Category: Pulverbatch

Pedagogues and Mountebanks

August 5, 2010 /

This is pretty spectacular.

“I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.“

That’s an excerpt from Erica Goldson’s valedictory address, which she wrote and issued earlier this year. Read the whole thing: it’s brief but convincing.

I wasn’t first in my class, but I was close, and I was aware of many of the issues Goldson raises even then–though less concerned, at a more self-centered time in my life, and mostly just happy that they were working in my favor. (Another thing we had in common: the textbook inspirational English teacher.) I’m less complacent these days, less willing to accept the cruel theater of fear and shame that we expect smart young people to suffer with piety. Our schools are bad, and their splash damage is everywhere.

I’m not sure what use I can be to education reform right now. It’s one of those issues that is never urgent but always important, and I need to figure out a path to involving myself in the cause. Erica Goldson’s example seems like a good start.

My friend Joe is committing some thoughtcrime

July 22, 2010 /

And he’s doing a Kickstarter thing to fund the print run. It’s a game called Perfect, and it’s one of the best, most effective story games I’ve ever played: a Clockwork Orange-meets-Fahrenheit 451-meets-actual Victorian evil premise that the mechanics support to a startling degree. Playing it, you find yourself alternately drawn toward becoming a violent enemy of the state, and seduced by power like a guard in the Stanford prison experiment. It’s a nasty game, and I really, really like it. Joe talks more about it here.

If you’re interested by this kind of thing, you should chip in $5! If Joe meets his goal, you get a PDF of the game, and if he doesn’t, you get your money back (well, technically, it never even leaves your account).

July 13, 2010 /

After seeing it on LJ a couple times, I put some stuff from my blogs into the I Write Like tool. Different NFD entries came back as Stephen King, Douglas Adams and (oh God) Dan Brown. Anacrusis consistently gets tagged as Margaret Atwood.

I was prepared to disclaim this whole post, but I cannot argue with that at all. “The world’s longest-running Atwood microhomage” is a painfully accurate description of Anacrusis. You win, Mémoires.

Pathetic

July 7, 2010 /

Hey, remember how the Washington Post took down a president thirty-five years ago? They’re still riding on that little laurelmobile, and yet their current policy, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, is to censor themselves based on the likelihood of an argument from the administration. The merit of that argument is never even considered. Cameron W. Barr:

“After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding.”

Coates says these are the compromises one makes for a marriage. He’s right, and there was a shotgun-equivalent at the wedding, namely the threat of access withheld. Even Coates’s own house is a bit glassy in this regard, with Atlantic Political Editor Marc Ambinder bouncing around in castles with the Bidens. (Yes, castles. I’m not sure these people know what symbolism is.)

Among the biggest exposés of the past year was Matt Hastings’ infamous McChrystal article, published in Rolling Stone, of all places. Hastings is a freelance reporter whose highest-profile work was in covering the Iraq war for Newsweek, yet his piece ended up in Rolling Stone, which has spent the past decade sucking heartily on anything you have available.

The loudest media reaction to that article was not “oh hey, there’s dissension in the highest ranks of our government about the running of the longest war in American history,” it was “how could he risk losing his access?” When our military actually murders journalists, the people who tell us about it get arrested; meanwhile, news outlets are astonished at the use of journalistic currency to actually do it for a change.

This is the junkie’s mindset–I can’t do anything they wouldn’t like with it, or they might take it away! Access generates pageviews, and pageviews sell ads, and ad sales are an addiction as hard to kick as heroin or oil. This is what I was trying to say in my post about comments last month: a race for the bottom is a race we lose.

90% of the links I send to the team mailing list at work are sourced from Daring Fireball, though

June 15, 2010 /

Standard boilerplate about not necessarily buying everything in the article I’m about to link, but:

“Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.”

Yes, yes, infinite yes. It’s an iron rule. I know they drive pageviews, but if your business model relies on sacrificing the level of discourse to achieve pageviews, you’re in a bad business.

I, of course, have cleverly routed around this problem by never becoming popular, but this is the reason I’ll never turn on the comments on this blog or Ommatidia. (I honestly can’t remember why they’re on at the CHK, but that website is not a sole proprietorship.) The technology of blog comments is a net negative for the human race. If you want to talk publicly about a blog article, do it in your goddamn blog.

iPhone icon gloss overlay in pure CSS

June 10, 2010 /

As part of a Not Very Secret Project, I’ve been poking around at how the iPhone picks and generates icons for sites that you bookmark to your home screen (I only learned about Apple touch icons earlier this afternoon). Apparently, unless you specify otherwise, it applies a glossy overlay to that icon when it gets clipped out.

A lot of people seem to hate that gloss, but there are some ways out there to replicate it, mostly using a PNG overlay. I thought it might be interesting to try and get the same effect using pure CSS (note that this probably won’t work if you’re reading this post via syndication; click through to the original to see it). I am indebted to Neven Mrgan’s PSD replication, which I used for comparison purposes.

So here’s a plain 57×57 touch icon:

And here it is with the gloss, which is put together with Webkit and Mozilla border-radius and CSS gradients:

It’s not perfect–browsers don’t let you specify blending modes for shadows and highlights, and the antialiasing on gradients is still a little wonky–but it works at least as well as an image overlay, and now I get to feel superior for doing it with code instead of sprites.

The CSS in question:

 #glossy-icon {
	width: 57px;
	height: 57px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 8px;
	-moz-border-radius: 8px;
	background-image: -webkit-gradient(radial, 28.5 -47, 0, 28.5 0, 700, 
		from(rgba(255,255,255,1)), to(rgba(255,255,255,0)),
		color-stop(10%, rgba(255,255,255,0.2)),
		color-stop(10.5%, rgba(140,140,140,0.2)),
		color-stop(13%, rgba(140,140,140,0)),
		color-stop(13.7%, rgba(255,255,255,0)),
		color-stop(17%, rgba(255,255,255,1))), url(http://www.xorph.com/images/ba-icon.png);
	background-image: -moz-radial-gradient(28.5px -47px 45deg, circle farthest-side, 
		rgba(255,255,255,1) 0%, 
		rgba(255,255,255,0.2) 72%, 
		rgba(140,140,140,0.3) 74.5%, 
		rgba(140,140,140,0) 85%,
		rgba(255,255,255,0) 95%,
		rgba(255,255,255,1) 160%), url(http://www.xorph.com/images/ba-icon.png);
}