January-March 2022 Archive

10 March 2022

I have tattoos.

And I'm damn proud of them.

I've decided to remove the W3C validator link from the bottom of this page. Not that my XHTML isn't valid, mind you, but the W3C just recently started engaging in some dumbassery that severely compromises the accessibility of their tool:

• http://validator.w3.org/ now mandatorily redirects to https://validator.w3.org/, which doesn't work at all in older browsers (or the newest browsers capable of running on older operating systems) due to a backwards-incompatible TLS implementation.
• When clicking on the validator link, I'm no longer presented with validated output. I'm now redirected to a Cloudflare-hosted interstitial page that thumbs its nose unless JavaScript is enabled and run.
• If I manually validate an HTML file by file upload, I'm now thrown a "403 Forbidden" error half the time I try to do so.

Too bad. Over the last 25 years, the W3C validator had been a rock of stability in an unstable web.

7 February 2022 (709 March 2020?)

When I'm distressed about the state of the world, I create.

Three weeks ago in this space, I farcically said...

You can probably guess what happened next. Never say "Nah," folks!

16 January 2022 (687 March 2020?)

• Slowly but surely, the endgame of everything I've been focused on for the last five years is near:

  

• I've been triple-vaxxed...since, you know, one of the most important lessons I learned in West Virginia (lost on the rest of its populace) was that all people should be vaccinated, with no exemptions whatsoever, because we're all in on this together.

• Religious affiliation in Canada is at an all-time low...and the trend has accelerated since the mid-2010s, just like in the US. Here's a mediocre article about this, which glosses over the real reasons people are bailing from the pews (Christianity being wed at the hip to sadistic, amoral policies of homophobia, white supremacy, misogyny, authoritarianism, climate and health science denial, insurrection, and the ghoulish cult of D*n*ld Tr*mp, anyone?) and presents the decline of churches as though this were a problem, rather than a positive. But it still has this gem of a quote in it:

  "Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, who teaches sociology at the University of Waterloo, has been tracking changes to Canada's religious landscape for years. However, she subverts the question of decline: 'I say, 'Why were so many people involved with Christianity?' rather than saying, 'Why are so few involved now?''"

  Canada has always been a few steps ahead of the States on secularization and liberalization...but I wonder how long it will take before more tangible efforts at dismantling the country's Christian privilege come to fruition. Ending Ontario's provincially-funded Catholic school system would be a great leap on that front.

• At long last, I've updated my semi-embarrassing Third Eye Blind fansite (the front page of it, anyway) to reflect on that band's post-2000 devolution. Which is a shame, really...since for a time in the late '90s, they were pure magic.

  Should I do a search-and-replace, and turn it into a semi-embarrassing Walk the Moon fansite? ...Nah.

• Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I now know that there were at least two people in PikeView High School's Class of 2003 who weren't straight. This made my year.