I originally though I’d cycle out here in the evening and see if I could reach the hashpoint, but with the weather so delightful (and the dog clamouring for a walk) I opted to adapt my
lunchtime plans to go to Standlake Post Office (rather than the only-slightly-closer Eynsham Post Office) to post a parcel and take the dog for a walk… and check out the hashpoint at
the same time!
Expedition
Success! The dog and I parked near the Post Office, and tired firstd walking through the allotments, but they don’t go as far back as I thought they might and we couldn’t really get
close to the hashpoint. So we doubled back, with the anticipation of going via the churchyard, when I spotted a convenient footpath sign (for a footpath not marked on my map), so we
followed that. Conveniently it turned out to be a shortcut to Horns Way, the alternative route I’d considered to try to get close to the hashpoint. Travelling along it, we found an
(also not on the map) back gate into the allotments: we could’ve just come this way, after all! We’d later use this route to get back home.
Approaching the hashpoint, we needed to push through a thicket of trees and jump a ditch, but this delivered us into a delightful meadow. We reached the hashpoint at 13:44, took the
requisite silly photo, and set off back. On returning to the footpath (by a decidedly inferior route) we discovered a bench (with a dedication on it) that also wasn’t listed on
OpenStreetMap nor on OpenBenches. I took a photo and pushed it to OpenBenches. There should be an achievement for that.
I clearly nerdsniped Terence at least a little when I asked whether a blog necessarily had to be HTML, because he went on to implement a WordPress theme that delivers content entirely in plain text.
Okay, we’re gonna need a whole lot of caveats on the “this is 5,000” claim:
Engage pedantry mode
First, there’s a Ship of Theseus consideration. By “this blog”, I’m referring to what I feel is a continuation (with short
breaks) of my personal diary-style writing online from the original “Avatar Diary” on castle.onza.net in the 1990s via “Dan’s Pages” on avangel.com in the 2000s through the relaunch on scatmania.org in 2003 through migrating to danq.me in 2012. If you feel that a change of domain precludes continuation, you might
disagree with me. Although you’d be a fool to do so: clearly a blog can change its domain and still be the same blog, right? Back in 2018 I celebrated the 20th anniversary of my first blog post by revisiting how my blog had looked, felt, and changed over the decades, if
you’re looking for further reading.
These posts were from the 1990s (in case the design didn’t give that away), and despite a change in domain name, I’m counting them. They’re still accessible, via this domain,
today!1Similarly, one might ask if retroactively republishing something that originally went out via a different medium “counts”2.
In late 1999 I ran “Cool Thing of the Day (to do at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth)” as a way of staying connected to my friends back in
Preston as we all went our separate ways to study. Initially sent out by email, I later maintained a web page with a log of the entries I’d sent out, but the address wasn’t
publicly-circulated. I consider this to be a continuation of the Avatar Diary before it and the predecessor to Dan’s Pages on avangel.com after it, but a pedant might argue that because
the content wasn’t born as a blog post, perhaps it’s invalid.
Pedants might also bring up the issue of contemporaneity. In 2004 a server fault resulted in the loss of a significant number of
149 blog posts, of which only 85 have been fully-recovered. Some were resurrected from
backups as late as 2012, and some didn’t recover their lost images until later still – this one had some content recovered as late as 2017! If you consider the absence of a pre-2004 post until
2012 a sequence-breaker, that’s an issue. It’s theoretically possible, of course, that other old posts might be recovered and injected, and this post might before the 5,001st, 5,002nd,
or later post, in terms of chronological post-date. Who knows!
Then there’s the posts injected retroactively. I’ve written software that, since 2018, has ensured that
my geocaching logs get syndicated via my blog when I publish them to one of the other logging sites I use, and I retroactively imported all of my
previous logs. These never appeared on my blog when they were written: should they count? What about more egregious examples of necroposting, like this post dated long before I ever touched a keyboard? I’m counting them all.
I’m also counting other kinds of less-public content too. Did you know that I sometimes make posts that don’t appear on my front page,
and you have to subscribe e.g. by RSS to get them? They have web addresses – although search
engines are discouraged from indexing them – and people find them with or without subscribing. Maybe you should subscribe if you haven’t already?
Generating a chart...
If this message doesn't go away, the JavaScript that makes this magic work probably isn't doing its job right: please tell Dan so he can fix it.
I’ve only recently started actively keeping stats on my blogging activity, without which I probably wouldn’t even have
noticed that my “5K” milestone was coming up!
Let’s take a look at some of those previous milestone posts:
In post 1,000 I announced that I was ready for 2005’s NaNoWriMo. I had a big ol’ argument in the comments with
Statto about the value of the exercise. It’s possible that I ultimately wrote more words arguing with him than I did on my writing project that
month.
It takes a pretty special geocache for me to make a video about it (unlike my geohashing expeditions, for which videos aren’t uncommon). The only other
one I can think of was one of my own…
I absolutely count this as the 5,000th post on this blog.
Here’s to the next 5,000!
Footnotes
1 Don’t go look at them. Just don’t. I was a teenager.
I’ve been GMing/DMing/facilitating1 roleplaying games for nearby 30 years, but I only
recently began to feel like I was getting to be good at it.
The secret skill that was hardest for me to learn? A willingness to surrender control to the players.
I’m a big fan of the Karma/Drama/Fortune (K/D/F) model for understanding resolution. My relationship with K/D/F is a story for another blog post, but I’ll use it as as a framework here.
Karma, Drama, Fortune
I could write a lot about the way I interpret the K/D/F model, but for today here’s a quick primer:
The K/D/F model describes the relationship between three forces: Karma (player choices), Drama
(story needs) and Fortune (luck, e.g. dice rolls). For example,
When the lich king comes to the region to provide a villainous plot hook, that’s Drama. Nobody had to do anything and no dice were rolled. The story demanded a “big
bad” and so – within the limitations of the setting – one turned up.
When his lucky critical hit kills an ally of the adventurers, that’s Fortune. That battle could have gone a different way, but the dice were on the villain’s side and
he was able to harm the players. When we don’t know which way something will go, and it matters, we hit the dice.
When one of the heroes comes up with a clever way to use a magical artefact from a previous quest to defeat him, that’s Karma. It was a clever plan, and the players
were rewarded for their smart choices by being able to vanquish the evil thing.
And elsewhere on their quest they probably saw many other resolutions. Each of those may have leaned more-heavily on one or another of the three pillars, or balanced between them
equally.
The balance point varies by group and can change over time, but crucially it doesn’t neglect any one of the three aspects.
Disbalancing drama
For most of my many years of gamemastering, I saw my role as being the sole provider the “drama” part of the K/D/F model. The story
comes from me, the choices and dice rolls come from the players, right?
Nope, I was wrong. That approach creates an inevitable trend, whether large or small, towards railroading: “forcing” players down a particular path.
A gamemaster with an inflexible and excessively concrete idea of the direction that a story must go will find that they become unable to see the narrative through any other lens. In
extreme examples, the players are deprotagonised and the adventure just becomes a series of set pieces, connected by the gamemaster’s idea of how things should play out. I’ve seen this
happen. I’ve even caused it to happen, sometimes.2
What if Bilbo and his party escaped from the wood elves by land, heading directly East to Erebor instead of via Esgaroth? What if he failed to determine Smaug’s weakness, or chose not
to steal from him? What if the dwarves successfully fought off the goblins and didn’t need rescue? The difference between an adventure story and an adventure game
should be that in a game, nobody – not even the author – can be certain ahead of time of the answers to all the questions.
A catalogue of failures
I’ve railroaded players to some degree or another on an embarrassing number of occasions.
In the spirit of learning from my mistakes, here are three examples of me being a Bad GM.
Quantum Ogre
Scenario: In a short-lived high fantasy GURPS
campaign, I wanted the party to meet a band of gypsies and have their fortune told, in order to foreshadow other parts of the story yet to come.
What I did: I pulled a quantum ogre (magician’s choice) on them: whether
they travelled by road, or water, or hacked their way through the forest, they were always going to meet the gypsies: their choice of route didn’t really matter.
Why that was wrong: I’d elevated the value of the encounter I’d planned higher than the importance of player agency. The more effort it took to write something, the
more I felt the need to ensure it happened!
Two things I could’ve done: Reassessed the importance of the encounter. Found other ways to foreshadow the plot that didn’t undermine player choices, and been
more-flexible about my set pieces.
Fudging
Scenario: In a Spirit of the Century one-shot an antagonist needed to kidnap a NPC from aboard an oceanbound ship. To my surprise – with some very lucky rolls – the players foiled the plot!
What I did: I used a fudge – an exploit based on the fact
that in most games the gamemaster controls both the plot and the hidden variables of the game mechanics – to facilitate the antagonist kidnapping a different
NPC, and adapted the story to this new reality.
Why that was wrong: It made the players feel like their choices didn’t matter. I justified it to myself by it being a one-shot, but that undermines the lesson: I
could’ve done better.
Two things I could’ve done: Used the failed attack as a precursor to a later renewed offensive by a villain who’s now got a personal interest in seeing the party
fail. Moved towards a different story, perhaps to a different element of the antagonist’s plan.
Ex Machina
Scenario: In a long-running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st edition!) campaign, a series of bad choices and terrible luck left the party trapped and unable
to survive the onslaught of a literal army of bloodthirsty orcs.
What I did: I whipped out a deus spiritus ex machina, having a friendly ghost NPC
basically solve for them a useful puzzle they’d been struggling with, allowing them to escape alive (albeit with the quest truly failed).
Why that was wrong: It deprotagonised the adventurers, making them unimportant in their own stories. At the time, I felt that by saving the party I was “saving” the
game, but instead I was undermining its value.
Two things I could’ve done: TPK: sometimes it’s the right thing to allow everybody to die! Pivot the plot to
facilitate their capture (e.g. the arch-nemesis can’t solve the puzzle either and wants to coerce them into helping), leading to new challenges and interesting moral choices.
Those examples are perhaps extreme, but I’m pretty sure I’ve set up my fair share of lesser sins too. Like chokepoints that strongly encourage a particular direction: do that
enough and you train your players to wait until they identify the chokepoint before they take action! Or being less invested in players’ plans if those plans deviate from what
I anticipated, and having a convenient in-party NPC prompting players with what they ought to do next. Ugh.3
The good news is, of course, that we’ve all always got the opportunity for growth and self-improvement.
In my defence, many professionally published adventures are a series of scenes connected by the assumption that the author knows exactly how the players will proceed from
each. These don’t teach gamemasters how to handle any deviation: no wonder we don’t learn not to railroad!
The self-improvement path
I’ve gotten better at this in general over the years, but when I took over from Simon at DMing for The Levellers in July, I decided that I was going to try to push myself harder than ever to avoid railroading. Simon was always especially good at
promoting player freedom and autonomy, and I wanted to use this inspiration as a vehicle to improve my own gamemastering.
What does that look like within the framework of an established campaign?
Some days, a critical hit is just enough. Other days, you should’ve just stayed at the inn and got drunk. This third-party photo is copyrighted with all rights reserved; not under
my usual license.
Well: I ensure there are clues (usually three of them!) to
point the players in the “right” direction. And I’ll be on hand to give “nudges” if they’re truly stuck for what to do next, typically by providing a “recap” of the things
they’ve previously identified as hooks that are worth following-up (including both the primary plotline and any other avenues they’ve openly discussed investigating).
But that’s the limit to how I allow Drama to control the direction of the story. Almost everything else lies in the hands of Karma and Fortune.
Let all gamemasters strive to be as prepared as Abed.
Needless to say, opening up the possibility space for my players makes gamemastering harder4!
But… not by as much as I expected. Extra prep-work was necessary, especially at the outset, in order to make sure that the world I was inheriting/building upon was believable and
internally-consistent (while ensuring that if a player decided to “just keep walking East” they wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world). But mostly, the work did itself.
Because here’s the thing I learned: so long as you’re willing to take what your players come up with and run with it, they’ll help make the story more
compelling. Possibly without even realising it.5
This tip brought to you from the Department of Splitting The Party Before They Think To Do It Themselves.
The Levellers are a pretty special group. No matter what the situation, they can always be relied upon to come up with a plan that wasn’t anywhere on their DM‘s radar. When they needed to cross a chasm over their choice of one of two bridges, each guarded by
a different variety of enemy, I anticipated a few of the obvious options on each (fighting, magic, persuasion and intimidation, bribery…) but a moment later they were talking
about having their druid wildshape into something easy-to-carry while everybody else did a group-spider climb expedition down the chasm edge and along the underside of a bridge. That’s thinking outside the box!
But the real magic has come when the party, through their explorations, have unlocked entirely new elements of the story.
Player-driven content
In our campaign, virtually all of the inhabitants of a city have inadvertently sold their immortal souls to a Archduchess of Hell by allowing, over generations, their declaration of
loyalty to their city to become twisted away from their gods and towards their mortal leader, who sold them on in exchange for a sweet afterlife deal. The knights of the city were
especially-impacted, as the oath they swore upon promised their unending loyalty in this life as well. When the fiendish pact was made, these knights were immediately possessed
by evil forces, transforming into horrendous creatures (who served to harass the party for some time).
Every party’s got a character who pores over the textual detail of every prop6, right? Or
is it just every party that includes JTA as a player?
But there’s a hole in this plot7.
As-written, at least one knight avoided fiendish possession and lived to tell the tale! The player characters noticed this and latched on, so I ran with it. Why might the survivor knights
be different from those who became part of the armies of darkness? Was there something different about their swearing-in ceremony? Maybe the reasons are different for different survivors?
I didn’t have answers to these questions to begin with, but the players were moving towards investigating, so I provided some. This also opened up an entire new possible “soft” quest
hook related to the reason for the discrepancy. So just like that, a plothole is discovered and investigated by a player, and that results in further opportunities
for adventure.
As it happens, the party didn’t even go down that route at all and instead pushed-on in their existing primary direction, but the option remains. All thanks to player
curiosity, there’s a possible small quest that’s never been written down or published, and is unique to our group and the party’s interests. And that’s awesome.
“The spell takes effect, and with whoosh of air you find yourself whisked to the bottom of the page, ready to finish reading the post.”
In Conclusion
I’m not the best GM in the world. I’m not even the best GM I know. But I’m getting
better all the time; learning lessons like how to release the reins a little bit and see where my players can take our adventures.
And for those lessons, I’m grateful to those same players.
Footnotes
1 I’m using the terms GM, DM, and facilitator interchangeably, and damned if I’m writing them all out every single time.
2 A gamemaster giving all of the narrative power to any one of the three elements
of K/D/F breaks the game, but in different ways. 100% karma and what you’ve got is a storytelling game, not a roleplaying game:
which is fine if that’s what everybody at the table thinks they’re playing: otherwise not. 100% drama gives you a recital, not a jam session: the gamemaster might as well just be
writing a book. 100% fortune leads to unrealistic chaos: with no rules to the world (either from the plot or from the consequences of actions) you’re just imagining all possible
outcomes in your universe and picking one at random. There’s a balance, and where it sits might vary from group to group, but 100% commitment to a single element almost always breaks
things.
3 A the “lesser sins” I mention show, the edges of what construes railroading and what’s
merely “a linear quest” is a grey area, and where the line should be drawn varies from group to group. When I’m running a roleplaying session for my primary-school-aged kids, for
example, I’m much more-tolerant of giving heavy-handed nudges at a high-level to help them stay focussed on what their next major objective was… but I try harder than ever to
encourage diverse and flexible problem-solving ideas within individual scenes, where childish imagination can really make for memorable moments. One time, a tabaxi warrior,
on fire, was falling down the outside of a tower… but his player insisted that he could shout a warning through the windows he passed before landing in flawless catlike
fashion (albeit mildly singed). My adult players would be rolling athletics checks to avoid injury, but my kids? They can get away with adding details like that by fiat. Different
audience, see?
4 A recent session took place after a hiatus, and I wasn’t confident that – with the
benefit of a few months’ thinking-time – the party would continue with the plan they were executing before the break. And they didn’t! I’d tried to prep for a few other
eventualities in the anticipation of what they might do and… I guessed wrong. So, for the first time in recorded history, our session ended early. Is that the end of
the world? Nope.
5 Want a really radical approach to player-driven plot development? Take a look at
this video by Zee Bashew, which I’m totally borrowing from next time I start running a new campaign.
6 You know what I miss? Feelies. That’s probably why I try to provide so many “props”, whether physical or digital, in my
adventures.
7 The plothole isn’t even my fault, for once: it’s functionally broken as-delivered in the
source book, although that matters little because we’ve gone so-far outside the original source material now we’re on a whole different adventure, possibly to reconvene later on.
The rest of my family and I enjoy a Go Ape, so we came out this morning for a bout of tree climbing and high ropes at the nearby centre. After our picnic lunch, and while the kids were amusing themselves in the play area (they couldn’t be persuaded to join
me for a walk!), I excused myself for a few minutes to find this cache.
A great cache in an excellent location. I get so sick of tiny caches barely off the footpath, so it’s a real treat to find one of a decent size a little further into the woods!
TNLN, SL, TFTC. Now I’d better get back to the family so we can
all go swimming!
I’ve now confirmed that this cache is missing (it looks like it was removed by the council during the installation of the signs for the new 20mph limit1) and sourced the requisite parts to construct a
like-for-like replacement. I’ll aim to get that constructed and in-place within the next two weeks.
Dave Winer kindly let me know about a proposed
standard for linking to OPML blogrolls. Given that I added a page
containing my blogroll last year, it was easy enough for me to add a tiny bit of code to the header to add support for automatic detection of my blogroll.
Now all we need is some tools that can do such detection!
(You’ll note I’ve added a title attribute: as I discovered the other day, some browsers including ELinks will show all
<link>s of unknown rel="..." at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!)
theunderground.blog‘s content, with the exception of its homepage, is delivered entirely through an XML Atom feed. Atom feed entries do require <title>s, of course, so that’s not the strongest counterexample!
This blog is available over several media other than the Web. For example, you can read this blog post:
We’ve looked at plain text, which as a format clearly does not have to have a title. Let’s go one step further and implement it. What we’d need is:
A webserver configured to deliver plain text files by preference, e.g. by adding directives like index index.txt; (for Nginx).5
An index page listing posts by date and URL. Most browser won’t render these as “links” so users will have to copy-paste
or re-type them, so let’s keep them short,
Pages for each post at those URLs, presumably without any kind of “title” (just to prove a point), and
An RSS feed: usually I use RSS as shorthand for all feed
types, but this time I really do mean RSS and not e.g. Atom because RSS, strangely, doesn’t require that an <item> has a <title>!
Unlike other sites, I didn’t need to test textplain.blog in Lynx to
know it’d work well. But I did anyway.
In the end I decided it’d benefit from being automated as sort-of a basic flat-file CMS, so I wrote it in PHP. All requests are routed by the webserver to the program, which determines whether they’re a request for the homepage, the RSS feed, or a valid individual post, and responds accordingly.
It annoys me that feed
discovery doesn’t work nicely when using a Link: header, at least not in any reader I tried. But apart from that, it seems pretty solid, despite its limitations. Is this,
perhaps, an argument for my.well-known/feedsproposal?
If you’ve ever found yourself missing the “good old days” of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret “it” broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings?
etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I’m working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
I miss the era of personal web sites started out of genuine admiration for something, rather than out of a desire to farm a few advertising pennies
This. You wanted to identify a song? Type some of the lyrics into a search engine and hope that somebody transcribed the same lyrics onto their fansite. You needed to know a fact?
Better hope some guru had taken the time to share it, or it’d be time for a trip to the library
Not having information instantly easy to find meant that you really treasured your online discoveries. You’d bookmark the best sites on whatever topics you cared about and feel no
awkwardness about emailing a fellow netizen (or signing their guestbook to tell them) about a resource they might like. And then you’d check back, manually, from time to time to see
what was new.
The young Web was still magical and powerful, but the effort to payoff ratio was harder, and that made you appreciate your own and other people’s efforts more.
When was the last time you tested your website in a text-only browser like Lynx (or ELinks, or one of
several others)? Perhaps you
should.
I’m a big fan of CSS Naked Day. I love the idea of JS Naked Day, although I missed it earlier this month (I was busy abroad, plus my aggressive caching,
including in service workers, makes it hard to reliably make sweeping changes for short periods). I’m a big fan of the idea that, for the vast majority of websites, if it isn’t at least
usable without any CSS or JavaScript, it should probably be considered broken.
This year, I thought I’d celebrate the events by testing DanQ.me in the most-limited browser I had to-hand: Lynx. Lynx has zero CSS or JavaScript support, along with limited-to-no support for heading levels, tables, images, etc. That may seem extreme, but it’s a reasonable
analogue for the level of functionality you might routinely expect to see in the toughest environments in which your site is accessed: slow 2G connections from old mobile hardware,
people on the other side of highly-restrictive firewalls or overenthusiastic privacy and security software, and of course users of accessibility technologies.
Here’s what broke (and some other observations):
<link rel="alternate">s at the top
I see the thinking that Lynx (and in an even more-extreme fashion, ELinks) have with showing “alternate versions” of a page at the top, but it’s not terribly helpful: most of mine are
designed to help robots, not humans!
Four alternates is pretty common for a WordPress site: post feed, comments feed, and two formats of oEmbed.
I wonder if switching from <link rel="alternate"> elements to Link: HTTP headers would
indicate to Lynx that it shouldn’t be putting these URLs in humans’ faces, while still making them accessible to all the
services that expect to find them? Doing so would require some changes to my caching logic, but might result in a cleaner, more human-readable HTML file as a side-effect. Possibly something worth investigating.
Fortunately, I ensure that my <link rel="alternate">s have a title attribute, which is respected by Lynx and ELinks and makes these scroll-past links
slightly less-confusing.
Not all sites title their alternate links. IKEA.com requires you to scroll through 113 anonymous links for their alternate language versions, because Lynx doesn’t understand the
hreflang attribute.
Post list indentation
Posts on the homepage are structured a little like this:
Strictly-speaking, that’s not valid. Heading elements are only permitted within flow elements. I chose to implement it that way because it seemed to be the most semantically-correct way
to describe the literal “list of posts”. But probably my use of <h2> is not the best solution. Let’s see how Lynx handles it:
Lynx “outdents” headings so they stand out, and “indents” lists so they look like lists. This causes a quirky clash where a heading is inside a list.
It’s not intolerable, but it’s a little ugly.
CSS lightboxes add a step to images
I use a zero-JavaScript approach to image lightboxes: you can see it by clicking
on any of the images in this post! It works by creating a (closed) <dialog> at the bottom of the page, for each image. Each <dialog> has a unique
id, and the inline image links to that anchor.
Originally, I used a CSS :target selector to detect when the link had been clicked and show the
<dialog>. I’ve since changed this to a :has(:target) and directed the link to an element within the dialog, because it works better on browsers
without CSS support.
It’s not perfect: in Lynx navigating on an inline image scrolls down to a list of images at the bottom of the page and selects the current one: hitting the link again now
offers to download the image. I wonder if I might be better to use a JavaScript-powered lightbox after all!
gopher: and finger: links work perfectly!
I was pleased to discover that gopher: and finger: links to alternate copies of a post… worked perfectly! That shouldn’t be a surprise – Lynx natively supports
these protocols.
In a fun quirk and unusually for a standard of its age, the Finger specification did not state the character encoding that ought to
be used. I guess the authors just assumed everybody reading it would use ASCII. But both my
WordPress-to-Finger bridge and Lynx instead assume that UTF-8 is acceptable (being a superset of
ASCII, that seems fair!) which means that emoji work (as shown in the screenshot above). That’s
nuts, isn’t it?
You can’t react to anything
Back in November I added the ability to “react” to a post by clicking an emoji, rather than
typing out a full comment. Because I was feeling lazy, the feature was (and remains) experimental, and I didn’t consider it essential functionality, I implemented it mostly in
JavaScript. Without JavaScript, all you can do is see what others have clicked.
The available emoji vary from post to post; I sometimes like to throw a weird/fun one in there, knowing that it’ll invariably be Ruth that
clicks it first.
In a browser with no JavaScript but with functional CSS, the buttons correctly appear disabled.
But with neither technology available, as in Lynx, they look like they should work, but just… don’t. Oops.
Lynx is correct; this is sloppy code. Without CSS support, it even shows the instruction that implies the buttons will work, but they don’t.
If I decide to keep the reaction buttons long-term, I’ll probably reimplement them so that they function using plain-old HTML
and HTTP, using a <form>, and refactor my JavaScript to properly progressively-enhance the buttons for
those that support it. For now, this’ll do.
Comment form honeypot
The comment form on my blog posts works… but there’s a quirk:
At the end of the comments form, an additional <textarea> appears!
That’s an annoyance. It turns out it’s a honeypot added by Akismet: a fake comments field, normally hidden, that tries to trick spam bots into filling
it (and thus giving themselves away): sort-of a “reverse CAPTCHA” where the
robots do something extra, unintentionally, to prove their inhumanity. Lynx doesn’t understand the code that Akismet uses to hide the form, and so it’s visible to humans, which
is suboptimal both because it’s confusing but also because a human who puts details into it is more-likely to be branded a spambot!
I might look into suppressing Akismet adding its honeypot field in the first place, or else consider one of the alternative anti-spam plugins for WordPress. I’ve heard good things about
Antispam Bee; I ought to try it at some point.
Overall, it’s pretty good
On the whole, DanQ.me works reasonably well in browsers without any JavaScript or CSS capability, with only a few optional
features failing to function fully. There’s always room for improvement, of course, and I’ve got a few things now to add to my “one day” to-do list for my little digital garden.
Obviously, this isn’t really about supporting people using text-mode browsers, who probably represent an incredible minority. It’s about making a real commitment to the
semantic web, to accessibility, and to progressive enhancement! That making your site resilient, performant, and accessible also helps make it function in even the
most-uncommon of browsers is just a bonus.
A mysterious Roman artefact found during an amateur archaeological dig is going on public display in Lincolnshire for the first
time.
The object is one of only 33 dodecahedrons found in Britain, and the first to have been discovered in the Midlands.
…
I learned about these… things… from this BBC News story and I’m just gobsmacked. Seriously: what is this thing?
This isn’t a unique example. 33 have been found in Britain, but these strange Roman artefacts turn up all over Europe: we’ve found hundreds of them.
It doesn’t look like they were something that you’d find in any Roman-era household, but they seem to be common enough that if you wandered around third century Northern Europe with one
for a week or so you’d surely be able to find somebody who could explain them to you. And yet we don’t know why.
Here’s two of them and an equally-mysterious icosahedron found in Germany. Photo courtesy Kleon3, used under a Creative Commons license.
We have absolutely no idea why the Romans made these
things. They’re finely and carefully created from bronze, and we find them buried in coin stashes, which suggests that they were valuable and important. But for what?
Frustrated archaeologists have come up with all kinds of terrible ideas:
Maybe they were a weapon, like the ball of a mace or something to be flung from a sling? Nope; they’re not really heavy enough.
At least one was discovered near a bone staff, so it might have been a decorative scepter? But that doesn’t really go any distance to explaining the unusual shape,
even if true (nor does it rule out the possibility of it being some kind of handled tool).
Perhaps they were a rangefinding tool, where a pair of opposing holes line up only when you’re a particular distance from the tool? If a target of a known size
fills the opposite hole in your vision, its distance must be a specific multiple of your distance to the tool. But that seems unlikely because we’ve never found any markings on these
that would show which side you were using; also the devices aren’t consistently-sized.
Roleplayers might notice the similarity to polyhedral dice: maybe they were a game? But the differing-sized holes make them pretty crap dice (researchers have
tried), and Romans seemed to favour cubic dice anyway. They’re somewhat too intricate and complex to be good candidates for children’s toys.
They could be some kind of magical or divination tool, which would apparently fit with the kinds of fortune-telling mysticism believed to be common to the cultures
at the sites where they’re found. Do the sides and holes correspond to the zodiac or have some other astrological significance?
Perhaps it was entirely decorative? Gold beads of a surprisingly-similar design have
been found as far away as Cambodia, well outside the reach of the Roman Empire, which might suggest a continuing tradition of an earlier precursor dodecahedron!
This author thinks they might have acted as a kind of calendar, used for measuring the height of the
midday sun by observing way its beam is cast through a pair of holes when the tool is placed on a surface and used to determine when winter grains should be planted.
Using replicas, some folks online have demonstrated how they could have been used as a knitting tool for
making the fingers of gloves using a technique called “spool knitting”. But this knitting technique isn’t believed to have been invented until a millennium later than the youngest of
these devices.
Others have proposed that they were a proof of qualification: something a master metalsmith would construct in order to show that they were capable of casting a
complex and intricate object.
Seriously, what the hell are you for?
I love a good archaeological mystery. We might never know why the Romans made these things, but reading clever people’s speculations about them is great.
I continue to be sceptical of AI‘s ability to solve 90%+ of the problems that people are trying to solve with it.
But damn, if you’re feeling uninspired as you’re getting ready to start work on a Monday morning, try dumping your to-do list into a songwriting AI like Suno and ask it to write an uplifting song about how you’ll get it finished. It’s like having your very own
cheerleader.
❎ Good ❎ Cheap ☑️ Fast. I guess generative AI is a “choose one” situation, and the one you have to choose is “fast”. But still:
it certainly got me pumped-up and ready to work.
Prompt:uplifting electronic pop about Dan completing his to-do list today: filing his meetup expenses; performance-testing his CircleCI workflow; leading a team
meeting; learning about Full Site Editing
Lyrics:
Filing expenses
Gotta get ’em done
No time to waste
Gotta have some fun
Dan’s on a mission
Gotta stay on track
He’s gonna conquer
Ain’t nothing gonna hold him back
Performance testing
Gonna make it fly
CircleCI workflow
Gonna reach the sky
Dan’s got the focus
He’s in the zone
Gonna make it happen
Gonna make it his own
Leading that team meeting
Gonna show his might
Guiding them forward
Shining so bright
Dan’s a leader
He’s got it all
Inspiring the team
Gonna make ’em stand tall
I think I might be more-prone to nerd sniping when I’m travelling.
Last week, a coworker pointed out an unusually-large chimney on the back of a bus depot and I lost sleep poring over 50s photos of Dutch building sites to try to work out if it was
original.
When a boat tour guide told me that the Netherlands used to have a window tax, I fell down a rabbit hole of how it influenced local architecture and why the influence was different in the UK.
Why does travelling make me more-prone to nerd sniping? Maybe I should see if there’s any likely psychological effect that might cause that…
