#learn HTML Attributes

[anomalouscorvid]

how did you go about doing the navigation links on your neocities? it's really neat!

MY NEOCITIES... i really need to add more to that. every so often i remember it exists. anyway

the sidebar and main text, first of all, are two containers in the simplest possible flexbox container (the css for it just has 'display: flex' and nothing else). very useful, i love flexbox. if you haven't used it before, i'd recommend looking into it! loads of examples and guides out there. (there's also css grid, but i've never used it)

the navigation itself in the html is very simple, basically a list of links.. not actually a list, just separate 'paragraphs'. (which i have to update on every page every time i add/rename/remove another page..) additional thought: i think mayyybe if i used a flexbox container for the links themselves it'd be easier to make it so the navigation turns horizontal (and along the top) instead of vertical when the screen is small enough? or something with inline blocks maybe. i haven't gotten around to trying any of that though

back on topic, the symbol before each link and the translucent 'label' on hover is from the css, like this

so basically the 'label' sticking out is, like, an offset background? and also the current page link gets a custom class that gives it the same formatting as the hover text

i think that's everything, i'm not great at actually explaining how i did stuff so i hope this is helpful haha

[yan-lorkai]

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ﾟ A/n: totally not trying to learn html (which technically isn't a programming language, for what I had read), and well, if Idia was teaching me I would learn everything so quickly tbh. Or not. He would start explaining and I would have the sudden urge to kiss him, oh well it happens ig

"Uh... I think I have an error in my code." You break the silence, tone soft as the computer screen lights up your eyes just the right way for Idia to lost himself in the reflex. He love your eyes, your concentrated face, the way you stick out your tongue without realizing.

And he loves the way you timidly look to him, as if he has all the answers to your questions - which, about this subject, he have, by the way.

"Ah~ your closing array is missing a closing slash. Here, Yuu-shi." He pointed your error with a soft tone, blue nail hitting the screen, and a surprised pout grew on your lips.

He wanted to smother you in his arms, to pick you up and hold you till his arms fell off and his corpse rot - that was how bad he yearned for you, your skin, you smell. He breathes really hard to refrain from doing it, though. You wouldn't want that. He was just a mere R card, a lonely gamer, a-

"Thank you, Idia. You're the best." You giggle to yourself, feeling yourself warm under his eyes and lousy smile. Unbeknownst to you, the only things that were going through his head were about you.

Your smile, the way your eyes lightened up, your laughters and giggles, the messages you passed each other in class (when he was there in person), your secret handshake. Idia loved you. He loved your very dearly.

He loved you so much that he could cry.

"Uh... it's no big deal," yet his hair was getting hotter, rosey tone starting to burn brightly. "Don't forget the closing stash, and everything should work properly. This programming language is not that used anymore, but most can learn useful things learning it anyway. I think."

Idia had half of his mind to know that he was rambling again, talking so fast that he could make Eminem cry. But he couldn't stop when you looked at him with such big eyes filled with curiosity and wonder, taking notes of everything he was saying.

He noted then that you had hello kitty stickers on your page. A few drawings that Ortho made of him, Idia and you; that almost killed him right then and there.

"Ah... HTML uses elements, tags, and attributes to organize text, images, links, and other multimedia elements. It can be combined with CSS for styling and JavaScript for interactivity."

[izicodes]

Convert HTML to Image: A Step-by-Step Guide ✨

Do you want to turn some HTML code you've made that's on your website and have a way to convert it into an image for you to save?

Well, look no further! I too wanted to do the same thing but funny enough, there weren't any straightforward tutorials out there that could show you how! After hours of searching, I finally discovered the solution~!

This is an old tutorial I made 🐼

💛 Set your environment

Before we dive into the conversion process, I'll assume you already have your HTML code ready. What you want to learn is how to turn it into an image file. You should have a good grasp of HTML and JavaScript. For this tutorial, we'll use the following HTML code example:

We won't include the CSS code, as it doesn't affect this tutorial. The JavaScript file (script.js) at the bottom of the body element is where we'll add the functionality for the conversion.

Your page should resemble the following:

As you can see, the "Click me" button will handle the conversion. We aim to convert everything within the div.info-div into an image.

💛 Using the html2canvas JavaScript Library

The html2canvas library allows you to take screenshots of webpages and target specific elements on a screen. Here are the steps to include the library in your project:

The steps to put the library in your project:

Visit the html2canvas website for more information.

Copy the CDN link from here

and include it in a script tag in your project's head tag in the HTML file:

That's it for including the library on the HTML side. Now, let's move on to the JavaScript code.

💛 JavaScript Functionality

Here's the JavaScript code to handle the conversion:

In this code, I want to turn the whole div.info-div into an image, I put it into a variable in const div = document.querySelector(".info-div");.

I also put the button into a variable in const button = document.querySelector("button");

I added a click event listener to the button so when the user clicks the button, it will follow the code inside of the event listener!

You can find similar code like this in the documentation of the html2canvas library:

What is happening here is:

We add the div (or what the element we want to take an image of) into the html2canvas([element]).then((canvas)

Added the image file type url to a variable = const imageDataURL = canvas.toDataURL("image/png"); - You can replace the png to other image file types such as jpg, jpeg etc

Created an anchor/link tag, added the href attribute to imageDataURL

The download attribute is where we will give the default name to the image file, I added "dog.png"

Perform the click() function to the anchor tag so it starts to download the image we created

And that's it!

💛 The End

And that's it! You've successfully learned how to turn your HTML into an image. It's a great way to save and share your web content in a unique format.

If you have any questions or need further clarification, please comfortable to ask. Enjoy converting your HTML into images! 💖🐼

[hauntinginprogress]

neocities heracles trials: from a chaotic newbie

okay so i want to actually start posting here and i finally got it through my thick skull that this is LITERALLY A BLOG. i'm supposed to blog. so here's a blog post.

anyways, for context, i've been working on my neocities for a while now, recently started over to make things more original and more me. another thing to note is that i'm using VScode.

the issue here is that i have zero well not exactly zero but i lack any professional/academic background experience with making websites. the html isn't the issue (thankfully) but holy shit dude...css+javascript implementation . basic styling with css is no biggie, right? absolutely, however...may i introduce: smooth transitions + the absolutely tragic fact that the <marquee> tag is deprecated an accessibility issue.

so, my first goal day one was to recreate a marquee animation through css. so i tried to simply implement this incredibly useful bit of code into my site (in which if you're interested i totally think my failure to get it working was user error so please check it out it works great if you're not me) but, lo and behold, despite me getting it to work in my V1 project, i could not, for the life of me, get it to work. so i, not too familiar with css animation and completely lost when it comes to javascript, started grasping at straws. i ended up finding this tutorial and, with some improvisation since the tutorial is for webflow and i'm manually writing everything, managed to make my own css recreation of a marquee effect essentially from scratch, and even learned about the animation-play-state css attribute so i could pause the effect when the marquee is hovered over! victory, basically.

then, i looked around the many cool and absolutely awesome sites on neocities to get inspiration, and then i was like "hey what if i made a custom button background image" and with some trial and error, made myself a pretty decent base (for now) with aseprite, and learned more about the program in the meantime which is always a plus.

then i decided that i wanted to do more with the buttons. i wanted to make it animate on hover. not too hard right? you'll...you'll see why i struggled...in a moment...

anyways, i settled on a simple shrink animation. which THIS i could do with ease, messed around a bit, got the keyframes, assigned that to the button:hover and all of that and all was good!...until i realized that once i stopped hovering over it, it snapped back to its original scale instead of transitioning smoothly again. THIS is where the "fun" began.

see, although i can wrap my head around things easily when it comes to css, i have to constantly look up what the proper syntax for everything is because otherwise i'll mess everything up. and through my research i had conducted (aka surfing through multiple blogs and reddit posts alongside other things on random forum websites) i had discovered the very neat transition attribute.

but we'll have to return to this because i have adhd, and i ended up getting distracted during this process. see, originally i had decided that the button would change it's visual to appear like it was pressed when the user's mouse hovered over it. then i was like "i don't think this makes sense" so i changed it so that the button wouldn't change its background image unless the user actually clicked on it. so i did that. then i had to make sure that the button wouldn't magically scale up again so i had to transform the styling and blah blah blah those details aren't really that important ANYWAYS the actual important bit about this is that if you use the transition attribute and there's a change in background images that change will also be transitioned unless you set the transition to only apply to a specific change. and i didn't know that originally. so every time i tried to fix things up with a transition so the button wouldn't snap back to it's original size out of nowhere the background would slooowly change as well and i actually got so frustrated with this that i wanted to burn something down because that's a totally normal reaction i guess. anyways, then i started frantically searching for answers on the topic and EVERY. SINGLE. THING. THAT I FOUND. INCLUDED JAVASCRIPT.

i do not know javascript. i have not learned anything about it unlike css and html. it SCARES me and it is FRUSTRATING. but i thought i'd try it anyways. news flash that shit didn't work at all and i almost thought about scrapping the animation entirely especially when it randomly stopped working when i made certain changes, but i ended up eventually figuring out what i mentioned earlier (CSS transitions and the fact that you can assign them to only affect a specific change instead of everything) so with some dabbling here and there i eventually managed to finally figure out how to make everything smooth through pure css and although it still snaps if the element hasn't finished animating i'm happy with it.

moving on to another thing, i wanted to then make a sound effect play when you click the button. yes, we are still talking about buttons. THIS i could not do with css, like, at all. javascript admittedly is for interactivity and i had already been bending the rules quite a bit with the animations since those teechnically should've been done with javascript as well but this? this was impossible without javascript. so i found a free mp3, and searched up a nice little tutorial on the very basics of javascript.

little did I know that apparently, this would be my own personal little hell.

see, no matter how many times i tried a different script, the sound just would not work like at all. i'd do everything in what i assumed to be the correct way, and no matter what, it would not play. knowing that i'd just have to revisit this, i decided it was best to just sort of put it on the back burner.

and this is where i wish i could say this is the end of my absolutely gobstopping rant. however, i cannot.

see, one thing that i really like that i've seen in a lot of other people's sites is draggable windows. i think they're sick. but this ALSO requires javascript, but i didn't think this could POSSIBLY be that bad since so many people did it.

...right?.......right? guys. right?

MOTHERFUCKER I WAS SO WRONG.

see, it turns out that a lot of people do this sort of thing with jQuery, specifically for user interfaces. but vscode doesn't have a "user friendly" way to get jquery to work with it. and because i don't want to mess with program files, i decided that logically speaking jquery just makes writing things in js scripts less complicated and doesn't introduce things that are impossible in vanilla javascript so i decided i could suffer a little bit and try and do things without jquery.

this led me to looking at many sites with draggable windows to look at their own scripts, in which every single time i tried replicating things i FAILED.

i eventually stumbled upon a nice code that worked. but the issue with it - in which unfortunately i can't find it, else i'd link it - is that it works with not only element classes but also a specific ID. see, this would be fine if i only wanted ONE draggable element. but i want multiple. and i thought that maybe if i just duplicated the script and dedicated it to a different ID and changed function names it would work but nooo life cannot be this easy apparently. so after setting up my webmaster status window, getting that to work, i tried doing the aforementioned method for what will eventually be a guestbook of sorts. it failed.

so i decided, "hey i'll revisit this later!!" and i went on to finding a way to implement a status widget into my site. this honestly was really easy as i ended up stumbling upon status.cafe . so i registered, eventually got my account activated, and i got it working in my live port of vscode just fine!! all is good in the world.

well that's what i thought until i found out that since i had created my neocities account in march of 2024, and i'm unemployed since i'm still in high school hence i have a free account, that i could not. use the widget. in neocities. so i tried finding a work around, found this handy guide (which is genuinely useful by the way) and set up things through a RSS feed instead which is essentially just a work around that complies with the security restrictions of neocities that i'm bound by. anyways, this works great but i literally just can't customize it to how i want so this is another fail. then i find imood.com which, although is NICE, doesn't suit what i want on its own. so i'm at a loss here too.

so, again, another thing to put to the side i suppose.

so i started working on getting my guestbook, browsed through people's homepages again, and found chattable . and you probably think i have another paragraph complaining about this but honestly i can't write about something when i can't figure out how to even create a chat to implement onto my site in the first place so...y'know.

plus, i honestly have no clue if it'll work on my site either due to security restrictions so this is fun!!

anyways, after dealing with all of this, i finally decided it was about time i ported what i had so far over onto my neocities account. which isn't actually that hard i just had to wipe all of my files, overwrite the content in my index.html file there and paste in what i have now, and then upload my new files. but for some god awful reason after i went through all of this chrome just. kept depending on my old stylesheet??? so i had to clear some of my browsing data and eventually everything was loading properly for me.

and THIS is finally the end of my ridiculous documentation concering my neocities adventure so far.

i have no doubts i'll end up ranting here AGAIN about all of this but for now this is all i have on my plate...besides finally caving and learning javascript for real and continuing to learn more about html and css. hopefully one day i'll stop having such frequent issues but now is not the time and i doubt that'll be anytime soon either.

moral of the story, if you want to start something new and pick up a new hobby, please for the love of all that is of substance in this world don't go in completely blind like i've done if you're going to be making a project of some sorts. it will only lead to many misfortunes.

anyways you can see what i currently have done in my neocities here, make suggestions or give advice in the notes and whatnot i don't know.

[outoftheblue-if]

hi! i’m wanting to make custom templates for my twine games. i was wondering — for the main menu screen you have on your template, did you have to delve into the storyinterface? honestly thats the only part thats confusing me 😂

Hi there! I'm not entirely sure which of the two templates you're referring to, but I did use StoryInterface for both of the templates 😊

Using StoryInterface allows you to build the user interface entirely yourself using HTML, but it will replace all of SugarCube's built in code, so you'll have to create all the elements of the UI yourself - if that makes sense.

You must include an element with the id "passages" for your story's passages to show up, for example with a <div id="passages"></div> element. Just leave it empty, and Twine will populate it with your story's passages.

Another neat trick is using the "data-passages" attribute to populate elements with content from certain passages. For example, in my first template the StoryInterface contains this element:

class="story-author" obviously allows me to style the element using CSS in the Story Stylesheet, whereas the data-passage attribute is an attribute native to Twine that allows you to populate elements with the content of specific passages. This one has the value "storyAuthor", which means that Twine will automatically populate the <h2> element with whatever content is inside a passage called "storyAuthor" when the game runs.

Other than that, if you're looking to learn more coding, I find w3schools really helpful, it's completely free and you find everything you need there. I also used the Twine documentation a lot. To learn more about how everything works, maybe download one of my templates and play around with the StoryInterface that's already built to learn what everything does? 💁🏼‍♀️

Hope that helps, anon! Have a nice weekend 🤎

[codomars]

Day 30 — 35/ 100 Days of Code

I learned how to handle JavaScript features (default parameters, spread, rest, and destructuring).

And I finally reached the DOM chapeter, 'The Document Object' which contains representations of all the content on a page. I'm still discovering its methods and properties.

So far, I've learned about the most useful ones: getElementById(), querySelector, changing styles, manipulating attributes, and the append method.

I'm doing some silly practice exercises just to get more familiar with the DOM methods. The more I progress in my course, the more fun things seem to get. I'm really excited to start building stuff with code and combining HTML, CSS, and JS all together.

[lanayrucodes]

Hello! I ran into your skin Fading echoes and was curious if you had any tips for coding a main forum that is hover/tabbed for the rp section like that? I've been searching everywhere for something similar, or even tips on how to start that style. I saw one waaaaaay back in the day and fell in love. I'm an amateur skinner with big dreams, so if you have any advice or sources that would help learn to make a main forum body like that, I'd love to have them!

Sure! I can't claim that the method I used for Fading Echoes was the most efficient, since it was my one of my first attempts actually getting tabbed forums to work - on a skin I planned to sell, no less - but hey. If it works, it works.

I would like to also mention in advance before I explain these convoluted methods that Niobe & FizzyElf have a script resource for tabbing forums and categories. I didn't come across this until MUCH later, after I'd already sold Fading Echoes, which may be a better and more efficient method than the ones I'm about to explain.

The "Style" of Skin

First things first: typically, when you're making a skin for a Jcink forum using HTML Templates, you're expected to only put one type of markup/structure per template and the system then repeats it for every instance where that structure is meant to occur - i.e. you only write a single forum row structure, and that structure is repeated for every forum, etc.

For example, we have my WIP "Kingdom of Calamity" skin, which has the same forum row style in every category, each of them identical to the last and the next:

(Where you can see all the structures are identical when viewed from the index, and there's only one set of markup in the Forum Row template for the skin.)

When you mention skins "of that style" in your ask, I'm assuming that you mean skins with a highly customized index like Fading Echoes, where every category has a different layout for their forums. In these instances - a custom index where forums in certain categories are going to have a drastically different structures from one another, and isn't something manageable with CSS - I give each of them their own markup.

This means that you'll have multiple sets of markup for each different structure you want, for each different template. This is less important for the Category Headers, and more important for the Forum Rows.

As an example in this case, take my WIP "Garden of Dreams" skin: it has a different layout for its forums in each category, and even the layout of each forum per category wildly varies from one another-

If you look under the hood of the skin inside of the HTML Templates - specifically, the Forum Rows - you'll see that I have a lot more markup here than a normal skin calls for:

This is because for each different forum that's going to have a different structure or layout, I'm writing completely new markup for it.

That's the general "gist" behind skins with custom indexes or ones done in this style: we're not using a single markup style with hard-coded elements (though that can also be done) but customizing each category and each forum to its exact placement on the index and in the skin.

To do this, I do two things:

First, slap IDs on fucking everything, and I mean everything. You can see in my screenshot the first few forums (for "announcements" and "moderation" respectively) that the first attribute on those containers is an ID for "fr-(ID variable)". I also have IDs on the category for "cat-(ID variable)". I've started to make it a habit in my newer skins to put an ID variable on anything and everything I can get my grubby little raccoon mitts on in the skin, up to and including even the body element and anything within that such as categories, forums, post containers, profiles, etc.

That sets you up for the second thing, which is setting all forum/custom containers to "display: none" with a style attribute. I do this to prohibit any and all structures from displaying by default in every category, and potentially mucking stuff up when their styles, size, or formatting isn't compatible with the new/other/different category and surrounding forums.

These two steps, when combined, make it so you can selectively chokehold any elements on your index and wrestle them into submission with CSS - making sure they're visible where they need to be, and hidden where they don't need to be.

(And please, for God's sake, make sure your ID's are unique to only that container/element. That's a mistake I made often in my earlier skins that could have saved me a lot of grief: CLASSES are for repetition and grouping. ID's are not.)

Tabs on the Index

So, I can admit that I've never experimented with a hover on the forums before - mostly, because I still consider complex hovers and transitions to be my arch nemesis (although, it is on my list of things to eventually master) and I can't imagine that hovers are so different that the information provided above wouldn't be helpful in some manner. So, do as you will with that.

Tabs, however, can be accomplished in a variety of ways. In general, I consider there to be two separate ways to get tabs on something:

Using Javascript/jQuery/some type of script to trigger events for clicking.

Using radio button inputs and CSS to control display, also for a click or selection event.

They're both means to the same end, in some regard: you click on something, usually a button. That button controls what shows or hides. It's just the inside stuff that changes.

Funny enough, using a script of some sort is going to be what I consider the more "beginner friendly" option, and it's what I used for the tabs in Fading Echoes. In fact, I used this script in specific, which is a tutorial one from W3 Schools, and I just modified it to use the forum stuff instead of city names. It's important to keep in mind that for Fading Echoes, I also had unique Category Headers (new markup) for every single category, as well as unique Forum Rows like discussed above. I put the "tablinks" (the buttons/labels used as tabs) inside of the category markup, and I just created a new forum layout for the IC/RP forum containers as the "tabcontent". That make it so the tabs only displayed in that category, and specifically only worked for the forums with a corresponding ID number.

There are also other scripting methods of doing this, like Noire's script that I mentioned at the start of this. And that one, if memory serves, wouldn't force you to make multiple different category types like Fading Echoes did.

The method of radio buttons/inputs is also possible to use, though it does require you to have a good working understanding of using radio buttons for toggles - because if you don't understand what's going on with :checked attributes, you may not understand how to write your CSS in order to select the correct forum to display. I've done this method only once, on my vaguely "House of Night" themed skin that I'm still working on, and while it's a little buggy in some regards, it's also very much functional!

Here, I just made a second forum row structure (the other forums all use the same type of structure) and put the input/radio button inside of the forum, along with it's label, and corresponding elements for the forum. Then, the toggle - or which forum is displayed when you click on the tab - is controlled via CSS, as is the case with most input-based tabs like this.

Full disclaimer, the "little buggy" part I mentioned is that I had to use jQuery to get the correct tab to select when the page first loads, before a user clicks on any tabs. Otherwise, it was trying to select the first radio button/label combo on the page, which was technically in another category for a forum that had that "display: none" property set on it. (Remember, each forum structure you put in your "Forum Rows" HTML Template will get used for every forum being displayed. By putting IDs on them, we're just hiding them from showing with CSS, but they still very much exist on the page.)

If you've never worked with CSS tabs before, I have a few versions on my portfolio site that are considered "base" templates you can play around with:

Basic HTML & CSS Tabs

Basic HTML & CSS Accordion

Basic HTML & CSS Checkbox Toggle

I'd highly recommend getting used to them as a template for a post, to make sure you're really grasping how they work and the CSS selectors at play, before you try putting them into a skin.

I hope that helps, and as always, I'm willing to answer any coding questions people might have - not just stuff related to my work, but also general "how does [X] work" or "how do you do [Y]" - provided that I know the answer. I'll be the first to admit that I'm very much self-taught, and not a professional. I don't know everything, but I'm a Google search away from learning at least one new thing.

[streetlights-was-taken]

Hello! I hope I don't bother you again. I have two questions for you (I think there are more). I'm writing a zosan fanfic and I came up with the idea of ​​putting "titles" in what happens in the "chapters" separated by the divider, like the titles of anime episodes (very One Piece with spoilers about what happens in the episode), I would like to know what do you think of this idea? I have images of what these titles would look like if you want them for better visualization. 2- Is there a skin work on ao3 that imitates these "titles", as if they were chapter titles of a book (but without having to have several chapters as I want to make a oneshot)?

hello! yes, I think that sounds like a neat idea. you should go for it!!

I don't watch one piece so I hope I'm visualizing it right. if I got it wrong, feel free to send me a picture.

anyway. are you trying to do something like this?

if this is what you're going for, you can try this code out! I also created a pastebin for this one, so you can just copy paste to your own workskin.

so here, we're creating the lined-title css class. you can just add it to your <p> tags in the html when you want to apply them. e.g.

<p class="lined-title">TITLE</p>

feel free to play around with border-style and the border-color (or any other attribute). you'll want border-style:solid if you just want one single line, for example.

you can also check AO3's FAQ on what colors and fonts you can use. fun fact: border-style:double is the same css they use to add those double lines in the FAQ!

note that this will span the entire width of the page. so if you have a short title, it'll look like this on desktop:

if you don't want it to span the whole page, we could try this instead (also included in the pastebin link):

which will result in this:

however, we can't manipulate the spacing between the text and the lines in this one. on the other hand, it has text-decoration-style:wavy which the first option doesn't have!

for custom scene dividers, you can also check out these guides:

How to Make Customized Page Dividers by La_Temperanza

Dividers & how to style them by skinofthesoul

Rainbow Paragraph Divider by benwvatt

bonus: inspect element

also, are you familiar with inspect element yet? if you are, great! you can just skip this. otherwise, if you're still getting the hang of working with workskins and aren't used to editing css, you can try this:

right click on the text you want to change on AO3, then click "inspect" or "inspect element" (not sure what it's called in browsers these days; on firefox, it's just "inspect"). this will bring up a bunch of developer tools and it kinda looks like this:

it might look different depending on the browser.

but here on the side, you can see the html on top and css at the bottom. as you can see in the screenshot, we are inspecting the title and we can see the different css rules for the title.

if you want to play around with the css, you can just change them from this panel and it will automatically reflect on the page. these changes are not permanent so it's a good way to test different styles without having to go through the cycle of updating the workskin and refreshing the fic page.

if this is your first time trying this out, it might look overwhelming, but it's very helpful if you get the hang of it. but of course, you don't need to learn how to do this to style your fics. :D

[therealbeachfox]

Myths of Gotham: Batman & The Two Cities

Ever wondered what the DCU looks like for all those people who aren't privy to the what's and why's of the multiverse shattering events they live through? I sure do. That's melded with my "The Completely Normal Adventures of a Crime Alley Kid" series into this: An exploration of the stories the kids of Gotham would create to explain the world around them. Featuring a foul-mouthed homeless Crime Alley kid vending an education to the younger set, and one Bernard Dowd adding his historical and cultural commentary on the side.

Also available on Ao3, but I'm posting it here because I think it works just fine as a standalone without the 160k+ words of Henchman-In-Denial shenanigans on the side.

Or ignore that link and read it below the cut!

Myths of Gotham

Supplemental Document 3

Harris (Age-12, Male, Irish/African) [[1]]. “The Origin of Batman and the Robins” Interview by Bernard Dowd. 14th August 202X. BDOH #009, Myths of Gotham Project, https://BerDProductions.net/MythsofGothamProject/bdoh-009.html. Accessed 21st November 202(X+2)

[[1. No further information given, even after being told it’d be for proper attribution. "Harris" is also most likely to be pseudonym. Sorry, researchers of the future.]]

Transcript has been mildly edited for clarity and to remove vocal disfluencies. It is otherwise presented in its entirety without any attempts to correct grammar and other verbal slips. Additional notes by the transcriber may be found in the footnotes.

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     Alright, everybody needs to settle their shit down, it’s education time. If you don’t wanna sit here and listen to me explain shit, this place has got like twenty other rooms you can go hang out in, k? This aint school, no one’s keeping you here. ‘Xcept you, Carlos. Yeah, well you tried to go chasing after one of the Exquisite Birds the other day, so you obviously need to learn why you shouldn’t be doing that shit.

     Okay, so. We’ll be talking about the Bat Man, but there’s a lotta other stuff we gotta talk about too, first. He didn’t just show up outta fucking nowhere, you know. Now settle down, thank our slumming Posh Boy over there for tonight’s food, and watch what your tongues wag cuz he’s recording all this shit.

     Alright. The Bat Man. Where the fuck did he come from? Why the hell is he here? Why do other cities get flying muscle-men in bright colors and we got a living shadow that breaks bones? Why the hell is our shithole of a city like this? Well sit back and listen a learning, cuz unfortunately it all ties together.

     Alright, so. The first thing we gotta make clear is that we don’t live in the first Gotham. We’re the second Gotham, the johnny-come-lately Gotham, the weird mirror shadow of the first Gotham. Not saying the other Gotham’s the “real” one and we’re some sort of fake, just that there are two Gotham’s and the one we live in aint the original.

     And an important side-note cuz I can see some of you squirming to ask and someone always asks here, I’m not talking about the False Gothams you sometimes see from between buildings or in the reflections of broken windows or stuff. [[2]] Those things aren’t real; they’re just illusions and traps, spun up by something that wants to lure you in with the promise of there being a version of the world where everything didn’t go to shit. It’s all lies. Most kids who go hunting after False Gothams never come back, but there’ve been a few who have, and they’ve got wild as shit stories to tell. But we’re not getting into all that tonight. Basic point is, you don’t get to The Other Gotham by going down weird alleyways. Nah, you just gotta go down.

[[2. Harris appears to be referring to Gotham’s ‘Mirage City’ phenomenon where heated air trapped in narrow gaps between skyscrapers can sometimes warp the light enough to appear to show an altered city skyline between them. The implications of the fact that this phenomenon is most often reported near sites of Justice League confirmed inter-dimensional fracture points is beyond the scope of this project and will just be noted as a point of further study for the reader.]]

     So the way it was told to me by the kids who knew shit back when I was among you all listening was like this: Gotham, that is to say, our Gotham, is The Black City, The Gotham Above. The Other Gotham, the original Gotham, is The White City, the Gotham Below, and it was here first. [[3]] The way it’s told, it’s not just the first Gotham, it’s the first city ever, built (or carved) out of the rock way back before people had figured out things like writing shit down instead of remembering it all, math, or how to build something more than two stories high.

[[3. There have been urban legends of an underground city that exists as a mirror of Gotham since the late 1600s, barely a decade or two after the city’s founding. The two main versions either say that it was some ancient city that sank beneath the swamp and bogs before the arrival of the Europeans, or that it’s an inverse mirror of Gotham that’s formed from all our wickedness and corruption. No evidence of either version of such a city has ever been officially recorded. It’s usually assumed that people who wrote of such things, especially in the earlier centuries, had stumbled upon some of the vast cave networks that extend beneath the breadth of greater Gotham and their stories of giant chambers with rock formations that rivaled the tallest buildings in size were misinterpreted.]]

     So you know those whacked out monsters and aliens and weird-dicked demon things you have the Justice League out there beating the ass of every other week? They had all that shit way back in pre-history times too, but they didn’t have any cavemen in capes and spandex to punch them in the face. And they were everywhere. Big creepy monsters, fucked up demons that crawled out of the earth or shadows or fires and might not actually be from Hell, but acted like such murderous shits you could see how humanity got the idea of Hell in the first place. You had twisting shadows that would infect people’s own shadows and turn them into evil twisted things like them. You had monsters that only existed as silent whispers that’d get in a guy’s brain and tell them all sorts of shit till they honestly believed that wearing other people’s skin and dancing under the moon was a totally normal and not at all fucked up thing to do. You look back at the earliest stories humans ever wrote down and you can see they were remembering all sorts of fucked up shit we don’t got around anymore. Or at least, didn’t have around anymore until recently. [[4]] And it’s because of The Other Gotham.

[[4. Like with many aspects of Gotham’s unhoused youth culture’s mythic cycle, the timeline of this all doesn’t line up with actual history except in the vaguest of sense. It is interesting to note however that Princess Diana of Themyscira’s speech about ‘The Return of the Mythic’ (end note (i)) has somehow gotten incorporated here, and in a way that almost perfectly aligns with with current historical consensus.]]

     So, the way we figure it must’ve happened was like this: Just because they didn’t have superheroes back then, it doesn’t mean they didn’t have magic. Like, we don’t got a lot of it now, but you can’t argue it doesn’t exist, and pretty much everyone agrees that there used to be a lot more of it way back when, whenever that when was. And that when was here. This is the Way Back When. So a bunch of the smartest most powerful magicals [[sic]] got together to try and figure out a way to get humanity on more of an even standing against all these fucking monsters and evil spirit shits everywhere, and what they came up with was the idea for a great big fuck-off prison for the lot of them.

     So they went and found the one place on the planet that had the most Fucked Up energy possible - guess where - and set to work carving it out deep underground. At the bottom of the biggest cavern there was under the three islands and surrounding swamps, they dug out a pit. Not a giant wide pit, but a long deep one. As deep down as they could dig with whatever magic and tools they had back then. And down there at the bottom, they carved out a great chamber in the rock and covered it with all the runes and magic writing and iron and silver and whatever the fuck else you need to keep giant millipedes that eat souls in check. Then, somehow - and if anyone knows how, it sure as shit aint gonna be us - they managed to lure or suck in or capture just about every evil nasty messed up thing on the planet and locked them down in it.

     You can tell when this happened if you know enough history cuz it would’ve taken place right before humanity got its collective shit together and started doing things like building cities and writing stuff down and everything else that they count as ‘civilization’ these days. [[5]] But like I said, none of the cities everyone topside were building was the first. The first city was built right here, under our feet. They started out by carving out the insides of the biggest stalag-whatevers hanging down from the cavern roofs to live in while they did the original work. Then, once they figured out how that sort of thing worked, they started building their own towers, hanging down from above where they could keep an eye on their monster prison. All spires and guardian statues and skyways and at the center of it all, a giant hole drilled straight to the middle of the whole fucking planet.

[[5. ‘The Great Binding’ and it’s coinciding with the beginnings of known civilization (end note (ii)) is one of the newest theories out of the field of metahistory. Notably, UC Berkley’s article on the subject referenced in the end notes came out seven weeks after this interview took place. And as a side note to the footnote, even proponents of The Great Binding have no concrete theory on where such a prison might’ve been placed. A giant pit right on the Eastern Seaboard seems incredibly unlikely, however.]]

     So yeah, the Gotham Below. Sure, it wasn’t being called Gotham way back then. Not sure they even would’ve given the place a name to begin with. If you’ve never had a city before, would you even think it was something that needed a name? Anyways, Gotham Below. And they didn’t have shit to burn down there, but they did have magic. So, as the story goes, they kept the place lit with magic instead of fire. And all that rock remained as white and untouched by soot and ash as they day it’d gotten carved out. So Gotham Below, the White City. And even with all their magic, those people still eventually got old and died, so it was their kids left watching over the great pit prison. Then they grew old and died, and it was their grandkids left watching. And so it went for centuries and centuries and centuries, for however long it took for humanity to start building cities, then for Europeans to develop to the point where the felt like being assholes, and then for them to decide to go fuck up the rest of the world, and then landing on these same islands and decide that this abandoned remote hellhole was the perfect place to build a brand new city cuz there weren’t enough of those yet or whatever.

     Now, this should be obvious, but you can’t keep a thousand million monsters and demons and evil alien ghosts all trapped in one spot and not have shit kinda bleed out over time. When those pilgrims showed up to start building shit here, shit got weird. Now, I haven’t read any of this myself, but the kid who told me all this did, and according to him, if you go back and read through the journals and writings of those guys responsible for building up Gotham originally, you can see that they were fucked in the head. They kept writing about dreams they’d be having, silent streets of gleaming white they’d walk through while they slept and how the visions of great towering spires and skyways and a billion fucking gargoyles filled their pages whenever they tried to draw up designs. [[6]] So that’s what they all wound up making, one bridge and building and road at a time. A perfect mirror of the City Below, but reaching up in the sky instead of down into the earth. Each stalagamitite tower hanging down in one had a tower reaching up in the other. And smack in the middle of original Old Gotham stood the tallest building of all, right over where the pit was drilled far far below. [[7]] The Clocktower aint the tallest building in Gotham anymore, but it used to be. And while the Gotham Below remained pure and gleaming white, up here they hadn’t even finished putting up the first medieval porta-potties before shit was stained with soot and ash and coal smoke and whale oil residue.

[[6. Harris overstates things, but the base assertion is correct here. The writings of Cyrus Pinkney are infamous for their frequent reference to ‘dark and shadowy dreams’ (end note (iii)) and his open acknowledgment of how much those dreams influenced his designs. Not to the extent described here, though.]]

[[7. The Great Gotham Tower. Known better these days as The Gotham Clocktower or just The Clocktower. It was placed at the center of Gotham as it existed in it’s original state, with the rest of Old Gotham laid out around it in expanding circles connected by thoroughfares at each of the eight cardinal directions.]]

     And that’s how we got to where we are: With the White City, Gotham Below, and the Black City, Gotham Above.

Now, you can’t go building an entire fucking city without the downstairs neighbors hearing the noise and poking their heads out to see what it’s all about. This is another case where you can find references across all that early writing stuff they keep in the libraries. People started seeing ghosts. I mean, they were calling them ghosts, but they really obvious weren’t. People up high, watching people below. They’d wear big white robes that looked like wings when they moved. They wore strange masks with big smoke-glass eyes. They moved through shadows like they were part of them, they could climb a building as easy as walking, and anyone who tried to climb up to one would either find them gone, or would next be seen falling off the tallest building in the neighborhood.

     As the history goes, the masks they wore looked vaguely birdlike. A specific type of bird. But it quickly became obvious that whoever these people were, they really didn’t like it when people called them… that specific bird species. So we don’t. Adults still do sometimes, but that’s because they’re fucking idiots. [[8]] If you need to talk about them, call them the White Birds. Or, even better- They’re vain, these White Birds. If you flatter them, they’re less likely to decide to kill you for talking about them at all. The term that tends to get used a lot these days is Exquisite. [[9]] Not sure who came up with it, but we’ve barely had any kids go missing since we started. Still, it’s best to wait until the middle of the day, and talk about them someplace out in the open where you can be sure no one’s lurking in any shadows.

[[8. Beware the eyes of owls

Who watch us all the time

From lofty perches up on high

To the deepest pits of grime.

They watch us as we work and play

They watch us in our bed

Speak not a whispered word of them

Least talons strike you dead.]]

[[9. “Exquisite” is recorded as being Gotham street-kid slang for ‘untrustworthy john/rich person/official’ in the early 1980s (end note (iv)). An article in The Gotham Gazette from 1954 quotes a homeless kid as saying “We all always knew you couldn’t trust him. He was a full Exquisite Bird type through’n’through. None of us is surprised they found all those bodies up’n’in his place.” (end note (v)), and a stylized EXQU was used as hobo code for a place that seemed nice but must be avoided at all costs along the mid-Atlantic coast during the 1930s. (end note (vi)).]]

     So throughout all of Gotham’s history, they’re just… there. Watching from up high in the shadows, the Exquisite Birds. If you see one, no you didn’t. If someone asks you about them, you don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t like it when people admit they see them, and they’re as quick to slice open witnesses as any other two-bit gang.

     So that’s where shit stood for a few centuries. Then something happened. We really don’t know what, and no one who would is the sort who’d tell us, either. We just know what resulted. Grownups call it the Cataclysm, or the Big One. [[10]] One day, the earth just turned over in a giant earthquake, split open, and half of Gotham fell down. Then, suddenly, there were monsters. Monsters everywhere. Gotham had always been shit, but now you had people dressing up like insects and murdering people with giant roach traps, or gangsters turning from murdering assholes to mass-murdering assholes who’d torture you for five hours then pull out your eyeballs for their collection, or giant piles of toxic mud coming to life and eating people.

[[10. It goes without saying, but at this point, Harris’ version of events deviates radically from the known timeline. The first recorded footage of Batman was taken eight years before the Great Gotham Quake, with the first rumors of his existence being almost twelve years earlier. This condensing down of timelines and assuming all events from more than five years ago took place at around the same time is a known phenomenon with children-created mythic cycles. (end note (vii))]]

     It was chaos. Everything broke down, no one knew what was going on. The rest of the country looked at what was happening in Gotham and flipped out and shut it all down. They blew up the bridges, put mines in the rivers and blockaded the entire city to try and contain whatever the hell this all was. [[11]]

[[11. No Man’s Land did take place, but if it was because elements of the US government were concerned about an outbreak of mythical monsters in the city, that fact remains undocumented.]]

     Now, like I said, we don’t know how everything kicked off, but we know how it ended. Somehow, whether on accident or on purpose, someone broke open the prison buried deep under out feet. Not all the way; none of the truly giant world-ending shit has gotten out. But all those twisted shadows and invisible whispers and nasty spirt ghost fuckers? They slid out just fine. We don’t know if the earthquake cracked it, or if the cracking of it caused the earthquake. We don’t know if the Exquisite Birds did it on purpose, or why if they did. We don’t know if they didn’t stop it because they didn’t care, or they just couldn’t.

     End result, though? Chaos in Gotham and monsters killing and corrupting and twisting everyone they could get their semi-visible claws into. And the Exquisite Birds just sitting there up high, watching and doing jack shit about it.

     These days, we know what to do when shit like that goes down. We know how to feed wishes to the gargoyles and how to call out for the Bats and the Robins, but people back then, they didn’t know any of that. Hell, there wasn’t anything to pray to or to collect those wishes yet. So you had a whole city of people hoping and praying for something to come save them, and nothing for all that power and energy to ground itself in. And there was a whole lotta power in the air. That ancient magic prison had just busted open after all, so along with all the evil smoke demons and monsters and shit, you also had all that raw protective magic leaking out at the same time. And it got mixed up with all those unanswered wishes and pleads as it coiled up through the spires of a city that was the mirror of its own. And there, at the top of everything, it all found it’s lightning rod and grounded itself and WHAM! Just like that, everything changed.

     Now, I’ve seen the old photographs, from back when you got pictures of city skylines from giant blimps and stuff. And the resolution on them is never great, but you can see it all the same. Back when The Clocktower was the tallest building in the city, it had a big fuck-off gargoyle on top of it. Big swept back wings and these curved back horns, and hunched all over looking out towards the ocean for anything that might be sailing in to do harm.

     It’s not there anymore. Supposedly, it fell off during the Cataclysm, but I’ve never heard of no reports of it getting dug outta the rubble. [[12]] We know what really happened to it, though. All those wards on the monster prison had failed, all the watching guardians of Gotham Below had failed, and Gotham Above was filled with unanswered prayers. It all came together at the highest point of Old Gotham, and the Bat Man statue sitting there was imbued with both the power and the motive to protect us. All of us. Bam! Batman!

[[12. The Sentinel of Gotham was an actual statue that stood on top of Gotham Tower for over 150 years. It was an angel-winged figure standing ten feet tall with a sword at its side and a shield held facing out to the bay. It fell off the top of the Clocktower in 1967 along with a significant portion of the north-western corner. The damage would remain until the revitalization of Gotham at the end of No Man’s Land. What happened to the statue is unknown. It was recovered for restoration and assumed display in one of Gotham’s museums, but I can find no further word about it after 1968.]]

     I mean, we all know about the next parts, yeah? Lots of punching, lots of asskicking. Big giant monster with glowing eyes descending from above to kick the teeth in of anyone who’d given in to the whispering shadows, to the monsters wearing human skin, to the demons and their shadows and all the rest. And it was awesome.

     But the kids at the time, the kids like us, they had it rougher. I mean, the way it’s like today isn’t like it was back then. Batman’s been alive for a lot longer now; he’s had time to learn how to be a person and not just some sort of monster-fighting gargoyle. But you can still see it. He talks like most of his throat’s still rock, and he moves like it too. He’s got a punch that sends people through walls, and bullets only make him bleed when he remembers they should and they never keep him down for long. And he still doesn’t really get what it means to be a person, or how to deal with humans. Like, you can tell he tries, but he’s an ancient protective guardian powered by even more ancient vengeance magic and there’s only so much that can do. To the kids of those early days, he was even worse. He didn’t understand that they’d be hungry or lost or alone. He didn’t understand why something like him would be terrifying, and he didn’t get why sometimes you had to steal to eat and survive.

     So some of the smart kids of back then got together and worked out a plan. There was still a lot of that protection magic in the air from the prison getting busted wide open and they got the idea to try and channel it all, but on purpose this time.

((The wishes!!))

     Right, the wishes. This is when that started. They spread the word. When you needed something, when you’d lost something, when you needed someone to help, you would write down your wish and what and who you needed to fix it, and you’d feed it to a gargoyle. Wish by wish, paper scrap by paper scrap, we taught the gargoyles what sort of protector the city’s children needed. There were attempts to get kids to feed them all to one specific gargoyle or another, but it didn’t really work out, everyone just wound up stuffing them into whatever gargoyle they liked best, or was easiest to reach, or was safe to get to. Turns out, you don’t need to feed the wishes to any specific gargoyle, they all talk to each other. What you wish to one gets picked up by all the others. [[13]]

[[13. This tradition appears to have started a year or two after Robin first premiered. It’s unclear exactly how it originated, but it’s now city-wide knowledge, especially among the kids, that you can feed wishes to gargoyles if you want them to come true. Previous writers have compared this to wishing on a star and have suggested that it’s how Gotham’s youth have adjusted for the fact you can rarely see any stars to wish upon in the city. (end note (viii, ix)). ‘Wishes for Gargoyles’/’Wishing on a Gargoyle/Gargoyle Wishes’ is often used by older Gothamites – particularly parents, teachers, and other caregivers – to refer to young foolish wishes, but with a positive connotation (similar to the phrase ‘puppy love’ meaning young foolish love, but with a positive connotation). (end note (x)). And despite what some city officials have worried, there’s never been a need to invest in going around and clearing years of paper pulp out of gargoyles across the city. What exactly is happening to the wishes instead is unknown.]]

     And it worked, is the thing! It barely took a year before there was a second shape following behind the Bat at night. And it wasn’t like the Bat at all. It wasn’t a soot and ash-stained version of the Exquisite Birds, carved out of stone and one with the shadows. It was small, and bright, with the colors of Christmas, Halloween, and the circus all in one. He laughed and told jokes and understood the difference between kids who were crying because they were scared, or tired, or lost, or had just too much happen to them too soon. He knew how to talk to kids and how to help us. He stood between kids who just needed money to eat and the Bat Man’s strict ethics. We’d done it, we’d made a protector of our own. Warmer, more real, more human.

     Kind a little too human, it turns out. Robins aren’t eternal like the Bat is. Robins grow up and grow old. Robins can die. Turns out, Robins aren’t made by a gargoyle coming to life like the Bat Man did. It’s more like, the gargoyles sort of push out the essence of all those stored wishes into a form that’s shaped after themselves, but made of our wishes and hopes and needs instead of just stone and rock. We don’t even know exactly which statues most of them came from.

     We know the Second Robin’s gargoyle. But we’re Crime Alley kids, so of course we know. He went back to it whenever he needed to rest and heal. There are kids who still climb up there to tend to it and feed it offerings. We’re never gonna get Our Robin back, but it doesn’t feel right to let his gargoyle sit abandoned. And there are some kids who think, or hope, that if we can feed it enough wishes and offerings and positive vibes, maybe someday Crime Alley’s Robin will be able to reform to protect us again.

     Until that happens, though, we keep feeding wishes to all the others. The first Robin evolved into Nightwing and became the protector guardian of Bludhaven. Kids who were smarter than me figure it’s because that protective magic is still leaking out of the broken prison and spreading out like a fog. It’s spread far enough out that it can feed them the next city over. Which means they also have those invisible whispers and corruptive shadows and all the rest, which, if you’ve ever talked to a kid from there, you know they absolutely do.

     The Uptown Robin dyed himself Red and moved in closer to us here in the Alley. Personally, I figure it’s because he’s been getting all those wishes and offerings we’ve been giving to Second Robin’s gargoyle. It’s sort of merging the two of them a little. Hell, if it wasn’t for that Red Hood guy showing up, he probably would’ve become the Crime Alley guardian fully by now. I always kinda wondered if the Uptown kids have a gargoyle they keep up like we do ours, they just don’t tell anyone about it. I mean, we scarcely do. We sure as hell don’t tell anyone who doesn’t need to know where it is, that’s for damn sure. [[14]]

[[14. I only asked after the second Robin’s gargoyle’s location once. When I told that information wasn’t shared, I didn’t peruse it any further. All the extra glaring here was just really unnecessary.]]

     Oh shit, good question, yeah, no, the Bat Girls totally come from the same place. Why some go by one and others go by the other is beyond me. There’ve been girl Robins, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’ve been guy Batgirls. I think it’s because Gotham’s kids feed so many wishes into the system? There’s a lot of need out here, and so Gotham keeps birthing out new protectors for us. For awhile, I thought it was just a case of there were usually two ‘new’ ones at any given time, so one would get called Robin and the other would get called Bat Girl, but then we had two Bat Girls for awhile, and then Red Robin went back to being Robin while the other Robin was also Robin, but then they kept changing names, and…

     Look, I’m sure there are kids out there who have a better grasp on this stuff than I do. I just know where they come from, not what sort of weird rooftop pack/hive dynamics they got going on these days, you know?

     So, couple of other points before we close this all up. First, on the nature of wishes. I know it’s real cathar- ceth-. Fuck. Real good feeling to wish death by a thousand cuts on those fuckers who beat you up and stole all your food, or wish that the dad who beat you has his arms chopped off and whatever, but we’re all, all of us kids, city-wide, we’re really pushing that everyone cut down on the violence level of the wishes. The latest Robin we got came out with a sword. He’s straight up merc’ed a few guys too, and it didn’t work out as well as it feels like it should. We don’t want the next one to be even worse. Robin is supposed to be our protector, not our vengeance.

     If you want someone to wind up stabbed, you learn how to use a knife and take care of that shit yourself.

     We’re pretty sure the one extra invisible Bat Girl was formed out of the Bat’s shadow. She doesn’t talk much because they have to share the same voice, and she’s usually happy to let him use it, but this way the Bat’s able to properly Bat at two different places in the city at once. So she’s like the born wish of a born wish. It’s no wonder she’s so slippery and invisible half the time. Unless she’s actively punching something, she barely physically exists at all.

     And no, no one’s exactly sure what’s up with Signal. I mean, yeah, obviously he was formed out of the Bat Signal. Skin’s the same color as the metal, outfit’s the same color as the light, and he actually shines and glows and all the rest. And he says he’s The Signal. This is like obvious base level shit.

     We just don’t know who’s wishes he was born from. I mean, it’s possible that somehow the Bat Signal’s gotten tied into the gargoyle network, but that seems kinda implausible to me. Some have said maybe he was born out of the wishes of the police for Batman to show up and help out during the day for fucking once, but he’s way less violent and murdery than you’d expect from something born out of cop wishes.

     Buddy of mine who’s pretty damn smart and is usually better at these things than me thinks Signal might’ve been born from the police commissioner’s wishes specifically. Which kinda makes sense. He’s like the one cop who actually gets upset when someone gets shot twenty times in the back for no reason, and he’s always the one turning on the Bat-Signal and talking to the Bat under it for years and years and years.

     Kid I knew a year back actually managed to ask Signal who’s wishes he was born out of, but Signal just laughed and said something along the lines of “Doesn’t really matter who wished for me. What matters is they wished for everyone to be safe, so that’s what we’re here to do.” Then he blasted apart these giant shadow-bat things with bat-light beams and it was awesome.

     So yeah. That’s where Batman and the Robins and the Bat Girls and all the rest came from, and why they do what they do. Give thanks to Poshkid for the food, remember to put out your fires before you sleep, and if anyone wants to talk about the EBs, track me down tomorrow and we’ll go hang out in Leeds’ Park around noon so we can be sure nothing’s listening in.

[donnyclaws]

Ur website so cool!! ❤️❤️ Do you have by any chances coding tips? Been trying to make my own website for a while but adhd won't let me concentrate a second when it comes to learning coding

Thank you! And 100% It is deceptively approachable but also time consuming, I'm familiar enough with html from a highschool class where we did need to write code out by hand, and then soft practice with coding toyhou.se profiles and futzing around with free code snippets. Largely though I don't think you need to know everything or to write everything by hand, you just need to frankenstein code pieces together (As long as they're free ofc).

I used this first, it's fucking insanely handy and lets you make a simple layout with sidebars, navigation, header, footer and a body base ect, and then just generate and copy the code. The html itself also has greyed out little notes about what parts do what!

I'll be real the rest of it after that is just me googling what I want to do or googling html snippets bc I forgot them. So like html image link with size attributes ect ect, how to make a html image gallery. I don't use one site exclusively but w3schools.com has a bunch of common ones and also has a little live code editor in its tutorials.

Like I still get greatly stumped for hours bc code's kinda sensitive and one or two characters out of place will break sections of it especially when ur just frankensteining. Trying out little segments in live code editors is really helpful because you can kinda break it apart and diagnose the issue before putting it into your site html.

Also if it helps this is kind of how I break it down in my brain as another ADHD-er. so fuckign sorry for how this looks im doing it in snipping tool. But code bits love to live in cages even if it all looks the same, iit would also help if you clean your code up mine is pretty horrid but you just want to familiarize yourself with the little "Sections" ig that's where doing things by hand would help because you would 100% know what each chunk is for but yk yk.

CSS is a different beast I barely understand. The parts of code where it starts stacking on top instead of being horizontal is css and it's basically how you do fancier things to your code, it's linked to stuff you already have down. So like changing the background in the body text box or something, you can only do so much in there. Css targetting the body text box is where you can level it up. Again the sadgrl layout builder has notes so you're not completely blind in there. There's also 100% so many resources to explain what all these words mean, my mmethod is incredibly avoidant I don't know what flex is I haven't needed to fight her yet ect ect.

Sorry if this is confusing this is just my hack and slash understanding atm. Be humbled by code I've spent too long trying to fix up hysterical margin issues just because I had a random apostrophe somewhere or because I tried to spell it colour and not color ect.

[mydevdiary]

Svelte Basics: First Component

I'm going through the Svelte tutorial since it's very comprehensive and up-to-date.

I'm going on a bit of a tangent before I start this post, but I'm straying away from YouTube videos and Udemy courses when learning new programming languages and frameworks. YouTube videos are too fragmented to get good information from. Courses (and YouTube videos) are usually not up-to-date, rendering parts of them useless. Not to mention that you have to pay for free information that's packaged in a course, which is kind of scummy.

Anyway, I've gotten quite a bit further than just the introduction section of Svelte basics, but I don't want to overload myself (or readers) with information.

My First Svelte Component:

This section was relatively straightforward. There wasn't much new information, but I was hooked because of its simplicity. I personally love the idea of having the script tags be a place to define variables and attributes:

<script> let var = "a variable!" </script>

<p>I'm {var}</p>

The example above shows how dynamic attributes are used. I can basically define any variable (and states, but that'll be for the next post) between the script tags that can be used in HTML.

This may seem mundane to programmers experienced in Svelte, but I think it gives really good insight into the philosophy behind Svelte. It's clear that they wanted to keep the language simple and easy to use, and I appreciate that.

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I have a background in React, which has a reputation for being convoluted. Well, maybe that's just my perception, but how Svelte is written is a breath of fresh air!

I look forward to making more posts about what I learn and my attempts at understanding it.

Until next time!

[inspofromancientworld]

Megalithic Sites

A megalith is a huge stone that has been put to some type of purpose, typically between the Mesolithic through the chalcolithic period, fading out through the Bronze age. They can be single or multiple stones, though they are generally not tombs.

Single stones can come in three general types: Menhir, also know as 'standing stones', monolith (a single stone on its own), and capstones, which cover burial chambers without other supports. Multiple stones can come in five general types: Alignments which can be rows or spirals, megalithic or Cyclopean walls, which are rough-hewn bolder walls, stone circles or cromlechs like Stonehenge, dolmen which can be called a portal tomb and are table like entrances into tombs, and cist which is a stone coffin.

By German Archaeological Institute, photo E. Kücük. - Dietrich L, Meister J, Dietrich O, Notroff J, Kiep J, Heeb J, et al. (2019) Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey. PLoS ONE 14(5): e0215214. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215214Image: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215214.g001"Copyright: © 2019 Dietrich et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited." (links to CC BY 4.0 the day the picture is uploaded), CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90543136

Humans began building large stone structures even before we began living in cities. Some of the earliest are around the area of Gobleki Tepe in modern day Turkey, which were built around 9000 BCE by a culture that we don't know what they call themselves and first rediscovered in 1963. It wasn't until about 1994 that the excavations began. These sites consist of many large stones that are decorated with male figures and animals. Because these sites predate writing, we don't know what the purpose was, but we can tell by what refuse is around that these sites were not for full-time shelter. Because of this, we believe that they held ceremonial significance. However, with less than 5% of the site excavated, we still have a lot to learn about this site, though we have learned so much already.

By Mahmut Bozarslan (VOA) - https://d33vxfhewnqf4z.cloudfront.net/a/tarihin-yeni-sifir-noktasi-karahantepe/7351113.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145335567

Nearby, there is a site called Karahan Tepe that was discovered more recently that might be older, possibly dating as far back as 11000 BCE. It also includes area where the stone for the megaliths was quarried. It was first rediscovered in 1997. It hasn't been as excavated or studied as much as Gobekli Tepe, however it appears to have been intermittent in habitation, possibly following herds of grazing animals and availability of wild growing grasses such as barley and wheat.

By Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15044109

Atlit Yam is a site one kilometer off-shore from modern day Atlit. At the time it was built, approximately 6900 BCE, during the last Ice Age, the location was on the shore. There is a large stone semicircle that would have been around a freshwater spring. This site also has what appear to be houses as well. Around 6300 BCE, Mount Etna appears to have a collapse of its eastern flank that likely led to 40m tsunami in the Mediterranean. There were piles of fish and other evidence of rapid evacuation of the site. Within the site, there is also a woman and child that appear to have had tuberculosis, the earliest known cases, as well as men who have inner ear damage that indicate that they probably dived to fish and that the water was likely cold. There is evidence that this was one of the earliest sedentary cultures with grain storage and what appear to be wells, before it was abandoned to the tsunami and sea-level rise of the end of the last Ice Age.

By Raymbetz - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7525976

Another pre-agriculture seasonal megalithic habitation is Nabta Playa in modern day Egypt. While the location is now within the Sahara Desert, at the time, it was a rich savanna with a lake nearby. Archaeological findings suggest that people began camping there seasonally around 10000-9000 BCE. The megalithic structure was probably built around 7500 BCE, The megalithic site seems to be a "calendar circle", though there is some debate about that. Given that the exact alignment of the stars and seasons has shifted over the past 12000 years, it's difficult to know for sure which constellation the stones align to and which season, but they do seem to align with the bright stars in the constellation Orion. There are suggestions that the site was used as a ceremonial gathering site prior to the building of the stone circle based on the remains of cattle found in the location. It's believed, based on modern nomadic cultures, that cattle would have only been killed on important occasions.

Resources:

Milo Rossi (miniminuteman on YouTube and tiktok): Series on Archaeology of Southern Turkey Series regarding Netflix's Ancient Apocalypse

[wojenka]

Hnnnghh I was informed by tatp that u know about about coding wdgvbb any tips or whatever I’m trying to make a neocitys website or smthg

Since it's neocities website all you need is: HTML, CSS and maybe some graphics. As I said before I'm shit at explaining stuff but I will try my best. So here's "I want to make my own website" the basics!

HTML - markup language, the base of your websiteCSS - style of your website, can change color of html elements, size, font etc. I linked w3schools website since it's pretty easy to understand.Do you need to learn all of this before coding? No. I think it's the best to just check things that you need for your website. If you need to change background color of your website just find a w3schools tutorial on it or simply search for "how to change background color in css". You just should know html tags and basic attributes: id and class and how to link your css in html file so your style actually works! Neocities has it's own tutorials on html and css so you could check them out too! Neocities also has it's own code editor. You can edit everything in browser. I personally like to code in Visual Studio Code then just paste the code into Neocities editor. VS Code has a lot of addons (some of them are there by default) that make coding way easier for example: autocorrection of syntax errors and giving you suggestions!

Example: If you type html in vs code html file you will get 3 suggestions:

choose the html:5 one:

TAADAAAM!! VS Code just wrote the whole website structure for you! You can install more extensions here under extension section! There is this extension called vscode-pets it won't help you with coding but its really cute:

some yt tutorials: CINNIMANI (specifically for neocities), web coding playlist (this one is good for all websites in general); https://sadgrl.online if you were on neocities you probably saw her website. She has a lot of useful resources including image resources and also she made her own WEBSITE BUILDER or acutally layout builder! It's pretty simple website builder but still. If you are looking for premade layouts you can just search them on google or get sum from the website I linked ^__^ Uploading your website to neocities is really easy since all you need to do is to put all the files on there! I guess that's all for now. If you have any problems or questions just ask. I'm here to help ^^ websites with free to edit code: https://codepen.io, https://github.com

[guzsdaily]

I'm stuck

Day 87 - Jan 31st, 12.024

Apparently, writing Nix files doesn't count as "real programming", because it's being hard to code lately.

I have been writing Nix files, with are pretty much just "fancy JSON", for more than a week, and now, coding even on JavaScript is being somewhat hard on my brain. This new project is a "subproject" of the whole productivity system, and it is just a small CLI application to transform Obsidian's Markdown, into plain [CommonMark] Markdown. And my head is fighting on trying to come with solutions to code, it is like I can imagine the concept and separate the pieces of this project to work on, and I feel like even a simple task I can't just code y'know? Even when I'm being hands-off with things like dependencies count, scalability, etc. etc. Things which normally I take care in "production code".

To be honest I even don't know if I should use JavaScript for this, I choose it because it is the easiest language to just get things done, and it seems logical to use it for content-related and/or HTML-related things. However, I kinda feel I should use Go or Rust, even if I need to learn them from scratch and have a smaller related ecosystem, I don't know if I should, knowing that it is a project that I would like to not spend a lot of time, but also the idea of learning something new in the time kinda drives me another way? I don't know, maybe I will try to use Go or Rust in this project, so it's easier to use them in my future "actual" projects.

I even don't know if I should continue using Obsidian all together now, because even if it is where I settled up most everything, even when it is the center of my productivity and note-taking routine, I kinda feel locked-in a lot more than I like, and having this Obsidian-like syntax (together with all the plugin's syntaxes), it can be kinda hard to get out of it. Yes, it is impossible to me to not be locked-in some technology, but I feel like I would prefer to have everything in plain Markdown and edit it with a Neovim config, than to have a lot of things that I can't read and use without a specif editor and previewer.

However, if I continue this, I will also never work on actual projects, you know, the ones that can give me a job. But without "The System", I can't organize and share easily said projects.

I feel stuck.

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Today's artists & creative things

Song: That Funny Feeling - by Bo Burnham

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Copyright (c) 2024-present Gustavo "Guz" L. de Mello <contact.guz013@gmail.com>

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License

[fashtech]

Frontend Technologies (React.js and Angular.js)

Ever since the advent of the world wide web, technologies have been researched and created to streamline the creation of Web pages that are displayed to a client upon the client's request. These web pages began by being static and non-interactive with the use of basic HTML and CSS. After awhile, the Javascript programming language stormed the world of web applications and brought a layer of interactivity, finesse, and dynamism to web applications. Since then, more technologies, most of which are built on the basic initial technologies, have come out. Two of the most popular and effective technologies are React.js and Angular.js. In this article, an attempt would be made to highlight the differences in these technologies and what makes them unique and powerful.

Firstly, React.js is built on Javascript and produced and managed by Meta while Angular is also built on TypeScript but it was produced and managed by Google.

React is a Javascript library while Angular is a framework.

React makes use of a "templating langauge" called JSX to extend Javascript into HTML and it is rendered in the server side while Angular extends the functionality of HTML by adding more attributes like "ng-bind" and it is client side rendered.

React works by using a virtual DOM, while Angular uses the real DOM.

React is a highly scalable library because of the reusability of its components while Angular is less Highly scalable.

Having itemised these differences, they each have their strengths and what makes developers prefer one over the other. React has support for mobile App development, reusability and predictability of code, one can learn it really fast Etc. Angular has faster server side rendering, fewer lines of code, takes time to learn, Etc.

I specifically prefer React to Angular which is why I am glad that React is being used in the HNG internship https://hng.tech/internship where I am currently interning. I have used React to build highly interactive web applications and look forward to honing my skills better as I use it for more daunting projects in the HNG internship. Check out HNG on their website https://hng.tech/premium

[lunarsilkscreen]

JavaScript Frameworks

Step 1) Polyfill

Most JS frameworks started from a need to create polyfills. A Polyfill is a js script that add features to JavaScript that you expect to be standard across all web browsers. Before the modern era; browsers lacked standardization for many different features between HTML/JS/and CSS (and still do a bit if you're on the bleeding edge of the W3 standards)

Polyfill was how you ensured certain functions were available AND worked the same between browsers.

JQuery is an early Polyfill tool with a lot of extra features added that makes JS quicker and easier to type, and is still in use in most every website to date. This is the core standard of frameworks these days, but many are unhappy with it due to performance reasons AND because plain JS has incorporated many features that were once unique to JQuery.

JQuery still edges out, because of the very small amount of typing used to write a JQuery app vs plain JS; which saves on time and bandwidth for small-scale applications.

Many other frameworks even use JQuery as a base library.

Step 2) Encapsulated DOM

Storing data on an element Node starts becoming an issue when you're dealing with multiple elements simultaneously, and need to store data as close as possible to the DOMNode you just grabbed from your HTML, and probably don't want to have to search for it again.

Encapsulation allows you to store your data in an object right next to your element so they're not so far apart.

HTML added the "data-attributes" feature, but that's more of "loading off the hard drive instead of the Memory" situation, where it's convenient, but slow if you need to do it multiple times.

Encapsulation also allows for promise style coding, and functional coding. I forgot the exact terminology used,but it's where your scripting is designed around calling many different functions back-to-back instead of manipulating variables and doing loops manually.

Step 3) Optimization

Many frameworks do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to caching frequently used DOM calls, among other data tools, DOM traversal, and provides standardization for commonly used programming patterns so that you don't have to learn a new one Everytime you join a new project. (you will still have to learn a new one if you join a new project.)

These optimizations are to reduce reflowing/redrawing the page, and to reduce the plain JS calls that are performance reductive. A lot of these optimatizations done, however, I would suspect should just be built into the core JS engine.

(Yes I know it's vanilla JS, I don't know why plain is synonymous with Vanilla, but it feels weird to use vanilla instead of plain.)

Step 4) Custom Element and component development

This was a tool to put XML tags or custom HTML tags on Page that used specific rules to create controls that weren't inherent to the HTML standard. It also helped linked multiple input and other data components together so that the data is centrally located and easy to send from page to page or page to server.

Step 5) Back-end development

This actually started with frameworks like PHP, ASP, JSP, and eventually resulted in Node.JS. these were ways to dynamically generate a webpage on the server in order to host it to the user. (I have not seen a truly dynamic webpage to this day, however, and I suspect a lot of the optimization work is actually being lost simply by programmers being over reliant on frameworks doing the work for them. I have made this mistake. That's how I know.)

The backend then becomes disjointed from front-end development because of the multitude of different languages, hence Node.JS. which creates a way to do server-side scripting in the same JavaScript that front-end developers were more familiar with.

React.JS and Angular 2.0 are more of back end frameworks used to generate dynamic web-page without relying on the User environment to perform secure transactions.

Step 6) use "Framework" as a catch-all while meaning none of these;

Polyfill isn't really needed as much anymore unless your target demographic is an impoverished nation using hack-ware and windows 95 PCs. (And even then, they could possible install Linux which can use modern lightweight browsers...)

Encapsulation is still needed, as well as libraries that perform commonly used calculations and tasks, I would argue that libraries aren't going anywhere. I would also argue that some frameworks are just bloat ware.

One Framework I was researching ( I won't name names here) was simply a remapping of commands from a Canvas Context to an encapsulated element, and nothing more. There was literally more comments than code. And by more comments, I mean several pages of documentation per 3 lines of code.

Custom Components go hand in hand with encapsulation, but I suspect that there's a bit more than is necessary with these pieces of frameworks, especially on the front end. Tho... If it saves a lot of repetition, who am I to complain?

Back-end development is where things get hairy, everything communicates through HTTP and on the front end the AJAX interface. On the back end? There's two ways data is given, either through a non-html returning web call, *or* through functions that do a lot of heavy lifting for you already.

Which obfuscates how the data is used.

But I haven't really found a bad use of either method. But again; I suspect many things about performance impacts that I can't prove. Specifically because the tools in use are already widely accepted and used.

But since I'm a lightweight reductionist when it comes to coding. (Except when I'm not because use-cases exist) I can't help but think most every framework work, both front-end and Back-end suffers from a lot of bloat.

And that bloat makes it hard to select which framework would be the match for the project you're working on. And because of that; you could find yourself at the tail end of a development cycle realizing; You're going to have to maintain this as is, in the exact wrong solution that does not fit the scope of the project in anyway.

Well. That's what junior developers are for anyway...