With Terry Crews, Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel, Mel B., Simon Cowell
Dear God, what am I doing with my life?!
Fortunately, I spent a lot of time while watching doing other things around the house…
Month: January 2019
👓 AT&T wireless CEO on fake 5G complaints: ‘that makes me smile’ | The Verge
"Every company is guilty of building a narrative of how you want the world to work."
👓 I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone | Motherboard
T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.
👓 High demand from retirees to live on campus at Arizona State University I InsideHigherEd
A sold-out housing complex for senior citizens on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus sparks a conversation about whether universities are doing enough to engage with older people.
👓 Used Clothing Floods Beacon’s Closet, Courtesy of Netflix’s “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” | The New Yorker
👓 I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman | Time
At every step of a fairly typical pregnancy for a black woman in the U.S., I was rendered an incompetent subject with exceptional needs.
I just don’t have words.
If you’re feeling depressed and angry though, I invite you to continue on with some stories I can’t help but collect:
👓 Everything Old is New Again: Adventures in the IndieWeb | Desert of My Real Life
Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)I’ve written about my forays into the IndieWeb movement before. I have even written about how I feel like I’m moving to a philosophy of sharing my work that is kind of old school. Last week, I had the occasion to see a perfect example of how the “new” ways that I’m working are actually the old ways.
Kudos Cathie for rolling up your sleeves and delving in like this! You’re getting some fairly solid results and have far stronger grasp of what is going on than I certainly did in my first year–not to say that I’m much better off now to be honest.
The tougher part is that some of your post seems a bit misleading to me.
The couple of microformats related lines you’re adding in your child theme like add_theme_support( ‘microformats2’ ); are in fact declaring that your theme properly supports microformats v1, v2, and microdata which it doesn’t quite. Those lines don’t actually add support (as the hook might indicate), but tell other WordPress plugins that your theme is microformats compatible which may prevent them from adding particular pieces of redundant microformats related code.
While you’ve got an h-entry in your header file, you’re closing the related </div> just after the title so that if the body of your post includes a p-summary or an e-content microformat, parsers are likely to have problems. Instead you might want to do something similar in either your content.php (or other file that adds the body of your post) or your footer.php files where you close that div in one of those two files instead of in your header.php file. If you need it the article page on the wiki has a simple example of what the final result should look like.
My favorite template for how to add microformats to a WordPress theme is David Shanske’s fork of the TwentySixteen theme. Because of GitHub’s interface and the fact that he made changes in relatively small increments, you can look at the history of his changes (start with the oldest ones and move forward) and see the highlights of what he added and removed in individual files to effect the necessary changes. (He made some other drastic changes like removing Post Formats in preference to Post Kinds as well as some other non-microformats changes, so you’ll necessarily want to skip those particular changes.) I think I learned more about WordPress Themes by going through this one example a change at a time than any of the books or tutorials I’ve ever seen.
Another tool in addition to indiewebify.me is the Pin13 parser which will parse your page and give you some indication about what it is finding (or not) and how things are being nested (or not).
If you need some help, feel free to catch one of the WordPress folks in the IndieWeb chat. I suspect that since you’ve got the fortitude to dive into the code the way you have, that you’ll be able to puzzle it out.
👓 2018: a year in gratitude | Mark A. Matienzo
Mark A. Matienzo (Mark A. Matienzo)This year was largely complicated and often felt like a massive garbage fire to myself and my crew. I didn’t accomplish a number of my goals and was inconsistent about others, so recapping awesome things I did doesn’t feel appropriate and also happens to be a soft reminder of either failure or things not going as planned. I also tend to hate “best of the year” lists but I find them helpful to remember about where I found joy or the ability to connect to something outside of myself. I suppose this is an attempt to reconcile those things, or perhaps more in line with the end of year spirit, a way to articulate gratitude to the people and things around me that impacted me.
Interesting, but I’m not sure how this rates for cross-posting to IndieWeb News…
👓 Consuming Instagram differently | Jonas Voss
Jonas Voss (Left handed typing since 2017)I've been looking for a different way of consuming Instagram. Facebook has introduced more and more features in their neverending quest to wrestle users from Snapchat and onto Instagram, and I don't care for those. I like Instagram, the photo sharing part, not so much the TV and Stories part. The ot...
🔖 Ungifted by Gordon Korman
This funny and touching underdog story is a lovable and goofy adventure with robot fights, middle-school dances, live experiments, and statue-toppling pranks! When Donovan Curtis pulls a major prank at his middle school, he thinks he’s finally gone too far. But thanks to a mix-up by one of the administrators, instead of getting in trouble, Donovan is sent to the Academy of Scholastic Distinction, a special program for gifted and talented students. Although it wasn’t exactly what Donovan had intended, the ASD couldn’t be a more perfectly unexpected hideout for someone like him. But as the students and teachers of ASD grow to realize that Donovan may not be good at math or science (or just about anything), he shows that his gifts may be exactly what the ASD students never knew they needed.
Finally, Foursquare has updated the address of my library, but not the GPS coordinates.
Also I’d just finished a Gordon Korman book the other day, and the book gods have apparently noticed that I’d need a new one.
🎧 Before the Flood:The Mesopotamian Enuma Elish and Atrahasis | The Literature and History Podcast
BCE 1700-1500
The Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis, in circulation 3,800 years ago, were Mesopotamia's creation and flood epics, making them 1,000 years older than Genesis.
There are a few sections of these ancient texts which indicate that thousands (or more) were wiped out due to illness and disease that sound like a flu, a virus, or some other local pandemic. Gives pause to think about what the state of public health was at the time.
Enuma Elish and Atrahasis are indeed not well known, but I’ve actually seen quite a bit about them as the result of reading within the area of Big History.
I’ll have to do some digging but I’m curious if any researcher(s) have done synoptic analyses of these books and the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament. I’m sure there aren’t as many as there are of the synoptic gospels from the New Testament, but it might be interesting to take a look at them.
The obvious quote of the day:
The gods became distraught at the destruction they had unleashed. The midwife goddess, Mami, who helped raise the first generations of mankind, was particularly saddened, and “The gods joined her in weeping for the vanished country / She was overcome with heartache, but could find no beer”. Yes, it really says that.
As a side note, fermented beverages like beer were more popular throughout history than they are in modern America, because unlike now, prior generations of humans didn’t have the public health ideals or levels of clean drinking water that we do today. Thus beer and other alcoholic drinks were more par for the course because they were less likely to make you sick or kill you to drink them. Naturally the Mesopotamian gods must have been healthier for drinking them as a result too!
👓 There’s One Encouraging Thought Buried In Zuckerberg’s 2019 Challenge | Techdirt
Every year Mark Zuckerberg sets a "challenge" for himself for that year, which as many people have noted, Facebook has turned into a big PR vehicle for the company. We usually don't even bother to write about it, because why bother?...
Do we want technology to keep giving more people a voice, or will traditional gatekeepers control what ideas can be expressed? ❧
Part of the unstated problem here is that Facebook has supplanted the “traditional gatekeepers” and their black box feed algorithm is now the gatekeeper which decides what people in the network either see or don’t see. Things that crazy people used to decry to a non-listening crowd in the town commons are now blasted from the rooftops, spread far and wide by Facebook’s algorithm, and can potentially sway major elections.
I hope they talk about this.