My 17 year old daughter generously sat down with me to talk about consent — her personal experiences with it, humor of it, nonverbal versions, and how to respond to rejection. We
talked about her thoughts on the Dear Boy Who Likes My Daughter episode, how she perceives my romantic relationships, what makes a good cuddle partner, and being resourceful after
trauma. There’s laughing and crying and lots of proud mama.
I’ve been gradually catching up on Dr. Doe‘s Sexplanations podcast; I’m up into the 30-somethings now but my favourite so far might have been
episode 25, which presents a very authentic and raw look at Lindsey and her daughter Des’s thoughts on sex, romance, and consent. Adorable.
When I write a blog post, it generally becomes a static thing: its content always
usually stays the same for the rest of its life (which is, in my case, pretty much forever). But sometimes, I go back and make an
amendment. When I make minor changes that don’t affect the overall meaning of the work, like fixing spelling mistakes and repointing broken links, I just edit the page, but for
more-significant changes I try to make it clear what’s changed and how.
This blog post from 2007, for example, was amended after its publication with the insertion of content at the top and the deletion
of content within.
Historically, I’d usually marked up deletions with the HTML <strike>/<s> elements (or
other visually-similar approaches) and insertions by clearly stating that a change had been made (usually accompanied by the date and/or time of the change), but this isn’t a good
example of semantic code. It also introduces an ambiguity when it clashes with the times I use <s> for comedic effect in the Web equivalent of the old caret-notation joke:
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.
Better, then, to use the <ins> and <del> elements, which were designed for exactly this purpose and even accept attributes to specify the date/time
of the modification and to cite a resource that explains the change, e.g. <ins datetime="2019-05-03T09:00:00+00:00"
cite="https://alices-blog.example.com/2019/05/03/speaking.html">The last speaker slot has now been filled; thanks Alice</ins>. I’ve worked to retroactively add such
semantic markup to my historical posts where possible, but it’ll be an easier task going forwards.
Of course, no browser I’m aware of supports these attributes, which is a pity because the metadata they hold may well have value to a reader. In order to expose them I’ve added a little
bit of CSS that looks a little like this, which makes their details (where available) visible as a sort-of tooltip when hovering
over or tapping on an affected area. Give it a go with the edits at the top of this post!
ins[datetime],del[datetime]{position:relative;}ins[datetime]::before,del[datetime]::before{position:absolute;top:-24px;font-size:12px;color:#fff;border-radius:4px;padding:2px6px;opacity:0;transition:opacity0.25s;
hyphens:none;/* suppresses sitewide line break hyphenation rules */white-space:nowrap;/* suppresses extraneous line breaks in Chrome */}ins[datetime]:hover::before,del[datetime]:hover::before{opacity:0.75;}ins[datetime]::before{content:'inserted 'attr(datetime)''attr(cite);background:#050;/* insertions are white-on-green */}del[datetime]::before{content:'deleted 'attr(datetime)''attr(cite);background:#500;/* deletions are white-on-red */}
CSS facilitating the display of <ins>/<del> datetimes and citations on hover or touch.
I’m aware that the intended use-case of <ins>/<del> is change management, and that the expectation is that the “final” version of a
document wouldn’t be expected to show all of the changes that had been made to it. Such a thing could be simulated, I suppose, by appropriately hiding and styling the
<ins>/<del> blocks on the client-side, and that’s something I might look into in future, but in practice my edits are typically small and rare
enough that nobody would feel inconvenienced by their inclusion/highlighting: after all, nobody’s complained so far and I’ve been doing exactly that, albeit in a non-semantic way, for
many years!
I’m also slightly conscious that my approach to the “tooltip” might cause it to obstruct interactivity with something directly above an insertion or deletion: e.g. making a hyperlink
inaccessible. I’ve tested with a variety of browsers and devices and it doesn’t seem to happen (my line height works in my favour) but it’s something I’ll need to be mindful of if I
change my typographic design significantly in the future.
A final observation: I love the CSS attr() function, and I’ve been using it (and counter()) for all
kinds of interesting things lately, but it annoys me that I can only use it in a content: statement. It’d be amazingly valuable to be able to treat integer-like attribute
values as integers and combine it with a calc() in order to facilitate more-dynamic styling of arbitrary sets of HTML elements. Maybe one day…
For the time being, I’m happy enough with my new insertion/deletion markers. If you’d like to see them in use in their natural environment, see the final paragraph of my 2012 review of The Signal and The Noise.
Quick cache and dash while in the vicinity. Overshot the obvious parking place and so parked up the road at the premises of “Q Associates”. Figured they wouldn’t mind given than it’s
Sunday. Plus their company has the same name as my surname, so I could probably claim it’s mine if anybody challenged me. Cool solution!
I’m increasingly convinced that Friedemann Friese‘s 2009 board game Power Grid: Factory Manager (BoardGameGeek) presents gamers with a highly-digestible model of the energy economy in a capitalist society.
In Factory Manager, players aim to financially-optimise a factory over time, growing production and delivery capacity through upgrades in workflow, space, energy, and staff
efficiency. An essential driving factor in the game is that energy costs will rise sharply throughout. Although it’s not always clear in advance when or by how much, this increase in
the cost of energy is always at the forefront of the savvy player’s mind as it’s one of the biggest factors that will ultimately impact their profit.
8 $money per $unit of electricity I use? That’s a rip off! Or a great deal! I don’t know!
Given that players aim to optimise for turnover towards the end of the game (and as a secondary goal, for the tie-breaker: at a specific point five rounds after the game begins) and not
for business sustainability, the game perhaps-accidentally reasonably-well represents the idea of “flipping” a business for a profit. Like many business-themed games, it favours
capitalism… which makes sense – money is an obvious and quantifiable way to keep score in a board game! – but it still bears repeating.
There’s one further mechanic in Factory Manager that needs to be understood: a player’s ability to control the order in which they take their turn and their capacity to
participate in the equipment auctions that take place at the start of each round is determined by their manpower-efficiency in the previous round. That is: a player who
operates a highly-automated factory running on a skeleton staff benefits from being in the strongest position for determining turn order and auctions in their next turn.
My staff room is empty. How about yours?
The combination of these rules leads to an interesting twist: in the final turn – when energy costs are at their highest and there’s no benefit to holding-back staff to
monopolise the auction phase in the nonexistent subsequent turn – it often makes most sense strategically to play what I call the “sweatshop strategy”. The player switches off
the automated production lines to save on the electricity bill, drags in all the seasonal workers they can muster, dusts off the old manpower-inefficient machines mouldering in the
basement, and gets their army of workers cranking out widgets!
With indefinitely-increasing energy prices and functionally-flat staff costs, the rules of the game would always eventually reach the point at which it is most cost-effective
to switch to slave cheap labour rather than robots. but Factory Manager‘s fixed-duration means that this point often comes for all players in many games at the same
predictable point: a tipping point at which the free market backslides from automation to human labour to keep itself alive.
There are parallels in the real world. Earlier this month, Tim Watkins wrote:
The demise of the automated car wash may seem trivial next to these former triumphs of homo technologicus but it sits on the same continuum. It is just one of a gathering
list of technologies that we used to be able to use, but can no longer express (through market or state spending) a purpose for. More worrying, however, is the direction in which we
are willingly going in our collective decision to move from complexity to simplicity. The demise of the automated car wash has not followed a return to the practice of people
washing their own cars (or paying the neighbours’ kid to do it). Instead we have more or less happily accepted serfdom (the use of debt and blackmail to force people to work) and
slavery (the use of physical harm) as a reasonable means of keeping the cost of cleaning cars to a minimum (similar practices are also keeping the cost of food down in the UK).
This, too, is precisely what is expected when the surplus energy available to us declines.
I love Factory Manager, but after reading Watkins’ article, it’ll probably feel a little different to play it, now. It’s like that moment when, while reading the rules, I first
poured out the pieces of Puerto Rico. Looking through them, I thought for a moment about what the “colonist”
pieces – little brown wooden circles brought to players’ plantations on ships in a volume commensurate with the commercial demand for manpower – represented. And that realisation adds
an extra message to the game.
Beneath its (fabulous) gameplay, Factory Manager carries a deeper meaning encouraging the possibility of a discussion about capitalism, environmentalism, energy, and
sustainability. And as our society falters in its ability to fulfil the techno-utopian dream, that’s perhaps a discussion we need to be having.
Seriously, this film is awesome.
But for now, go watch Sorry to Bother You, where you’ll find further parallels… and at least you’ll get to laugh as you do
so.
My 12th favourite and my 27th favourite YouTubers just did a collaboration and it’s brilliant. Also: I totally knew seven out of the twelve terms Dr
Doe brought to the table and would have been able to guess at least one more (as well as, of course, knowing what TomSka meant by his
British slang), so this video made me feel clever.
Last year, Robin Varley and his friend Sergio thought it would be an
amusing challenge to pedal the 50-odd mile gap between Brixton and Brighton using only London’s colloquially-named Boris Bikes. The trip lasted just over 10 hours, including a
brief photo op with Gatwick police, and set the
pair back a modest sum of 40 GBP.
This year Robin enlisted the help of fellow adventure-seeker Magnus Mulvany, and while the duo kept the alliterative theme of the campaign they opted for a significantly more
daunting circuit.
Cyberattacks don’t magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to
something called the “cybersecurity kill chain”: a way of thinking about cyber defense in terms of disrupting the attacker’s process. On a similar note, it’s…
Bruce proposes a model to apply the cybersecurity kill chain to the problem of thwarting information operations of the types that we’re seeing day-to-day in the cyberwar landscape. Or
at least, to understand it. Interesting reading, but – and call me cynical – I don’t know if it’s possible to implement some of the kill-stops that would be required to produce
a meaningful barrier.
Applied mathematics at its… best? After predicting statistically that it would take 400-500 packets of Skittles before you’d expect to find the same permutation of colours, an
experiment finds empirical backing for this answer at pack number 464.
Turns out the glue I’d used had interacted badly with the material: wasn’t melting because of the heat (although that won’t have
helped) but because of a chemical reaction on the plastic! Repaired and replaced, all good to go now!
