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We still haven't decided on a process for transferring an essay in a text editor to our website. We've been using LibreOffice Writer, exporting the essay as an HTML document, and then stripping all the paragraphs of their formatting so they can be formatted by our CSS when we insert the essay into the page template. The XHTML and XML exports don't seem much cleaner. It's probably better to just paste the plain text and format it manually, but we would have to get used to linking the endnotes ourselves. It feels like formatting it manually would take more time but it probably doesn't.

Branch 1 could still use some tweaking to make it more readable. It's hard to decide what changes to make without overwriting the color palette and formatting for a set that's already known to work. The other branches don't have as many large blocks of text, so there was less thought involved in their palettes. Branch 1 might actually be the least readable of all the branches because of how much text is in it. It should work with reader modes or extensions most on browsers but it's preferable to not depend on that.

This guide recommends tweaking line length, contrast, white space, alignment, font size and font style. The line length is about 91 characters. Contrast is the biggest issue because light on dark text is usually harder to read for longer periods of time. Giving main content a different color and background might help but it might also look odd compared to the rest of the theme.

We decided to go with the complicated answer and make a palette-switching button. The page should appear in night mode by default and the button switches between palettes. That should hopefully make the essays easier to read without sacrificing the first impression of the theme. It needs more work before it's added to all of branch 1 but it was a good learning opportunity. We haven't done much with JavaScript in a long time.

The white space was increased too. Might as well.

On that note, the essay is here with the day/night button in the top right.

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Thoughts

• We're probably not even going to be able to write an essay out of our notes relating to Lion Kimbro's book. we may just post the notes by themselves.
• We should redo our organization for writings or add another section for things unrelated to personal experiences.
• The effects in Electric Zine Maker are fun. Having multiple templates and export options is also very handy.
• Working on a blog post and two essays at the same time might be a bit too much.
• In other news, Othercon was fun! The conversations were entertainingly chaotic and the panels were interesting. We got to most of the ones we wanted to see.
• We said in our last blog post that topic journals don't work for us. That's not quite true, because we each journal in different ways. Some of us have thoughts in different files but we tend to collect them into one file per person if it's accessed frequently so it doesn't take long for someone to write what they want to write and move on. People who write less often have their files more scattered about.
• Remembering multiple things at once is hard. Write one thing down, you want to expand on it so you don't forget what it means, and then putting more thought into it makes you forget everything else...
• We've been listening to depressive breakcore and atmospheric drum & bass to focus. A lot of ambient, lo-fi and game soundtrack music makes good background music but those two genres specifically seem to be the best for being energetic while giving us nothing specific to focus on. Some of us do prefer to use softer music or start off with a slower song because of how jarring some of the songs can be, though.
• Are.na is an interesting site and it does seem helpful for finding new things to explore without getting caught up with social media's usual issues, but it's probably not a site we could get into.
• We want to redo our about page to give it a new layout. It's possibly the part of the website that we've spent the least amount of time on even though it may be the first page after the index that someone sees. It feels like it deserves to be more interactive.
• Shared and non-shared dreams are weird. We still don't really know how that works.
• There are some small parts of formatting we can never seem to agree on.
• It might be best to aim for updating the blog around once a month. We've had this blog post for a while but we can be picky about what we choose for our main topic.

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Things

• "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think" by Lion Kimbro in 2003 and a visual summary by Sacha Chua in 2013
  • Remember: There are two types of thought- intentional, and incidental. This writing process- this is mostly intentional. The framework I am writing to you is from my INCIDENTAL analysis. I collected speeds (incidental), a few POI’s (intentional), mapped them out, and almost the Entire Structure of this book is based on the resulting structure. However, that structure isn’t everything. You also have to “reach out” with your thought. As I write and expand this, I am also “reaching out.”
  • Chaos is just papers that have hoards of thoughts on them with no obvious subject placement, or that are so hopelessly beyond recovery (or take so LONG to recover) that you might likely just throw it out, but that you’d like to give it “one last chance”. After staring at it for a while, though, you decide, “Nah. Toss it.” And you do. Or you don’t. I’ve occasionally found a jewel in there. Whatever you like.
  • Our notes on this got way too long, if we don't finish cleaning them up in the future we'll just put them in the main topic of another blog post and link this post or something
• Bonfire is an in-progress Fediverse app that aims to be customizable. It looks like an interesting project.
• SCP-5031
• sixey.es dream wiki is made of text and some minor styling. The color palettes look pretty. The page styling is random every time you open one, so you can see the same page a few different ways by refreshing.
• Orca programming language for music
• White Tail webcomic
• "Take Your Time" short story
• "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK" is an interactive zine about trauma.
• These Tweets about Structural Dissociation Theory and the history of the term DID, based on this article where the person who put it in the DSM says he did so because he doesn't believe plurality exists.
  • "The Haunted Self: A Detailed Review" on Dreamwidth for more about structural dissociation theory
• This (intentionally) badly designed form you can challenge yourself to filling out quickly.
• "two stats" is a Neocities page that gives you two random RPG stats when you refresh.
• Style Tiles is a free PSD template for efficiently getting across web design ideas.
• "Open-Source Insulin: Biohackers Aiming For Distributed Production"
• "Razer bug lets you become a Windows 10 admin by plugging in a mouse"
• The microCOVID Project estimates how much risk there is of getting COVID in a situation.
• "Why Some Socially Liberal Gen-Z Voters Aren't Leaving the GOP"
• "Fan is a Tool-Using Animal" is the maker of Pinboard's experience interacting with fans to make the website work for them as someone with little experience with fandom.
  • "Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I could not believe what I was seeing. It was like a mirror world to YouTube comments, where several dozen anonymous people had come together in love and harmony to write a complex, logically coherent document, based on a single tweet."
  • "How the Tech Sector Could Move In One Direction" is a related talk. It's about how many women learn how to use technology through fandom but they don't feel able to apply that knowledge to jobs because society considers fandom hobbies "lesser" for being associated with teenage girls.
  • "I realised that I was spending all this time trying to think about how to engage women with technology, and I was ignoring the fact they already were. They were essentially already video editors, graphic designers, community managers. They were teaching each other CSS to make their tumblr themes look more gorgeous, and they were using Chrome extensions in anger to make tumblr do what they wanted. These were basically front end developers, social media managers, they were absolutely immersed in technology, every day, and we weren’t paying attention, because they were doing it in service of something we don’t care about."
• "Protests and Power" compares protests and elections in Hong Kong and the USA.
• "An Interview With Anarchist Yondae"
  • "What we see people should learn from Korean anarchism is how easy anarchism can destroy itself when colluding with the horrendous mutants of totalitarianism, such as statism or nationalism."
  • "Seeing that even though Korean Anarchism is destroyed, the Anarchist mass is more vivid than ever. We believe that people can learn that anarchism does not exist in some enlightened brains, or in some kind of revolutionary books, but in the vivid life and action of the masses."
• "How to make a zine"
• 52 Portraits of Trans Men
• "Template Zine"
  • "The publication is an examination of life as a template-based experience. It points out ways we systematize human life, from naming our children to online dating to death rituals."
• "The Thoughts of a Spiderweb" is about how spiders might outsource some of their processing to their web in order to minimize the amount of resources they need to put into their brain.
• The Touch of Sunlight webcomic
• "Digital Blackface?" is a video essay about the origins of minstrelsy and how its tropes are reflected in modern culture.