[life]

Fruits Of My Labor

A drizzling Berlin November evening. Three friends crammed around one of the gnarly wooden pub tables that have provided refuge on the wrong side of the Tram tracks of Warschauer Straße for nearly a quarter of a century.

Our stage of intent, blissful insobriety has hit the level where anyone who dares asking will learn our names actually are Tom Collins, Glühwein, and Strawberry Daiquiri. And the laughs only die for a brief 17 seconds when the speakers above us begin to pour Doug Pettibone’s trembling guitar sixths over Fruits Of My Labor and Lucinda Williams reminds at least one of us of the fragile poetry of companionship so indispensable in a life that has changed at a terrifying pace over the course of barely two years.

Published
Categorised as Life Tagged
[life]

Bridge Over Troubled Water

Back in the days when an adolescent consciousness wouldn’t yet be cluster-bombed with a virtually limitless stream of algorithmically pre-selected media from the moment they had learned to press a button, it was access to vinyl records that would determine most of your cultural intake as a young person – music, that is.

Where I grew up, the radio (and later MTV if you had cable) would serve contemporary Pop and Rock music. If you wanted to dive into the history that had made those two what they had become at the time, however, you would find yourself at the local record store looking up acts from the 1960s and 70s who had proven to still be commercially relevant to a white audience 20 years later.

Or, if you were me, a grown-up you would have expected it from the last would quietly slip you an original copy of Aretha Franklin’s Greatest Hits album from 1971, on the B side of which they would send a message to you that you’d only begin to understand decades later.

Published
Categorised as Life Tagged
[notes]

We must understand the precedent of #FacebookDown

When the lights went out at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on October 4th, 2021, half of my Twitter feed seemed to be taking the piss out of the fact that Mark Zuckerberg’s employees weren’t able to even access their buildings, while the other half was showing some degree of concern for the hundreds of millions of livelihoods harmed by the incident.

[notes]

Sustainability isn’t someone else’s weather

At WordCamp Europe 2021, I had a brief conversation on contributing to open source as a company. I referred to sustainability as an approach to doing business which embeds but also goes beyond the environmental aspects of the term.

The next day, I tried to connect a few dots on Twitter; this post is an adaption of my initial thread with some additions. A tonne of additions, frankly.

[notes]

Powered by WordPress

Somebody threw a fit over having to clone WordPress’ default theme’s footer.php into a child theme to remove the ‘powered by WordPress’ link, and they used extra white space to make their micro rant stand out in source view.

HTML comment: So. WordPress default theme developers, or whoever is responsible… (sighs) It’s an absolute FUCKING DISGRACE that you guys STILL make people set up a full-blown child theme and clone this fucking footer.php file JUST so that they’re able to remove that powered-by-WordPress’ shit from their sites that you have the nerve to hard-code down here. What is this, a fucking LINK FARM?? Honestly, it’s 20 fucking 20. Get over yourselves. Fuck.
(Found in my drafts, source URL not shared for privacy reasons)

I suppose this is one of the things we will be able to submit to the realms of nostalgia once Full Site Editing hits WordPress core, and I for one wont’t cry. 😄