This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
I’m not a big fan of job titles. I’ve always had trouble defining what I do as a noun—I much prefer verbs (“I make websites” sounds fine, but “website maker” sounds kind of weird).
Mind you, the real issue is not finding the right words to describe what I do, but rather figuring out just what the heck it is that I actually do in the first place…
I am a survivor of an abusive relationship, and parts of that experience affect the way that I engage in romantic relationships… but I have difficulty quantifying exactly how much. Insert obvious (minor) trigger warning here, and scroll past the kitten if you want to read more.
I’m fine, by the way. It took… a long, long time, like in the region of a decade, to be completely fine about it, and I appreciate that compared to many people, I got lucky. Like many victims (and especially among men), my recovery was hampered by the fact that I found it difficult to see the relationship as having been abusive in the first place: that first step took many years all by itself. I’m not kidding when I say I’m fine, by the way: no, I don’t need to talk about it (with many of my circles of friends made up of current and former helpline volunteers of various types, I feel the need to make that doubly-clear: sometimes, one just can’t escape from people who care about you so much that they’ll offer you a cup of tea even if they’ve only got saltwater to make it with, if you catch the drift of my needless in-joke).
But I wanted to share with you something that I’ve gradually realised about how I was changed as a result of that relationship. Something that still affects me today and, for all I know, probably always will: a facet of my personality whose origins I eventually traced back to that dreadful relationship.
A major factor in my attraction to people, for the last decade and a half, has been whether or not they demonstrate being attracted to me. I’m sure that’s the case for everybody, at least to some extent – there’s a necessary reciprocity for a relationship to work, of course – but in my case there’ve been times in my past when the entirety of my attraction to somebody could be described in terms of their attraction to me… and that’s a level that definitely isn’t healthy! It stems from a lack of belief in my own worth as relationship material, which had grown to such an extent that feeling as if I were even-remotely attractive in somebody else’s eyes has, regardless of whether or not I’d be interested in them under other circumstances, made me feel as though I ought to “give them a shot”. Again: not healthy.
This, in turn, comes from a desperation of considering myself fundamentally unattractive, undateable, and generally unworthy of the attention of anybody else in any relationship capacity… which is highly tied-up in the fact that I had a relationship in which my partner repeatedly and methodically taught me exactly that: that I was lucky to be in a relationship with them or indeed with anybody, etc.
Given enough time, persuasion, and coercive tactics, this is the kind of shit that sinks in and, apparently, sticks.
I don’t mind that I’m a product of my environment. But it bugs me a little that I’m still, to a small (and easily managable, nowadays) extent the product of somebody else’s deliberate and manipulative efforts to control me, a decade and a half after the fact.
Now I’ll stress once again that I’m fine now: I’ve recovered by as much as I need (or at least expect) to. Some years ago, I finally got to the point that if you let me know that you’re attracted to me then that isn’t by itself something that makes me completely infatuated with you. Nowadays, I’m capable of actually engaging my brain and thinking “Hmm: would I be interested in this person if it weren’t for the fact that they’d just validated my worth in some way?” But I’m still aware of the sensation – that nagging feeling that I’m acting according to a manipulative bit of programming – even though I’m pretty confident that it doesn’t influence how I behave any more.
It’s funny how our brains work. At the end of the relationship, I made a reasonably-rapid bounceback/recovery in terms of my general self-worth, but it took far, far longer to get control over this one specific thing. I guess we all react to particular stresses in different ways. For me, somebody who’d spent his childhood and teen years with perhaps, if anything, a little much self-worth, it might have been inevitable that I’d be unable to rebuild the part of that self-image that was most-effectively demolished by somebody else: the bit that is dependent upon somebody else’s validation.
But who knows… as I said, I have difficulty quantifying how much that abusive relationship impacted me. Because it is, of course, true to say that every single thing I’ve ever experienced will have affected me in some way or another – made me the person I subsequently became. How can I justify blaming a single relationship? I know that I wasn’t “like this” back when I first started my dating life, but I can’t conclusively prove that it was the result of any one particular relationship: for all I can claim, perhaps it was something else? Maybe this was always who I’d become? Or maybe, of course, this entire paragraph is simply the result of the fact that my brain still has difficulty with the term “abusive relationship” and is more-than-happy to keep trying to reach for whatever alternative explanations it can find.
Once again though, I’ll stress that I’m okay now and I have been for many years. I just wanted to share with you an observation I’d made about my own psychology… and the long tail that even the “tamest” of abusive relationships can leave.
This month, I experimented with web technologies to which I’d been introduced at Render Conf, developed a websockets-and-orientation-sensor controlled game called Steer!, and looked back on the ways that I’m still affected by an abusive relationship that ended a decade and a half prior. I shared an XKCD comic.
Posts marked by an asterisk (*) are referenced by the summary above.
Reposts marked with a dagger (†) include my comments or interpretation.
As you may know, I’ve lately found an excuse to play with some new web technologies, and I’ve also taken the opportunity to try to gain a deeper understanding of some less bleeding-edge technologies that I think have some interesting potential. And so it was that, while I was staffing the Three Rings stall at last week’s NCVO conference, I made use of the time that the conference delegates were all off listening to a presentation to throw together a tech demo I call Steer!
As you can see from the GIF above, Steer! is a driving game. The track and your car are displayed in a web browser on a large screen, for example a desktop or laptop computer, television, or tablet, and your mobile phone is used to steer the car by tilting it to swerve around a gradually-narrowing weaving road. It’s pretty fun, but what really makes it interesting to me is the combination of moderately-new technologies I’ve woven together to make it possible, specifically:
The desktop browser does all of the real work: it takes the orientation of the device and uses that, and the car’s current speed, to determine how it’s position changes over the time
that’s elapsed since the screen was last refreshed: we’re aiming for 60 frames a second, of course, but we don’t want the car to travel slower when the game is played on a
slower computer, so we use requestAnimationFrame to get the fastest rate possible and calculate the time between renderings to work out how much of a change has
occurred this ‘tick’. We leave the car’s sprite close to the bottom of the screen at all times but change how much it rotates from side to side, and we use it’s rotated to decide how
much of its motion is lateral versus the amount that’s “along the track”. The latter value determines how much track we move down the screen “behind” it.
The track is generated very simply by the addition of three sine waves of different offset and frequency – a form of very basic procedural generation. Despite the predictability of mathematical curves, this results in a moderately organic-feeling road because the player only sees a fraction of the resulting curve at any given time: the illustration below shows how these three curves combine to make the resulting road. The difficulty is ramped up the further the player has travelled by increasing the amplitude of the resulting wave (i.e. making the curves gradually more-agressive) and by making the road itself gradually narrower. The same mathematics are used to determine whether the car is mostly on the tarmac or mostly on the grass and adjust its maximum speed accordingly.
In order to help provide a visual sense of the player’s speed, I added dashed lines down the road (dividing it into three lanes to begin with and two later on) which zip past the car and provide a sense of acceleration, deceleration, overall speed, and the impact of turning ‘sideways’ (which of course reduces the forward momentum to nothing).
This isn’t meant to be a finished game: it’s an experimental prototype to help explore some technologies that I’d not had time to look seriously at before now. However, you’re welcome to take a copy – it’s all open source – and adapt or expand it. Particular ways in which it’d be fun to improve it might include:
This checkin to GLQR2CZT Stadium Arcadium reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found with help from my 3 y/o niece (who was able to teach reach the cache… once she was sat on my shoulders!). TFTC.
This checkin to GC4DYXD Stadium Arcadium reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Original log extremely damp, dampness spreading to new log. Needs some attention. CO: if you’re happy for a visitor to remove the old log, worth making a note to that effect?
This checkin to GLQQRWZK Collice Street Water Pump reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
After an extended trip to the nearby park – one of our little one’s favourite places – she was able to be persuaded to join me for a little hike around the village. This old water pump (which she loved to play with) and the nearby cache was our first stop. An easy find: the little one was pleased to swap a sliding puzzle (which we barely managed to fit into the container) for a marble. SL. TFTC!
This checkin to GLQQT32Y Islip Millenium Wood reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
After a lovely walk up from the pump at GC6PDXP, my 3 y/o geocaching buddy and I found this lovely cache with no difficulty. Could easily justify a larger container here!
Beautiful day and a great location. TFTC.
This checkin to GCZ51Y Eddie Confesses reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
After a delightful hike across from two other caches, my 3 y/o geocaching assistant and I were optimistic about another find, but it wasn’t to be. It’s probably how well it’s camouflaged, but we hunted high and low sound the GZ for some time without success. The hint didn’t mean anything to us, so we hunted some more, but eventually had to give up. Maybe another day!
Maybe it’s because I was at Render Conf at the end of last month or perhaps it’s because Three Rings DevCamp – which always gets me inspired – was earlier this month, but I’ve been particularly excited lately to get the chance to play with some of the more “cutting edge” (or at least, relatively-new) web technologies that are appearing on the horizon. It feels like the Web is having a bit of a renaissance of development, spearheaded by the fact that it’s no longer Microsoft that are holding development back (but increasingly Apple) and, perhaps for the first time, the fact that the W3C are churning out standards “ahead” of where the browser vendors are managing to implement technical features, rather than simply reflecting what’s already happening in the world.
It seems to me that HTML5 may well be the final version of HTML. Rather than making grand new releases to the core technology, we’re now – at last! – in a position where it’s possible to iteratively add new techniques in a resilient, progressive manner. We don’t need “HTML6” to deliver us any particular new feature, because the modern web is more-modular and is capable of having additional features bolted on. We’re in a world where browser detection has been replaced with feature detection, to the extent that you can even do non-hacky feature detection in pure CSS, now, and this (thanks to the nature of the Web as a loosely-coupled, resilient platform) means that it’s genuinely possible to progressively-enhance content and get on board with each hot new technology that comes along, if you want, while still delivering content to users on older browsers.
And that’s the dream! A web of progressive-enhancement stays true to Sir Tim’s dream of universal interoperability while still moving forward technologically. I’ve no doubt that there’ll always be people who want to break the Web – even Google do it, sometimes – with single-page Javascript-only web apps, “app shell” websites, mobile-only or desktop-only experiences and “apps” that really ought to have been websites (and perhaps PWAs) to begin with… but the fact that the tools to make a genuinely “progressively-enhanced” web, and those tools are mainstream, is a big deal. If you don’t think we’re at that point yet, I invite you to watch Rachel Andrews‘ fantastic presentation, “Start Using CSS Grid Layout Today”.
Some of the things I’ve been playing with recently include:
Only really supported in Chrome, but there’s a great polyfill, the Intersection Observer API is one of those technologies that make you say “why didn’t we have that already?” It’s very simple: all an Intersection Observer does is to provide event hooks for target objects entering or leaving the viewport, without resorting to polling or hacky code on scroll event captures.
What’s it for? Well the single most-obvious use case is lazy-loading images, a-la Medium or Google Image Search: delivering users a placeholder image or a low-resolution copy until they scroll far enough for the image to come into view (or almost into view) and then downloading the full-resolution version and dynamically replacing it. My first foray into Intersection Observers was to take Medium’s approach and then improve it with a Service Worker in order to make it behave nicely even if the user’s Internet connection was unreliable, but I’ve since applied it to my Reddit browser plugin MegaMegaMonitor: rather than hammering the browser with Javascript the plugin now waits until relevant content enters the viewport before performing resource-intensive tasks.
I’d briefly played with Service Workers before and indeed we’re adding a Service Worker to the next version of Three Rings, which, in conjunction with a manifest.json and the service’s (ongoing) delivery over HTTPS (over H2, where available, since last year), technically makes it a Progressive Web App… and I’ve been looking for opportunities to make use of Service Workers elsewhere in my work, too… but my first dive in to Web Workers was in introducing one to the next upcoming version of MegaMegaMonitor.
Web Workers add true multithreading to Javascript, and in the case of MegaMegaMonitor this means the possibility of pushing the more-intensive work that the plugin has to do out of the main thread and into the background, allowing the user to enjoy an uninterrupted browsing experience while the heavy-lifting goes on in the background. Because I don’t control the domain on which this Web Worker runs (it’s reddit.com, of course!), I’ve also had the opportunity to play with Blobs, which provided a convenient way for me to inject Worker code onto somebody else’s website from within a userscript. This has also lead me to the discovery that it ought to be possible to implement userscripts that inject Service Workers onto websites, which could be used to mashup additional functionality into websites far in advance of that which is typically possible with a userscript… more on that if I get around to implementing such a thing.
The final of the new technologies I’ve been playing with this month is the Fetch API. I’m not pulling any punches when I say that the Fetch API is exactly what XMLHttpRequests should have been from the very beginning. Understanding them properly has finally given me the confidence to stop using jQuery for the one thing for which I always seemed to have had to depend on it for – that is, simplifying Ajax requests! I mean, look at this elegant code:
fetch('posts.json')
.then(function(response) {
return response.json();
})
.then(function(json) {
console.log(json.something.otherThing);
});
Whether or not you’re a fan of Javascript, you’ve got to admit that that’s infinitely more readable than XMLHttpRequest hackery (at least, without the help of a heavyweight library like jQuery).
So that’s some of the stuff I’ve been playing with lately: Intersection Observers, Web Workers, Blobs, and the Fetch API. And I feel all full of optimism on behalf of the Web.
This checkin to GLQP5J37 Best Kept Garden reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Easy cache & dash for my 3 y/o niece and I on the way back from a trip to Islip play area (and one of Islip’s multis) from our home in Kidlington. Super easy find, nice and fast. No sign of the travel bug. TFTC.
This checkin to GLQP4RPJ Church Micro 9088 - Islip, St Nicholas reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Came out with my 3 y/o niece (and budding geocacher) to the play area across the road and took a diversion to come find this cache. Enjoyed finding the stages and reading/counting to get the requisite numbers. GZ (from our interpretation of the coordinates) had an ‘obvious’ hiding place, based on previous Church Micros we’ve found, but our instincts were deceptive: what we needed to be looking for wasn’t really ‘micro’-sized nor was it, as we’d initially suspected, magnetic!
Hint meant nothing to us (some kind of pop culture reference?) but previous logs that mentioned broadening the search helped us resolve to carry on searching despite the recent DNF, and we evacuating found the container. We found it on the ground, but based on its design we don’t believe that that’s where it was supposed to be, so we returned it to the nearest location for which its design seemed to fit. Logs slightly damp, not critical, but we weren’t carrying our repair kit so we weren’t able to do any maintenance.
A great idea for a multicache but might benefit from a better hint (it still makes no sense even after finding the cache!) and perhaps a better hiding place (based on the logs, this one looks like it keeps getting disturbed).
SL. TFTC.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This checkin to GLQJY8NE keele TB HOTEL north reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Stopped off on the Southbound carriageway and took a walk over here to find this cache while I was nearby. Only had my phone and not my GPSr, which made finding this harder than I’d like (my phone’s GPS is usually pretty appalling) but the hint made all the difference. GZ a little disgusting right now as clearly the walk across the car park to the services’ toilets was too far for somebody (eww), made worse by this being the hottest day of the year so far (double eww). No sign of either travel bug – must have already been taken – which is a pity because I’m sure I could have helped both along! Ah well! TFTC.
This checkin to GC2033H Heigh-Ho #5 - Doc reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I just met somebody who was in the team that built this bridge (he was explaining about how the bridge is slightly wonky because the wrong kind of beams were delivered to the site). I was thinking: that’s a great story, I’m going to put a geocache somewhere near that bridge. But yours was already there so I shan’t. Just thought I’d share!
