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caligvlasaqvarivm · 2 months

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Wait what was that that Beforus Eridan being Kankri’s culler? What? How? Does that mean that candy red includes aquatic mutations?

Okay, so, this is PURE speculative headcanon and I debated over whether or not I should even say it, but it's pretty fucking hilarious so I figured I'd mention it with the heavy caveat that I made it all up & not to take it seriously, it's just a headcanon I believe because it's a really funny idea to me, and i do not at all consider this "canon" the way some of my other theories are. i hope you also find it funny

So the big difference between Feferi and Meenah's troll society is what "culling" entails; where on Alternia, culling means killing off the weak, orphaned, disabled, and/or lower classes, on Beforus, it means taking care of them. So the characters on Alternia that would've been slated for culling would, on Beforus, actually have lived very cushy lives where a highblood provides for them. It's still another way of enforcing the class divide, so it's still shitty, but I guess it's better than people being killed all the time.

Karkat is one of the most cullable trolls on Alternia for being a mutant not on the hemospectrum, and the only reason he has a symbol and lusus at all is because the Signless's followers prepared them for him. This is why Kankri doesn't seem to have a symbol or lusus, because a situation similar to the Signless never happened on Beforus, and instead, Kankri (and presumably Karkat as well) would've been culled, AKA taken care of by a highblood.

Another part of Kankri's characterization is that he fucking loves sea dwellers - he's actually pretty polite to Meenah, even trying to ingratiate himself to her via nautical references, and desperately, desperately wants to be pale with Cronus. This leads me to infer that Kankri was specifically culled by a sea dweller, and the law of conservation of detail (not a real thing, it's a trope name) leads me to further infer that Kankri was culled by one of our KNOWN sea dwellers, either Feferi or Eridan. And since Feferi was busy managing Meenah, it seems like the task would've fallen onto Eridan.

Now, I have a whole set of headcanons for what Beforus!Eridan was like, but as I tend not to speculate too much on AUs divested too far from canon, I'm only going to note the pertinent details:

Beforus!Eridan was very well-regarded by the population and had the same kind of standing as a major celebrity,

Many hundreds of sweeps ago, Karlkat Marx Karkat Vantas used to be Eridan's freeloader. Their relationship was extremely difficult to classify, and nobody really understood it (many assumed Eridan was culling him, but Eridan vehemently denied this, insisting Karkat just lived on his sofa rent-free and all expenses paid, like this was a normal thing for them to be doing),

Karkat was generally an absolute disaster in the romance department, having a long string of relationships up and down the hemocaste with his trademark Blurry Quadrant Bullshit, always sadly slinking back to Eridan's sofa at the end of his wild, vascillatory flings,

Karkat would write a massive scathing critique of Beforan society, its consumer capitalism, its casteism and classism, its power structure, etc. etc., which Eridan distributed posthumously, because unfortunately Karkat had the lifespan of a lime & passed away long before Eridan was even at the halfway point of his own lifespan,

Eridan was never the same, and while his public persona remained widely beloved, he became an interpersonal disaster in his private life, and Feferi handed him Kankri as a wiggler to cull in the hopes that it would get him out of his funk,

This Did Not Work At All and in fact fucked up a perfectly good wiggler

I mean, honestly, I don't think there exists such a thing as a "bad class," but I do think Princes should not be raising kids.

So Eridan, who, even in the best case scenario, has disastrous social skills and a fucked up sponge, had literally 0 idea what to do with this kid, and pretty much just threw money at it. It was pretty inevitable for Kankri to remind Eridan of Karkat, so most of what few conversations they'd actually have revolved around Karkat, especially Karkat's extremely fucked up romantic affairs, the recounting of which slowly shrivelled the Seer of Blood up like a raisin and made him decide that romance was really, truly not worth it.

At the same time, Kankri craved an emotional bond with his fucked-up adoptive dad, and the spark would sometimes come into Eridan's eyes whenever Kankri started talking about hemocaste equality. The guy who used to live on his couch would say things like that...

But this would also mean that Eridan was alive at the same time as his descendent, Cronus, so I'm pleased to inform you all that he managed to neglect TWO children, both his biokid and his adopted one. Hooray! As Eridan was universally beloved, Cronus always had a lot to live up to, and very little opportunity to be his own person, divorced of his status as a sea dweller or his ancestor's shadow. Hooray!

But the way it comes full circle is this: Canon!Eridan actually outright admits that his typing quirk is fake, calling it "weird" and dropping it when he's trying to be emotionally sincere. Thus, to me, it stands to reason that it's something he would stop using after he has his character development, and he stops caring about how a "sea dweller" is "supposed to" act. We see it happen with the other trolls, losing/changing their quirks to reflect big life events - Aradia dropping her 0s because she's not doomed anymore, Sollux losing his 2's when he loses his li2p. I've been struggling for a while with what Eridan would replace his quirk with after he drops his ww/vvs because it'd be kind of lame if he just had, like, basically nothing.

Also, I lowkey don't really vibe with Karkat ever using the sym69ls in text - he already resented his ancestor, and he'd especially hate the idea of using them after meeting Kankri. Hell, he's pretty reluctant to even type in his blood color even after everybody knows what it is. But then I realized - Eridan is already the guy on the team who dresses up in the colors of his dating partners. What if he replaced his ww/vv quirk with the sym69ls to show his support for Karkat?

Like yeah Karkat would hate it but it would also be literally so funny, and I think Karkat would be secretly comforted by the way Eridan would stubbornly insist that he's doing it FOR KARKAT, and not for the Signless or whatever, he's literally called Signless, that was like his whole thing idiot, this is Kar's symbol, shut the fuck up.

And also, genuinely, one of the things I'm most sad about missing out on was a conversation between Kankri and post-character-development!Eridan, because... can you fucking imagine? Here's Kankri, who actually loves sea dwellers and the caste system, who wants to be pale with Cronus so so so badly, yet is celibate by choice because he's a slut shamer (and in this headcanon, because he heard too many terrible stories about his ancestor's hellish dating life), who uses "social justice" as a cudgel and couches outright contempt for his friends in "polite" mealymouth language about equality...

... And then Eridan "these are my emotional support slurs" Ampora rocks up to the chat.

Even without the culler stuff, it'd be fucking hilarious, right? Eridan's insane and makes a lot of wild assumptions, but he's usually kind of right (he assumes Kanaya doesn't want to c3< him and Vriska because she's in <3 with Vriska, and he's at least right about the latter; he assumes Rose is highborn nobility, and, like, she IS a rich girl). Despite posturing about supporting the caste system, he doesn't actually give a shit about it, and arguing with him is basically a huge waste of time because he doesn't listen to people.

What I'm saying is, Kankri would be like "excellent, another sea dweller to befriend" + "finally, emotional validation from my distant father" & Eridan would immediately call Kankri a slur, ignore his arguments and rebut with something crazy like how "royal-v" is actually a more offensive term than "wader" because the former assumes sea dwellers have such delicate feelings that they can't stand not to have their globes kissed every five seconds, call Kankri a wader, ask Kankri why Kankri is hitting on him (Kankri isn't), proclaim that he and Karkat make out despite being moirails, and then start insisting that Kankri has to stop using his quirk because it's a quirk for Karkat and Karkat doesn't even like Kankri so Kankri doesn't get to use it anymore.

I think Kankri would start crying. Especially because a crowd has gathered and Kankri accidentally calls Eridan "dad" and Eridan is like i Don't know what that is.

Anyway the point that im making is the sym69ls were originally Beforus!Eridan's quirk because that was how he and Karkat used to curl up on the sofa together. 69. All cozy like. And that's where Kankri got them from and he decided to match his whistles to the motif. And after bullying Kankri into not using them anymore and taking them on himself, they go back to being Eridan's quirk. In a beautiful and stupid time loop of karma, the likes of which Homestuck is so fond of. Amen

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redspiderling · 3 years

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Could you please stop promoting ScarJo? Yes the movie is good but she's still an Allen and Whedon apologist.

Hi anon!

Listen, first of all, the block/unfollow button is there for a reason. You really don't have to read my stuff and I say this kindly. I know I don't like coming across content that doesn't sit well with me, and I personally use that block button liberally so, honestly, no hard feelings. The rest under the cut, because again, not everyone is interested in this type of rant.

Why is it so hard for people to understand that you can appreciate one aspect of someone's personality, but not agree with every word that's coming out of their mouths? Or be able to recognise that human beings can make mistakes. And sometimes even make them again 'cause... They're stupid humans?

To be specific, sure, if I were in her shoes I might not have supported Allen publicly. But I'm not in her shoes. I don't know what it's like to have a close friend be so despised by the general public, and being asked to offer an opinion on the subject. I don't know what my stance would be and frankly, I don't particularly care about hers either. It's not impacting anyone no matter what she says, and the only reason she gets asked in the first place is because the journos know that no matter what she says, it will sell. Maybe it's an act of defiance on her part, a "fuck you, you won't bully me into a pre-approved answer, you have no power over me" thing. Fuck if I know, makes 0 difference either way.

She's never taken a stand against abuse victims, has been very vocal about the importance of women feeling safe enough to come forward with cases of abuse, has put money where her mouth is with donations, and so far the content she's producing is making a positive impact. She herself isn't an abuser, or generally a person who is just so despicable that I couldn't in good conscience support her work.

Hell, I've been bitching about the Russos for the longest time because they're a prime example of privilege bringing success without talent, but if they ever make a good movie I'll say it's good.

Beyond that, it's just gossip fodder. I find Whedon disgusting, but I've never met him, never was required to put in a good word for him for the sake of professionalism (and if you haven't had to bite your tongue and smile and say a good word for co-workers or supervisors you despise for the sake of your job, lucky you). But literally, every single person who's ever collaborated with Whedon (and not just Whedon, all Hollywood abusers) has had to smile and say the right stuff when the cameras are on. When these people are uncovered as racist, or sexist, etc, it's a matter of PR- what their former collaborators will say. This is why everyone -quite rightly- thinks of Hollywood as Fake™. Because it is. Most of Hollywood will say the PR thing to get rid of the press, and move on. That's just it.

So, having said all of that, why on Earth should I not thank Scarlett Johansson for being almost singlehandedly responsible for the production of a movie I've been begging to see for over a decade? And she didn't just do that, she helped a lot of women further their careers in the industry in the process, and she did it productively, and with a lot of support and respect towards them.

Finally, I'd like to point out that unlike her, I'm not under constant scrutiny from the entire world 24/7, because if I were I'm pretty sure I'd get cancelled every other day. I say a lot of stupid shit I don't think through.

And even if she did think it through and went "no, I think Whedon was a good director when I worked with him so I'll stick by that statement"... And? Not the best PR, for sure, but like... Who gives a shit?

You need to realise that all this bullshit is only real on social media, and have absolutely no influence in people's lives whatsoever. If it did Woody Allen would be in prison, regardless of whether he's guilty or not.

If you think "cancelling" a celebrity online for saying stupid shit is making an impact, sorry to break it to you but that's not how it works. Part of the reason why Scarlett doesn't give a fuck about what the public says about her, is the fact that it doesn't matter. You think she worked hard to build a ridiculously successful career all her life to throw it away with stupid comments? Or do you think she doesn't have the resources to get the best PR agency in the world to create the perfect illusion for her, if she wanted to? She just doesn't give a single flying fuck, about any of it.

So, in conclusion, please, feel free to despise Scarlett Johansson to your heart's content. I've never gone into anybody's space who says they don't like her for whatever reason and asked them to stop, everybody's entitled to their opinion, that's what blogs are for.

Best advice I can give you anon: If you don't like people's posts online, look at something else.

#the same vent #anons #asks #is this a spoiler?#my god I've become paranoid

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eurosong · 4 years

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Undo my ESC

Good evening, folks! If you saw my first instalment of “Undo my ESC”, the annual feature where I make a year’s Eurovision better for me by making alterations in each country, you might have thought that ESC getting cancelled had dulled my edge, since, comparing to usual standards, I hardly changed much at all there. Well, that’s because, once again, we have seriously uneven semis, and Semi #1 would have been killer, whilst Semi #2 would have been dead. Here is what Í would have done to even those semis up! 🇦🇱 Albania: The Albanian delegation had seemingly done all it could to wash its hands of, well, two years of comparatively excellent results with authentic, melancholically poëtic and qualitative tracks, namely Malland Ktheju tokës. They brought in Byuckman, in whose interest it is for the contest to become as generically “radio-friendly” as possible, and the genius who brought us lyrics like “this is love/rain falls from above”. As judges. Of a serious musical festival. The foreign jurors did as expected, and voted for the appointed “bop”, but were foiled, however, by one of the minority Albanian jurors on the panel who put it low in her ranks. An actual renowned music professor who got called all the names under the sun for doing so. And so, to an ensuing shitstorm, the classical and powerful Shaj prevailed instead. Unfortunately, the battle was won but the war was lost, because the representative herself took the lessons of 2018-9, threw them down the aeroplane toilet on the way to LA, and ripped the spirit out of the song, reverting back to the previous Albanian trend of terrible “revamps” and laboured translations into English. The result, Fall from the sky, is but a husk of the original. In my ESC, I’d probably simply keeping the original version of Shaj, which was my uncontested #1 of all songs, but part of me would opt for Ajër, which I love almost as well but which doesn’t carry the baggage of hanging over my head like the sword of Democles this entire season. 🇦🇲 Armenia: I’ve more often than not loved the entries of Hayastan, from the joyous Jan Jan to the soaring Fly with me and defiant Walking out. To say they took a step back this year is kind – it was more like a powerful jump backwards that landed them in the nearest ocean, where they sank like a stone. It was one of the most singularly unpalatable NFs that I have ever watched in this era. Rather than retraumatise myself by going into detail about it, I’ll just say, I would have sent Srbuk or Artsvik again to get the top 10 that I feel both warranted!

🇦🇹 Austria: What a journey for Österreich. From Conchita to this guy, a perky homophobe who explicitly said he wished his kids would not turn out to be gay. He comes up with a third-rate impersonator of a third-rate Benjamin Ingrosso impersonator’s third-rate impersonation of a Timberlake b-side. I would throw that in the bin and invite Pænda back from last year for a shot at redemption after her gorgeous Limits got slept on in 2019.

🇧🇬 Bulgaria: Some people had the neck to say to me “who needs Hungary when Bulgaria is coming back?” Well, I do. Hungary were constantly in the top of my rankings, and just quietly and consistently brought quality. Bulgaria has brought me one good thing – Poli Genova’s œuvre – and a tonne of hype. Their song this year was one of the favourites, and I still can’t wrap my head around how other than the force of PR. It’s a bizarre, unsettling combination of passive-aggressive “look how much you’re making me hurt myself” lyrics with Disneyish saccharine accompaniment, topped off with a key change?! For want yet again of a national final, I would bring Poli back – third time even luckier? 🇨🇿 Czechia: The Bohemians (and Moravians) keep it contemporary but superficial for a third year running, although, thankfully, for the first time since they began doing national finals, we finally have a song without a dubious attitude towards women in the lyrics. Not that there is much to analyse in those lyrics. It’s a merely ok song for me, no better, no worse: a superior alternative would have been Barbara Mochowa’s lush and contemplative second effort, White and black holes, or the glorious 90s British indie-influenced All the blood. 🇩🇰 Denmark: Did Denmark confound international monitors into calling it the world’s happiest country by exposing them to the relentlessly cheery songs that they pick for Eurovision lately? And yet – I really do say yes to Yes, To a certain extent, to a limited amount of exposure, and despite the fact that it leans a little too hard into the territory of sounding like a second Little talks. It was one of the few good songs from DMGP – I also liked the 80s shoegaze-ish Den eneste goth– and I feel so mad at DR that they won’t give Ben and Tan a guaranteed second shot to represent their country after they won in front of an empty crowd. 🇪🇪 Estonia: The days of Eesti being Beesti seem like from a distant memory to me, but there was some quality and quirkiness in Eesti Laul, buried under mountains of beigedom, like the rich-voiced Egert Miller’s soulful Georgia, the jazzy Write about me, or the feisty earworm that was Ping pong. Instead, we got a dreary dirge with sub-Hallmark lines about wot luv is, which would have sounded dated in a contest 30 years ago, sung by a repugnant guy who tried to get people to vote for him last year by leaning on the idea that he was the “only true Estonian.” I’d have Egert get his rightful place as Jüri Pootsmann’s spiritual successor. 🇫🇮 Finland: I was one of the few to be jubilant when a bizarre ode to an Italian porn star with a backing track sounding like a violated version of Eläköön elämä came second in the polls to its spiritual opposite: a shy and rather awkward guy singing a quietly moving song about the passing of time. I love Looking back and wouldn’t change a thing. 🇬🇪 Georgia: You never know what to expect from Georgia, except the unexpected, and yet even I was surprised by what they came up with: a close-shaven guy with veins popping in his head screaming “why don’t you love meeeee?” to a rocky, electronic backdrop. Me being me, I actually do like it a lot. “Take me as I am” sounds like a veiled potshot at the big 5 and a vindication of Georgia’s “keep it weird, send what we want” philosophy. I could suggest that the lyrics, that sound like those of a spurned angsty teen, change a bit, but that would be defeating the purpose of Georgia: one takes them as they are. 🇬🇪 Greece: So, somehow, despite S!STERS coming dead last with 0 pts in the televote last year, using exclamation marks to substitute the letter I is now a thing in Eurovision with the advent of Superg!rl. I spent an hour watching folk waffle on in Greek in its reveal show only for them to reveal the song literally at the very end, so after that, it was a little underwhelming, and nowhere near as good as Better love in 2019. I don’t hate it – and the music video’s concept of her being an amazing superhero who can change the world, but instead she’s stopping people slipping over bananas and rescuing cats from trees is weirdly endearing, so it can stay, but I’d improve the lyrics, particularly in the chorus. “I’m a supergirl, supergirl, in a crazy world, crazy world” is not much higher than “this is love, rain falls from above” in historically bad Greek lyrics at ESC. 🇮🇸 Iceland: Daði Freyr came back from near-victory with the delightful Is this love, added a lovely inspiration in his newborn daughter to a similarly funky and playful track, and came out with Think about things. Unlike what usually happens with songs that are a little bit odd, I was positively surprised to see it walk the NF, and become a phenomenon even outside the ESC fandom. This was perfect and joyous from beginning to end. I hope Iceland will not be like the other Nordics, and will invite Daði directly back .🇱🇻 Latvia: I have come to enjoy the bizarre chaötic energy of Still breathing, It’s a hot mess, but I take weird over dull any day. It wasn’t my favourite in Supernova – that would be the effortlessly cool Polyester, an earworm with a social conscience, written about the cost of fast fashion but dismissed by many people as “she luvs t-shirts song lol”. Given that Samanta Tina tried over half a dozen times to go to ESC, finally won and then had the chance ripped out of her hands by the cancellation, I don’t have the heart to remove her from my ideal ESC 2020 though. She stays, but maybe the staging changes? It’s odd to have what you believe is a feminist anthem but then relegate your backing singers to in the distance, their faces shielded away. 🇲🇩 Moldova: Life is too short to follow Moldovan national finals, especially when you know, lately, that whoever is backed by the hilariously inaptly named Dream team will win there. They are like a parasite, sucking out the colour and fun out of a country that once had plenty of both – cross-reference Hora din Moldova or Lăutar to name just two examples. I guess out of an uninspiring lineüp, I’d go for Moldoviţa for having at least a hint of the brassy folk that used to be their calling card. 🇵🇱 Poland: Speaking of calling cards, after a one year hiatus with an arresting combo of white voice and rocky instrumentation, Poland has returned to what it has most often done in recent years – presented us with an absolute dirge, Empires, which seems like it was written by an unenthusiastic English student whose homework assignment (for which they received a generous C-) was to write a poëm with a bunch of metaphors “we’re moths to a flame, birds to a pane of glass, gasoline and a match”. Despite having a big music industry from which to choose many gems, Poland offers me little alternative choice given that there were only three songs in their grand final – one by the Czech representative last year who, as you might guess from what I said literally a sentence up, isn’t even Polish!Horny Elf, who’s contractually obliged to write only creepy lyrics for songs, tried to represent Polska with a song inspired by a true-life situation where he went around Tel Aviv with a cardboard cutout of one of the hostesses of the show. It’s a love song inspired by gallivanting around with a piece of cardboard. Addressed to that actual hostess. And it’s an almighty earworm that hasn’t escaped my mind since. Amazingly, his Lucy would be my Polish representative. 🇵🇹 Portugal: Portugal is another country beloved by me by for dancing to the beat of its own drummer, or perhaps, rather shedding tears to the strumming of its own fado guitar. They struggled being different, they won being different, and for the last few years they’ve struggled again, despite having a lot of support for both O jardim and Telemóveis amongst fans. This year, the televote went for one interesting song, the charmingly Gallic, accordion-drenched Passe-partout, a song about a cultured girl shaking off her boorish ex who could “never even get into Piaf”, whilst the jury got behind another interesting song, Gerbera, an entrancing, arresting and poëtic song laden with metaphor about the idea of music competing itself. This let Medo de sentir,second in both polls, turn silver into gold. It’s a lovely, heart-felt track, but rather unexceptional - I would have had one of the other more singular songs win. 🇸🇲 San Marino: The weird boil on the face of ESC that somehow never pops, SM is back after its bewildering qualification with a tone-deaf dentist wailing to a microwaved disco song… with something actually palatable, sort of. The aptly named Freaky is dated, odd, overly busy, but Senhit has a lot of charisma, and the idea of “break[ing] all the rules, mak[ing] up some new [ones] and destroy[ing] all of them too” and “life goes by too quickly not to be freaking it up”, well, maybe we do get on board. 🇷🇸 Serbia: Serbia is usually a byword for quality at the contest – they won with one of the best 21st century winners hands down in Molitva, and also sent some of the most beautiful compositions in the contest’s history at the hands of Željko. This year, they decided to join in the leitmotif of reliable countries sucking by sending a group that sound like a third-rate mid-2000s girl band from Transnistria when beautiful songs like Cvet sa Prokletija were right there. 🇨🇭 Switzerland: Fair play to the Swiss for not doing a Cyprus and leaning in on their success with their male Fuego, She gat me, and instead going in a completely different direction with this moody effort. I’m not entirely convinced by the teenage emo-ish lyrics or the unnecessary falsetto, but Répondez-moi is a refreshing effort, and has the bonus of being in French too! And the automatic qualifiers: 🇫🇷 France: You’ve heard of France, right? You know, that wee country south of Belgium, north of Andorra, not much of a music industry… or so you’d think, given that the troolee jeenyuss new delegation, who abandoned their brilliant national final which showcased how diverse and qualitative their music scene is despite it being a huge success in the fandom, and instead reached out to the writer of last year’s last place song for the UK and a few other rentaswedes and they produced something that sounds like a b-side that not even Westlife would have recorded, replete with a stock key change. About as French as IKEA köttbullar. A real shame for one of Europe’s most highly esteemed cultural hotbeds. If they wanted to pick Tom Leeb, who seems like a nice guy and has written some lovely music, he could have made his own song and it would have indubitably been scores better than this. 🇪🇸 Spain: I’m going to apply this to all the automatic qualifiers voting on this semi-final: they scrapped a national final for this? OT was not an ideal format as last year demonstrated with its shit show of contestants sabotaging themselves so as not to get picked for ESC – but still. There’s not much I can say about this other than I don’t like it much and I’d rather Spain return to a proper NF. You don’t spend time trapped on a bus where this song with its torturous falsetto was on replay and emerge with fond feelings. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Usually, in this space, I can point to a song that the UK should have sent and that I fell in love with – like I wish I loved you more or You. Once again, though, another big 6 nation scrapped their NF after tanking it with a bizarre format last year. The BBC said nothing for months, then were unwilling to spend tv time on ESC this year so just blurted out an announcement of an announcement in about 40 seconds after some dance show. And then they dropped this song. It’s… passable at best, with an annoying chorus (especially that beat in “my last… breath”) and a staggering amount of repetition in a song that clocks in at only around 80% of the standard Eurovision song length. James Newman surely could have come up with something better. It’s a baby step in the right direction, but one taken at the shore where you need to start running to avoid getting pulled away in a rip.

#eurovision #eurovision song contest #opinion #esc 2020 #eurovision 2020

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

Don't sit here making up a priori theories about what users want. I read on individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories. For example, so far the filter has caught two emails that were sent to my address because of a typo, and one sent to me in the belief that I was someone else.1 Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. In every swing state they overestimated the Kerry vote. Many of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR Society of America gets to the heart of the matter: Bloggers are sensitive about becoming mouthpieces for other organizations and companies, which is like a runner asking If I'm such a good athlete, why do I feel so tired?2 In How to Start a Startup I advised startups never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. In the Valley it's not only real but fashionable. The disadvantage of having a larger universe of tokens is that there is more chance of misses. There are two kinds of spams I currently do have trouble with.

That idea is almost as old as the web. They won't necessarily buy them outright. They can tell at a young age that a contest where everyone wins is a fraud.3 They just wanted to make the point that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net.4 9198 Url free 0.5 And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.6 At least, it did when people wrote about it online. What will happen when they do? But prudence can't tell me what sentence to write next. With both employers and investors, the balance of power is slowly shifting towards the young. 6546 In the Plan for Spam uses a very simple definition of a token.

Notes

The angels had convertible debt is a great programmer will invent things, they wouldn't have. Since we're not doing anything with a million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be secretive, because talks are made of spolia. Here is the most fearsome provisions in VC deal terms have to talk to corp dev is to fork off separate processes to deal with slaps, but rather by, say, good deals.

There are situations in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. In this context, issues basically means things we're going to get a personal introduction—and in a reorganization. Maybe it would be easier to say yet how much harder.

I'm satisfied if I could pick them, if we couldn't decide between turning some investors away and selling more of a cent per spam. The main one was drilling for oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy. Possible doesn't mean the hypothetical people who are good presenters, but Javascript now works. Y Combinator.

It does at least, the term literally. Quoted in: it's much better to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's up to two more investors. Certainly a lot better. Apple's just by hiring someone to invent the spreadsheet.

This is not economic inequality. Which in turn means the slowdown that comes from ads on other investors doing so much in their early twenties. There is nothing more unconvincing, for an investor seems very interested in investing but doesn't want to get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to capture the service revenue as well.

He was off by only about 2%. 99,—9. I say in principle 100,000, the Nasdaq index was.

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elizabethrobertajones · 8 years

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(1/2) I can literally understand all of your bi-dean meta except for the male siren thing. The siren literally was trying to be the perfect little brother for Dean. I mean the siren literally says "I should be your little brother. Sam. You can't trust him. Not like you can trust me. In fact, I really feel like you should get him outta the way, so we can be brothers. Forever." as well as "No. I gave him what he needed. And it wasn't some bitch in a G-string. It was you. A little brother."

(2/2) I mean I’m NOT against bi-dean, everyone has the right to their own opinions. And A LOT of your analysis is interesting and valid, but if your suggesting that bi-dean is proven through “Sex and Violence.”, I’m lost, cause that seems to have incestuous subtext rather than bi-dean subtext (not that there’s anything wrong with shipping Wincest). I mean Dean could get any girl (and probably guy) if he wanted. The siren revealed what he needed/wanted most was family(specifically Sam)…

(3/2) Cause at this point, tensions were high between the brothers due to Sam’s powers/secrets and Dean needed someone he felt he could trust by his side, a little brother who was devoted to him, some one who understood him (which is why Nick shared the same tastes and interest). I mean I have a little sister and every time she likes something I enjoy, I’m fucking ecstatic. I mean I’ve watched this episode so many times and I fail to see how this is anything but an episode meant to solidify…

(4/2) and push the point that the brothers were not on the same page, and it foreshadowed the future fight and subsequent rift b/t them in “When the Levee Breaks.” I mean y'all say that Nick was a sexual being meant to seduce Dean, but it’s still weird cause he’s trying to being the perfect brother in canon. Sorry this got so long, I’m just curious at why so many people think the male siren has anything to do with bisexuality (of the non-incestuous variety, cuz I can see tht meta 4 wincest ship)

Heya!

I think this is really to do with something I was talking about last night about suggestive subtext, when trying (incoherently) to explain why I didn’t think Dean getting his memories back was textual - I think it can be taken as a strong reading and I wouldn’t disagree because I literally make the same reading, but I think it’s implied canon. Ditto the bi subtext around Larry this latest episode. We all know it’s a mechanical bull with a gendered name, not a human male, but between Dean being told he “had the hots” and the ridiculously pornographic riding sequence, and the general phallic nature of the bar they were in, it all still is overwhelmingly suggestive of queerness.

When it comes to the siren we actually had some more of this suggestiveness this episode which sort of repeats my point I’ll make about it: we only heard Sam say that there could be male sirens. No context, about brothers or even the context of the case for the easiest surface reading that it was just trying to get some hunters off its back by any means necessary. If you’ve forgotten the siren episode or it’s only a dim hazy memory and you sort of connect it to Dean but don’t regularly chug the entirety of canon and then yell about it with strangers online, the episode is not as memorable. So it’s really just posing the point that sirens aren’t all hot chicks, and giving us Dean’s reaction because, right then, he is the casual viewer, and all he knows is the concept that a siren could seduce you as a guy as well, and he just says, “huh.”

Its surface text reading (and I checked this with my mum after watching because she’s admitted she has 0 queer subtext reading skills but is a very smart, character-driven writer who knows how to read a text) is platonic, not remotely sexual, and when I told her that some of the fandom takes it as proof of Wincest, she burst into hysterical laughter at the concept, and explained to me the reading that Dean is just concerned about his brother and it was an obvious exploitable emotional weakness.

(So the rest of this answer is like a more than usual implied “sorry Mum” :P)

To me, this episode works by sorting out several layers and understanding that any reading of it you make has to have at least the surface text pasted firmly on top at all times. It WAS a platonic brother thing, and that’s the only way to wring a successful queer reading out of it, because if you start to suggest too far, you immediately cross over into wincest territory, by suggesting the surface text has the sexual element and that it was actually present in the episode as like, feelings and shit the characters were dealing with.

If you look at it as SUGGESTIVE subtext, accept that the siren is “just” Larry the mechanical bull, then you have exactly the right angle on it for the “huh” of your own.

So, I guess you’re bringing up the meta I wrote about Bobby and 4x06/4x14 - in that case Bobby is the perfect little “huh” angle into it. No one tells him on screen about the brother thing. He definitely knows the siren was presenting as male when it attacked Dean. He killed the thing :P He was the one who sussed it out by checking Nick’s FBI alias out. He knew for half the episode that Dean was being stalked by a male siren, came in, killed it, and aside from some pointed looks from under his hat, didn’t mention it.

There’s a popular text post about the episode that goes:

remember how sam and dean both thought that the siren infected its victims through sex

and when sam walks into the motel room to find dean with nick-the-siren and dean’s totally under the siren’s control sam just

rolls with it

This is the suggestive subtext at work. Nothing here affects the actual text of the episode: it’s about both our interpretation and interpretation within the text of the episode about how this situation might be read. (Obviously this mentions Sam but it goes doubly for Bobby who didn’t see the talky part of the fight, and is never corrected on screen about what he just saw.)

It’s not about wilfully forgetting that the episode has a main text about the brothers, but to see beyond it, within that text. I think it’s probably the causes of the biggest misunderstandings about this episode when you see arguing about it because I think an all or nothing “it’s literally about bisexuality” gets usurped by “I should be your brother” but saying “it’s just about these surface text platonic feelings (because the show would never make it about surface text wincest)” also means you block yourself off from analysing it. The wincest reading of the episode exists in the exact same liminal space of the subtext as the bisexual reading, which means they stumble all over each other and makes the arguments incredibly difficult to untangle because two people can both stand there pulling on the arms of the same moment arguing it means different things in a way most episodes don’t have when it comes to direct, sexual subtextual readings. (e.g the Dean & pie/cake subtext if you don’t agree can just be discarded, rather than it being directly suggestive of the completely alternative reading.)

Like, stuff your ears to the other subtext and sail right on past :P (When I did the rewatch I actually did essentially lash myself to the mast and demand to hear the song while obviously letting the ship sail to the proper place without getting dashed on the rocks, and I think it’s compelling but not my subtext and most importantly, since I read 0% of other episodes as having overt Wincest readings but many many episodes as having overt bi!Dean readings, I’m utterly secure in literally watching the siren episode and picking out the Wincest subtext and being like “yeah okay then”)

If you don’t assume that the show is saying anything profound about Wincest, though, and the “i should be your brother” is just a deflection away from overt sexual readings, it’s much more interesting for the bi Dean subtext. An example I’ve compared it to before is in 2x03, which follows a very similar emotional pattern to this episode with Dean and Gordon. Before Sam and Dean fight, we’ve seen Dean get VERY buddy buddy with Gordon, and there’s a wealth of suggestive subtext in their very brief interactions since they bond alarmingly fast at a bar, thirdwheeling Sam, and that’s immediately got hook up connotations. When Sam confronts Dean he has a sort of “I know what this is about” moment and there’s a real “Oh shit he’s going to tell Dean he’s crushing on Gordon and his judgement is impaired” moment, before Sam tells him it’s because Dean misses John and is filling the gap. I do not think the suggestiveness of Gordon and Dean’s interactions suggests that Dean had the hots for John, just like I carry on not thinking that when Crowley starts his official seduction in 9x11 comparing himself to John, or later in 10x01, to Sam.

Once I’ve got a surface reading and the deflection and the way it was read in the aftermath (yeah we’re working backwards through the episode here :P) then there’s a kind of solid place of understanding my own interpretation to examine the rest of it.

There’s this article which would be kind of pointless as evidence in other cases of actor commentary on the story because PR is not showrunning, etc, and we can’t really depend on them to answer with a proper understanding of what WE are listening out for, or what the show has crafted around their understanding, but in this one when we’re looking at suggestiveness is fascinating:

http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/147614438213/bluestar86-findmyjaffa-mishabethyname

“yeah, at that point I thought he should be ambiguously sexual. As an FBI agent he was a guys guy, but this creature wasn’t a guy or a girl. I tried to find something in between and enjoyed having control over these boys in a sexual way”

This is not describing anything between Sam and Dean, but how the actor played it between himself and them - he saw the siren at work, as using sexuality as part of its control. This reading applies to the entire episode, with all the cases of the siren at work, but obviously those were all “hot chick” siren moments, and so exerting control over the men was a given that it had been using a strip club full of female dancers as the lure to find them, so they’d be understandably into hot women. Which means the overt reading of sexuality is oh so much easier to make and credit and honestly having him say even this much about it is pretty dramatic, though of course as a killed-off one time character, he’s got a lot more freedom to chat about the process and admit to playing up sexuality in a room with 3 male actors.

I’m just going to grab my laughing from the rewatch I did for the next point, about the gap between Nick commenting that he was the siren and had trapped Dean, and the brother line:

That glorious, glorious moment of floating amazement where the it-was-a-actual-legit-seduction text peaks, and you’re allowed a moment from which most bi Dean peeps never recovered. (There’s a three strikes and you’re out policy here: Playthings, this, Dr Sexy. :P)

Because of course, whatever comes out Nick’s weasely mouth once I press play again, the question has been asked. The idea has been planted. It doesn’t matter what they say after this even setting aside all the logic of siren lore explained in the episode or any of the other circumstantial stuff which leads me to my text of the episode conclusion this is a bi Dean episode through and through.

They gave Dean a male siren and gave us these few seconds to let us reflect on that in its pure, this-was-a-seduction in the main text of the episode moment. There’s a level outside the text here where they set this all up, and threw this at us, and handled it in such a way as to leave it open to going on 7 years of fandom arguments about what interpretation was the correct one of the 3 on the table. This is the thing about these fandom arguments: when it comes to people trying to tell those who see Dean as bi that they’re making it up or something, or putting it into the text themselves, the response is usually, no, we’ve got it from the show. Even if you immediately go along with one of the other 2 alternatives (it was platonic all along despite the siren’s sexually charged MO: it was about a sexual proxy for Sam all along despite the fact the siren textually does not have to replace like for like objects of affection) THIS MOMENT before we know it’s officially about Sam, the show is textually letting you think about it for 3 seconds in a deadly serious context.

It’s like 2:30am I need to stop waxing on about this but seriously this fucking moment.

http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/125513601548/spn-hellatus-rewatch-4x14-or-honestly-this

If I ever try to explain to myself WHY this episode is bi Dean, it’s all resting first and foremost on those few seconds of screen time, because in that point, no take-back has been offered. Knowing there IS a take-back a second later doesn’t actually detract from the raw suggestiveness of this moment, which let us think, if we picked up on it immediately, that Dean had a male siren and had been seduced just like all the men and their “hot chicks”. It allows a whole moment where it seems like the show is telling us that Dean is *just* into men and the siren managed to snare him that way by catching him unawares. After all, Sam and Dean are looking for a siren-cum-stripper so getting in under their noses would be important. Dean didn’t trust Cara because she was female despite her being in a generally more socially accepted job, and she was used as a deliberate false lead by Nick (by planting the flowers) AND the show to imply that someone in their general vicinity that they’d been having a thing with that episode could be the siren. Sam’s new female character hook up was not, in fact the siren. Dean’s new male friend WAS. Admittedly it’s a lot of thinking to do in 3 seconds but if you’ve been waiting for the blow to fall that the siren has been worming its way in romantically as Cara, and going along with the surface text of the episode so far, then the instinctive “wait WHAT” is enough to do the work here before the show comes back out of slow mo and carries on like usual, establishing a nice safe cushion-y layer of no homo.

The show DOES however offer its own reading on TOP of the no homo, within the episode, to make it absolutely unequivocally clear there’s a “no incest” reading too - the surface text is EXTREMELY fragile this episode and they do a lot of hard work and backpedalling to try and maintain the fragile surface tension, so, still working backwards through the episode, we get to this:

DEANSo whatever floats the guy’s boat, that’s what they look like?

SAMYeah. You see, sirens can read minds. They see what you want most and then they can kinda, like, cloak themselves. You know, like an illusion.

Cut to the siren seducing the next dude and cue the sweet relief of the subtext that shatters the first interpretation offered by the subtext so far. Sam n Dean have had their relationship portrayed a certain way (overtly: the lying and ongoing season 4 angst, subtextually, a little odd framing and more stray comments beyond the norm) and the episode will come down about said relationship, but this random bloke is the key to what happens next.

Siren:

Disappointed mom and Jesus judging this guy:

The siren emphasises not that she’s a sexual rival (although we don’t know if that guy has Oedipal issues) but mentions that she is a sink on his time and an anchor stopping him from running away with them to be alone together forever and ever and ever, which, with their line about him not sticking her in a care home yet, suggest that she is ill and frail enough to be a full-time job for the guy, much like Dean is stuck with Sam as part of their full-time job and ongoing “look after Sammy” mentality.

So before Nick ever shows up it’s clearly shown that “floats the boat” has a surface level disconnect to the target of murder (and it’s just that statistically the siren is going after mostly hetero dudes with wives, given where they pick the men up and how lends itself to the typical MO). This scene is obviously the “lol no incest” for the end of the episode once the siren tries to drive them apart. […] Both sexualised interpretations live on: the massive logic leap to say “yeah well what if there were Oedipal undertones to this relationship?” which is a headcanon you can float which will mean the siren can still get Dean for that reason, but at this point, the main text of the episode becomes: “the siren will use sexuality to seduce the man, but the target closest to the man that will be the victim is that of unfortunate proximity, not necessarily a sexual rival to the siren.” And therefore, until the reveal after Dean drinks from the flask, we have a long stretch of episode where Nick is main-text seducing Dean with no argument, and the only counter-argument offered is Nick’s own words.

[…]

DEANWait, he killed his mom?

SAMThe woman he was closest to.

Dean’s thoughts go there. Sam shrugs it off, having either not noticed this is weird because new info makes sense to him, or he’s already worked this one through and come to the realisation the siren’s pattern isn’t strictly sexual or that this was a thing but he’s not going to judge. :P So we have two conflicting interpretations at work here; Sam’s chill attitude which surface level suggests there was nothing odd about it, and Dean’s ‘ugh wait but with the information I had available to me I have come to an incredibly awkward realisation!’ tone of voice. (And the subtextually buried one contradicted by the main text of Sam’s dialogue where it is also possible he assumes like Dean this was incest but that it isn’t weird/gross enough for comment.) Sam is implied to be ahead and be offering a rational explanation for this to Dean, i.e. wow that was an unfortunate interpretation, Dean! Fortunately, I, a better-informed individual who has had more information to work with than you before we started this conversation, have come up with a rational alternate explanation which does not involve incest!

This one particular death has pretty much the whole episode riding on it when it comes to interpretation because it is used as the way to confirm non-incestuous relationship replacement with the siren (which along with the siren still showing sexual control over Sam and Dean when he has them under his control backs up the way it seduces the man and says they should run off together romantically - Nick also makes them fight in order to be in love with one of them ~forever~ (a.k.a until the spell wears off and the survivor comes to his senses and probably kills himself over what he did)) - of course because despite the focus on the mother, the man still sleeps with the siren and it’s still framed as a romantic/sexual seduction to get him to the point of murder. The sexual element persisting after the siren says “I should be your brother” is a point I’ll get to better in a minute when I recap the conclusion from my rewatch but does essentially give you the choice of reading that he was talking crap there :P

There’s also the implication of the empty beds/back and forth of the episode, where Sam and Dean’s time management parallels back and forth. There’s suggestive subtext here between Dean and Nick because Sam has wall-banging sex with Cara, and their part of the story is directly back and forthing with Dean and Nick - we have some serious gaps in time, and when Sam returns to the room just before the fight, Nick and Dean are waiting, on those neatly made beds that seem to see no action. I don’t think they slept together. BUT the suggestiveness is right there and people have commented on it and picked it up, so it’s a valid part of the subtextual layer.

Here’s the conclusions I came to in my rewatch:

Aw, Nick, no. We were having so much fun.

MUNROEOr it could be her saliva… You really should have wiped the lip of that thing before you drank from it, Dean. I should be your little brother. Sam. You can’t trust him. Not like you can trust me. In fact, I really feel like you should get him outtta the way, so we can be brothers. Forever.

DEANYeah. Yeah, you’re right.

So, what’s left on the table?

Completely valid if out of left field for the episode’s subtext alternate reading of Dean as somewhere on the Aro spectrum so the siren doesn’t affect him at all romantically, and goes for filling the emotional void it creates from a different angle (several season 3 moments imply Dean has a void in himself for romantic love as emphatically distinct from his need for Sam, but I’m pretty sure I clocked them all coming from Sera as an ongoing subtext about Lisa as endgame, including foreshadowing of what happened with Lisa in the long run when Gamble got to write that full arc, so you could argue A: it’s all from one source as with the many contradictory writer impressions of Dean’s sexual/romantic identity, and B: it wasn’t even as straightforward as that even when she was implying it existed, as that relationship eventually wrecked itself upon the shores of the brotherly bond too, by her pen).

The interpretation that this was just about Sam, platonically, because this is his closest relationship, and the siren, recognising he was a hunter, needed to get to him fast (the other victims took a lot of softening up and a hefty blow to their bank accounts first because this is clearly how the siren makes a living: like the shifters it doesn’t need to kill to eat, just for fun, using its powers for personal benefit and amusement) and so it took an alternate approach to get under his skin in a day using the available tools: Dean is all fucked up about Sam’s secrets and sneaking around talking to Ruby and being a monster and so on, creating an ideal weak spot to get at him: Nick creates an uncomplicated ideal other human for Dean to adopt as a brother in the shortest time possible, because he fully intends just to make the hunters kill each other/themselves on realising what they did and leg it out of town before anyone comes to finish him off and so to Nick the sexual side of it is an unnecessary complication to tidying up the situation.

As above, but the wincest reading, with the siren’s sexually charged MO included despite the only proxy-kiss because of all the subtextual implications and the apparent links between Nick and Sam.

As point 2 again, but with the siren’s sexually charged MO still counting in the background of why Nick, because Dean’s repressed bisexuality made him a double easy target. Dean would not suspect the dude, while thinking he was hunting a stripper, and yet the siren’s MO still works on him as Dean’s “float the boat” umbrella is very wide. The “brother” thing goes back to the main text platonic reasons, and Nick just needs to say something to get Dean on his side that’s still broadly in character for Dean (like, he would not have just magically got through his whole gay panic in that moment: the other victims were all aware of who they were and what they wanted throughout [see also: the first man they interviewed at the start]: part of Dean’s horror in this moment is probably realising the siren affected him AS Nick and having the same moment of wondering about himself before Nick’s reassuring words ease him along - oh, this is just about Sam). So in this case Nick finds it easier to go for the surface reasons Dean was emotionally vulnerable with the emphasis on his lack of trust in Sam, because Dean IS emotionally vulnerable in his most important relationship, and creates an ideal other person is someone who represents Sam just enough to show he fits the emotional void, but is sufficiently different enough (fun, common traits and interests to Dean, trustworthy) to count as a separate identity to Sam (because Dean does have a ton of issues which do not necessarily have to be incestuous but can be to do with the most important relationship in his life having an overbearing effect on everything he does and the way he relates to other people, as constantly shown elsewhere without demanding we pay attention to the alternative reading unless the viewer is inclined to like it and look for it).

And I am aware that after talking about how the incest subtext takes the most leaps along the way, it’s the bisexuality argument which, by being debunked by platonic bros main text, gets relegated to the back seat, now needs a strong counter-argument to its own “debunking”, while the main text is more compatible to the other subtext’s conclusions.

This is why there are fights. :P

Obviously I choose to believe the very careful mental meanderings that back up my reading that there is a suggestive element to the episode that can imply Dean’s bisexuality without having to credit that the sexual element includes a wincest reading, and as I said, this is because the episode is highly suggestive, but everything it tries to tell us in text is broadly the platonic bros reading, so it is left to choice, favoured interpretation, emotional preference, whatever, to pick out what you want. There’s a valid in-text suggestion that the siren does NOT work incestuously even when the most important relationship is a family one, and if you use these as the guidelines, the rest of the suggestiveness about the sexual elements can just be read as the fact that Dean was into Nick as a person rather than having been attracted to him because he reminded him of Sam.

Although honestly it really just comes down to part 23346346 of infinity under the same heading as:

why I’m on the dean is bi train:

we’d never get a two minute montage of sam “riding larry.”

http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/157196244593/goodfemalecharacters-why-im-on-the-dean-is-bi

#Asks #4x14 #references to #12x11 #Dean is bi #long post for ts #incest for ts #suicide mention cw

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lauramalchowblog · 4 years

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Ask a Health Coach: Real Tips on Breaking Through a Plateau

Hey folks. This week, Primal Health Coach Erin is answering your questions about breaking through plateaus with tips and strategies you can start putting into practice right away. If you’re stuck in a weight loss rut, stalled out on your fitness routine, or need a push getting out of your comfort zone, today’s Ask a Health Coach post is for you. Got more questions? Keep them coming in the comments or over in our Mark’s Daily Apple Facebook Group.

Kimberley asked:

“I’ve lost a total of 70 pounds and have maintained my weight loss for over a year now, but I’m struggling to lose those last 10 pounds. Any tips on getting the scale to move again?”

First of all, congratulations. The fact that you’ve lost that amount of weight and kept if off is proof you’re committed to your goal. Even better, I love that you’re not using words like “diet” or “falling off the wagon,” both of which imply that you’ve embarked on a temporary lifestyle change. Weight loss is a long-term process that includes ups and downs. And plateaus like the one you’re experiencing right now are a natural part of that process.

Anytime you’re going through a plateau, you can take it as a sign that something needs to change. It doesn’t need to be a drastic change, but it is an opportunity to take a closer look at what you’re doing — or not doing.

I find that the biggest culprit of weight loss plateaus with my own health coaching clients is that they’ve loosened the reins a bit. In the beginning of your journey, you might have been meticulous about avoiding grains and refined sugars. If you’re following the Primal Blueprint, you might have kept your split at a solid 80/20. But as the months and years go on it’s absolutely normal to let some things slide without realizing it.

Eating more than you think is extremely common. Extra handfuls of nuts. Wine every night. A carb-fest on Sunday that turns into sandwiches and ice cream all week. You get the picture. Occasional indulgences should be enjoyed guilt-free, however it’s important to be aware of them instead of mindlessly refilling your glass. Small changes can be sneaky, and they add up fast.

Tip: Keep a Food Journal for 3-5 Days

I’m not a big fan of tracking calories and macros in general. But taking a few days to get back in touch with what you’re really doing can be a game changer for breaking through a plateau. After keeping a food journal, one of my clients found that the good stuff she was loading her morning yogurt with (chia seeds, flax seeds, unsweetened coconut, and nuts) was packing on about 400 calories more than she thought. Tasting bites of food while cooking or cleaning up are two other common places those extras tend to slide in.

Need more convincing? Researchers at Kaiser Permanente found that participants who kept a food diary lost twice the amount of weight compared to participants who didn’t.1 Writing down your choices forces you to be accountable for your actions.

It could also be that you’re restricting too much during the day, then binging at night. A food journal is a great way to monitor eating patterns and course correct right away. This free online tracker features a huge database of foods (including restaurant options), but if you’re looking for a less fussy way to keep track, just grab a notebook and start writing.

Keep this in mind too. Although the scale isn’t budging, you might actually be losing fat. Notice if your tops are easier to button, if your pants are looser, or your face is looking slimmer. People often look to the scale for validation on weight loss efforts, but what you really want is fat loss, which won’t necessarily be reflected on the scale.

Brad asked:

“I’m training for a virtual half-marathon this summer with a sub-2-hour finish goal, which would be about a 10-minute PR for me. Even though I’m running every day, I can’t seem to run faster without stopping to catch my breath. What gives?”

Just like weight loss, plateaus are an inevitable part of the training process. And while your speed may indicate what you’re capable of right now, it doesn’t dictate what you’re capable of in the future. Well, once you get to the root of what’s holding you back.

You’re putting in the work, however there could be outside forces compromising your efforts. For instance, if work or family life is really stressful or you’re not fueling yourself properly, your body will feel drained and won’t respond appropriately.

There could also be physiological factors at play. And being overly focused on your goal might be one of them. I can tell that you’re highly motivated because you’re out there training daily. But sometimes being too results-oriented can backfire.

If every time you lace up you worry that you won’t run fast enough to reach your PR, guess what will happen? You won’t run fast enough to reach your PR. Seems simple, but your mind has a powerful way of getting you closer to your goals — or further away.

The second self-doubt starts to creep in, you’re already sabotaging yourself.

In this case, training your mind is as important as training your body. Some athletes look ahead to their workouts with fear and anxiety, worrying about their performance and all the what ifsthat come with it. Others don’t let past experiences (or fears about past experiences) influence their workouts.

Stanford University psychologist, Carol Dweck studies the impact of people’s underlying beliefs about their abilities and found that those who believe their traits are fixed, meaning you’re either born with a certain trait or not (what she calls a Fixed Mindset), often resist and dread challenges, while those who believe deep down that they can improve (called a Growth Mindset) tend to reach their goals more easily.

Dweck conducted several studies and found that individuals who had a growth mindset achieved higher levels of success in different areas of their lives, regardless of their initial abilities.

Tip: Reframe your challenges as opportunities

Instead of focusing on securing your 10-minute PR, forcing faster speeds, and panicking that they won’t be fast enough, take each run as a chance to grow, without worrying about where you’ve been or where you’re going. Start by writing down your challenges. They might be, “I’m out of breath by mile 3” or “How am I going to keep this pace for 13 miles?” Then, write down the potential opportunity, like “I bet I can make it to 4 miles tomorrow” or asking yourself what you can learn about yourself from maintaining a faster-than-normal pace.

By flipping the script on your perceived obstacles, you’re actually allowing yourself to overcome them. Remember, a plateau is never permanent. And it certainly doesn’t define you as a runner. You just have to get your mind in the right space.

Jeff asked:

“I’m the official definition of a couch potato. I follow the Primal Blueprint and I’m onboard with eating meat, fish, and nuts, but when it comes to movement, it’s a no-go. I find I’m spending a lot of time sitting around, trudging through my day. How do I move the needle on starting an exercise routine?”

Our comfort zones are such a comfortable place to be, aren’t they? But here’s the deal. Comfort zones aren’t really about comfort. They’re about fear. In your case Jeff, it could be the fear of looking foolish, the fear of getting injured, or the fear of being judged. After all, if you’ve been a couch potato your whole life, what are people going to think when you start working out?

No one says you have to go all-in on a crazy exercise regimen. You don’t have to train for a marathon or even join a gym. It’s not a competition either, so what you see other people doing — even Primal Blueprint people is their business, not yours.

Tip: Start with Baby Steps

Assuming your efforts are stalling out due to the need to stay inside your comfort zone, you’ll want to brainstorm things you could do that aren’t so intense and scary. Some people thrive by jumping into the unknown, where others become quickly overwhelmed. I’m guessing you’re in the second camp.

My advice to you is to take small steps toward your goal. What would you say about walking to the end of your street and back every morning? Or following one of the quick free workouts on the Mark’s Daily Apple YouTube channel? Or adding a few microworkouts to your day that you can literally do in 60 seconds or less. You can even use your couch as a squat bench if you like.

The point is, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by activities you’ve deemed are outside of your comfort zone, but by taking baby steps, you’ll notice your comfort zone gradually getting bigger and bigger.

What’s worked for you? Tell me about your experience getting through a plateau in the comments!

(function($) { $("#dfNSMJT").load("https://www.marksdailyapple.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=dfads_ajax_load_ads&groups=674&limit=1&orderby=random&order=ASC&container_id=&container_html=none&container_class=&ad_html=div&ad_class=&callback_function=&return_javascript=0&_block_id=dfNSMJT" ); })( jQuery );

References

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/114298#1

The post Ask a Health Coach: Real Tips on Breaking Through a Plateau appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Ask a Health Coach: Real Tips on Breaking Through a Plateau published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

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jesseneufeld · 4 years

Text

Ask a Health Coach: Real Tips on Breaking Through a Plateau

Kimberley asked:

“I’ve lost a total of 70 pounds and have maintained my weight loss for over a year now, but I’m struggling to lose those last 10 pounds. Any tips on getting the scale to move again?”

Tip: Keep a Food Journal for 3-5 Days

Brad asked:

The second self-doubt starts to creep in, you’re already sabotaging yourself.

Dweck conducted several studies and found that individuals who had a growth mindset achieved higher levels of success in different areas of their lives, regardless of their initial abilities.

Tip: Reframe your challenges as opportunities

Jeff asked:

Tip: Start with Baby Steps

What’s worked for you? Tell me about your experience getting through a plateau in the comments!

(function($) { $("#dfrBpDr").load("https://www.marksdailyapple.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=dfads_ajax_load_ads&groups=674&limit=1&orderby=random&order=ASC&container_id=&container_html=none&container_class=&ad_html=div&ad_class=&callback_function=&return_javascript=0&_block_id=dfrBpDr" ); })( jQuery );

References

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/114298#1

The post Ask a Health Coach: Real Tips on Breaking Through a Plateau appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Ask a Health Coach: Real Tips on Breaking Through a Plateau published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

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laurelkrugerr · 4 years

Text

How Should Designers Learn To Code? Git, HTML/CSS, Engineering Principles (Part 2)

About The Author

Paul Hanaoka is a Design Manager at Liferay, based in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and serving the North American teams. His passion is at the intersection of … More about Paul …

In Part 1, Paul explained the basics of the terminal, shared a few productivity hacks to get you started, and how to choose a code editor. In this part, he’ll continue with the topics of version control (Git), HTML and CSS, semantic code, and a brief introduction to some key engineering principles.

Literally, tomes have been written on version control. Nevertheless, I will start by sharing a brief explanation and other introductory content to whet your appetite for further study.

Version control (not to be confused with version history) is basically a way for people to collaborate in their own environments on a single project, with a single main source of truth (often called the “master” branch).

I’ll go over today is the bare minimum you’ll need to know in order to download a project, make a change, and then send it to master.

There are many types of version control software and many tools for managing and hosting your source code (you may have heard of GitLab or Bitbucket). Git and GitHub are one of the more common pairs, my examples will reference GitHub but the principles will apply to most other source code managers.

Aside:

Collecting Data, The Powerful Way

Did you know that CSS can be used for collecting statistics? Indeed, there’s even a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics. Read a related article →

Your First Contribution

Before doing these steps, you’ll need a few things set up:

A GitHub account,

Node and NPM installed on your computer,

A high tolerance for pain or a low threshold for asking others for help.

Step 1: Fork (Get A Copy Of The Code On Your GitHub Account)

On GitHub, you will fork (fork = create a copy of the code in your account; in the following illustration, the blue, orange, red, and green lines show forks) the repository (repo) in question.

By creating branches off of the master, it’s possible for multiple people to contribute to different areas of a project and then merge their work together. (Large preview)

You do this by navigating to the repo in GitHub and clicking the “Fork” button, currently at the top right-hand corner of a repo. This will be the “origin” — your fork on your GitHub account.

As an example, navigating to https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design should show your fork of the Liferay.Design repo.

This is victorvalle’s GitHub fork. (Large preview)

Step 2: Clone (Download The Code To Your Computer)

In your terminal, navigate to where you’d like to store the code. Personally, I have a /github folder in my /user folder — it makes it easier for me to organize it this way. If you’d like to do that, here are the steps — after typing these commands into your terminal window, press the ↵ key to execute:

cd ~/ ## you'll usually start in your root directory, but just in case you don't this will take you there mkdir github ## this creates a "github" folder — on OSX it will now be located at users/your-username/github cd github ## this command navigates you inside the github folder

Now that you’re in the /github folder, you will clone (download a copy of the code onto your computer) the repo.

clone https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design

Once you enter this command, you’ll see a bunch of activity in the terminal — something like this:

Cloning into 'liferay.design'... remote: Enumerating objects: 380, done. remote: Total 380 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 380 Receiving objects: 100% (380/380), 789.24 KiB | 2.78 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (189/189), done.

Step 3: Install (Get It Running On Your Machine)

Navigate into the /project folder. In this case, we’ll enter cd liferay.design. Most projects will include a README.md file in the /root folder, this is typically the starting place for installing and running the project. For our purposes, to install, enter npm install. Once it’s installed, enter npm run dev.

Congratulations! You now have the site available on your local computer — typically projects will tell you where it’s running. In this case, open up a browser and go to localhost:7777.

Step 4: Commit (Make Some Changes And Save Them)

A commit is a collection of changes that you make; I’ve heard it described as saving your progress in a game. There are many opinions on how commits should be structured: mine is that you should create a commit when you’ve achieved one thing, and if you were to remove the commit, it wouldn’t completely break the project (within reason).

If you aren’t coming to a repo with a change in mind, a good place to go is the ‘Issues’ tab. This is where you can see what needs to be done in the project.

If you do have an idea for some change, go ahead and make it. Once you’ve saved the file(s), here are the steps required to create a commit:

git status ## this will print out a list of files that you've made changes in git add path/to/folder/or/file.ext ## this will add the file or folder to the commit git commit -m 'Summarize the changes you've made' ## this command creates a commit and a commit message

Tip: The best recommendation I’ve ever seen for commit messages is from Chris Breams’s “How To Write A Git Commit Message”. A properly formed Git commit subject line should always be able to complete the following sentence: “If applied, this commit will [your subject line here].” For more info on commits, check “Why I Create Atomic Commits In Git” by Clarice Bouwer.

Step 5: Push (Send Your Changes To Your Origin)

Once you’ve made some changes on your computer, before they can be merged into the master branch (added to the project), they need to be moved from your local to your remote repo. To do this, enter git push origin in the command line.

Step 6: Pull Request (Ask For Your Changes To Be Merged Into Upstream)

Now that your changes have gone from your fingers to your computer, to your remote repository — it’s now time to ask for them to be merged into the project via a pull request (PR).

The easiest way to do this is by going to your repo’s page in GitHub. There will be a small message right above the file window that says “This branch is X commits ahead repo-name:branch” and then options to “Pull request” or “Compare”.

Clicking the “Pull request” option here will take you to a page where you can compare the changes and a button that says “Create pull request” will then take you to the “Open a pull request” page where you’ll add a title and include a comment. Being brief, but detailed enough in the comment, will help project maintainers understand your proposed changes.

There are CLI tools like Node GH (GitHub also recently released a beta of their CLI tool) that allow you to initiate and manage pull requests in the terminal. At this point you may prefer to use the web interface, and that’s great! So do I.

The ‘Pull request’ and ‘Compare’ options will appear once your fork has diverged from the upstream repo. (Large preview)

Bonus Step: Remote (Link All The Repos)

At this point, we have three repository references:

upstream: the main repo that you’re tracking, often it’s the repo that you forked;

origin: the default name of the remote that you clone;

local: the code that is currently on your computer.

So far, you have #2 and #3 — but #1 is important because it’s the primary source. Keeping these three things in-line with each other is going to help the commit history stay clean. This helps project maintainers as it eliminates (or at least minimizes) merge conflicts when you send pull requests (PR’s) and it helps you get the latest code and keep your local and origin repositories up-to-date.

Set An Upstream Remote

To track the upstream remote, in your terminal enter the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design

Now, check to see what remotes you have available — enter git remote -v into your terminal, you should see something like:

origin and upstream are the most common labels for remotes — ‘origin’ is your fork, ‘upstream’ is the source. (Large preview)

origin https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design (fetch) origin https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design (push) upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design (fetch) upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design (push)

This will allow you to quickly get the latest version of what is upstream — if you haven’t worked in a repo in a long time and don’t have any local changes that you want to keep, this is a handy command that I use:

git pull upstream master && git reset --hard upstream/master

GitHub Help is a great resource for this and many other questions you might have.

HTML And CSS: Starting With Semantics

On the web, there is an endless supply of resources for learning HTML and CSS. For the purposes of this article, I’m sharing what I would recommend based on the mistakes I made how I first learned to write HTML and CSS.

What Are HTML And CSS?

Before we get any further, let’s define HTML and CSS.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

Hypertext:

“Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access.”

— “Hypertext” on Wikipedia

Markup Language:

“…a system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text.”

— “Markup Language” on Wikipedia

In case you also don’t know what a lot of those words mean — briefly put, HTML is the combination of references (links) between documents on the web, and tags that you use to give structure to those documents.

There’s an HTML5 tag for pretty much any basic element — otherwise you can always use a div! (Large preview)

For a thorough introduction to HTML and CSS, I highly recommend the Introduction to HTML and CSS first steps, both on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) web docs. That, along with the excellent articles that websites such as CSS Tricks, 24 Ways and countless of others provide, contain basically everything you’ll ever need to reference with regards to HTML/CSS.

There are two main parts of an HTML document: the <head> and the <body>. – The <head> contains things that aren’t displayed by the browser — metadata and links to imported stylesheets and scripts. – The <body> contains the actual content that will be rendered by the browser. To render the content, the browser reads the HTML, provides a base layer of styles depending on the types of tags used, adds additional layers of styles provided by the website itself (the styles are included in/referenced from the <head>, or are inline), and that is what we see in the end. (Note: There is often also the additional layer of JavaScript but it’s outside of the scope of this article.)

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets — it is used to extend the HTML by making it easier to give documents a custom look and feel. A style sheet is a document that tells the HTML what elements should look like (and how they should be positioned) by setting rules based on tags, classes, IDs, and other selectors. Cascading refers to the method for determining which rules in a sheet take priority in the inevitable event of a rule conflict.

“‘Cascading’ means that styles can fall (or cascade) from one style sheet to another, enabling multiple style sheets to be used on one HTML document.”

— Cascade — Max Design

CSS often gets a bad reputation — in sites with lots of style sheets it can quickly become unwieldy, especially if there aren’t documented, consistent methods used (more on that later) — but if you use it in an organized fashion and following all the best practices, CSS can be your best friend. Especially with the layout capabilities that are now available in most modern browsers, CSS is not nearly as necessary to hack and fight as it once was.

Rachel Andrew wrote a great guide, How To Learn CSS — and one of the best things to know before you start is that:

“You don’t need to commit to memorizing every CSS Property and Value.”

— Rachel Andrew

Instead, it’s far more vital to learn the fundamentals — selectors, inheritance, the box model, and most importantly, how to debug your CSS code (hint: you will need the browser developer tools).

Don’t worry about memorizing the syntax for the background property, and don’t worry if you forget about how exactly to align stuff in Flexbox (the CSS Tricks Guide to Flexbox is possibly one of my top-10 most visited pages, ever!); Google and Stack Overflow are your friends when it comes to CSS properties and values.

Some code editors even have built-in autocomplete so you don’t even need to search on the web in order to be able to figure out all the possible properties of a border, for example.

One of my favorite new features in Firefox 70 is the inactive CSS rules indicator. It will save you hours of time trying to figure out why a style isn’t being applied.

Kids these days have it so easy! (Large preview)

Semantics

Let’s start with semantic code. Semantics refers to the meanings of words, semantic code refers to the idea that there is meaning to the markup in any given language.

There are many reasons why semantics are important. If I could summarize this, I would say that if you learn and use semantic code, it will make your life a lot easier because you will get a lot of things for free — and who doesn’t like free stuff?

For a more complete introduction to semantic code, see Paul Boag’s brief blog post on the topic.

Semantics gives you many benefits:

Default styles For example, using a headline tag <h1> for the title of your document will make it stand out from the rest of the document’s contents, much like a headline would.

Accessible content Your code will be accessible by default, meaning it will work with screen readers and will be easier to navigate with a keyboard.

SEO Company benefits Semantic markup is easier for a machine to read, which makes it more accessible to search engines.

Performance benefits Clean HTML is the foundation for a high-performing site. And clean HTML will also likely lead to cleaner CSS which means less code overall, making your site or app faster.

Note: For a more in-depth look into semantics and HTML, Heydon Pickering wrote “Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements” which I highly recommend reading.

Engineering Principles And Paradigms: The Basics

Abstraction

There are tons of applications, tangents, and levels we could explore over the concept of abstraction — too many for this article which is intended to give you a brief introduction into concepts so that you are aware of them as you continue to learn.

Abstraction is a foundational engineering paradigm with a wide variety of applications — for the purposes of this article, abstraction is separating form from function. We’ll apply this in three areas: tokens, components, and the Don’t Repeat Yourself principle.

Tokens

If you’ve used a modern design tool for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered the idea of a token. Even Photoshop and Illustrator now have this idea of shared styles in a centralized library — instead of hard-coding values into a design, you use a token. If you’re familiar with the concept of CSS or SASS variables, you’re already familiar with tokens.

One layer of abstraction with tokens is to assign a name to a color — for example, $blue-00 can be mapped to a hex value (or an HSL value, or whatever you want) — let’s say #0B5FFF. Now, instead of using the hex value in your stylesheets, you use the token value — that way if you decide that blue-00 is actually #0B36CE, then you only have to change it in a single place. This is a nice concept.

Tokens for colors in the Lexicon Alerts component helps keep things DRY. (Large preview)

If you take this same paradigm of abstraction and go a layer further, you can token-ception — and assign a variable to a functional value. This is particularly useful if you have a robust system and want to have different themes within the system. A functional example of this would be assigning a variable like $primary-color and map that to $blue-00 — so now you can create markup and instead of referencing blue, you’re referencing a functional variable. If you ever want to use the same markup, but with a different style (theme), then you only need to map $primary-color to a new color, and your markup doesn’t need to change at all! Magic!

Components

In the past 3-4 years, the idea of components and componentization has become more relevant and accessible to designers. The concept of symbols (pioneered by Macromedia/Adobe Fireworks, later expanded by Sketch, and then taken to the next level by Figma and Framer), is now more widely available in most design tools (Adobe XD, InVision Studio, Webflow, and many others). Componentization, even more than tokens, can separate the form of something from the function of it — which helps to improve both the form and the function.

One of the more notable early examples is Nicole Sullivan’s media object component. At first glance you might not realize that a whole page is essentially composed of a single component, rendered in different ways. In this way, we can re-use the same markup (form), modifying it slightly by passing in options or parameters, and styles — and have it provide a variety of value (function).

Don’t Repeat Yourself

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is one of my favorite principles — creating things that can be reused over and over is one of the small victories you can have when coding.

While you often can’t (and arguably shouldn’t) strive to apply the DRY principle 100% of the time, every time — it’s at least beneficial to be aware of this so that as you’re working, you can consider how you can make whatever you’re working on more reusable.

A note on the Rule of Three: A corollary to the DRY principle is the rule of three — essentially, once you re-use (copy/paste) something three times, you should rewrite it into a reusable component. Like the Pirate’s Code, it’s more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule, and can vary from component to component and from project to project.

CSS And Styling Methodologies: Atomic vs. BEM

There are a lot of different ways to organize and write CSS code — Atomic and BEM are only two of the many that you’re likely to come across. You don’t have to “pick” a single one, nor do you have to follow them exactly. Most of the teams I’ve worked with usually have their own unique blend, based on the project or technology. It is helpful to be familiar with them so that over time, you can learn which approach to take depending on the situation.

All of these approaches go beyond “just” CSS and styling, and can often influence the tooling you use, the way you organize your files, and potentially the markup.

Atomic CSS

Not to be confused with Atomic Web Design — atomic (perhaps more aptly referred to as “functional”) CSS, is a methodology that essentially favors using small, single-purpose classes to define visual functions. A few notable libraries:

Atomic CSS by Steve Carlson;

Tachyons by Adam Morse;

Tailwind CSS by Adam Wathan.

What I like about this method is that it allows you to quickly style and theme things — one of the biggest drawbacks is that your markup can get pretty cluttered, pretty fast.

Check John Polacek’s article on CSS-tricks for a full introduction to Atomic CSS.

BEM

The BEM philosophy is a great precursor to a lot of the modern JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.

“BEM (Block, Element, Modifier) is a component-based approach to web development.”

— BEM: Quick Start

Basically, everything that can be reused is a block. Blocks are comprised of elements, something that can’t be used outside of a block, and potentially other blocks. Modifiers are things that describe the status of something or the way it looks or behaves.

Personally, I like the theory and philosophy of BEM. What I do not like is the way that things are named. Way too many underscores, hyphens, and it can feel unnecessarily repetitive (.menu, .menu__item, etc).

Recommended reading: BEM For Beginners written by Inna Belaya

Thank U, Next(.js)

After you have sufficiently mastered these topics, don’t worry, there is still plenty to learn. Some suggestions:

Functional and object-oriented programming We touched on it lightly, but there’s plenty more to learn beyond CSS.

Higher-level languages and frameworks Typescript, Ruby, React, Vue are the next things you’ll tackle once you have a strong grasp of HTML and CSS.

Querying languages and using data Learning about GraphQL, MySQL, REST APIs will take your coding ability to the next level.

Conclusion: Designers Who Code != Software Engineers

Hopefully, this article has shown you that learning to code isn’t as difficult as you may have previously thought. It can take a lot of time, but the amount of resources available on the internet is astounding, and they’re not decreasing — quite the opposite!

One significant point that I want to emphasize is that “coding” is not the same as “software engineering” — being able to fork a repo and copy/paste in code from Stack Overflow can get you a long way, and while most, if not all, software engineers that I know have done that — you must use your new-found skills with wisdom and humility. For everything you can now access with some engineering prowess, there is that much more that you don’t know. While you may think that a feature or style is easy to accomplish because — “Hey, I got it working in devtools!” or “I made it work in Codepen.” — there are many engineering processes, dependencies, and methods that you probably don’t know that you don’t know.

All of that is to say — don’t forget that we are still designers. Our primary function is to add business value through the lens of understanding customer or user problems and synthesizing them with our knowledge of design patterns, methods, and processes. Yes, being a “designer who writes code” can be very useful and will expand your ability to add this value — but we still need to let engineers make the engineering decisions.

Anything Amiss?

There’s a good chance that something in this post was obscure, obtuse, and/or obsolete and I’d love the opportunity to make it better! Please leave a comment below, DM me, or @mention me on Twitter so I can improve.

Further Reading

Coding Bootcamps vs. Computer Science Degrees: What Employers Want and Other Perspectives (Kyle Thayer)

How To Start Using Sketch And Framer X (by Martina Pérez, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction To Linux Commands (by Paul Tero, Smashing Magazine)

Become A Command-Line Power User With Oh My ZSH And Z (by Wes Bos, Smashing Magazine)

A list of the common cmd.exe and Unix commands that you can use in PowerShell (Microsoft Docs)

regular-expressions.info (by Jan Goyvaerts)

regexone.com (learn regular expressions with simple interactive exercises)

Batch Resizing Using Command Line and ImageMagick (by Vlad Gerasimov, Smashing Magazine)

Shortcuts And Tips For Improving Your Productivity With Sublime Text (by Jai Pandya, Smashing Magazine)

Visual Studio Code Can Do That? (by Burke Holland, Smashing Magazine)

Why version history is not version control (by Josh Brewer)

Modern Version Control With Git (by Tobias Günther, Smashing Magazine)

“Hello World” (a GitHub step-by-step guide)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on a Mac (by Dave McFarland)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on Windows (by Dejan Tucakov)

Why I Create Atomic Commits In Git (by Clarice Bouwer)

How to Write a Git Commit Message (by Chris Breams)

Semantic code: What? Why? How? (by Paul Boag)

Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements (by Heydon Pickering, Smashing Magazine)

Designing for Performance: Chapter 4. Optimizing Markup and Styles (by Lara C. Hogan, O’Reilly Media)

The media object saves hundreds of lines of code (by Nicole Sullivan)

Let’s Define Exactly What Atomic CSS is (by John Polacek, CSS Tricks)

BEM For Beginners: Why You Need BEM (by Inna Belaya, Smashing Magazine)

Javascript for Cats: An Introduction for New Programmers

Roadmap.sh: Frontend Developer

Functional Programming vs OOPS : Explain Like I’m Five

Why, How, and When to Use Semantic HTML and ARIA (by Adam Silver, CSS Tricks)

HTML Semantics (an eBook by Smashing Magazine)

The Fundamentals – HTML + CSS (on Syntax.fm)

Cascade and inheritance (westciv.com)

CSS Tricks (by Chris Coyier)

Getting Started With CSS Layout (by Rachel Andrew, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction to HTML (MDN web docs)

CSS first steps (MDN web docs)

JavaScript First Steps (MDN web docs)

24 Ways (by Drew McLellan)

(mb, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-should-designers-learn-to-code-git-html-css-engineering-principles-part-2/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-should-designers-learn-to-code-git.html

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douglassmiith · 4 years

Text

How Should Designers Learn To Code? Git HTML/CSS Engineering Principles (Part 2)

About The Author

Paul Hanaoka is a Design Manager at Liferay, based in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and serving the North American teams. His passion is at the intersection of … More about Paul …

Literally, tomes have been written on version control. Nevertheless, I will start by sharing a brief explanation and other introductory content to whet your appetite for further study.

I’ll go over today is the bare minimum you’ll need to know in order to download a project, make a change, and then send it to master.

Aside:

Collecting Data, The Powerful Way

Did you know that CSS can be used for collecting statistics? Indeed, there’s even a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics. Read a related article →

Your First Contribution

Before doing these steps, you’ll need a few things set up:

A GitHub account,

Node and NPM installed on your computer,

A high tolerance for pain or a low threshold for asking others for help.

Step 1: Fork (Get A Copy Of The Code On Your GitHub Account)

On GitHub, you will fork (fork = create a copy of the code in your account; in the following illustration, the blue, orange, red, and green lines show forks) the repository (repo) in question.

By creating branches off of the master, it’s possible for multiple people to contribute to different areas of a project and then merge their work together. (Large preview)

As an example, navigating to https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design should show your fork of the Liferay.Design repo.

This is victorvalle’s GitHub fork. (Large preview)

Step 2: Clone (Download The Code To Your Computer)

cd ~/ ## you'll usually start in your root directory, but just in case you don't this will take you theremkdir github ## this creates a "github" folder — on OSX it will now be located at users/your-username/githubcd github ## this command navigates you inside the github folder

Now that you’re in the /github folder, you will clone (download a copy of the code onto your computer) the repo.

clone https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design

Once you enter this command, you’ll see a bunch of activity in the terminal — something like this:

Cloning into 'liferay.design'...remote: Enumerating objects: 380, done.remote: Total 380 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 380Receiving objects: 100% (380/380), 789.24 KiB | 2.78 MiB/s, done.Resolving deltas: 100% (189/189), done.

Step 3: Install (Get It Running On Your Machine)

Congratulations! You now have the site available on your local computer — typically projects will tell you where it’s running. In this case, open up a browser and go to localhost:7777.

Step 4: Commit (Make Some Changes And Save Them)

If you aren’t coming to a repo with a change in mind, a good place to go is the ‘Issues’ tab. This is where you can see what needs to be done in the project.

If you do have an idea for some change, go ahead and make it. Once you’ve saved the file(s), here are the steps required to create a commit:

git status ## this will print out a list of files that you've made changes ingit add path/to/folder/or/file.ext ## this will add the file or folder to the commitgit commit -m 'Summarize the changes you've made' ## this command creates a commit and a commit message

Step 5: Push (Send Your Changes To Your Origin)

Step 6: Pull Request (Ask For Your Changes To Be Merged Into Upstream)

Now that your changes have gone from your fingers to your computer, to your remote repository — it’s now time to ask for them to be merged into the project via a pull request (PR).

The ‘Pull request’ and ‘Compare’ options will appear once your fork has diverged from the upstream repo. (Large preview)

Bonus Step: Remote (Link All The Repos)

At this point, we have three repository references:

upstream: the main repo that you’re tracking, often it’s the repo that you forked;

origin: the default name of the remote that you clone;

local: the code that is currently on your computer.

Set An Upstream Remote

To track the upstream remote, in your terminal enter the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design

Now, check to see what remotes you have available — enter git remote -v into your terminal, you should see something like:

origin and upstream are the most common labels for remotes — ‘origin’ is your fork, ‘upstream’ is the source. (Large preview)

origin https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design (fetch)origin https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design (push)upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design (fetch)upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design (push)

git pull upstream master && git reset --hard upstream/master

GitHub Help is a great resource for this and many other questions you might have.

HTML And CSS: Starting With Semantics

What Are HTML And CSS?

Before we get any further, let’s define HTML and CSS.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

Hypertext:

“Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access.”

— “Hypertext” on Wikipedia

Markup Language:

“…a system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text.”

— “Markup Language” on Wikipedia

There’s an HTML5 tag for pretty much any basic element — otherwise you can always use a div! (Large preview)

“‘Cascading’ means that styles can fall (or cascade) from one style sheet to another, enabling multiple style sheets to be used on one HTML document.”

— Cascade — Max Design

Rachel Andrew wrote a great guide, How To Learn CSS — and one of the best things to know before you start is that:

“You don’t need to commit to memorizing every CSS Property and Value.”

— Rachel Andrew

Instead, it’s far more vital to learn the fundamentals — selectors, inheritance, the box model, and most importantly, how to debug your CSS code (hint: you will need the browser developer tools).

Some code editors even have built-in autocomplete so you don’t even need to search on the web in order to be able to figure out all the possible properties of a border, for example.

One of my favorite new features in Firefox 70 is the inactive CSS rules indicator. It will save you hours of time trying to figure out why a style isn’t being applied.

Kids these days have it so easy! (Large preview)

Semantics

Let’s start with semantic code. Semantics refers to the meanings of words, semantic code refers to the idea that there is meaning to the markup in any given language.

For a more complete introduction to semantic code, see Paul Boag’s brief blog post on the topic.

Semantics gives you many benefits:

Default styles For example, using a headline tag <h1> for the title of your document will make it stand out from the rest of the document’s contents, much like a headline would.

Accessible content Your code will be accessible by default, meaning it will work with screen readers and will be easier to navigate with a keyboard.

SEO Company benefits Semantic markup is easier for a machine to read, which makes it more accessible to search engines.

Performance benefits Clean HTML is the foundation for a high-performing site. And clean HTML will also likely lead to cleaner CSS which means less code overall, making your site or app faster.

Note: For a more in-depth look into semantics and HTML, Heydon Pickering wrote “Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements” which I highly recommend reading.

Engineering Principles And Paradigms: The Basics

Abstraction

Tokens

Tokens for colors in the Lexicon Alerts component helps keep things DRY. (Large preview)

Components

Don’t Repeat Yourself

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is one of my favorite principles — creating things that can be reused over and over is one of the small victories you can have when coding.

CSS And Styling Methodologies: Atomic vs. BEM

All of these approaches go beyond “just” CSS and styling, and can often influence the tooling you use, the way you organize your files, and potentially the markup.

Atomic CSS

Atomic CSS by Steve Carlson;

Tachyons by Adam Morse;

Tailwind CSS by Adam Wathan.

What I like about this method is that it allows you to quickly style and theme things — one of the biggest drawbacks is that your markup can get pretty cluttered, pretty fast.

Check John Polacek’s article on CSS-tricks for a full introduction to Atomic CSS.

BEM

The BEM philosophy is a great precursor to a lot of the modern JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.

“BEM (Block, Element, Modifier) is a component-based approach to web development.”

— BEM: Quick Start

Recommended reading: BEM For Beginners written by Inna Belaya

Thank U, Next(.js)

After you have sufficiently mastered these topics, don’t worry, there is still plenty to learn. Some suggestions:

Functional and object-oriented programming We touched on it lightly, but there’s plenty more to learn beyond CSS.

Higher-level languages and frameworks Typescript, Ruby, React, Vue are the next things you’ll tackle once you have a strong grasp of HTML and CSS.

Querying languages and using data Learning about GraphQL, MySQL, REST APIs will take your coding ability to the next level.

Conclusion: Designers Who Code != Software Engineers

Anything Amiss?

Further Reading

Coding Bootcamps vs. Computer Science Degrees: What Employers Want and Other Perspectives (Kyle Thayer)

How To Start Using Sketch And Framer X (by Martina Pérez, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction To Linux Commands (by Paul Tero, Smashing Magazine)

Become A Command-Line Power User With Oh My ZSH And Z (by Wes Bos, Smashing Magazine)

A list of the common cmd.exe and Unix commands that you can use in PowerShell (Microsoft Docs)

regular-expressions.info (by Jan Goyvaerts)

regexone.com (learn regular expressions with simple interactive exercises)

Batch Resizing Using Command Line and ImageMagick (by Vlad Gerasimov, Smashing Magazine)

Shortcuts And Tips For Improving Your Productivity With Sublime Text (by Jai Pandya, Smashing Magazine)

Visual Studio Code Can Do That? (by Burke Holland, Smashing Magazine)

Why version history is not version control (by Josh Brewer)

Modern Version Control With Git (by Tobias Günther, Smashing Magazine)

“Hello World” (a GitHub step-by-step guide)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on a Mac (by Dave McFarland)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on Windows (by Dejan Tucakov)

Why I Create Atomic Commits In Git (by Clarice Bouwer)

How to Write a Git Commit Message (by Chris Breams)

Semantic code: What? Why? How? (by Paul Boag)

Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements (by Heydon Pickering, Smashing Magazine)

Designing for Performance: Chapter 4. Optimizing Markup and Styles (by Lara C. Hogan, O’Reilly Media)

The media object saves hundreds of lines of code (by Nicole Sullivan)

Let’s Define Exactly What Atomic CSS is (by John Polacek, CSS Tricks)

BEM For Beginners: Why You Need BEM (by Inna Belaya, Smashing Magazine)

Javascript for Cats: An Introduction for New Programmers

Roadmap.sh: Frontend Developer

Functional Programming vs OOPS : Explain Like I’m Five

Why, How, and When to Use Semantic HTML and ARIA (by Adam Silver, CSS Tricks)

HTML Semantics (an eBook by Smashing Magazine)

The Fundamentals – HTML + CSS (on Syntax.fm)

Cascade and inheritance (westciv.com)

CSS Tricks (by Chris Coyier)

Getting Started With CSS Layout (by Rachel Andrew, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction to HTML (MDN web docs)

CSS first steps (MDN web docs)

JavaScript First Steps (MDN web docs)

24 Ways (by Drew McLellan)

(mb, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/how-should-designers-learn-to-code-git-html-css-engineering-principles-part-2/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/how-should-designers-learn-to-code-git-htmlcss-engineering-principles-part-2

0 notes

riichardwilson · 4 years

Text

How Should Designers Learn To Code? Git, HTML/CSS, Engineering Principles (Part 2)

About The Author

Paul Hanaoka is a Design Manager at Liferay, based in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and serving the North American teams. His passion is at the intersection of … More about Paul …

Literally, tomes have been written on version control. Nevertheless, I will start by sharing a brief explanation and other introductory content to whet your appetite for further study.

I’ll go over today is the bare minimum you’ll need to know in order to download a project, make a change, and then send it to master.

Aside:

Collecting Data, The Powerful Way

Did you know that CSS can be used for collecting statistics? Indeed, there’s even a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics. Read a related article →

Your First Contribution

Before doing these steps, you’ll need a few things set up:

A GitHub account,

Node and NPM installed on your computer,

A high tolerance for pain or a low threshold for asking others for help.

Step 1: Fork (Get A Copy Of The Code On Your GitHub Account)

On GitHub, you will fork (fork = create a copy of the code in your account; in the following illustration, the blue, orange, red, and green lines show forks) the repository (repo) in question.

By creating branches off of the master, it’s possible for multiple people to contribute to different areas of a project and then merge their work together. (Large preview)

As an example, navigating to https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design should show your fork of the Liferay.Design repo.

This is victorvalle’s GitHub fork. (Large preview)

Step 2: Clone (Download The Code To Your Computer)

Now that you’re in the /github folder, you will clone (download a copy of the code onto your computer) the repo.

clone https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design

Once you enter this command, you’ll see a bunch of activity in the terminal — something like this:

Step 3: Install (Get It Running On Your Machine)

Congratulations! You now have the site available on your local computer — typically projects will tell you where it’s running. In this case, open up a browser and go to localhost:7777.

Step 4: Commit (Make Some Changes And Save Them)

If you aren’t coming to a repo with a change in mind, a good place to go is the ‘Issues’ tab. This is where you can see what needs to be done in the project.

If you do have an idea for some change, go ahead and make it. Once you’ve saved the file(s), here are the steps required to create a commit:

Step 5: Push (Send Your Changes To Your Origin)

Step 6: Pull Request (Ask For Your Changes To Be Merged Into Upstream)

Now that your changes have gone from your fingers to your computer, to your remote repository — it’s now time to ask for them to be merged into the project via a pull request (PR).

The ‘Pull request’ and ‘Compare’ options will appear once your fork has diverged from the upstream repo. (Large preview)

Bonus Step: Remote (Link All The Repos)

At this point, we have three repository references:

upstream: the main repo that you’re tracking, often it’s the repo that you forked;

origin: the default name of the remote that you clone;

local: the code that is currently on your computer.

Set An Upstream Remote

To track the upstream remote, in your terminal enter the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design

Now, check to see what remotes you have available — enter git remote -v into your terminal, you should see something like:

origin and upstream are the most common labels for remotes — ‘origin’ is your fork, ‘upstream’ is the source. (Large preview)

git pull upstream master && git reset --hard upstream/master

GitHub Help is a great resource for this and many other questions you might have.

HTML And CSS: Starting With Semantics

What Are HTML And CSS?

Before we get any further, let’s define HTML and CSS.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

Hypertext:

“Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access.”

— “Hypertext” on Wikipedia

Markup Language:

“…a system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text.”

— “Markup Language” on Wikipedia

There’s an HTML5 tag for pretty much any basic element — otherwise you can always use a div! (Large preview)

“‘Cascading’ means that styles can fall (or cascade) from one style sheet to another, enabling multiple style sheets to be used on one HTML document.”

— Cascade — Max Design

Rachel Andrew wrote a great guide, How To Learn CSS — and one of the best things to know before you start is that:

“You don’t need to commit to memorizing every CSS Property and Value.”

— Rachel Andrew

Instead, it’s far more vital to learn the fundamentals — selectors, inheritance, the box model, and most importantly, how to debug your CSS code (hint: you will need the browser developer tools).

Some code editors even have built-in autocomplete so you don’t even need to search on the web in order to be able to figure out all the possible properties of a border, for example.

One of my favorite new features in Firefox 70 is the inactive CSS rules indicator. It will save you hours of time trying to figure out why a style isn’t being applied.

Kids these days have it so easy! (Large preview)

Semantics

Let’s start with semantic code. Semantics refers to the meanings of words, semantic code refers to the idea that there is meaning to the markup in any given language.

For a more complete introduction to semantic code, see Paul Boag’s brief blog post on the topic.

Semantics gives you many benefits:

Default styles For example, using a headline tag <h1> for the title of your document will make it stand out from the rest of the document’s contents, much like a headline would.

Accessible content Your code will be accessible by default, meaning it will work with screen readers and will be easier to navigate with a keyboard.

SEO Company benefits Semantic markup is easier for a machine to read, which makes it more accessible to search engines.

Performance benefits Clean HTML is the foundation for a high-performing site. And clean HTML will also likely lead to cleaner CSS which means less code overall, making your site or app faster.

Note: For a more in-depth look into semantics and HTML, Heydon Pickering wrote “Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements” which I highly recommend reading.

Engineering Principles And Paradigms: The Basics

Abstraction

Tokens

Tokens for colors in the Lexicon Alerts component helps keep things DRY. (Large preview)

Components

Don’t Repeat Yourself

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is one of my favorite principles — creating things that can be reused over and over is one of the small victories you can have when coding.

CSS And Styling Methodologies: Atomic vs. BEM

All of these approaches go beyond “just” CSS and styling, and can often influence the tooling you use, the way you organize your files, and potentially the markup.

Atomic CSS

Atomic CSS by Steve Carlson;

Tachyons by Adam Morse;

Tailwind CSS by Adam Wathan.

What I like about this method is that it allows you to quickly style and theme things — one of the biggest drawbacks is that your markup can get pretty cluttered, pretty fast.

Check John Polacek’s article on CSS-tricks for a full introduction to Atomic CSS.

BEM

The BEM philosophy is a great precursor to a lot of the modern JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.

“BEM (Block, Element, Modifier) is a component-based approach to web development.”

— BEM: Quick Start

Recommended reading: BEM For Beginners written by Inna Belaya

Thank U, Next(.js)

After you have sufficiently mastered these topics, don’t worry, there is still plenty to learn. Some suggestions:

Functional and object-oriented programming We touched on it lightly, but there’s plenty more to learn beyond CSS.

Higher-level languages and frameworks Typescript, Ruby, React, Vue are the next things you’ll tackle once you have a strong grasp of HTML and CSS.

Querying languages and using data Learning about GraphQL, MySQL, REST APIs will take your coding ability to the next level.

Conclusion: Designers Who Code != Software Engineers

Anything Amiss?

Further Reading

Coding Bootcamps vs. Computer Science Degrees: What Employers Want and Other Perspectives (Kyle Thayer)

How To Start Using Sketch And Framer X (by Martina Pérez, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction To Linux Commands (by Paul Tero, Smashing Magazine)

Become A Command-Line Power User With Oh My ZSH And Z (by Wes Bos, Smashing Magazine)

A list of the common cmd.exe and Unix commands that you can use in PowerShell (Microsoft Docs)

regular-expressions.info (by Jan Goyvaerts)

regexone.com (learn regular expressions with simple interactive exercises)

Batch Resizing Using Command Line and ImageMagick (by Vlad Gerasimov, Smashing Magazine)

Shortcuts And Tips For Improving Your Productivity With Sublime Text (by Jai Pandya, Smashing Magazine)

Visual Studio Code Can Do That? (by Burke Holland, Smashing Magazine)

Why version history is not version control (by Josh Brewer)

Modern Version Control With Git (by Tobias Günther, Smashing Magazine)

“Hello World” (a GitHub step-by-step guide)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on a Mac (by Dave McFarland)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on Windows (by Dejan Tucakov)

Why I Create Atomic Commits In Git (by Clarice Bouwer)

How to Write a Git Commit Message (by Chris Breams)

Semantic code: What? Why? How? (by Paul Boag)

Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements (by Heydon Pickering, Smashing Magazine)

Designing for Performance: Chapter 4. Optimizing Markup and Styles (by Lara C. Hogan, O’Reilly Media)

The media object saves hundreds of lines of code (by Nicole Sullivan)

Let’s Define Exactly What Atomic CSS is (by John Polacek, CSS Tricks)

BEM For Beginners: Why You Need BEM (by Inna Belaya, Smashing Magazine)

Javascript for Cats: An Introduction for New Programmers

Roadmap.sh: Frontend Developer

Functional Programming vs OOPS : Explain Like I’m Five

Why, How, and When to Use Semantic HTML and ARIA (by Adam Silver, CSS Tricks)

HTML Semantics (an eBook by Smashing Magazine)

The Fundamentals – HTML + CSS (on Syntax.fm)

Cascade and inheritance (westciv.com)

CSS Tricks (by Chris Coyier)

Getting Started With CSS Layout (by Rachel Andrew, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction to HTML (MDN web docs)

CSS first steps (MDN web docs)

JavaScript First Steps (MDN web docs)

24 Ways (by Drew McLellan)

(mb, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-should-designers-learn-to-code-git-html-css-engineering-principles-part-2/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/613627004767649792

0 notes

scpie · 4 years

Text

How Should Designers Learn To Code? Git, HTML/CSS, Engineering Principles (Part 2)

About The Author

Paul Hanaoka is a Design Manager at Liferay, based in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and serving the North American teams. His passion is at the intersection of … More about Paul …

Literally, tomes have been written on version control. Nevertheless, I will start by sharing a brief explanation and other introductory content to whet your appetite for further study.

I’ll go over today is the bare minimum you’ll need to know in order to download a project, make a change, and then send it to master.

Aside:

Collecting Data, The Powerful Way

Did you know that CSS can be used for collecting statistics? Indeed, there’s even a CSS-only approach for tracking UI interactions using Google Analytics. Read a related article →

Your First Contribution

Before doing these steps, you’ll need a few things set up:

A GitHub account,

Node and NPM installed on your computer,

A high tolerance for pain or a low threshold for asking others for help.

Step 1: Fork (Get A Copy Of The Code On Your GitHub Account)

On GitHub, you will fork (fork = create a copy of the code in your account; in the following illustration, the blue, orange, red, and green lines show forks) the repository (repo) in question.

By creating branches off of the master, it’s possible for multiple people to contribute to different areas of a project and then merge their work together. (Large preview)

As an example, navigating to https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design should show your fork of the Liferay.Design repo.

This is victorvalle’s GitHub fork. (Large preview)

Step 2: Clone (Download The Code To Your Computer)

Now that you’re in the /github folder, you will clone (download a copy of the code onto your computer) the repo.

clone https://github.com/yourGitHubUsername/liferay.design

Once you enter this command, you’ll see a bunch of activity in the terminal — something like this:

Step 3: Install (Get It Running On Your Machine)

Congratulations! You now have the site available on your local computer — typically projects will tell you where it’s running. In this case, open up a browser and go to localhost:7777.

Step 4: Commit (Make Some Changes And Save Them)

If you aren’t coming to a repo with a change in mind, a good place to go is the ‘Issues’ tab. This is where you can see what needs to be done in the project.

If you do have an idea for some change, go ahead and make it. Once you’ve saved the file(s), here are the steps required to create a commit:

Step 5: Push (Send Your Changes To Your Origin)

Step 6: Pull Request (Ask For Your Changes To Be Merged Into Upstream)

Now that your changes have gone from your fingers to your computer, to your remote repository — it’s now time to ask for them to be merged into the project via a pull request (PR).

The ‘Pull request’ and ‘Compare’ options will appear once your fork has diverged from the upstream repo. (Large preview)

Bonus Step: Remote (Link All The Repos)

At this point, we have three repository references:

upstream: the main repo that you’re tracking, often it’s the repo that you forked;

origin: the default name of the remote that you clone;

local: the code that is currently on your computer.

Set An Upstream Remote

To track the upstream remote, in your terminal enter the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/liferay-design/liferay.design

Now, check to see what remotes you have available — enter git remote -v into your terminal, you should see something like:

origin and upstream are the most common labels for remotes — ‘origin’ is your fork, ‘upstream’ is the source. (Large preview)

git pull upstream master && git reset --hard upstream/master

GitHub Help is a great resource for this and many other questions you might have.

HTML And CSS: Starting With Semantics

What Are HTML And CSS?

Before we get any further, let’s define HTML and CSS.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.

Hypertext:

“Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access.”

— “Hypertext” on Wikipedia

Markup Language:

“…a system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text.”

— “Markup Language” on Wikipedia

There’s an HTML5 tag for pretty much any basic element — otherwise you can always use a div! (Large preview)

“‘Cascading’ means that styles can fall (or cascade) from one style sheet to another, enabling multiple style sheets to be used on one HTML document.”

— Cascade — Max Design

Rachel Andrew wrote a great guide, How To Learn CSS — and one of the best things to know before you start is that:

“You don’t need to commit to memorizing every CSS Property and Value.”

— Rachel Andrew

Instead, it’s far more vital to learn the fundamentals — selectors, inheritance, the box model, and most importantly, how to debug your CSS code (hint: you will need the browser developer tools).

Some code editors even have built-in autocomplete so you don’t even need to search on the web in order to be able to figure out all the possible properties of a border, for example.

One of my favorite new features in Firefox 70 is the inactive CSS rules indicator. It will save you hours of time trying to figure out why a style isn’t being applied.

Kids these days have it so easy! (Large preview)

Semantics

Let’s start with semantic code. Semantics refers to the meanings of words, semantic code refers to the idea that there is meaning to the markup in any given language.

For a more complete introduction to semantic code, see Paul Boag’s brief blog post on the topic.

Semantics gives you many benefits:

Default styles For example, using a headline tag <h1> for the title of your document will make it stand out from the rest of the document’s contents, much like a headline would.

Accessible content Your code will be accessible by default, meaning it will work with screen readers and will be easier to navigate with a keyboard.

SEO Company benefits Semantic markup is easier for a machine to read, which makes it more accessible to search engines.

Performance benefits Clean HTML is the foundation for a high-performing site. And clean HTML will also likely lead to cleaner CSS which means less code overall, making your site or app faster.

Note: For a more in-depth look into semantics and HTML, Heydon Pickering wrote “Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements” which I highly recommend reading.

Engineering Principles And Paradigms: The Basics

Abstraction

Tokens

Tokens for colors in the Lexicon Alerts component helps keep things DRY. (Large preview)

Components

Don’t Repeat Yourself

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is one of my favorite principles — creating things that can be reused over and over is one of the small victories you can have when coding.

CSS And Styling Methodologies: Atomic vs. BEM

All of these approaches go beyond “just” CSS and styling, and can often influence the tooling you use, the way you organize your files, and potentially the markup.

Atomic CSS

Atomic CSS by Steve Carlson;

Tachyons by Adam Morse;

Tailwind CSS by Adam Wathan.

What I like about this method is that it allows you to quickly style and theme things — one of the biggest drawbacks is that your markup can get pretty cluttered, pretty fast.

Check John Polacek’s article on CSS-tricks for a full introduction to Atomic CSS.

BEM

The BEM philosophy is a great precursor to a lot of the modern JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.

“BEM (Block, Element, Modifier) is a component-based approach to web development.”

— BEM: Quick Start

Recommended reading: BEM For Beginners written by Inna Belaya

Thank U, Next(.js)

After you have sufficiently mastered these topics, don’t worry, there is still plenty to learn. Some suggestions:

Functional and object-oriented programming We touched on it lightly, but there’s plenty more to learn beyond CSS.

Higher-level languages and frameworks Typescript, Ruby, React, Vue are the next things you’ll tackle once you have a strong grasp of HTML and CSS.

Querying languages and using data Learning about GraphQL, MySQL, REST APIs will take your coding ability to the next level.

Conclusion: Designers Who Code != Software Engineers

Anything Amiss?

Further Reading

Coding Bootcamps vs. Computer Science Degrees: What Employers Want and Other Perspectives (Kyle Thayer)

How To Start Using Sketch And Framer X (by Martina Pérez, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction To Linux Commands (by Paul Tero, Smashing Magazine)

Become A Command-Line Power User With Oh My ZSH And Z (by Wes Bos, Smashing Magazine)

A list of the common cmd.exe and Unix commands that you can use in PowerShell (Microsoft Docs)

regular-expressions.info (by Jan Goyvaerts)

regexone.com (learn regular expressions with simple interactive exercises)

Batch Resizing Using Command Line and ImageMagick (by Vlad Gerasimov, Smashing Magazine)

Shortcuts And Tips For Improving Your Productivity With Sublime Text (by Jai Pandya, Smashing Magazine)

Visual Studio Code Can Do That? (by Burke Holland, Smashing Magazine)

Why version history is not version control (by Josh Brewer)

Modern Version Control With Git (by Tobias Günther, Smashing Magazine)

“Hello World” (a GitHub step-by-step guide)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on a Mac (by Dave McFarland)

How to Install Node.js and NPM on Windows (by Dejan Tucakov)

Why I Create Atomic Commits In Git (by Clarice Bouwer)

How to Write a Git Commit Message (by Chris Breams)

Semantic code: What? Why? How? (by Paul Boag)

Structural Semantics: The Importance Of HTML5 Sectioning Elements (by Heydon Pickering, Smashing Magazine)

Designing for Performance: Chapter 4. Optimizing Markup and Styles (by Lara C. Hogan, O’Reilly Media)

The media object saves hundreds of lines of code (by Nicole Sullivan)

Let’s Define Exactly What Atomic CSS is (by John Polacek, CSS Tricks)

BEM For Beginners: Why You Need BEM (by Inna Belaya, Smashing Magazine)

Javascript for Cats: An Introduction for New Programmers

Roadmap.sh: Frontend Developer

Functional Programming vs OOPS : Explain Like I’m Five

Why, How, and When to Use Semantic HTML and ARIA (by Adam Silver, CSS Tricks)

HTML Semantics (an eBook by Smashing Magazine)

The Fundamentals – HTML + CSS (on Syntax.fm)

Cascade and inheritance (westciv.com)

CSS Tricks (by Chris Coyier)

Getting Started With CSS Layout (by Rachel Andrew, Smashing Magazine)

Introduction to HTML (MDN web docs)

CSS first steps (MDN web docs)

JavaScript First Steps (MDN web docs)

24 Ways (by Drew McLellan)

(mb, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/how-should-designers-learn-to-code-git-html-css-engineering-principles-part-2/

0 notes

hermanwatts · 5 years

Text

SUPERVERSIVE: Pokémon Sword and Shield is why I stopped using number ratings

“Pokémon Sword and Shield”, the new pokemon games for the Nintendo Switch, just came out amidst a whole heaping of controversy (though by modern standards of “controversy” admittedly tame). As a result a fascinating dichotomy formed between critic reviews and user reviews. On Metacritic, the critics gave it an 81 of 100; with users it’s stagnated around 4 of 10.

This, of course, is not unique, but what makes it fascinating is that, unlike in other cases where one would simply put more stock in the user score, we have good reason to believe neither score is giving us a particularly accurate reflection of the game’s overall quality. To figure out why, and review it properly, we need to take a look at the unusual circumstances surrounding the games’ release. I, as a huge and unashamed fan of the pokemon franchise, will of course be happy to take on the challenge.

First we have “dexit”, the term given to denote the 400 or so odd pokemon cut out of the game. It is the first time since generation three that not every single pokemon was transferrable to the next generation.

There’s also Gamefreak’s unusual PR surrounding the issue. When pressed as to why, Gamefreak gave a few reasons – better animations, remade models, improved graphics, and the sheer amount of time, effort, and space it would take to get all of the pokemon in. They also cited an attempt at balancing the game more properly for competitive play.

Then the game came out, and it became clear the models (at least most of them in most circumstances) were reused, many of the animations were the same (some were improved and some of the new ones do look great, but not all of them), and there’s about 6 GB of free space on the cartridge left over just begging to be filled by pokemon, an option Gamefreak has repeatedly shot down.

The models especially really annoyed people, since it explicitly stated by the head of Gamefreak, Masuda, that they were going to be remade. As a result of this, just before release (after data miners released the dirt they had on the models) #Gamefreaklied started trending on Twitter.

Now, do *I* think “Gamefreak lied? No, I don’t. That’s a long issue, but suffice to say that I do believe some models were remade and some animations were updated – but people expected more and didn’t get it. And that pissed people off.

The news that the exp share was going to be automatically left on also made people annoyed; even I criticized the exp all in Ultra Sun and the lack of an option to turn it off did not appeal.

Suffice to say, popular sentiment was already strongly against the games before release.

And then they came out.

And reviews started dropping in.

Long story short: 81 on Metacritic. 93 of 100 by IGN, with the critic even calling it the best pokemon game. Multiple 9+ of 10s by other outlets. Even one perfect score.

Hmmmmm…

Perhaps you can see why angry users decided to flood Metacritic – and everywhere else people were getting reviews – with 0’s to 3’s.

Well, I had been looking forward to this game for months. Trailers looked great, I loved the visual aesthetic, and the first pokemon game on the big screen was something I was simply not going to pass up. So I got Sword. I finished in around forty-five to fifty hours, and can confirm a few things.

The infamous 9.3 of 10 IGN score got a LOT of flak, and on one hand it’s easy to see why. The game’s big setpiece, the “Wild Area”, a massive hub that can be entered at any time teeming with a huge variety of pokemon, lags and has lackluster textures on close up objects. It is also relatively bare. Outside of the pokemon and dens where you can conduct “Max Raid” battles with other players – another nifty addition to the game where you team up with three other players to take on a super-charged wild pokemon – there isn’t much to see.

The good

The bad – bland and poorly textured. Cool I can finally get a Mechamp though.

The graphics are hit and miss. Cities look gorgeous, and the aesthetic is bright and fun, but routes are mostly bare bones (albeit with some beautiful looking panorama views in places). Battle animations are another mixed bag: Sometimes they look fantastic, and sometimes they look embarrassingly bad (I’m looking at you, double kick).

The characters and character animations are maybe a hair above average, nothing special. The story is extremely straightforward and linear; there’s little exploration to be had of the region itself – the game expects you to explore the wild area. “Pop ins” are a hilarious problem as well, with pokemon literally appearing out of thin air and disappearing again depending on which direction you step. And as beautiful as the towns look there is rarely a whole lot to them and they really need more people to fill them out.

Plus…dexit.

Now, all of this probably leads you to believe I’m going to give the game a bad review, right? Not so. I loved it. And not for subjective reasons either; there are legitimate reasons to love this game.

Let’s rewind back to that infamous IGN review: I actually think it makes quite a lot of sense. Here’s the thing: Sword and Shield is a pokemon game. It uses the standard pokemon formula – you are a player starting on a journey to become the new Pokémon League Champion. To do that you need to beat the leaders of 8 gyms (or 7 to 8 trials in the case of gen 7) specializing in various pokemon types. These gyms are spread throughout the region. Battles will get progressively harder as the game goes on, culminating in a final battle with the Champion for the title. Along the way you’ll have run ins with an evil team and since the Crystal version will tend to get wrapped up in a larger story involving the game’s mascot legendary.

Sword and Shield uses this formula, and it executes it well. So there’s step 1. Step 2: Does Galar have enough personality as a region, new pokemon included, to justify setting a game there? Having played for about forty hours now, I can say that the answer is most definitely yes. Galar can have more going on but there’s no denying that it’s a really fun place with a lot of personality and cool stuff to look at. So there’s another check.

Step 3: Does it improve anything from previous games?

Oh HELL yes. The wild area, for all of the flaws I mentioned earlier, is fantastic to actually play in, an absolute blast to explore and look for new and interesting pokemon. Not to mention, it’s big – big enough that Gamefreak can be proud of it anyway. Teaming up with other players in max raid battles is a ton of fun.

There is also a noticeably lower barrier of entry into the competitive scene, with effort values and individual values able to be altered relatively easily to create a competition-viable pokemon. This is something Gamefreak specifically focused on and by all accounts they seemed to be

The graphics are only sometimes up to snuff with other Switch titles but are a definite step up from previous pokemon games, and the visual aesthetic is terrific. Animations, again, could be better but some, at least, are an undeniable improvement.

The soundtrack is incredible. I mean it is legitimately one of the best soundtracks I have ever heard in a game. It may be the best soundtrack in a franchise famous for having great music.

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The small quality of life upgrades – a PC with you at all times, the move relearner, deleter, and name rater found in every pokemon center, the ability to turn off cutscenes, no HMs – are all great. None are unique to Sword and Shield but even so it deserves credit for bringing them all together in once place. I have never played Let’s Go so I can honestly say that having pokemon appear in the overworld is something I never knew I needed. It’s such a massive improvement, and adds so much life to the environments, that it spoils me when I go back to play previous games.

My favorite improvement, though, is the gym battles. Holy crap are gym battles cool. The soundtrack changes as the battle progresses, a huge crowd cheers along to the music, and dynamaxing – a mechanic that supersizes your pokemon for three turns for a power boost – seemed gimmicky in trailers but turns out to be insanely cool. The battles aren’t the hardest in the world but they’re the main reason the game justifies itself for the Switch.

So essentially we have a standard pokemon game but with better graphics, (some) better animations, an open world area full of dozens – maybe hundreds – of pokemon and special co-op battles, cooler gym battles, a lower barrier of entry into competitive battling, an incredible soundtrack, and tons of quality of life improvements. In that sense there is a very real way this can be legitimately called the best pokemon game.

It is also a game with little exploration outside of the wild area, noticeable glitches and bugs, graphics and animation that don’t take full advantage of the Switch, a fairly easy difficulty curve (though I would argue not nearly as easy as gen 7, at least until the Ultra games), and half of the pokedex unable to be transferred into the game.

And, incidentally, while a lot of the characters are fun and memorable the story is borderline nonsensical, easily the worst in a pokemon game. Now the appeal of pokemon games is NOT and never was the story – if anything it’s the least important aspect – but after the pretty good story of Ultra Sun it was at least a little disappointing. The fun characters make up for it to an extent, but not entirely.

In THAT sense there is a very real way this can be legitimately called the worst pokemon game.

What do I think?

I see repeatedly that I need to analyze it “as if it wasn’t a pokemon game” and I don’t understand this at all. It IS a pokemon game. That’s a major part of its appeal, as it should be. It executes the standard pokemon formula well.

If I had to give my recommendations, here goes:

Would I recommend it to someone who just doesn’t like pokemon with an eye to converting them? No, definitely not. If you don’t already like the series this won’t convince you.

Would I recommend it to somebody interested in trying a pokemon game for the first time? Absolutely! It’s a ton of fun and I think it would turn a first time player into a fan of the franchise unless they just don’t like pokemon’s standard gameplay style, in which case none of the pokemon games are going to do it for you.

So tell it to me straight, Senpai: Would you recommend it to long time fans of the series?

It’s hard for me to answer that question. All I can say is if you’re looking for a standard pokemon game but with better graphics, animations, and a cool open world area specifically designed for catching pokemon, you’ll love it; I certainly do. If you’re looking for a significant upgrade now that Game Freak is finally on a home console or something with more content, or if you’re mad about dexit, you’ll be disappointed. Draw your own conclusions.

A note: In case you’re wondering why I think most of the negative reviews are review bombs as opposed to actually negative reviews, it’s because I read them. Many of them spread blatantly false information: No, the game is not only 14 hours unless you speed your way through. No, the game is not absurdly easy; it’s about as easy as Sun/Moon, meaning, too easy for my taste but certainly playable, especially if you’re focused on building a large team (I lost battles more than one time even when seriously trying to win). No, the game is not incredibly laggy throughout or full of glitches that ruin the game, and yes, there is music in the legendary fight. No, there is absolutely NOT a bug that deletes all of the save files on the Switch. There is not “almost no postgame”, but about the average amount of postgame content as the majority of games in the series outside of Gen 2, Emerald, and Heartgold/Soulsilver.

A lot of this false information came from people watching pirated streams on hacked systems played by people who specifically wanted the game to fail. People who didn’t play the game shouldn’t be allowed to give reviews, folks. And no, NOT all bad reviews are review bombs; only a lot.

In short: I loved it, you might or might not, it is not a poorly designed game but it doesn’t take the series to the next level like a lot of people hoped. Score: Blergle out of 10, would play again even if other people wouldn’t. Play at your own risk.

SUPERVERSIVE: Pokémon Sword and Shield is why I stopped using number ratings published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

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thesinglesjukebox · 6 years

Video

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ARIANA GRANDE - 7 RINGS [4.28] For the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone...

Iris Xie: Ariana, NO. Riding on the rhythms of Black artists like Princess Nokia and 2 Chainz and mixing it with "My Favorite Things": I am astounded at her dismissive fluidity between the verse and the chorus, and her blatant entitlement in the hook, "I want it, I got it." This is not the same way that Beyoncé and other artists have used it; when they say "I want it, I got it," it's not just for the singer, it's representation for all who need to seek power and strength in that message. This is a declaration of privileged entitlement and is only sympathetic to those who need to seek power in not being held accountable, in feigning innocence, in hiding behind privilege to do whatever they want without consequences. Ari's built her empire, and the discarded cores of the songs wrung dry for "7 Rings" is part of the plan for her expansion. The disrespect of Black artists has always been part of the story in popular music (and the world) and is threaded into the very framework and sound of popular music, but it's honestly breathtaking how obvious and easy Ariana is about it. It's brutal, it's self-indulgent, it's disrespectful as fuck, and if she decides to cast herself as Alexander the Great for the "7 Rings" music video, that would just be perfect for this song. [0]

Vikram Joseph: I really thought Ariana might be self-aware enough to understand how downright obnoxious she might come across in releasing a glorified flex about her gigantic wealth, but apparently not. It's brazenly over-the-top ("my receipts be looking like phone numbers") and I hoped, vainly, that it might be satirical -- her own explanation of the backstory behind the song makes it plain that it's not. No right-minded person resents her success, but in this socioeconomic climate -- oh, fuck it, in any socioeconomic climate -- a line like "I see it/I like it/I want it/I got it" is craven and crass. Musically, it's a bland, passable slow-jam, apart from the parts which exhume the decaying corpse of "My Favorite Things," which nobody wanted to see. Ariana Grande has called this a "friendship anthem" (because she bought rings for 6 of her friends), which reveals more about her concept of friendship than she perhaps would have liked. [2]

Alex Clifton: I know Ariana's described "7 Rings" as a friendship anthem, which on the surface is true; it's inspired by a shopping trip where she bought her girls friendship rings. But for a song about friendship, it feels awfully distant. The lovely thing about "Thank U, Next" was that it was personal and empathetic, exes named and thanked with grace in a way we rarely ever see in pop music. Here, friendship seems to be replaced with luxury; her posse feels anonymous, like they could be any girls in the club. The song's an absolute bop, making "My Favourite Things" into something sexier than it should be while also giving Ariana the chance to rap impressively. [7]

Danilo Bortoli: It was not impossible to see this coming. After the song that pretty much defined the social media zeitgeist in all of its lack of glory, comes the contractually-obliged, self-congratulatory victory lap which anticipates an also mandatory album rollout ritual. Meaning: "7 Rings" should be a mere filler. Not only because it sounds like Princess Nokia with less wit and bravado and more privilege, and not only because it evokes mindless "Pretty Boy Swag" comparisons (suggesting Soulja Boy's flow is not in public domain by now). No, "7 Rings" is bad because it strips away Ariana's empathy and replaces it with a bunch of meme-worthy signifiers: Breakfast at Tiifany's, ATM machines, retail therapy, all wrapped under a cold, soulless beat. Yet, given how calculated that beat is, you can tell cold was what she aimed. Sadly. Here, "I want it, I got it" is her mere wish, lacking the wit to make it happen. [3]

Thomas Inskeep: "I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it," Grande sings on this ode to conspicuous consumption, and while I'm happy she's doing well, it's hard to relate when I've been unemployed for almost five months. And the track, based around a chunk of the melody of "My Favorite Things," is nothing special. She's raised expectations for her music, after the quality of last year's Sweetener, so this doesn't cut it on multiple levels. [3]

Julian Axelrod: I hoped "Thank U, Next" would be the Lemonade to Sweetener's Beyonce. Now I'm worried it's Ariana's Reputation. [6]

Katherine St Asaph: Viktor & Rolf just released a set of comically expensive reaction GIFs, also known as their Spring/Summer '19 collection. You probably shouldn't continue reading this blurb until you've seen every single one. The dresses themselves are either nightgowns with epaulets or hyper-femme tulle ziggurats, like Mount Everests constructed entirely from bubblegum and Marie Antoinettes. The main details -- if you can really call something a "detail" if it's in huge meme font -- are emblazoned snot-slogans like "I Am My Own Muse" or "No Photos Please" or just "NO." So swamped in fabric, all the models look even more like children than usual, making the collection resemble Abercrombie tees or Nickelodeon tween shows, in all their oversassed questionability. But there's craftiness to the brattiness. Said the Vogue writer, perhaps with a slight whiff of "oh god, I really have to, don't I": "All the assorted typography and graphic design -- the text as well as the eagle head, the skull, the candy hearts, and so forth -- resulted from layers of additional tulle. Trite sentiments backed up by technical prowess." This also describes Ariana Grande's music: tart but frilly, meme-ready but warmly produced. Or rather, it's a description of her music since Sweetener and before this. For all the suffocating memesphere around it, "Thank U, Next" is a fine standalone Mariah Carey pastiche. "7 Rings" is a Gwen Stefani pastiche, primarily of "Wind It Up": garish showtune interpolation, slapdash arrangement, half-assed lyrics (being tied up with cuffs? Weird sex, but OK), and borrowed hip-hop posturing, as if her main takeaway from "Formation" was it being about buying shit. Can you even imagine how bad a fast-fashion version of those gowns would be? You can certainly hear it. [3]

Will Adams: Ariana Grande's post-Sweetener rebranding as an Extremely Online #queen is an instructive, if tiresome, example of how social media has blurred the lines between genuine authenticity and personality as imagined by PR suits. "7 Rings" does the same trick of "Thank U, Next" in that it attempts to reverse engineer memes as desperately as Katy Perry. But while "Next" was at least tuneful, this is a joyless cover of OMG Girlz's "Pretty Girl Bag," no more effective at fostering goodwill than a deluge of tweets that only serve to remind you that you'll never be her. [3]

Maxwell Cavaseno: There was once a time where Ariana singles needn't be based around their ability to serve as content and memes. That time may feel like years behind us but it was quite literally three months ago and yet is titanically irreversible. Now Grande's songs feel less like any real ability to showcase the talents of her singing, just more like suitable IG Story content based on an effervescent bitchiness demonstrated as "#confidence" and beholden to boringly cynical rap cadences. "Spend It" sucked years and years ago as a dead-eyed anthem by a 40-year-old pro making songs for 30-year-olds trying to hang with the 20-year-olds in the club. Distressingly, its progeny in "7 Rings" doesn't sound any less cynical. People can say all the critiques about the Sweetener run they could, but nevertheless that was a period in which you could honestly indicate that Ariana Grande was enjoying herself and doing her best. I'd be hard pressed to find such from material like this. [3]

Nicholas Donohoue: I get in fights over Ariana's message discipline. It is now settled law that "Thank U, Next" is the high point of Ari's career in terms of self-mythologizing, but I couldn't help feeling stung by: i) her releasing the song right before the peak of "Breathin'" (her actual high point of artistic expression), capping herself at the knees by cutting off one great point of personal vulnerability in lieu of addressing her less interesting public persona and, ii) by attaching "Thank U, Next," her tight construction of showcraft and narrative shifting, to a music video Frankenstein-ing four early 2000's movies with distinct tonal and subject conceits together. For as much love as I have for a titan of courage and rolling-with-the-punches like Ariana, I feel she might be careless as to what she transfers into her own sound and image. I don't know what "7 Rings" is suppose to mean. I have confidence this style of more showtune trap is an element of Ariana, but I don't know if it's a wise progression from the tuneful, honest, and numbly reminiscent take in "Thank U, Next". The money and excess politics over a spare beat are confounding mostly due to people loving it because they seem destined to never have it. This isn't even touching the racial critiques that Ariana is strolling where pop-based Black women have had to stomp (re: Rihanna and the word "savage"). Undeniably there is power here for Ariana, but who is meant to benefit from this, including Ariana? [4]

Jonathan Bradley: From the R&B undertones of debut album Yours Truly on, Ariana Grande has been a white pop artist who has attempted to situate her work in a racially liminal space: not black, and not even a pantomimed blackness in the mode of Miley Cyrus's less estimable moments or Iggy Azalea, but one nevertheless imbued with performative and stylistic cues borrowed from that cultural context. It's a position that is complicated by the proficiency of her baby-Mariah vocal, by -- perhaps unconsciously on her part -- the historically contested whiteness of Italian-Americans, by a debut hit that interpolated the Latino rapper Big Pun and featured a guest verse from white rapper Mac Miller, by pop's history of making African American ideas into mass culture, and by Grande's own political advocacy for civil rights causes. And alongside this has been her claim on a decidedly non-liminal gendered space: from pastels and ponytails to short skirts and rom-coms, Grande's image is underlined by stylized femininity. In her post Sweetener singles -- and even on "God is a Woman" -- she has used this to stake out a claim of maturity and independence, and, by extension, a distinctly feminine authority: "Thank U, Next," for instance, was a sugary distancing from the men with whom she'd been associated that asserted self-reliance ("her name is Ari") and professional success ("this song is a smash"). "7 Rings" continues blending girlishness with power, and like Taylor Swift on Reputation, Grande is making herself more untouchable by making her music chillier. She nods at Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn from the opening line on, and posits feminine solidarity and capitalist consumption as the enabling force of her dominance. Her flow here has been sourced to everyone from Princess Nokia to 2 Chainz to Soulja Boi, but considering the lyric, the likely inspiration seems to be Beyoncé on "Formation." And that rapping, the trap beat, and the nods to luxury goods combine to form Grande's most overt and most questionable tracing of blackness in her career. Conspicuous consumption in black music is an implicit challenge to systems of wealth that have excluded its makers; in a white context, it's just shopping. Grande's ability to sustain public goodwill in maintaining the tenability of these contradictions seems dependent as much on the sensitivity of her approach as it does on the context of the music. "7 Rings" makes more explicit some of the uncertain contours of Grande's music, but it does not fail: it is delicious in its fluffy imperiousness. [8]

Stephen Eisermann: I said this last year about Drake, but it rings true now about Ariana: it was only a matter of time before things got too problematic to ignore. Someone, somewhere will surely write about the musical blackface (as well as excessive use of bronzer), but focusing on the song alone -- yeah, this is hot. Ariana's coos play well with the trap arrangement and although she may have stolen someone's flow, she sure wears it well. It's a fun song to bop to, and I'm all for a good friendship banger, but ignoring all other circumstances for a banger is just irresponsible at this point. [6]

Crystal Leww: Ariana Grande's always made some incredible music, but the art direction and conversation around her has been subpar, at best, and oftentimes kind of icky! That first album Yours Truly was so beyond in how well it paid homage and tribute to the feeling of the late-'90s/early-'00s R&B pop. But there were accusations of playing into the idea of the Sexy Baby to sell records. A lot of this was super unfair -- Grande was so young at the time and most of this was projection by gross, older men who should have known better -- but this weird dichotomy between Grande as a really excellent musician and Grande as a frustrating image, brand, pop star, object of obsession from stans has persisted. "7 Rings" kind of rules as an actual track; Grande's created a super polished, slick product that pays homage to Soulja Boy flow while borrowing the melody and concept from The Sound of Music. But everything around this track sucks from the continued "borrowing" of Black culture (e.g., 2 Chainz's pink trap house) to use of "Asian" characters and urban culture to the insane defensiveness from Grande stans around all of this. I can't believe that Ariana Grande is going through her Katy Perry phase. [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: God, this was a bad idea. Everything here shouldn't work -- the metronomic synths, the unholy fusion of Rodgers & Hammerstein to Soulja Boy, the diving head-on into the murky cultural appropriation accusations that have dogged Ariana for a minute now. And yet despite all of these (entirely self inflicted) problems, Ariana manages to pull together the best possible song given the circumstances. It's still not good, but her sheer force of personality makes "7 Rings" into an object of fascination. [5]

Alfred Soto: It's not any more mediocre than her other mediocre singles, but despite the famous sample and rap cadences she sounds like a person visiting a childhood home she happily left. The home is deluxe but sparely decorated, and the wine good. Guests are welcome, especially Mariah Carey. [5]

Edward Okulicz: I've seen The Sound of Music a number of times that is more than I wish to admit here. Rephrasing the song so it's not about things that are believably in the life of an Austrian nun and instead are about things you'd go buy or consume conspicuously isn't original, though. Big Brovaz did more with this chorus and I think poor-shaming is a PR mistake. [3]

Tobi Tella: Sampling The Sound of Music is an inspired choice, and one that will always get the inner theatre kid on me on a song's side. But the chorus mostly leaves me cold -- it's a fun boast, but there's not much too it and I don't think hip-hop is a particularly good genre for her. When she starts spitting bars during the bridge and saying things like "gimme the loot!" I just get secondhand embarrassment. [6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The inversion of "My Favorite Things" is sly: there's no admittance of sadness, the things in question aren't quotidian, and Ariana's able to attain everything at a moment's notice. The lay person can't just fly somewhere to witness "raindrops on roses" or "silver-white winters," but everything that Ariana lists is a consumable product that's readily purchasable. Since she was never sad in the first place, there's no actual need for "simply remember[ing]" anything -- she's creating her list of favorites as she has them rung up. As such, "7 Rings" isn't a song about surviving the present, but it does implicitly acknowledge its potential for being unsatisfactory. The cryptic synths and sparse arrangement hint at this sad undertone, but it never quite gets there. And therein lies the song's biggest flaw: the lack of melancholic (sub)text makes this less interesting, and the display of opulence is frequently offset by Ariana's fumbled rapping. There's little resembling actual human emotion or personality here, but given her success with "Thank U, Next" and now this, Ariana is maybe more interested in being a meme. [3]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#ariana grande #7 rings #music #new music #pop #pop music #music video #music writing #music reviews

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT DROPOUT

Leonardo da Vinci. Wealth is what people want. I would often help them find new names. At Viaweb, we would have been, if they hadn't had to write a parser or a regular expression library. For most people, the most powerful tools you can find a good teacher. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the default plan in big companies. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems.1

I was in college, a lot of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.2 As I was mulling over these remarks it struck me how familiar they seemed. But there's nothing to stop you starting new projects of your own.3 Hackers, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can't follow. To me it means, all that people learn in the course of working honestly on hard problems.4 I learned to think of math as a collection of formulas that were neither beautiful nor had any relation to my life despite attempts to translate them into word problems, but necessary.5 But if it were, taking money from a top firm would generally be a bargain.

But money is just the intermediate stage—just a shorthand—for whatever people want.6 0 applied to music would probably mean individual bands giving away DRMless songs for free. I got to Yahoo, I found that I did not program this way. The Internet is a genuinely big deal. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage.7 The second biggest is the worry that, if they don't buy you now, you'll be a grad-school dropout, and you shouldn't go unless you want to start your own company.8 Now we can recognize this as something hackers already know to avoid: premature optimization.

A programming language is, they'll say something like Oh, a high-level language is what the compiler uses as input to generate object code. White than from an academic philosopher.9 If i is the average outcome of the whole company moving in one direction or another.10 Ajax means is Javascript now works. The danger with grad school is close to paradise. I just gave. Technology that's valuable today could be worthless in a couple weeks.11

This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.12 One answer is the default way to solve problems you're bad at marketing. Because an ordinary employee's performance can't usually be measured, he is not expected to devote your whole life, and save every penny of your salary.13 This, as we then thought, let it slip by. 43, meaning that deal is worth taking if they can improve your outcome by 10%, you're net ahead, you wouldn't need PR firms to tell you, because hackers would already be writing stuff on top of it, they'll take away your market overnight. CEOs also have both measurement and leverage. Big companies can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization. That might be a good deal is that the project is technically, and that can probably only increase your earnings by a factor of ten of measuring individual effort. There is a conservation law at work here: if you trade half your company, but it is not only manufacturing companies that create wealth. And so there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems, as a way to steal it. In theory a liberal education is not supposed to supply job training.

It just means doing things right, and it's hard for the people running a company to pick these out. So although there may be, in certain specific moments like your family, this month a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You open a door and find yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage would be lead actor in a movie. Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can get the first deal. If you can't measure the value of your work. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.14 In hacking, this can literally mean saving up bugs. The whole field is uncomfortable in its own right, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that.15 Of course, all other things often are not equal: the able person may not care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group, and leverage from developing new techniques. I suppose that's worth something. It's hard to get money.

Notes

In high school junior.

If the startup after you, they sometimes say. One of the next year or two make the argument a little about how the stakes were used. They thought most programming would be better for explaining software than English.

The shares set aside a chunk of time and get data via the Internet.

But core of the advantages of not starving then you should be working on is a major cause of poverty are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves. And yet I think the top and get nothing.

That would be great for VCs if the growth is genuine. By mid-century big companies to acquire the startups, and B doesn't, that I see a clear upward trend. As well as a constituency. Keep heat low.

That's probably too much to seem big that they discovered.

And in World War II had disappeared. Steven Hauser. I got it wrong in How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what if they make money, the world in verse.

The average B-17 pilot in World War II had disappeared in a reorganization.

The biggest counterexample here is one of the iPhone too, of S P 500 CEOs in the old one was drilling for oil, which is as blind as the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else and put our worker on a seed investment in you, what that means the right way. A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-Mail. There is of course, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been a waste of time on a wall is art. Math is the extent to which the inhabitants of early 20th century was also obvious to your instruments.

A friend who started a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because you have to spend, see what the US since the war, tax loopholes defended by two of each type of thing. Revenue will ultimately be hurting yourself, because such companies need huge numbers of people like them—people who had been climbing in through the founders enough autonomy that they create rather than geography.

I don't like. I don't know how to be some things it's a hip flask.

If all the money, the whole world is boring. Many hope he was before, and it has about the millions of dollars a year to keep their stock. At first literature took a back seat to philology, which is the unpromising-seeming startups that has become part of a problem, but Javascript now works.

Because we want to work with the talking paperclip. Digg are especially sneaky, but he refused because a friend who started a company. People commonly use the standard series AA paperwork aims at a 30% lower valuation. With a classic fixed sized round, no one thinks of calling that unfair.

You can relent a little worm of 1988 infected 6000 computers. Stir vigilantly to avoid companies that tried to pay dividends. If you have to replace you. 4%?

But while it is to trick admissions officers. I'm not saying we should, because you have more money.

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eddiejpoplar · 6 years

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First Drive: 2018 Jaguar XE SV Project 8

If only all press launches were this casual and this honest. I’ve just arrived at the new hotel that sits alongside the fabulous Autódromo Internacional do Algarve and run straight to dinner. Instead of dozens of journalists, engineers and PRs, our group is small, nobody is wearing a name badge, and there are no carefully devised seating plans. Talk is of 997 GT3s, M4 GTS, Camaro Z/28s, and a Ferrari 812 Superfast that our colleague Chris Walton of Motor Trend had just tested. Just a bunch of enthusiasts getting geeky.

The car we’re here to drive is the 2018 Jaguar XE SV Project 8. Which, it strikes me, is a result of a bunch of enthusiasts getting geeky. The project was conceived and carried out by Jaguar’s SVO department and follows a tried-and-tested hotrod formula: Take the biggest, most powerful engine in the range and stick it into the most compact bodyshell. The result is an XE powered by a 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 that makes 592 hp at 6,500 rpm and 516 lb-ft from 3,500 to 5,500 rpm. Top speed? 200 mph. Sounds hilarious, right? The thing is, SVO wanted to create a halo car with a really hardcore track focus. The engine is just the start…

With absolute performance in mind the Project 8 adopts the all-wheel-drive system from the F-Type SVR, complete with the rear e-diff and torque vectoring by braking on both axles. It’s been completely retuned for the Project 8 and programmed to work with its heavily revised chassis. Project 8 benefits from new and much stiffer front uprights, two-piece upper wishbones that can be shimmed to provide camber adjustment, rubber bushes have been replaced with ball joints and there are now helper springs all round, too. The dampers are still continuously variable and switchable between Comfort, Dynamic, and Track settings, but you can also choose between two ride heights (if you have a set of spanners handy) depending on whether you’re driving on road or racetrack.

There’s so much more, but rather than run down the many, many changes I suggest you just look at the pictures for an insight into how comprehensive a transformation it is from XE to Project 8. The headlights had to be moved an inch and a half forward in order to fit the huge front wheels and tires; there are new front fenders, hood, rear doors, rear wings and fenders; and the exhaust is now made of titanium. The front track is 0.9-inch wider, the rear track 2.9-inches wider, the massive carbon-ceramic brakes save 40 pounds in weight, the carbon fiber hood saves a further 6.6 pounds, the front splitter can be by extended 2.4-inches and in combination with the rear wing in high downforce mode, Project 8 produces 269 pounds of negative lift at 186 mph—I told you it was geeky. Just 300 of these monster sedans will be built—all left-hand drive—each priced at around $187,500.

The result of all this incredibly detailed work is a new lap record for four-door sedans at the Nürburgring—a tasty-sounding 7 minutes and 21.23 seconds. “There’s more to come, too,” says David Pook, Project 8’s Vehicle Dynamics Manager. “That time was set on the last lap of the last day before the ‘Ring closed for the season. The car has evolved since then and it probably wasn’t the perfect lap. I reckon we could knock another few seconds off. I hope we get to try…”

There’s a lovely underlying determination in everyone involved with Project 8 and a mark of their confidence is that over dinner they ask me to have a go at setting a lap time around the Autódromo. “The fastest sedan lap around here is currently a BMW M3,” explains Dan Connell, Head of PR for SVO. “Wouldn’t it be nice to leave with a record?” In the next few minutes I throw out all the best racing driver excuses I’ve heard—“I don’t know the track… Hmmm, the surface is probably still green… I’ve had a bit of a fever… I’ll need to dial-in to the ca,” and many more. “You’ll be fine,” says Dan.

Come morning talk of lap times has disappeared and I’m plonked in the passenger seat with Mr. Pook. He’ll do a few laps and then we’ll swap places. Immediately Project 8 feels absolutely nothing like an XE and calls to mind cars like those we discussed last night. The way the car changes direction reminds me of the M4 GTS, the noise is Z/28 overlaid with manic supercharger whine, and the track appears to be coming at us at GT3-type pace. It’s intense but also extremely composed—the four-wheel drive system clearly provides fantastic traction.

Our car has the optional Track Pack, which means two-seater configuration with a rollcage in the rear. A sedan with two seats and a cage. Pretty cool, huh? Sadly, it’ll only be available as a four-seater in the US. Anyway, with the massive 265-section front and 305-section rear Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s nicely warmed up, it’s my turn.

Even rolling down pit lane Project 8 feels pretty sensational. I jink left and right and the steering response is fast and precise. The damping feels taut but it doesn’t have the harshness of an M4 GTS and the brakes have a lovely reassuring immediacy. What’s great is that it feels sharp but not jumpy. The rate of response of all the controls feels perfectly in harmony. It’s a confidence-builder.

Out on the track that impression only grows. Project 8 turns with beautiful accuracy and resists understeer so well for a roughly 3,900-pound front-engine machine. You get into turns quickly and then the four-wheel drive system allows you to get on the power nice and early. Somehow the booming V-8 soundtrack and sedan shape lead you to brace yourself for a big helping of exit oversteer, but it never really materialises. Yes, you will feel the rear wheels start to overspeed and the beginnings of a yaw angle, but as soon as it arrives, the four-wheel drive rebalances things and you simply thump out of the corner fully hooked-up with that angry engine set free to shriek and howl to the rev limiter.

Thankfully this poise is matched by a tolerance for exploring other cornering techniques. So, should you want to play with the balance you can trail brake in to the apex to set the rear free and use the instantly available torque to steer the car with some pretty lurid angles. To have a four-wheel drive system that provides such stability but also allows the driver to dictate the balance of the car with throttle and braking inputs really is the dream and Project 8 juggles that dichotomy expertly.

It’s over too soon, but there’s another Project 8 waiting in the paddock with four seats and a ride that’s 0.6-inch higher in optimum road spec. To be honest I didn’t hold particularly high hopes for its chances of shining away from a smooth racetrack. Surely to control all that weight so effectively on track requires spring rates and damper settings that will feel crazily stiff on the road? As it turns out, not really.

Of course, Project 8 feels pretty uncompromising compared to something like an E63 S but while the ride is firm it’s also brilliantly damped. The car doesn’t rattle over bumps but rather parries them effectively, the wheels don’t skip or hop but instead trace the surface neatly. At lower speeds you get to appreciate the lovely steering feel once you’re into the meat of a turn (it feels a little vague just off centre), the fantastic mid-range throttle response, and the rapid-fire shifts of the 8-speed automatic gearbox. It feels wickedly naughty but also carries finesse. I’m impressed.

I arrived back at the circuit thinking that the Project 8 finally delivers a no-holds-barred drivers’ car for Jaguar. The F-Type Project 7 was more about the look than the drive, but this feels like an engineering exercise first and foremost. Is it a match for something like a GT3? Well, ultimately it’s still bigger, heavier, more compromised, and in terms of ultimate feel, accuracy, control, and speed, it would have to give best to the Porsche. But for people with a big collection already I can see where Project 8 might fit in. It’s extroverted but useable, it looks outrageous but can back up the aesthetic with genuine track ability and endurance, and it’s just a damn cool concept made real.

It’s fast, too. Yes, they fitted a VBOX and made me do a lap. Here goes my renewed list of excuses—it was my 9th lap in the car (and first without a passenger) on a circuit I don’t know at all well, we didn’t have time to fiddle with tire pressures, and we were under strict instructions to get off the track as quickly as possible. Anyway, that M3 did a 2.10.70—and in the Project 8 I managed a 2.03.49. For further context, some bloke called Walter Röhrl did a 2.03.88 in a Cayman GT4 around here while journalist and Top Gear host Chris Harris managed a 2.02.02 in a 991.1 GT3. The Project 8 is quite the sedan.

2018 Jaguar XE SV Project 8 Specifications

ON SALE Now PRICE $187,500 (base) ENGINE 5.0L supercharged DOHC 32-valve V-8/592 hp @ 6,500 rpm, 516 lb-ft @ 3,500-5,500 rpm TRANSMISSION 8-speed automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 4-passenger, front-engine, AWD sedan EPA MILEAGE N/A L x W x H 185.6 x 81.7 x 55.9-56.5 in WHEELBASE 111.6 in WEIGHT 3,900 lb 0-60 MPH 3.3 sec TOP SPEED 200 mph

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