Mandaris

The show continues the trend of just putting me on edge. To be honest, the blood and gore are actually scenes that cut the tension for me. These character are in a world that does not wish them well unless it’s for financial gain.

With all the horrible things going on, some would wonder how I can watch a show where a puppet representation of a person is ripped to pieces. For that, I think it’s because it’s more unlikely than some of the violence that happens near my home.

Anyway, back to the show.

The actors are still doing a great job of bringing the characters to life. In an unreal world, they make me care about them and root for them no matter how bad they can get.

Kathy and Jay are feeling the burn(out) well maybe the steps before the burnout.

Some of the stuff that [@kjaymiller](https://micro.blog/kjaymiller) was talking about really hit home. I've been putting a lot of mental energy into projects when my focus should be elsewhere.

It’s kind of embarrassing that I lost this thing that I’ve put all my thoughts, plans, and feelings into for the last couple of months. Now I’m wondering around my home trying to decide if I should continue looking for it, create a temporary one (basically the closest sheet of paper that will ultimately be lost), or, prepare a new notebook.

It’s been more than six months since Reddit cut off Apollo, and I’m fine with that. At first, I did go through a significant amount of withdrawal because Reddit provided me with an endless supply of new things to look into. It really worked towards that slogan of being the Internet’s homepage.

Still, I have that ache in my heart of hearts where I want to find new things on the Internet. I took some time to look into alternatives for Reddit and some of them are just… bad… not bad in the interface but bad in the sense that they have horrible content on the home page. I’ve learned the lesson multiple times that you should listen to people when they tell you who they are, and some of these sites are telling me that they are not worth my time.

I’ve found myself doing more and more things with Micro.blog, discord, and mastodon. In a lot of ways, this is more engaging because I’m finding new people first and then the content that they link to. Versus looking at whatever is hot and then maybe glancing at the name of the person who posted (or, in the case of reddit, reposted).

I saw this classic yesterday and I still love it. Ok, the sand worms don’t hold up like they used to but I think it makes it even more amusing. 

It struck me as me of the few films that talk about death but only a small nod to grieving. 

Good times only!!!

I saw this classic yesterday and I still love it. Ok, the sand worms don’t hold up like they used to but I think it makes it even more amusing. 

It struck me as me of the few films that talk about death but only a small nod to grieving. 

Good times only!!!

I have a couple reviews in Letterboxd. While I was thinking about how I would rank them, I felt it writing it down would help me.

★

I finished this but I regret it.

★★

I’m glad someone was given a chance to make this. Hopefully the next thing is better. Still, I would be hesitant to try anything that boasted about being “The people who brought you X”.

★★★

It’s alright. I liked it enough. I would watch it again if it was on and enough peer pressure was applied.

★★★★

I definitely would watch again. I would recommend it to others. In fact, when I’m feeling overwhelmed with all the possibilities, this might be something I put on instead of something new.

★★★★★

Loved it!

Strangely enough, I don’t write a lot about the things I love on the internet. I feel it might be because it _is_the internet. Years of seeing things being ridiculed makes me hesitant to express a strong feeling about something.

I feel that I’m ready to do that more and more now.

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JavaScript is the fastest way to build yourself a slow website.

– Harry Roberts

I told myself I would not get into JavaScript optimization.

Tuesday, I released a post with and version bump of Labarum. I then went on and recorded a podcast stating that theme was now “feature complete”.

Well, I was wrong.

I went to the Homebrew Website Club to do some socializing and shared my site with the others. I pride myself on having a site that is pretty accessible. Turns out that the color contrast on my links isn’t good enough. I knew I had tested the basic font, but had misattributed the links not passing the contrast test as an issue with the test itself.

Definitely, I needed an intervention.

So, I spent about an hour going through all the accessibility issues and HTML validation errors. Some of them I can’t change at this time because the code is generated by Hugo/Goldmark. For example, if you have multiple articles on a page (index or list) and they each have a set of footnotes or use a table of contents, you will get an error about them using the same ids for those items.

I’m not going to put the time or energy into that.

Other issues such as a warning about using a trailing slash in the HTML did make me pause for a moment. For example the following from site-head.html:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

And

<img 
  src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/661/2023/children-who-are-wrong.jpg" 
  alt="Principal Skinner thinks the children  are wrong"
  title="Self Reflection can be hard."/>

I decided to keep examples like these and ignore the issue for now.

Other accessible issues that I’m not going to put more energy into at this point are the code blocks. Some of the contrast colors for keywords were flagged, and the tabindex="0" can make keyboard navigation more difficult than it needs to be.

The most egregious issue is that I use the colors in the headers and links at the very top of the page. I’ve since changed it in both light and dark mode to be something closer to the basic font color but still within the Nord color scheme.

Since I’m changing the colors, I’ll have to redo the images that I have in the README.md which will probably make me think of other things to change. I’m both dreading and excited by doing that as I’ve learned more about what makes for a good demonstration of Labarum.

What is the next opportunity for Labarum?

My favorite part about this post and this point release is that I’m writing about what I’m not going to do.

Sure, there are places that the theme needs improvement¹, but I have never been more confident and happy with where it is. I looked at the git history and the first commit was February 21st, 2022. That’s a significant amount of time.

I want to spend more time putting stuff on the blog and less time on what it looks like.

There are going to be changes in the future.

But at this point, it will be focused on changes that are related to the content that I’m creating.