Like the new Artist Activist website and many more I have brewing, this site thrives on the open source creations and contributions of Óscar Otero, particularly Lume and the elegant Simple Blog theme that is the root of Xeo.

Thank you Óscar.

I spent several years surveying the landscape of static site generation. That research culminated in the work I am currently embarking on with Lume alongside Óscar and its other lovely contributors and community members. As we progress, I am consistently blown away by Óscar’s architectural sensibilities and design intuition.

Come on in, the water is fire.

Cannot think of a better example of how woefully unprepared we are to deal with foreign influence operations than the defenestration of Twitter by repressive governments (Saudi 🇸🇦/UAE 🇦🇪) using their favorite stooge Elon Musk as a patsy.

That such an obvious and easily traceable gambit to poison political discourse was such a wild success at a relatively affordable price for the players involved has set an diabolical precedent.

Twitter: Forty four billion dollars.

Silencing political discourse: Priceless.

Some things in life are priceless. For everything else, there’s soulless patsies and bribed regulators.

Bloodstained Maps

Reminds me of this Chris Jankowski quote about project REDMAP, which was a Republican undertaking to use gerrymandering as a national strategy, from the excellent documentary Slay the Dragon (streaming on Hulu and Kanopy currently), paraphrased here by co-director Chris Durrance:

[Chris Jankowski] took control of a large number of states and basically the lower house of Congress for the best part of ten years and did it in a marathon political sense for peanuts (for about $30 million).

Update 6 April 2025: As far as I can tell, Apple Photos Shared Albums now function fully and without issue when Advanced Data Protection is enabled. I have not found anything to link to about this (please share it if you do). I wholeheartedly recommend you turn ADP on immediately. I have had mixed results trying to use iWork collaboration with Advanced Data Protection enabled, but it is hard to tell what is iCloud file sync flakiness, or iWork collaboration not working in general. Few people I know use iCloud for file sharing. iCloud Drive experiments with my family have fared poorly overall.

Let's talk about Advanced Data Protection for iCloud.

The upshot of this sentence in the “Security implications of sharing and collaboration” section:

iWork collaboration and the Shared Albums feature in Photos don’t support Advanced Data Protection.

…for me [in 2022, but this no longer happens in 2025, see UPDATE above], was that my wallpaper on my phone immediately disappeared and I was unable to access years of “photos added to Shared Albums.”

Not only on my phone. Those years of “photos added to Shared Albums,” were now inaccessible on any of my devices because they “are stored with standard data protection, as the feature permits albums to be publicly shared on the web.” Does anyone know if this is expected behavior or something I should try to report?

If it is indeed expected behavior to vaporize all shared albums until Advanced Data Protection is disabled (the albums and photos do return, once ADP is disabled), that’s huge bummer that I suspect will make this urgently needed protection a dealbreaker to most who attempt to enable it.

Also beyond shared albums, which are already widely used, if Apple wants iWork collaboration to find traction, making it work for people who want “their trusted devices [to] retain sole access to the encryption keys for the majority of their iCloud data” would seem to be wise.

Found the top two on Kornel’s Mastodon and then the third on Stevie Martin’s channel. Both recommended.

• It is in the best interests of Ukraine, and the west, to end this war as soon as possible

  Christopher S Chivvis

• The west’s calls for a total victory in Ukraine can lead only to ruinous escalation

  Simon Jenkins

Both articles display a wild misunderstanding of the reality of Russia’s aggression and Putin’s ultimate goal, which is the restoration of the Soviet empire. Appeasement will not work this time any better than it did in 2008 and 2014, and by promoting these Putin-friendly viewpoints so carelessly (that contradict so much of its own valuable reporting) The Guardian has lost my trust and has me considering canceling my yearly digital subscription.

For counterpoints that demolish the arguments made in the two dreary, misguided articles above, see:

• Yulia Tymoshenko on war in Ukraine: ‘It’s a chance for the free world to kill this evil’

  Luke Harding and Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv

• ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, Putin will come’: the 2014 Ukraine refugees forced to flee for a second time

  Photojournalist Serhii Korovayny has twice uprooted his family because of Russian invasion. He talks to others with the same experience
  by Sergey Korovayny

• Ukraine invasion may be start of ‘third world war’, says George Soros

  Veteran philanthropist tells World Economic Forum civilisation ‘may not survive’ what is coming
  Larry Elliott Economics editor

• ‘Warmongering, lies and hatred’: Russian diplomat in Geneva resigns over Ukraine invasion

  Boris Bondarev issues public statement saying: ‘Never have I been so ashamed of my country’
  Andrew Roth, Moscow correspondent

If all of this is depressing you, as it should, I invite you to read Virginia Heffernan’s excellent Volodymyr Zelensky and the Art of the War Story for Wired, that contains this refreshing passage:

Zelensky’s first video of the war appeared on February 23, the eve of the invasion. In Russian, he addresses “grazhdanam Rossi”—the citizens of Russia—as a “grazhdanin Ukraini”—citizen of Ukraine. The word citizens and not people reminds listeners that they’re members of a modern nation and not infantry in a holy war for an ethno-state. Zelensky also notably zeroes in on a Kremlin talking point that vexes him. He says, “You are told that we hate Russian culture. But how can you hate culture? Any culture?” In that moment of incomprehension, Zelensky dexterously clarifies for all the world the absurdity of a “culture war.”

Let’s slow it down. Broadly speaking, a culture is a patchwork of dialects, customs, habits, music, arts, mores, ways of living. In Russia, culture might include everything from forest folklore to vigorous strolling to the rave band Little Big. Deeper in, you might find Chagall, Turgenev, Anatoly Karpov, the Bolshoi, Lyudmila Ulitskaya. How can a culture be hated?

I’d never thought of it that way, but of course. A culture has no budget, no government, no army. It collects no taxes; it has no CEO, bible, or headquarters. If it can’t be precisely identified, how can a nation’s whole culture, which is made up of innumerable artifacts and practices, be loathed? And yet the constant warning of the far right in Russia—and France, and the US—is that someone, somewhere, hates your culture and thus deserves to die. No one but Zelensky has ever dissolved this hollow alarmism with such dispatch.

“Europe must wake up now,” Zelensky says in a video from March 4. Where he’d been in a funereal black suit and necktie a week earlier, now he wears the olive-drab that has become his trademark. “Russian troops are firing upon the nuclear power plant in Ukraine.” He again calls his audience into being and reminds us who we are: citizens with rights, not serfs with superstitions. Specifically, he addresses “all people who know the word ‘Chernobyl.’”

I dare you to read that and not call to your mind’s eye the story of Chernobyl (in the news in 1986 or on HBO in 2019) and however you understand that nuclear disaster. This is shrewd. Comprehension of this byword does indeed mark a person as informed, familiar with the dangers of nuclear tech, and mindful that lethal catastrophes are never merely local. Our understanding of history has now been both flattered and enlisted in the fight.

The other video from that day serves as Part II, and it’s aimed at Russian citizens. Again Zelensky is in army green. But this time he doesn’t expect his audience to startle at the mention of Chernobyl, so he issues a stern, scolding, vivid reminder of 1986 and how Russians and Ukrainians fought together as Soviets to contain the meltdown. “You have to remember irradiation,” he says, seemingly hoping the video will find its way to those who have been denied an education in history. For them, he issues a more primordial threat: “Take to the streets and say that you want to live, that you want to live on Earth without radioactive contamination. Radiation does not know where Russia is, radiation does not know where the borders of your country are.”

These videos lay out two significant ideas about Russian culture. First, there’s nothing to hate in it. A culture is grounded in sensory-emotional experience; it is too vast, multifarious, and shape-shifting to be hated as a monolith. Second, Russia as an authoritarian kleptocracy is a matter of utter indifference to the planet Earth, which is the source of our shared humanity. To poison Ukraine is to poison Russia. Say that you want to live, that you want to live on Earth.

🌍🌏🌎

When you hear the speech Ravyn Ariah Wngz gave at Ryerson University, you know it is the truth. You may be in various states of denying that truth, avoiding it, but it is still the truth.

A majority of people in Russia, China, and the USA support that truth. Fostering it into being is simply a matter of triggering the conditions that allow that transformation, that transcendence, to take place.

🚀 Why wouldn't we?

🌱 If we cannot survive here where we evolved for billions of years in adaptation to the environment why would we fare better anywhere else?

🚀 So the argument is to just give up?

🌱 Resolve not to give up or give in to escapism. To focus on repairing our damage instead of exhausting crucial resources further to chase fantasies of permanently existing elsewhere. Exploration and observation are science; exploitation and colonization are fever dreams.

Will you make the links open in a new tab so we don’t take people off the site?

I am super against this for various reasons, the main one being that target=_blank breaks the back button, the only browser feature most people understand.

Jakob Nielsen in 2005:

Since 1999, it’s been a firm Web usability guideline to refrain from opening new browser windows for several reasons:

• When new windows appear that users didn’t ask for, it’s both confusing and disruptive.
• If the new window completely obscures the old one, many users don’t even realize a new window has opened.
• Less-technical users can’t manage multiple windows.
• New windows can defeat users who are blind or have low vision, as, for example, when a new window opens outside the part of the screen that’s magnified for a low-vision user.

The common rationale designers have for opening new windows is “to keep users on our site,” but that’s bogus reasoning. If people want to leave, they’ll leave. And if they just want to look at the other site, they’ll return to your site by clicking the Back button—the second most used feature on the Web (after hypertext links). In fact, one of the usability problems of opening new windows is that they alter the expected behavior for returning to the previous location.

There are also associated security issues, the upshot being that if you do ever decide to use target=_blank you need to also include rel=noopener always, and possibly rel=noreferrer for older browsers.

Mathias Bynens:

Don’t use target=_blank (or any other target that opens a new navigation context), especially for links in user-generated content, unless you have a good reason to.

That last link is to a solid article on CSS Tricks about possible reasons to use it legitimately, like when someone might lose work in progress or there is media playing. Marco Arment provides another example in his 2014 article, Forcing links to open in new windows: an argument that should have ended 15 years ago.

For more background on the security issue:

• Target="_blank" — the most underestimated vulnerability ever
• Phishing by navigating browser tabs

So if you do use it anywhere, the link should look like:

<a href="https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Example domains</a>