that in my own post on digital relationships I expressed scant sympathy for people engaging in 'romantic' relationships with Replika chatbots or RealDolls equipped with ChatGPT.

I just spent the last two hours writing a response to your last post, only to have this site eat it. Because even in the future nothing works.

That's what I get for not pasting posts into Emacs and then hitting "reply" once I'm done editing my response offline. I'm not sure much of genuine value was lost, since I was still pushing what is basically the Gurren Lagann "Row! Row! FIGHT DA POWAH!" worldview but with marginally greater eloquence and significantly greater verbosity, so I'll settle for addressing this last point.

Is it really that ironic that I prefer to lurk on MelonLand instead of Agora Road? I say lurk because I don't post there that often. As I implied in my digital relationships post, the persona I project on my website is not my totality. I might manscape with this edge, but I've got room in my life for rainbows and unicorns and fluffy kittens named Wyld Butt Stallyon, too. After all, a unicorn can still gore you if you get too close, and kittens have sharp claws and haven't yet learned restraint in their use. =^.^=

I'm still cultivating discipline myself.

If I cannot be my own master and captain my own soul, there is no shortage of people who are no more than my equals who would happily stand as admiral over mine.

Here's a new post: Hacker News, Again.

I didn't think it was you, and I don't mind having links shared elsewhere. But HN leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm not convinced that anybody hanging out on web forums knows fuck-all about increasing virility. I sure as hell don't.

I was angsty too as a teen, but I had grown up doing duck 'n cover drills in the friggin' 1980s. And I never let my angst lead me to become a reactionary. Though there was a time when I found Ayn Rand appealing. For about a week between having finished Anthem and The Fountainhead. Reading Atlas Shrugged cured me. (I read the whole book. Even that long-ass chapter where John Galt shows Fidel Castro how to monologue.)