SALTY WORD HOLE

About a week before the end of October, I spent many hours messing with styling options for the Website League instance I'm on, some screenshots of which I'll div style="overflow-x: scroll; white-space: nowrap;":


I thought maybe I'd settle on using the oceany bubbly one after I got all of the tweaky impulses out of my system, but my inner Spirit had me clinging to the Halloween one.

Being stuck in bed, I cannot walk around my neighborhood, nor visit stores, so I do not see Halloween displays.

I live on Discord and social media, where the scenery never really changes. Sometimes a logo or a button will be different, and some of the things people post will take on seasonal themes, but the overall look of everything rarely deviates from a brand's inflexible design philosophy. It doesn't help that I'm usually only ever on my phone — mobile apps are often too clean™ and streamlined™ for such for-fun adaptations.

Outside of the style I made, my environment leading into the holiday was as [blue or red] and [white or black] as everything ever is... except Newgrounds at least switched to Halloween-themed user level icons, and put up an appropriate front page background with iconic spooky characters one might associate with the site. Good Website, pat pat, do you want a Newgrounds Nugget???

When the holiday spirit isn't in the css, I don't feel it.

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draft jubilee: uhhh be nice on inñernet pleece

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[this has been sitting in my drafts for a while, and upon taking another look at it, it seemed infinitely more postable with the removal of just a single line, so here]

it shouldn't simply be assumed that someone you're responding to, especially if they appear to be making an effort to present themself as acting in good faith, is actually engaging in bad faith / deliberately acting stupid or only pretending to miss something they're skirting around / not going to listen / incapable of growth / unworthy of clarity — someone more “worthy” of your energy is already listening.

for everyone's benefit, it is always better to prioritize being constructive and sympathetic vs. non-constructive and rude. the latter is not your only option, nor your strongest option, and if the former isn't worth employing, neither is the latter.

showing direct anger and hostility toward people via posting online is always a choice you have time to think over before hitting submit, and is one that I feel should essentially never be made, as it often provides an avenue for escalation and derailment, distracts from opportunities to communicate more constructively, and can hurt silent observers in unexpected ways.

depending on who your words reach, prematurely disengaging before establishing a mutual understanding could have negative downstream effects.

I think a very important thing to note about bullying / shaming is that those most affected are sensitive to how you feel, or at least to being perceived as having drifted away from your values. if they care about how you feel / visibly aligning with your values, it was probably possible to find a more benign way to work with them instead. if they’re more resistant to it, you might just be entertaining a troll.



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