#like obviously it's not as linear as this in practice and people do multiple things

[jackawful]

If you can directly damage the enemy or their profits, do so.

If you can't directly damage the enemy, go to a protest or event.

If you can't go to a protest or event, support those who do by providing food, transportation, and/or other needs.

If you can't directly support protesters, donate to those who do.

If you can't donate, get to know the people around you, and talk with them about building a better world.

Ask yourself: what is one more thing I can do to help fight back? Then, do that thing.

[gavinwielandsblog]

On Living in the Moment

I get the aviator-nation-yoga-matt-mom dread whenever I hear someone non-ironically tell me about how they are living (or working on living) in the moment. But from a philosophical perspective, I have to admit, this whole the present thing is a little fucking weird. 

If you have been systemically manufactured into thinking about history in the (problematic) western-hegelian-linear-line type of way like me, and you take some time to reflect (or smoke something), you might conclude that (as you pretend to do your homework in the library and are, instead, planning tomorrow morning's coffee shop [where you plan to see your crush] outfit) you and the rest of the people on the planet and in the library are actually on the precipice of space-time itself hurdling at the speed of time into the next infinitely short present moment. But I took calculus and you probably did too and, like you (unless you’re a math major), I don’t remember much. What I do remember though is if something is infinitely small, like the moments in time during the present, it just collapses into zero. So I guess I’m thinking that the aviator-nation-live-laugh-love-mom person actually can not, no matter how hard they try, live in the moment. The moment is just too damn short to live in. I guess an alternative might be that we live slightly behind the moment. Like the moment happens and then we react and process and, while all that’s happening, all of humanity is already hurdling through an infinity of new moments. 

The funny thing is though, none of the shit in that previous paragraph actually matters. If you’re convinced that the present doesn’t exist and we’re all just living slightly behind the moment you’re literally not going to change a single thing in your life. It’s basically just some bullshit semantics at the end of the day. Fuck it, I’m blaming it on my hyper-western education and Hegel. 

So, what if we disregard the whole straight-line history thing? How can we think about the present as something besides the ever-speedy perpendicular dividing history and future?

Well, I really hate to do it but I think we might have to look at this thing from the aviator-nation-shaka person perspective for a bit. When someone says they are living in the moment, they’re pretty much never talking about metaphysics. Even though you can kind of intuitively get the gist, it’s honestly quite hard to spell out what they really mean, unless they tell you. They might mean that they are trying to be more mindful of their current state of affairs. Or, they might mean that they are trying to emotionally jettison some fuck-shit that happened to them in the past, or some fuck-shit that they are anticipating in the future. Or, they might mean that they are trying to practice (often platitudinal) gratitude. Or, it might mean that they are (to obviously no avail) trying to slow (or stop) the only thing in the universe that never changes, change. 

Regardless of their implicit intentions, I think the multiplicity of meanings imbued in living in the moment should be enough to show it’s pretty damn trite. Sometimes, moment livers do give context though, so this isn’t always a problem. Regardless, the thing that sucks is that it actually seems to work for people. I mean, I wouldn’t be writing about this unless a fuck-ton of people had normatively embodied this shit. It begs the question: am I just a judgemental-academic-epistemic-hubris-dickhead or is this living in the moment shit whack?

I just re-read what I’ve written so far and it’s pretty clear that I am, in fact, a judgemental-academic-epistemic-hubris-dickhead, but I don’t think the two options posited above are mutually exclusive. Now, call me paranoid, but I think that those who explicitly tell others that they are living in the moment are actually implicitly weaponizing the practice in a sort of spiritual-superiority-complex. What I’m trying to say is: part of the reason living in the moment works for people is not just because of the actual introspective spiritual/emotional work, but because they are telling people that they are doing introspective spiritual/emotional work. This is not to say that people don’t actually do any of the cognitive gymnastics that might constitute their subjective working definition of living in the moment. I’m not trying to call them liars. I really just want to say that whether or not their reasons for performing these cognitive gymnastics in the first place are outward-facing, telling others is always (salient or not) implicitly intended to positively influence the way others see them. Whether others actually see them in a more positive light or not, the underlying (again, salient or not) expectation of their increased social (spiritual?) capital is enough for the practice, in part, to work for them. I see this as the spiritual-superiority-complex (SSC). 

And now there’s a problem. Intrinsically, it seems like living in the moment is a good thing. But, if you live in the moment and you tell other people about it, whether you like it or not, you are exercising the SSC. 

But is the SSC even a bad thing? Is it generally bad to say things that are implicitly intended to positively influence the way others see you? Well, we obviously say good things about ourselves all the time, so that’s not an issue. The problem with the SSC is in those cases where those outward-facing reasons are stronger than the inner facing ones. Cases where the liver lives because they want to improve the way others think about them, instead of improving themselves. What really sucks is that the livee has no way of knowing what the liver’s reasons are and, if the livee is emotionally immature like me, they’re going to assume the worst. 

This pretty much perfectly brings me to my conclusion: grind in silence. Stop telling other people that you are working on living in the moment and just fucking do it. Or, be like me and live in your relatively chill trauma. Okay Google, play Easter in Miami by Kodak Black.

[autobiographical-fiction]

Cinderella: A New Perspective

{Choose a well known short children's story, one that most people are familiar with (e.g., “The Three Little Pigs”). Retell the story, in a written outline format, so that the linear nature of the original story is reworked to make it non-linear. Good examples of non-linear style films include Memento, Pulp Fiction, and The Last Duel. It is possible to achieve a non-linear telling of the story by having the same story told from multiple points of view.}

Non-linear sequence: This story sequence is intended to be viewed side-by-side with the Disney animated movie, Cinderella. This story is meant to weave Anastasia’s (stepsister) perspective between the original story. For example, if you were to watch the events unfold in Cinderella, you’d be able to watch the same scene twice: once from Cinderella’s perspective and one from Anastasia.

Sequence 1: New Family

A young girl, Anastasia, sees entire life gets uprooted when her mother decides to get remarried and move her and her sister, Drizella, to a new an unfamiliar town. As if that wasn’t terrible enough, she must learn to get along with her new stepsister, Cinderella, with whom she doesn’t see eye to eye.

Sequence 2: Misfortune Strikes

Not long after she’s finally settled into her new life and learning to love her new family, the young girl’s stepfather dies. Now, she feels as though things have taken a turn for the worse and her family moving has been for nothing. Her family doesn’t have the same financial security they strived for and now there’s someone else to take care of too. She feels the need to blame someone, so she turns against the stepsister, the biggest reminder that her new life isn’t turning out the right way.

Sequence 3: Growing Up

Over the next several years as the girls grow into young women, changes sweep the home. Anastasia and Drizella grow closer to their mother, who, in her reign as woman of the house, implements so many changes to make the house feel more like a home to them. Anastasia and Drizella move bedrooms to stay closer to their mother and give Cinderella her own room on a separate floor for more privacy. The two sisters spend their time studying music and growing their talents as Cinderella opts to manage the day-to-day operations of the estate. Their mother manages social and class relationships in the town and kingdom.

Sequence 3: The Ball

One day, a visitor from the palace comes to give an invite to the family for a glorious ball at the palace to find the prince a wife. Anastasia dreams of meeting and falling in love with the prince, becoming ecstatic when the invite includes her name. She spends weeks preparing for the ball by practicing her dancing, trying on dozens of gowns and imagining what her new life could be like.

Once the day of the ball arrives, Anastasia dolls herself up, doing everything she can to keep the family’s reputation high. As she, her mother and sister are getting ready to leave, they see Cinderella rushing to join them as she’s dressed sloppily in a very obviously handmade gown and the jewelry Anastasia spent days scouring for. Anastasia, though upset, calmly walks over to Cinderella, explaining how unfair it was that she took her things without asking, so Anastasia asks for the jewelry back. She examines Cinderella’s dress, holding the skirt up to see the design better when the dress rips at an uneven seam. Anastasia tries to apologize, but Cinderella runs off crying. The carriage arrives to escort the women to the ball, so they go.

At the ball, Anastasia waits patiently to dance with the prince. When it’s finally her turn, she’s nervous, but the kind prince reassures her. They spend several songs swaying to the music and getting to know each other, and Anastasia feels herself falling for the prince. After she’s done dancing, she rejoins her family daydreaming of her fairytale romance.

Sequence 4: The Next Day

Anastasia spends the day talking about how she’s in love with the prince and the connection she knows they both felt during the dance. Drizella rags on her sister, talking about how it was clear that the prince fell in love with some blonde in a blue dress and that was all the kingdom could talk about. Anastasia ignores her, reliving every moment with the prince. 

A knock on the door disrupts her daydream, and Cinderella opens it to the Duke with a message from the prince, who is searching for the mystery woman from last night wearing a glass slipper. Anastasia, upset that it wasn’t her, decides to try on the glass shoe anyway, convinced that if she can just see the prince once more, he’ll remember the magical time they shared together. The shoe doesn’t fit Anastasia, but she’s even more devastated to learn that the slipper belongs to none other than Cinderella, feeling backstabbed by her stepsister who listened to her go on all day everyday for weeks about the prince. He was supposed to be with her, not Cinderella.

Sequence 5: The End

Anastasia decides to be a supportive sister unlike Cinderella and attends her stepsister’s wedding to the prince. She watches as the girl she called her family marries the man she loves without so much as a spare thought of Anastasia.

<3

[tipsycad147]

How to Interpret Your Dreams

Our dreams are a doorway into our subconscious. Our higher selves trying to breach the veil and speak to us, guide us to where we need to focus.

You can find whole books on symbolism to interpret your dreams but it really doesn’t have to be complicated. Nor do I recommend taking those books and symbols for face value.

Not everything in the dream has meaning behind it. Our brains are designed to story tell so it uses all of this extra stuff to fill in the gaps and make a story of sorts.

Of course, we shouldn’t try to interpret them per their story but instead by their

Emotions / vibrations

Underlying themes

Overall highlighted points

Whereas our conscious mind is bound by the perimeters of space time, our subconscious isn’t. That means the stories of our dreams may not make sense in a linear – physics as we know it type of way.

So we shouldn’t expect it to even if it seems to. They’re abstract and should be interpreted as such even if it was a well put together story.

You know in middle school Lit where you couldn’t just read the story becasue the teacher wanted you to instead look for hidden symbolisms and meanings and what the author may have meant by XYZ?

It’s like that, but arguably much easier since the messages and meanings are both written and meant for your unique ways of thinking.

Our subconscious (and/or guides) are taking the raw building blocks of how they know to communicate (energy and vibration) and attempting to relay a message in a way they hope YOU SPECIFICALLY may understand.

That means your symbolism may be different from what’s in the books. A red bird to one may mean abundance but to you specifically, who was, I dunno, chased through the house as a child by a red bird (shrug) may interpret it as fear or caution.

Anything could literally mean anything.

You get the drift. So look at what things in the dream mean to YOU when you’re interpreting.

Dream Interpretation

Dream interpretation is fun but remember the functional application that it has for our healing and progression in manifesting. It’s an extension of ourselves and the emotional guidance system that codes our existence.

Be careful not to pick up any false / limiting / harmful beliefs that may hold you back from your full potential.

You want to explore the dream with an open mind and be weary of assigning meanings to things simply because someone else said a certain aspect means XYZ.

Allow your intuition to assign the meanings and trust what it gives you.

What emotions are present in the dream?

To what degree? (Some may be bigger than others and thus, more important)

What seemed important?

Which emotions were tied to what symbols?

What else stood out?

Who was there?

Were there any patterns?

Don’t take anything for face value. Our dreams are just an introspective tool for the understanding and navigation of our world.

They’re a secret language meant for you and only you. The more you practice interpreting your dreams, the easier it will be to figure out what they mean and where they’re trying to lead you.

Let’s Interpret a Dream Together:

For example, in my dream last night, I was a bystander. I was just watching everything unfold and it was like a TV show (station 19 to be exact) and the theme was 1 person was leaving his wife for another and wanting to have babies.

Most of it was meh emotionally but the babies part was emphasized. They were having multiples (like whole damn litters) and hoping for girls.

This meant to me that I’m here to help women and since my emotions were calm and peaceful, it signaled that I’m on the right track with that.

look for things that are emotionally charged to interpret your dreams. If it seems insignificant or matter of factly, it probably is.

Try to leave bias out of it. Like in my dream, a man was leaving his wife for another woman. This is obviously something many people would have emotions about in real life. In the dream though, it was just part of the story. It didn’t mean anything significant and I could feel that.

Tips for Interpreting Your Dreams

The best time to practice dream interpretation is first thing in the morning, as soon as you wake.

Try and immediately write them down and ponder them. Any sort of distraction in between waking and writing will risk fading details.

Dream interpretation is a personal art that comes with practice. Although it’s helpful to discuss with others and bounce potential meanings back and forth (especially if this person is familiar with you and your life), I don’t believe anyone can accurately interpret them as you can.

https://earthandwater.co/how-to-interpret-your-dreams/

[lonelyrose]

Greymoon Tales

Imelda's letter to Celeste

~

Celeste,

I know you don’t want to hear from me, and that you’re probably angry at even receiving this. But please, I beg you, just read this letter.

Your father is ill, very ill. In all honesty, I'm terrified for him. His scars have deepened, and he won't eat a thing. He stays curled up in bed, completely out of it. Sometimes, when I stand outside the door, I can hear him muttering "I'm sorry" over and over again. I don't know how much longer this will last, or how much longer he will last, so my main point in writing this letter was to let you know in case you wanted to come see him.

I should to give you some context as to what's going on, and perhaps this will give you some clarity as to my decisions throughout your life.

I experience time a bit differently than most people, including you, do. Most consider time to be linear, with one past, present, and future. It’s a bit difficult to explain my experience in a way that would make sense to you, but I will try. Essentially, I can see multiple timelines with various outcomes, and because of that, I have to make decisions that follow whichever timeline seems most ideal at any given moment. A big drawback is that I can only see events, not emotions. And the events I see are not vivid. Here is an example:

Morgyn wanted to become a sage. I could see a future where they became one, so of course I wanted to do everything I could to guide them there. You may be wondering why I never stepped in when Demetrius was training Morgyn. Well, in the line where Morgyn became a sage, I saw that they would have to undergo harsh training. I couldn’t see the details, so I never knew what exactly Demetrius did, but I stopped myself from interfering because I knew that was the path Morgyn would have to take. Perhaps this was a mistake, perhaps it wasn’t. My visions have always been hazy, and they only get more so as I get older.

This way of experiencing time has influenced all of my decisions. It’s why I didn’t show you my true appearance. It’s why I never took you to the magic realm. It’s why I wanted you to live a normal life just like other non-magic children. While I have made many mistakes, I don’t regret raising you the way I did, because you have become a brilliant young woman, and I couldn't be prouder of you.

My visions lately have been so unclear; I can barely see anything. This is new and scary for me, and especially so because your father is very unwell right now. We never told you this, but the day I had you, I was very sick. Your father and I were scared that neither you nor I would make it, so he set out to find a remedy. And a remedy he found, but he encountered something terrible along the way. I don't know what this thing was, in fact I know practically nothing about it, but I do know that it infected him and gave him those eye scars. And it is what's making him so sick right now.

That's actually why your father and I left. I had no luck finding a way to help him for eighteen years. I couldn't rely on my visions anymore, so I had to work on my own, and when I researched the Sylvan Glade, I thought maybe we'd find a solution there. Obviously, we didn't, and we got turned into Poison PlantSims too. You know the rest.

For the first time ever, I truly have no idea what's going on. I won't force you, but it would mean the world to me and your father if you stopped by, even just for a few minutes. I am so, so sorry for how much we've wronged you throughout your life, and I don't expect forgiveness. I only hope that this information might give you some insight.

Much love,

Mom

P.S. I caught wind of your engagement to Morgyn. Congratulations, sweetie. I am so happy for you, and I wish you two a lifetime of love and happiness.

[bloodwillhavebloodtheysay]

Hi there! I’ve just recently become obsessed with SNM and am going for my 26th bday in November. I am a bit lost in understanding how to make a “strategy” in seeing the most rooms, scenes, 1:1s (if possible), etc. Any tips for a first timer? Sorry if you already answered questions like this! Thank you!

First, if you will be a first timer, STOP READING THE BLOGS AND GO IN BLIND!  But you have obviously discovered our SLEEP NO MORE Love Fest and have already learned far more than a person who is the sort to become obsessed with SNM should know going in, I’ll grant you this indiscretion.  ;)  And, I actually do understand and respect that some people are not in a position to see the show multiple times so you want to maximize the experience.  

Also, your questions has so many parts that I would suggest that there isn't one single strategy to apply to your many questions.  Finally, my strategy may not be the best for you, and there are as many approaches to the show as there are visitors to the McKittrick..

My answer really depends on how likely it is that you will be able to come back, and how often.

If you are destined to only have 1 or 2 chances, I would suggest sticking to the people rather than the rooms.  (Unless your primary interest is in set and light design, in which case you could easily be satisfied focusing on those elements and just paying attention to the characters as you come across them.)  But by picking a character and sticking with them, they will lead you to the content, and most characters will be involved in at least 2 major scenes and a number of smaller, more intimate ones. And while there are a handful of characters who stay within one or two floors, there are others that will give you quite a workout on the stairs, some doing the bottom-to-top climb in one fell swoop, some at a run.  Regardless, you can often steal a glance at rooms as you are traveling with the characters.

So, assuming you will have multiple opportunities (my wish for you, not that it counts for much), then it is more possible to develop a systematic strategy if that’s your aim.

Strategy to see most rooms:  Depending on how much you want to delve into the detail, you could fly through and systematically go from floor to floor and just do a walkthrough and it get an idea of which spaces you are most drawn too, and then spend the rest of the night going back end really digging around those (letters one the desks, files in the drawers and file cabinets, various journals and notebooks and chalk boards, and “easter eggs” that could appear practically anywhere like carved into the bottom of a drawer, side of a bed, posted on a bulletin board, etc). See below for what I think is a more fun approach to room/set exploration, although not one I employed until I had been dozens and dozens of times.

Strategy to see the most scenes:  I believe the possibly-verified-but-commonly-used-regardless amount of actual content is 21+ hours. In other words, if you took all the scenes and figured out how to present them in a linear timeline one after another instead of simultaneously as it is performed, it would take 21 hours to watch the whole show. But But I guess what do you consider “a scene.” Is the nurse hanging laundry, or Speakeasy resetting the rep-bar a scene? I say the certainly can be in the hands of the right performer.  So if your goal is to see the “bigger scenes with the most characters” that’s also a different strategy than wanting to see the intimate scenes.

Strategy to see the most 1-1′s:  We have a word for people with a strategy to see the most 1-1′s, and it isn’t kind. I say that fully acknowledging that I have absolutely approached shows with that focus before, and suspect most superfans have at one point or another, and if they tell you otherwise they are likely lieing. While I can say that it was occasionally fruitful (I’ve had as many as 6 or 7 in a single show), those nights more often than not lead to disappointment and frustration by completely pulling me out of the experience.

I didn’t have my first 1-1 until my 3rd or 4th show, and then one night I had 4 happen back to back just on a fluke--I literally stumbled into them not even knowing they were about to happen.   Last Monday, Ms. Novak was there for like the zillionth time and only got 1, but his first-timer friend, left to explore completely on his own got 4.  I had none, but I DID manage to get my friend standing in the right general area to be in the running for Malcolm, and he got it.  That made me happy.  But I will say that a really good way to increase the likelihood of getting 1-1′s (and this has been discussed by just about everyone who has ever posted about it) is to invest time in the characters, so...

My recommended strategy to hopefully increase the rooms, scenes, AND 1-1′s:  Yes, it’s become a cliche, but if you can be in the 1st elevator, get to the bottom floor as quickly as you can and you should catch a large party scene with an abundance of characters to choose from: Both Macbeths, both Macduff's, the three witches, Duncan, and Danvers are all there.  Pick a character (any character, but I recommend a witch if you can figure out which ones they are) and follow them until you they take you back to where you first picked them up, then switch to a different character (preferably one you didn’t see in your first loop travels, and do the same thing, picking yet a different character for the last loop.  This will give you coverage of most of the building.  Also, (and there are no perfect formulae here) being present, attentive, respectful, and loyal to a character for a loop really does go a long way toward getting you noticed by the performer, and just maybe selected for a 1-1.  Of course, shoving, aggressively planting yourself between a performer and any other audience member sometimes reaps the rewards, but we have a word for those people as well, and REALLY isn’t kind.  Don’t be that person.  It’s actually kinda funny to watch how some of us who know each well will other defer to each other and let each other pass through doors, and hold back from each other to the point of silliness.  There is a nice camaradery to that that really beats being a dick.

Enjoy.  Let us know how you like it!

[lucysweatslove]

There is something to be said about starting over.

Truthfully, though, I’m not sure what it is. My story is not new or unique; I’m just a woman in her mid-20s trying to figure out how to be herself again, or what that ever would look like. Few paths are linear, or even with one definitive trend. We start, we stop, we remodel and backtrack or go in an entirely different direction. I came back to tumblr for two reasons: 1, I really believe blogs are helpful in my planning, recording, and motivation for any part of my life, and 2, I tried a few other types of blogs and didn’t like them. Tumblr was where I got my life in order when I went to college. I made connections with people who helped me, in various ways, connect the dots in my own life as I became an adult. And then, for some reason, it stopped being that space. I could blame this change on politics, and honestly, deep in my mind, I do. Even prior to Trump taking office, or his campaign, tumblr’s focus shifted heavily to politics and the state of the world’s affairs. Understandable, and I harbor no ill will to those using their platforms to speak about what they believe to be right, but that shift took over my feed. Instead of positivity, I felt anger and desperation. Facebook, school, or work were places for politics- tumblr was my place without it. Tumblr was my place to work on my own health, inside and out, ignoring the health of our society. I could not- and still can’t- focus on my health while being bombarded with reminders of the degradation of the world. I don’t remember when exactly I stopped being on Tumblr for good, but it wasn’t recently. In the years since then, I didn’t have a place to hold on to my health, and I’ve deteriorated. I hate it. I don’t hate myself, nor do I hate the workings of my body, but I see myself and I am discouraged and disgusted. I try to do basic things, like body weight squats, that used to be easy activities, and I struggle. Some of this is related to age, some of it is related to health issues, and some of it is related simply to poorly managed stress. I have made numerous attempts now to get myself back to the health I was in 4-5 years ago. A previous post from 2018 on this very blog shows that off. In early 2019, I attempted a keto diet- which, even though I was very consistent with, did not “work” for me. I’ve started other blogs (which obviously failed), personal journaling, linking up with different food tracking apps, going to the gym more regularly, intuitive eating, even a well designed rewards program based off of the psychology and neuroscience of behavior modification and rewards- they all failed in the end (although the rewards program was wildly successful for the two months I did it, but after it ended and I went on a trip, it became too difficult to keep up). The problem with all of these attempts has been a lack of integration. Any attempt at in-person or even online but direct social support has been futile, and my attempts and feigning the idea of support or accountability (eg, a blog as I feel the “support” whether or not it is actually read) haven’t integrated what actually works best for me: numbers. I need all pieces to come together, and so far, I haven’t been able to do that. It’s like working on a large puzzle where the pieces continually go missing. You have one piece in your hand, but can’t find the piece it connects to, and when you finally do, the first piece mysteriously vanished. I think big parts of my difficulties the last two years especially have been medication and health. Right before I started this blog, I was started on a new antidepressant and anti anxiety med. This first made me REALLY sleepy, so as I was adjusting, I slept so much that I didn’t eat regularly. When that resolved, I thought I was doing fine on the medication, but without changing anything else, I experienced many side effects, including a 20 pound weight gain and a whole host of weird, systemic/somatic concerns (I was even lactating a small amount). I stayed on it because my anxiety seemed better, even though I felt all my emotions were dull. When this medication stopped working for my depression, I finally decided to switch it- and that was a process that lasted, no lie, over six months. I tried medication that gave me horrible heart palpitations, dizziness, tachycardia, and erratic blood pressure readings. I tried genetic testing. My psych moved practices. It was a mess. During this process, I tried multiple times to start going to the gym. There was ALWAYS something wrong. I would go consistently for two weeks, and then I would develop muscle spasms in my back. I couldn’t do yoga anymore because I developed a soft tissue injury in my left hand and could no longer put weight-bearing pressure on that hand. In early November, I developed an upper respiratory infection that lasted two months, required two courses of antibiotics, and still hasn’t fully resolved. But now I need to be determined. My honeymoon to Cancun is in 13 weeks, and every day now counts. While I can’t solve all my problems in a mere 91 days, nor will I have my “best body ever,” I am determined to be able to enjoy the beach vacation with my husband without letting my body, my insecurity, or my complete lack of fitness stop me. When is started paying attention to my diet, I was technically obese (just barely, but still). This number hit me hard. I remember crossing the line from normal weight to overweight and sobbing, so angry that I had let myself down. I remembered how awful I was treated by my peers the last time I had such a high weight. Now, I would love if I could reach that weight before my honeymoon. My “goal,” which I have entered into MyFitnessPal, is to lose 30 pounds starting from last week at 176.2; this would place me at 146.2 and a BMI just barely overweight. Would I love it to be lower? Yes. I would be overjoyed if I could lose even more weight. However, I don’t want to attempt anything unrealistic; if it happens, great! If not, I won’t be (too) disappointed. I have been too scared to measure my waist recently, or my hips or thighs, but I have a few linen dresses that I really want to fit in to, and while the scale is a great way to measure weight loss, I am really looking for more fat loss, improvement in how I look and feel, and to fit into clothing again- so as long as inches are going down, I’ll be happy with the weight loss too. As a disclaimer, for anybody reading this. Yes, 30 pounds in 14 weeks IS over 2 pounds a week, and it IS over 1% of my body weight per week as well (both of those values are typical suggested maximum rates). I’m not suggesting this particular weight loss goal to anybody, and my general/systemic health is constantly monitored. This last week included, I am being VERY conscious about keeping myself in good health throughout this process, and if I cannot reach a goal while maintaining my health, then the goal (in some part) will change so I CAN meet it healthfully.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

So this’ll probably be a multiple part submission, but again it’s the “ISTJ 4w5” anon here with more info about myself for better typing. Sorry it took so long to get back, I was out of town. So I read your post about what information is helpful when typing so I’ll do my best. Basically, I’ve gone back and forth with all different types, trying to find my best fit. A friend of mine who’s pretty knowledgeable about mbti was the one who suggested I may be ISTJ for a few reasons: I usually (1/?)

think everything through at least a little-as I’ve gotten older I’ve become a lot more spontaneous and adventurous about things, I love new experiences too-but even with these things I still think about how I’ll get it to work, what the possible repercussions will be, exactly what I need to do to accomplish things, etc., so Judging would make sense for my personality. I do actually do tons of research on most things beforehand, sometimes I’ll get lazy and “just do it” but I almost always (2/?)

go into something with at least a little foreknowledge. I also make decisions with my head, so for that reason it seemed like it made sense for me to have thinking as my dominant judging function, because I always choose the most logical option/what will yield the best result, sometimes based on what has worked in the past. But I’m not against new suggestions, because I look at what will work the best or yield the best result as I said before. But I will lean towards things that have worked(3/?)

before if they seem to be the best solution. I didn’t think I could be a Thinking dominant because for me there’s no way I could have inferior Feeling, which is why the stackup of a Perceiving function followed by Thinking and Feeling made sense-because I always check in with my values/feelings before making a decision but always rely on objective logic first-which I’ve heard is a staple of Te vs Ti subjective logic. But if I completely disagree with the morality of a choice I won’t do it.(4/?)

Basically, I’ll always find a way to make things work unless it’s absolutely impossible. Im pretty stubborn. I’m dependable and if I say I will do something I always do it. I have a good memory and I remember minor things my friends or people in my life tell me for a long time, just little details. I always need details when someone is telling me a story, or relaying something that happened, because I like to know specifics and analyze them. I strictly adhere to external logic when analyzing(5/?

(Im starting from where I think I left off bc tumblr wasn’t sending them) But if I completely disagree with the morality of a choice I won’t do it. Basically, I’ll always find a way to make things work unless it’s absolutely impossible. Im pretty stubborn. I’m dependable and if I say I will do something I always do it. I have a good memory and I remember minor things my friends or people in my life tell me for a long time, just little details. I always need details (6?/?)

and specifics and analyze them. I strictly adhere to external logic when analyzing things too, like my conclusions need to match up with the objective logic I use. I’m not much for rules or traditions like most ISTJ stereotypes go, but stereotypes are just that and aren’t what’s important to look at when typing. I have certain traditions that I appreciate but I’m almost always open to an adventure or new experience. I like the idea of making new memories as well, and I love learning new things.(7/?)

Idk how much of the last asks even sent, ugh. Anyway: I’m aware of my surroundings; I mean I can get lost in my own world or distracted like anybody else but my mood is heavily influenced by my environment. I get “vibes” from an environment and just kind of feel like they’re good or bad. Oftentimes a “good” vibe will be something that invokes a positive memory or experience, but it can also just be because it’s pleasant in some way. My comfort is important to me and I like to be in touch (8/?)

I can be spontaneous, but I’m not reckless because I always think things through at least preliminarily. I just believe in seizing the moment and making the most of an experience, so I love “adrenaline junkie” activities. Usually that’s an Se stereotype, it’s something I can relate to but I wouldn’t call myself impulsive because I analyze pretty much everything. I just have noticed that I can be more adventurous than my Se dom friend, which is interesting. But it’s all about how one thinks.(8/?)

For the zillionth time my tumblr was acting all wack and idk how many parts of my ask sent, so let’s hope they did... I’m aware of my surroundings; I mean I can get lost in my own world or distracted like anybody else but my mood is heavily influenced by my environment. I get “vibes” from an environment and just kind of feel like they’re good or bad. Oftentimes a “good” vibe will be something that invokes a positive memory or experience, but it can also just be because it’s pleasant somehow(8?/?

My comfort is important to me and I like to be in touch with my 5 senses, always. I often pick up on details other people miss but I can be as oblivious as anyone else on a bad day. I would consider myself a fairly intuitive person, but definitely not an abstract iNtuitive-type. Im just pretty perceptive about things, it’s something those close to me always tell me. I get senses or vibes from people when I meet them, and I’ve had plenty of experiences where I’ll get a certain vibe from (9/?)

mom sometimes, but that could be due to maturity. I used to think I was an iNtuitive, but I realized I am actually most likely a sensor who was mistyped thanks to bad descriptions due to intuitive bias. I know the only real difference is Sensing focuses on the here/now and the past, drawing on resources and memory, and using concrete, linear thinking, likes details and being in touch with surroundings, etc. I really dislike abstract thinking and I always need practical real life examples (10/?)

applications in order for me to care. I like the abstract symbolism in art, music, etc. And in that sense I like to determine what the real meaning is. So I don’t hate abstractions but they’re not my favorite, so an Ne weak spot in that department would make a lot of sense for me. I just hate abstract theories on things that have no real use or meaning to me. I also know that an “I” type doesn’t always mean one is a true introvert because it’s all about functions, but I’m almost positive I(11/?)

am one because I’m definitely an introvert and my primary thought process is always done internally. I’ve done so much research on mbti and enneagram, which my friend also thought could be due to wanting to discover my true identity, which I’ve heard is an enneagram 4 thing. Discovering my identity is very important to me. Obviously I’m not an expert, I’m just a person who wants to understand themself and has researched and read a lot to be able to do that (12/?)

There’s definitely parts of personality theory that I don’t know, but I definitely know more than anyone else I know personally in my life, it’s kind of become a hobby I guess. I just really want to know my type, not to flaunt it like some badge of honor for being a super “rare” or “cool” type; I want to know so I can grow as a person and understand myself and how I think and make decisions so I can see my reasoning and improve myself. Anyway I hope this info helps, I love your blog (13/14)

and thanks for taking the time to read all this horrific mess. (14/14)

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I wrote a much longer response but it was very piecemeal as these came through.

In short: my guess would be SFP, either ISFP or ESFP.

Reasoning: I think in your attempts to avoid intuitive stereotypes you fell into a whole lot of stereotypes about Se that led you not to type as using it even though you seem very clearly a high Se user to me. You don’t provide many specific examples, ironically enough (eg: a lot of people say they get vibes, but there is a difference between ‘I regularly guess information about people that they are shocked I could figure out’ and ‘I can tell when people are sad sometimes’ and people use ‘vibes’ for both), so Ti vs. Fi is more difficult as you don’t really provide examples of your logic and there’s a lot of tautology. That said your motivations for MBTI as true identity (which...it is not your true identity, please do not think of any personality theory as such, they’re all generic archetypes of your identity) seem more in line with Fi as do some other things. Some observations:

-most people think their actions through to some extent. Some more than others but even spontaneous Ne and Se users have like, a thought and don’t just leap blindly. You don’t really provide an example here of your planning or your adventurousness.

-”I make decisions with my head” and “I always choose the most logical option” are actually signs to me that you don’t have a great sense of self-awareness. No one always chooses the most logical option unless they’re a robot. We all do irrational things sometimes, and honestly, how do you even decide what’s more logical in a lot of decisions?

-while it is true that Te uses objective logic and Ti uses subjective logic, people are very bad at telling which they use - which isn’t a judgment on them or you, but it also means that if someone says “I use objective logic” it doesn’t really mean anything. You need to tell me what decisions you make that are objective.

-If you have moral stances but do things that completely contradict them...then you don’t have moral stances, you just say you do. So this is tautological.

-Lots of people can be stubborn; dependability is more stereotypically judgers but I’ve met some exceptionally reliable perceivers; it’s a learned skill that smart people learn to develop regardless of type.

-contrary to stereotype, while some Si-doms do have a great memory (I think mine is better than average) plenty don’t; the capacity to remember details is more sensing because of the detail-oriented nature.

-similar to the objective logic statement it would be helpful to understand what you mean by external logic.

-being always open to an adventure or new experience is not really likely in high Si users until they’re pretty old. I mean, I am as discussed in the midst of a bunch of new experiences and while I’ve moved and started new jobs/school a few times and am used to it I am still kind of constantly fighting the urge to just hide in my new apartment (not having wifi in it is ‘helping’). The fact that you also are an adrenaline junkie is really not typical of Si-doms at all.

-Finally: introversion. Your writing style strikes me as extroverted. You don’t provide examples. I would need to know more about what you mean by “your thought process is internal” because like, that is what thoughts are - internal. Extroverts still have a full inner monologue.

My guess is you’re a type 4 ESFP who is in the midst of tert-Te development and so you are currently identifying very strongly with logic and productivity. However, it’s also very possible you’re an organized ISFP; my ISFP sister is one of those. As mentioned a lot of people realize that being flaky isn’t really a good look; a lot of SFPs are also very practical (high Se) and place a high value on reliability as a moral trait or identity trait. I find the nature of Fi and Ti is such that it’s really hard for people who use them to always know which one they use because they’re so subjective by nature; high Fi users often see their moral decisions as logical and high Ti users often see their logical decisions as also moral (unless they are of the edgy, “I have no morals” sort).

[goodvibesatpeace]

Spirituality: Synchronicity: The Universe's Software Programs

Considered to be an a-causal connection of two or more psycho-social phenomena, modern interpretations of synchronicity could be seen as the person who checks their phone for a call, only to receive the call immediately upon checking, a Deja-vu including but not limited to information from dreams occurring in waking life, or a seemingly random string of events leading the subject to a specific goal that could not have been achieved had their original plans gone accordingly—and of course any number of other events.

In order to understand these events, it is imperative to understand the postulates of precognitive ability, telepathy, and other forms of extra-sensory perception, as scientists have realistically been trying to make the Mainstream Media aware of ESP’s existence since the early 20th century with minimal success.

Unfortunately the only attention that any scientific studies receive from the press in the fields of parapsychology are the ones that get a good laugh, and the serious scientific analysis is engulfed in the tidal wave of sensory data that creates today’s age of social technology.

However, once people begin to understand the collective unconsciousness as the earth’s magnetic field, and the archetypes as specific primordial frequencies that the mechanics of everyone’s brains are apt to tune into, et cetera, it will be clear to see that ESP is not a matter of “having special powers” but simply more a matter of two human brains communicating with each other in the same way two neurons communicate through synapses.

Moving forward (or backwards), it is important to point out, as always, that humans’ ancient ancestors were well aware of all of these concepts well before Modern Man; which is not very coincidental since Jung was inspired largely in part by eastern mysticism with his psychotherapy.

However, “synchronicity” philosophy can be found in both eastern and western schools of spirituality.

Generally speaking, the eastern synchronicity was considered Taoism, which is a metaphysical school of philosophy that involves asceticism and meditation in order to further understand and perceive the Tao, which is the “universal flowing one-ness” of everything.

In modern terminology, the idea of the Tao can very much be considered a software engine, computing an existence through pre-existing algorithms that can be diligently studied and eventually interpreted.

The interpretation part was much more emphasized in the west, as eastern mysticism tends to shun “conceptualizing”, “assuming”, or “expecting”, but even Taoists attempted to interpret the language of physical phenomena, the definitive collection of their work titled the I Ching in the West, one of the things that Jung was quite fond of in his psychotherapy.

Divination was the ideology of synchronicity in the ancient west, and was not so much secular like a religion or Taoism, but rather was an umbrella category of crude “ancient-science”, like numerology, astrology and other traditional occult practices.

Specifically, divination’s primary postulation was that every personal interaction with the exterior physical world (each physical “effect”, basically) could be considered something similar to a “word” or “phrase” that had latent information within it, whether the subject interpreted it or not.

This same general process is also used in numerology, when the numerical value of alphabetical digits is determined and reduced down to its core value through specific calculation.

In this sense, it could be considered that divination is the acknowledgement of the synonymous nature of waking life and dreaming; meaning that both are perceived as linear experience of the self, and in both, the “outside” world can be considered an effect of a person’s unconscious projection.

In dreams this is obviously a bit more evident, but even in reality a person creates not the physical phenomena itself, but the entire categorical basis of it within their brain, which is clearly unique as a fingerprint compared to anyone else’s interpretation of the phenomena, and thus completely different and unique to the person’s own unconscious.

The Dalai Lama was quoted on the subject saying, “I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path,” and Terence McKenna referred to the quantum frequency spectrum in which synchronicities occur as the “Cosmic Giggle”.

Researcher David Wilcock wrote a book on the subject titled, The Synchronicity Key, and David Icke, Michael Talbot, and Graham Hancock have discussed the subject, among others.

Dr. Michael Persinger and his colleague Todd Murphy have, although not using the term “synchronicity” or any spiritual terminology, released an incredible amount of scientific data revealing the mechanisms that could quite literally describe the realities of Synchronicity and other Jungian concepts.

Even the Police released their album Synchronicity in 1983, which was openly inspired by the Jungian concept, and John Constantine of Vertigo Comics is often seen riding the metaphysical “Synchronicity Highway” (McKenna’s Cosmic Giggle) in order to get a leg up on many of his adventures.

In general the pervasive and unavoidable presence of synchronicity becomes reportedly much more evident under the influence of natural psychedelic drugs, which goes hand in hand with the ancient shamanic traditions surrounding the philosophy.

Setting aside all the esoteric philosophy and ancient tradition, synchronicity is indeed dealing with a frequency spectrum just like everything else, and the main broadcasters into this spectrum within the human body are the brain and the heart.

Ultimately the real tool to this spectrum can be considered a “self-aware consciousness” in general. This however can be quite difficult due to the multiplicity of layers within the brain acknowledged by just about every psychiatrist and psychologist in history, although the definitions vary substantially at times.

The reason for this is the reality that the different sections of the brain can be considered different organs in terms of goals and use, and because of this, humans are bombarded with a woven web of information that is basically a bunch of simple organs communicating biological responses to each other.

This is not to say that human consciousness is just the projection of a bunch of organs—but more to illustrate that the brain is not the pinnacle of intelligence that most people think it to be, and is instead just another organ looking to perform functions.

However, underneath all these functions is an intangible but undeniable core self; whether it be considered a “soul” an “intuition, a “higher self” or simply “enlightenment.”

There are four universal layers of the brain’s projection: We have the Self, the Anima/Animus, the Persona, and the Shadow.

When a person is born, they are physically one sex, so conceptually their consciousness becomes inverted at its root so as to allow the person a piece of the full spectrum; meaning that a woman has the male aspect of the Animus embodying her reason and spirit, and a man has the female aspect of the Anima embodying his sensuality and intimacy.

Some even spiritually characterizing this as a man’s link to his beloved throughout time. The persona is the literal cognitive mask a person paints of themselves for the rest of the world, the Self is the full fractal collection of all within the brain (often represented by a mandala).

The self is also often considered to be the positive spectrum of the whole—the yin, so to speak—which brings us to the fourth layer: the counter-mimicry of the self, the inversion, the Shadow—the yang.

The synthesis of these layers of perception, thoroughly described by Jung in his work and expanded upon by many others, is what a Taoist would call honing his mind to the flow of the Tao, or even what Thoreau emphasized when he spoke of sucking the raw marrow from the bones of life—it is learning to navigate the waves of one’s own mind, because only then will one truly be able to accurately navigate the waves of the world around them.

Of course, the simple definition to all this would be following one’s “intuition”, but unfortunately this is easier said than done.

Most people believe in themselves to such a little extent that making personal decisions is difficult enough, let alone making decisions on the present environment in order to accurately gauge the conditions of the future—in the present.

The only conclusions that can and should be drawn from this are that synchronicity events are a recurring and intimate piece of the human experience. The modern era is so unbelievably chaotic that it’s difficult to tune into anything these days, let alone the programming of the universe.

The translation of the programs of the universe is one’s own intuition; everyone experiences these synchronicities whether they are aware of it or not, similarly to the way that everyone dreams whether they recall or not; and finally, that the existence of synchronicity events further demonstrates the very fine line between waking life and dreaming.

No-Nonsense Naysayers will be inclined like always to chalk these things up to impractical reasoning and gullibility, but those who have experienced these intimate moments with the world around them cannot be swayed, especially since once a synchronicity has been experienced, they usually continue and often even the frequency increases.

Those who have not yet experienced this should take note to study the work of Carl Jung, and the ancient metaphysic philosophy of Taoism—and to a lesser extent the ideology of divination as well.

Although it should again be noted that this was not a brotherhood of diligent thinkers, but rather a definition of something that was emerging in the culture in general, and as a result is a bit more convoluted.

If a person wishes to unveil the programming of the universe, it is not particularly difficult, nor is it unnatural, but it requires a mindset without mental friction.

Although still largely misunderstood/unknown by modern science, Synchronicity Events cannot be denied their existence or their pertinence, and those who continue to remain blind to the universal coding will simply be left behind by the others, as they continue to ride the wave and explore their own nature through the interactive and multi-layered existence around them.

[shylax]

1 Year Weight Loss Retrospective: 420+ lbs. to 293 lbs.

This is going to be a long read, so I’m going to insert a read more here:

I think the last time I was truly a normal weight was when I was 4 or 5. My parents were very lax about food and exercise. I liked to stay in and play video games more than play outside. I was never good athletically, so that made me less inclined to exercise. I always thought you had to eat foods you didn’t like in order to lose weight. I thought you had to eat perfectly right. I didn’t know about CICO until much later, or I would’ve done something about it sooner, most likely. I was just very hedonistic about food. My family went got fast food at least once a week, and I loved my chips and popcorn.

Last year, a friend invited me to go to an orchestral concert, and since they were playing songs from Pokemon, I was definitely in. Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account the walking we’d have to do. I was so easily exhausted after climbing one flight of stairs. We somehow made it, but I felt so embarrassed because I kept having to stop, sit down when a bench was available, and generally felt awful. I knew I had to do something, and I decided to lose weight. After looking at the loseit subreddit, I decided to put a plan into action on July 27 last year. That was the first day I started losing weight.

That day, I weighed 420.4 pounds, although it may have been even higher since that scale weighed about 10 pounds light compared to the scale I currently use. I hadn’t gone to the grocery yet, so I was using the food I still had on hand, but I made it work. I also started a walking progression, walking 5 minutes 3 times a week, and adding a couple of minutes every week.

I gradually made improvements on my diet, and I got to a point where I could walk so much more. I wanted to try something a bit more explosive, so I started Couch to 5K. My ankle kept getting sore, so I had to start it four different times, and one time I stopped and did DDP Yoga. But I stopped that because even though I liked the exercise, I didn’t feel like I was very good at the dynamic resistance thing. I’m still working my way through Couch to 5K.

My eating plan was pure calorie counting, and so far I’ve been eating TDEE - 1000, with adjusting my goal every 10 pounds so I don’t unwittingly stick myself on a plateau. I track everything with significant calories, I lazily track my diet drinks, and I don’t log my sugarless gum at all. (I’ve picked up a chewing gum habit, 2-4 pieces a day, at 3 calories a piece that’s only 6-12 more calories a day, and I burn some, if not all of it back chewing it.) I focus on getting as much protein as possible, but since I’m not much of a cook and also a picky eater, it can be hard to get optimal levels, but I am doing a lot better than I was before.

I also have a few rules for myself to help with weight loss. First is no liquid calories, largely meaning juice or full-calorie soda. Shakes are fine, since they do keep me full and provide me with nutrition. I don’t eat out of any container I haven’t already budgeted the full calorie amount for. I just can’t stop. If I wanted some chips, I would put it in a bowl so I know when to stop. (I rarely eat chips anymore.). Also, I log my food a couple of days in advance. It’s not practical for everyone, but I’m a creature of routine and like eating the same things every day. I also try to not go more than 6 hours without eating anything while awake, because extreme hunger can lead to binges. (Again, not to discredit intermittent fasting/OMAD - different strategies work for different people!)

When I started, I was the new guy on MyFitnessPal once again, slowly building my streak. I took it one day at a time. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into a year. I went from admiring people with longer streaks than me (and I still do!) to people starting to look up to me. I want to set a good example for other people. I want to not disappoint the people who have been following my journey.

I can do so much more now, 1 year later. Taking showers used to be a chore for me, now they’re no problem. My back hurt when I stood up for a long time, making going to the store a problem. Now going to the store is no problem, and I can make multiple trips up and down the stairs without being gassed if I have to. I ran for 25 minutes this morning! Running wasn’t even an option for me when I started, but now when I need it I have a little burst available.

If there’s one thing I want you to take from this post, is that everyone has the capability to lose, maintain, or gain to get to the weight they need to be. It’s just numbers and will. It’s not as easy as it sounds though, or everyone would be doing it already. But everyone can. They have that power within them.

Addenda:

Here’s my weight loss graph for the year:

The reason my weight went up a bit isn’t because I actually gained weight, but I switched scales, and this scale was more accurate, and it wouldn’t be worth it to adjust my previous weights. It does have a linear trend, but it’s very jagged. You will gain sometimes before you lose, even if you’re doing everything right.

Progress pictures:

Sadly I don’t have a proper 1 year ago picture, but this is the closest. I can’t believe I let myself go like that! It wasn’t as apparent to me when I didn’t see a picture like this. My arms and legs are thinner now, my belly is still big, but not as big, and I can feel my collarbones now! Obviously, I still have a long way to go, but look how far I’ve come!

How my diet has changed over the course of 1 year:

July 27, 2017:

El Monterey - Beef and Bean, Red Chili Burrito, 2 burrito (620)

Kroger - Shoestring Fries, 9 oz (45 pieces) (420)

Kroger - Ketchup, 2 tbsp (40)

Kroger - Penne Rigate Whole Wheat-whole Grain, 2.0025 cup dry  (561)

Kroger - High Fiber Oats & Chocolate Chewy Bars, 2 bar (320)

Kroger Fundaze Sundaes - Vanilla Cone, 1 cone (320)

Total: 2,281

July 27, 2018:

Kroger Peanut, Almond, and Dark Choc - Protein Bar, 1 bar (180)

Equate - Vanilla Shake, 1 can (180)

Hawaiian Punch - Single Water Mix In- Any Flavor- Sugar Free, 1 packet (10)

Powerade, 1 bottle (130) [Yeah, I accidentally got this instead of Powerade Zero. I’ll have to remember to get Zero next time.]

Kroger - Roasted Pumpkin Seeds, 0.33 cup  (160)

kroger - reduced calorie penne rigate, 6 oz (450)

I Can't Believe It's Not Butter - Original Spray, 5 sprays (0)

El Monterey - Chicken,Rice and Beans, 2 burritos (460)

Kroger - Vanilla Nonfat Greek Yogurt, 150 g (100)

Total: 1,670

So yeah, you don’t have to start out perfect when you start losing weight. I’m still not perfect with my choices now, but I’m doing a lot better, and that’s the main thing.

[chatting-leaves]

Thursday September 20th: Part 1 of 2

Genre: Personal. Very thinly veiled fiction.

The last time September 20th was on a Thursday, I woke up feeling very optimistic. That morning was to be the first morning of a new job assignment I had taken from a small staffing agency, my first work in nearly three months. Eight months earlier, my wife and I had moved to the northern suburbs of Boston, her home, after she had complained of feelings of homesickness and ennui and she felt she had nothing to lose by going back home. While in theory neither she - or even myself, who had been out of work prior - had nothing to lose, in practice we had everything to lose.

On that morning, I awoke in the guest bedroom of her grandparents house, our residence since we had moved as a means of having some place to stay at the outset. Instead, our lives had become what I would refer to as a “sadistic game of Wack-a-Mole” in which our employment statuses varied - first I had a contract position, then she finally got a relevant job four months after our arrival, then my position expired - and kept us from getting a place of our own. When this job arrived, I was told that it was a “sure thing” by the woman at the hiring agency; that while it was at the outset for only one month, there was “a very, very good chance” that it would become a permanent position and that my new employer, a semiconductor startup, was “a very strong operation that liked [my] background.” Over the ensuing eight months, we had become a bit more cynical, a little more than a bit chubbier, and a lot more worn down from having had little privacy for most of our first year of marriage and we were wanting to get a place of our own. After a shower and breakfast, I packed some snacks and a lunch and made my way out the door, walking down our residential street with signs for the upcoming elections littering our street, a byproduct of sorts of toxic political culture. Amidst the signs before reaching the main road came another form of litter echoing an alarming trend, discarded syringes and needle covers left by those abusing injectable drugs such as heroin. At the main road, I waited for a bus into Boston and upon boarding then weaved through an assortment of working class areas that could be seen by some more exclusionary types as the epitome of the stereotype of the “Townie”: rarely traveled, insular, working class, yet also a bit elitist in terms of town status and their defence of local sports teams. This commute is something I had done too many times to count when I had previously worked and on other days when I had taken a day off to ward off cabin fever and to try to have some semblance of the life we had left prior in a compact, accessible neighborhood of Washington, DC where everything I needed was either within walking distance or accessible by copious amounts of transit. We worked out way into Boston, eventually reaching the notorious highway of Route 1, through the twists of the post-industrial Chelsea before what some called Boston’s “other Green Monster”, the Tobin Bridge. At that time, it was a hunk of vaguely green metal pockmarked with copious amounts of rust where we sat stopped as the morning rush meandered its way through the toll booths to be waved through en route to our eventual arrival. After that point, I went through a similarly meandering journey via subway - Green Line to the historical Park Street, then Red Line to the bustling South Station, then a transfer to a confused mode known as the Silver Line, a mode often derided as a “bus that acts like a train” which would bring me to the front door of the building where I was to work. In my two weeks of waiting for this job, a period which my start date had been postponed twice as I was originally to have started the Thursday prior, I had never made the decision to do a dry run to see how this commute would have worked out and once the bus dropped me off I was a bit in shock at the scale of where I was working. I had known that it was in a relatively isolated of the South Boston Waterfront - or the “Seaport District” in modern marketing lingo - but the mass of the buildings once used as warehouses seemed a bit stunning as I tried to find exactly where to go in the linear maze I had fallen upon.

Having a few minutes to kill before my shift, I made my way to a restroom to give a final check of how I looked to make sure I made an excellent first impression. While the email I had received stated that business casual was the code, I decided to side with a pair of suit pants and a nice sweater I owned with a green and red argyle pattern. This choice was giving deference to the weather that morning, unseasonably cool and a harbinger of the coming autumn set to start officially the next day. I then made it upstairs to find an office full of people mainly in t-shirts and jeans, typical for a technology startup but I always liked being one better as to set a good example. After asking for the woman who was to be my boss, Kathryn, I was given the terse word that she was in a meeting and that I should wait a few minutes. Once she returned, someone spoke with her and then brought her my way. Without given any sort of greeting or salutations, Kathryn went immediately to business.

“Can you put together those three chairs?,” Kathryn said gesturing to three unopened boxes. “I’ll give you 30 minutes to an hour to do so. The sooner you finish these, the better because we need these chairs.” I responded affirmatively but withheld the truth - that I had never put office furniture together in my life and that the job description furnished to me had mentioned nothing of the sort. I will gladly say that I am a team player and will go above and beyond the call of duty, the description had been given had a lot of phone calls, emails, editing correspondence such as press releases, nothing of the sort about light furniture assembly. Not wanting to show weakness or failure, I spent the better part of the next hour trying to put together said chairs and succeeded in doing so. After finishing, Kathryn barked another order at me.

“Can you make some construction paper footballs for the football watch party on Sunday?” I had been told at the outset that the entire office had a Fantasy Football league and that they often had day-long watch parties during the NFL season. This Sunday made things convenient as the Patriots were playing in the night game, viewed nationwide and one of a handful of games each week seen all around the world. As with furniture assembly, arts and crafts was never one of my strong points yet once again I did what I needed to do even if it was well outside my job description. While doing my best to get these assembled, both via creation and by writing the names of employees and other guests on them, I started to feel some doubts about the job as twice they had given me duties well beyond what I had prepared myself for; in fact, in assembling the furniture I had started to sweat as I obviously had not dressed for such a task. When done, Kathryn directed me to a computer and left a copy of their corporate compliance handbook with some notes attached.

“We’ve had to update our policy on bringing dogs into the office. Can you edit this in? Here’s your login,” she said while also giving me a piece of paper with a username - my name, last name heavily mangled - and temporary password. After helping myself to some complimentary pretzels and a soda, a hallmark of a startup leaving free food and drink for their employees, I tried to log in only to find the username the had created for me did not work and after multiple tries brought the matter to Kathryn who claimed that she would have it sorted out during my lunch later that day. Logging me into a guest account, I made all the edits that I had been given as well as doing some general copy editing as there were some typographical and grammatical errors lingering in the bowels of that handbook. At around 12:30, two-and-a-half hours into a six-and-a-half hour shift, I was given a request.

“Can you go to lunch?,” Kathryn asked.

“It’s a little early to take my lunch, I was going to hold off until I was completely done working on this,” I responded, knowing that I liked to take my lunch closer to the mid-point of my shift to break up the day easier.

“I really want you to take it now,” Kathryn fired back.

“Okay. I brought a lunch in with me which I put in the fridge. Let me just go get it since I don’t need anything else,” I continued.

“I really need you to leave for lunch. There’s an Au Bon Pain two buildings over. I’m sure you can get there, eat, and get back in a half hour. Your work can wait,” Kathryn insisted.

Under protest, I relented and took the walk over to Au Bon Pain, a bakery cafe with the typical assortment of salads, sandwiches, baked goods, and the like. While walking, I realized that “two buildings over” was a good five minute walk given the massive scale of each building and upon arriving I discovered that this literally was the only viable lunch spot for a pretty large community of workers as there were no other establishments open at that time. Not being a fan of salad and not wanting to hold up the line, I ended up deciding on a container of lobster macaroni and cheese from a small self-serve bar and a baguette as it was the easiest option to get, eat, and run back. This lunch set me back about $10, not much to the established people there but for someone who had not worked in three months was a relatively large sum as by that point I was not even getting unemployment due to a conflict that surfaced right before taking this job. As I ate, I wondered if my being forced out of the office had a ulterior motive to it such as ending the assignment; a prior non-temporary job I had did this to set up a meeting to let me go due to having less resources to support my position than originally thought. “Surely a job would not let someone go after only two hours,” I thought as I finished my lunch and made a mad dash back to to the office. Upon returning, I found a slip of paper with my fixed username and a temporary password. Once again, it did not work and once again Kathryn put me back on a guest account to finish editing the handbook then to add some more names to a mailing list they maintained. By 2:30 that afternoon, I had exhausted all of the work I was given only to find that she was in a meeting and the only advice given to me was to “wait for her”. For the next half hour, I sat and waited while trying to not play with my charging phone, my fear being that had I done so it would be used as just cause to end the assignment. Upon Kathryn’s return, she came with news.

“I think they fixed your username,” she said. Once again, I tried only to find that the username in the system still did not exist. After a couple of minutes, she ended up relenting.

“You can go home now if you want,” she offered. “We really don’t have anything else left here and we can just start fresh on Monday.” Going into this, both she and the agency knew that I had a standing commitment that required I not work on the 21st - we had plans to go to Vermont for our first anniversary.

“Are you sure I’ll be here on Monday,” I asked.

“Yes. As much as today seemed rocky we really will need the help starting next week,” Kathryn concluded. I went to get most of my stuff but I felt confident to leave my lunch - a package of frozen pizza bites - in the freezer for the weekend. After that, I went to catch a bus home, about an hour later reaching my front door before the afternoon rush intensified. As optimistic as my departure that day was, I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that something might be slightly awry given what had transpired. While packing my clothes for the imminent vacation, I wondered what would happen when the agency inevitably called to see how my first day was and mulled giving them a preemptive all to get it over and done with.

Little did I know what was set to transpire.

[razieltwelve]

On Psychometrics and Individual Differences

Psychometrics and individual differences are the parts of psychology that are devoted to measuring people. This measurement is most commonly concerned with gauging either intelligence or personality through some form of test, but it can also be applied to a host of other attributes (e.g., social skills, emotional intelligence, clinical practice, etc.). However, this measurement should not be carried out recklessly.

Before a test can be used, there are three conditions that must be satisfied:

Be certain that what you want to measure is actually measurable

Be certain that you can measure it accurately and consistently

Be certain that measuring it is useful

If you cannot meet all three of these conditions, then you may end up doing more harm than good when using a particular test.

These three conditions are related to three very important concepts in psychology:

Measurability

Reliability

Validity

The order in which they are given here is not a coincidence. For a test to be valid, it must first be reliable. And for a test to be reliable, what it is testing must first be measurable. Of course, at the moment, I’m writing mostly in jargon. Let’s simplify things.

Measurability

It is not uncommon for people to assume that everything can be measured. Certainly, that assumption fits well with our everyday experiences. If we look around us, we see many attributes like height or weight that are obviously measurable. It is also clear from our everyday experience that people vary in terms of their intelligence and personality in much the same way that they vary in terms of their height and weight. But does that mean we can measure intelligence and personality like we measure height and weight?

Not necessarily.

Consider a simple statement: John weighs twice as much as Jill. The meaning of this statement is clear. If John weighs 100 kilograms, then we know that Jill must weight 50 kilograms. Likewise, if we have John and Jill sit on opposite sides of a seesaw, we know that Jill will have to sit twice as far from the centre as John to balance the seesaw.

But what about intelligence? If John has an IQ of 100 does that mean he is twice as smart as someone with an IQ of 50? Well, not exactly. An IQ of 100 is considered average but someone with an IQ of 50 would be considered severely intellectual impaired. Certainly, many courts would be reluctant to hold a person with an IQ of 50 responsible for their own actions since such a person would be in the bottom 0.15% or so of the population.

Clearly then, two people with an IQ of 50 are not going to be able to do the same amount of intellectual work as one person with an IQ of 100. Contrast this with the weight example. Two Jills (each 50 kilograms) really do equal Jim’s weight (100 kg). Weight is additive but intelligence may not be, at least, not in the same linear fashion.

We can make a similar case for personality. If someone receives a score of 100 on a test of extroversion, are they really twice as extroverted as someone who receives a score of 50? Even a cursory examination of most modern tests of extroversion will show that such a belief is simply not tenable. It doesn’t make sense.

So what does this mean? Tests are instruments that assign numbers to people. However, that does not mean we can treat these numbers like we treat other numbers. Weight assigns a number. Weight is also quantitative (a very special property), which means we can make a range of very important statements, like :

5 kg + 10 kg = 15 kg

10 kg divided by 2 = 5 kg

10 kg multiplied by 2 = 20 kg

0 kg means that something has no (zero) weight

Those statements might seem obvious, but let’s try to apply them to IQ:

50 IQ + 100 IQ = 150 IQ

100 IQ divided by 2 = 50 IQ

100 IQ multiplied by 2 = 200 IQ

0 IQ means someone has no (zero) intelligence

Do these statements make sense?

If you take someone who is severely intellectually impaired and have them work with an average person, is their intellectual output similar to a genius? No.

If you take two severely intellectual impaired people and have them work together, is their intellectual output similar to a normal person? No.

If you take two average people and have them work together, is their intellectual output comparable to a genius amongst geniuses? No.

If you take someone with a score of zero, do they have absolutely no intelligence? No. Well, in fairness, they’re likely not very bright, but they would still possess some level of intelligence. Just being able to attempt the questions (even if they get them wrong) is a sign of intelligence.

Clearly, then, weight and intelligence are not the same, or at least, scores on them do not have the same meaning. Weight is clearly measurable. Intelligence may well be measurable too, but not to the same extent. This is where scales of measurement become important:

Nominal

Ordinal

Interval

Rational

When we measure things in a nominal way, all we can do is tell them apart. Think of names. We know that Tom, Sam, and Bill are different people. How are they different? We don’t know. We just know that they are different.

An ordinal scale can rank things. So, for example, if Tom came first in a race, Sam came second, and Bill came third, then we can have an ordinal measure of their speed. Not only do we know they have different speeds from each other, but we also know how they rank. What we do not know is how big the differences are (e.g., Tom might have only just beaten Sam while both of them were way ahead of Bill). If you are measuring things in an ordinal way, all you can do is rank them. You cannot comment on the size of the differences between them.

An interval scale is more advanced. It can accurately reflect the differences between things. The best example is the Celsius scale for temperature. The difference in temperature between 5 degrees celsius and 10 degrees celsius is the same as the difference between 10 degrees celsius and 15 degrees celsius. What is missing, however, is a meaningful zero. 0 degrees celsius does not reflect an absence of temperature. It is simply the freezing point of water. Without a meaningful zero, we cannot multiply and divide meaningfully. For instance, 10 degrees celsius is not twice as hot as 5 degrees celsius.

A ratio scale has all the properties of an interval scale but with a meaningful zero. The Kelvin temperature scale is a ratio scale since its zero point does represent an absence of heat. Weight and length are also ratio scales since 0 kg means an absence of mass and 0 metres means an absence of length.

It should be clear by now that when we say that we are measuring something, we like to imagine that we are measuring it on a ratio scale. That lets us do all of the fancy maths and statistics that we like, and even more importantly, it means that all of those maths and statistics actually mean something. But if we don’t have a ratio scale, what then? Well, we can still do the math and statistics… they just won’t mean anything.

And this is where things can get ugly. On what scale do you think we can measure intelligence, personality, and other psychological attributes? I think we can be confident in measuring them to at least an ordinal scale, but are we measuring them on an interval or ratio scale?

More worrying is another question: is it even possible to measure intelligence, personality, and other psychological attributes on an interval or ratio scale? If it isn’t, then tests of intelligence and personality are built upon foundations of sand.

Reliability

The question of measurability is highly theoretical and conceptual in nature. In contrast, the question of reliability is much more straightforward. For a test to be reliable, it must measure something consistently and accurately.

Consistently and accurately means that if the attribute being measured has not changed, then a test should give the same result when used on multiple occasions. Consider weight. If my scale is reliable, then if I weigh myself ten times in a row, I should get the same result each time. Likewise, if someone’s personality or intelligence has not changed, then a test of those attributes should give the same result each time.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done since psychological tests are generally vulnerable to practice and demand effects. If I gave you the same intelligence test five times in a row, one after the other, you would undoubtedly get better at it because you have seen the questions before. Similarly, if you are applying for a job, and I give you the same personality test five times in a row, you might start to figure out what sort of personality is desirable for the job and change your answers accordingly.

This is why measures of test-retest reliability are seldom used in personality and intelligence. People learn when they are asked to do a test multiple times, and this in turn changes their scores. So how can this problem be solved? The simplest method is to design alternate versions of the test that are matched in difficulty and overall content (e.g., you might have two versions of a maths test that have the same problems, just with different numbers involved). You could then look at how closely scores on the two version corresponded. This is called alternate forms reliability.

Finally, there is something called internal consistency. If your test has multiple questions that are each attempting to measure the same thing (e.g., multiple questions about someone’s extroversion or multiple questions about problem solving), then someone’s performance across all of these questions should be fairly similar.

The reliability of a test can thus be measured in several ways:

Test-retest reliability

Alternate forms reliability

Internal consistency

A test that does well in these categories is consistently and accurately measuring something. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s measuring the right thing (that’s what we’re about to get to), but it is measuring something.

Validity

In simple terms, validity is all about whether a test measures what it is supposed to. More practically, a valid test is also a useful test since it can either predict some important outcome or corresponds to something important. In other words, if you want to know if a test is valid, the question you should be asking is: does this test measure what it is supposed to measure.

The simplest way to check validity is also the one that is most prized in human resources and organisational psychology: predictive validity. A test has predictive validity if scores on it can predict some important outcome (e.g., an intelligence test predicting job performance or a personality test predicting managerial ability).

If a test of something is good, then the scores it gives an individual should be similar to the scores given by other good tests of that same thing. For example, if you design a new intelligence test, then the scores it gives people should correspond to the scores given by pre-existing good tests of intelligence. Another way of thinking about it is to imagine that you’ve made a new ruler to measure length. If you already have a good ruler, then the two rulers should produce similar results when you measure the lengths of different objects. If they don’t, then one of them is wrong. This form of validity is called concurrent validity.

Content validity is about whether or not a test samples adequately and representatively from the domain of interest. For instance, if you are constructing a test of mathematical ability, including only questions about addition while neglecting subtraction and other operations would not be a good idea. Likewise, if you were designing a test to measure reasoning ability, having only problems of one type is unlikely to give you a valid measure of reasoning.

Perhaps the most complex form of validity is construct validity. In simple (but complex) terms, construct validity is whether or not your test measures what it claims to measure. The two mains ways of determining this are to see whether it relates to the things it is supposed to be related to (e.g., virtually all measures of intelligence are correlated with each other) and whether it does not relate to things it shouldn’t (e.g., measures of intelligence generally do not show strong correlations with measures of personality).

Conclusions

Before we use a psychological test (or any kind of test), we need to be certain that we are doing the right thing. This is particularly important when we move away from research into areas where the test serves as the basis for an important decision, such as in human resources or organisational psychology. But how do we know we’re doing the right thing?

A good test must be able to satisfy three criteria:

Measurability

Reliability

Validity

These criteria are not independent. A reliable test is one that measures something consistently and accurately. A valid test is one that measures what it is supposed to measure. Therefore a test must be reliable before it can be valid. Yet the issue of measurability is even more important. An attribute (e.g., intelligence) must be measurable before we can measure it with a test. Moreover, it must be measurable in certain ways, such as being quantifiable and measurable on a rational scale, if we are to apply many of the advanced statistical techniques that are so popular. It is not uncommon for people to simply assume that something is measurable, yet measurability, much like reliability and validity, is something that must be demonstrated, not simply assumed.

Tests and assessment instruments can have a powerful impact on people. It is the responsibility of the people using those tests and assessment instruments to make sure that they are using the right tests in the right ways.

If you want to read more about my thoughts on writing, education, and other subjects, you can find those here.

I also write original fiction, which you can find here.

[megacatstudios]

THE HARDEST RETRO GAMES WE'VE GROWN TO LOVE

Glide on the Pain Train The hardest retro games we’ve grown to love there is plenty of nostalgia to be had when it comes to retro games. Some of it might come from the times of your life when things were simpler due to how young you were when you played them. Or maybe some of it was because these retro games were some of your earliest forays in terms of video gaming experiences. After all, the reasons for nostalgia vary from person to person. However, this also means that someone out there will have nostalgia for games because of how insanely hard they were. Video games have had leaps and strides when it comes to handling difficulty, with more accessibility options than before. But during the retro gaming era, developers were limited by both hardware and development experience. Since there was limited space to do things, games tended to be hard so that there would be more replayability, even though this was artificial in a sense. And since plenty of game development back then usually stemmed from arcade experiences, developers came with the mindset to make games harder to increase penny munching. Despite these limitations, however, players have increasingly grown fond of these absolutely difficult games, accepting their difficulties as gauntlets were thrown at the face of their gaming expertise. So join me today as we walk through some of the hardest retro games that have been thrown at us by the video game developers of yore.

GRADIUS 📷Not quite bullet hell, but hellish nonetheless Let’s start with one of the few games on this list that I have actually finished without using save states or cheat codes. Usually cited as one of the most important shooter games due to popularizing the horizontally-scrolling shooter genre, players are seated into the cockpit of Vic Viper, blasting their way through levels filled with enemies trying to ram you and plenty more that shoot bullets at you. At the end of each level, you will be confronted with a boss, and you’d have to shoot their weak points to defeat them. However, a lot of these points are actually protected by an additional layer that you have to destroy before being able to shoot at the weak point. The creativity of these boss battles is a highlight of the original game, as is the difficulty of each one. My favourite part of Gradius has to be the power-up system, though. Unlike most other shooters, Gradius only has one kind of power-up, and when you pick it up, it will advance a power meter at the bottom of the screen, and if you reach a point in the meter that you would want to obtain, you can do so anytime by pressing the power-up button, but doing so would reset your power meter to zero, creating a mini push your luck game of trying to survive as long as possible with a weak weapon to reach as far as you can on your power meter.

GHOSTS ‘N GOBLINS 📷Jumping in your boxers debut game of one of the most underrated franchises from Capcom, Ghosts ‘n Goblins sees a knight named Sir Arthur try to rescue Princess Prin-Prin from Astaroth, the king of the Demon World. While that plot is pretty thin, it is often referred to as one of the most difficult video games of all time. Unfortunately, much of that difficulty is either a love it or hate it kind. Sir Arthur can only withstand one hit before losing one life, and each life is also timed. What’s more, once Sir Arthur jumps, he can’t change directions until after he lands, which is maddening if you’ve played literally any other side-scroller. What’s worse is that each level only has one checkpoint, and that checkpoint is always smack dab in the middle of the level. If you die before reaching that point, you’ll be thrown back at the start of the level! Sure, there’s plenty of additional weapons that you can pick up along the way, and the game is still pretty much beatable, but right when you thought you’ve gotten the hang of it, a very nasty surprise will meet you at the end of your playthrough because now you need to do everything all over again with a higher difficulty to reach the true ending of the game! Sure, it’s nasty, but it wouldn’t be notorious for its difficulty if it was any much easier than this.

CONTRA: HARD CORPS 📷The bad news that the title is not just a silly pun. This entry to the popular Contra franchise is actually very hardcore. If you thought the original Contra for the NES was hard, the first and only Contra game released for a Sega console is even harder. Despite the prettier graphics, it has more things to master with its multiple characters, each with its own different sets of weapons. The Hard Corps also features multiple branching paths, with each providing a different ending. While that may all seem like an enticing ride, at the end of the day, multiple endings will only have players trying to finish the game multiple times. That wouldn’t be much of a problem if it’s not a Contra game that we’re talking about, especially one that is already considered one of the hardest entries in the franchise.

CASTLEVANIA 📷Don’t let go of your holy water! While not the most difficult game on this list, the original Castlevania will still take you by surprise, especially if you were able to play future entries into the series. Unlike the newer games, Castlevania doesn’t take an entire map and let you explore it to your whims. This was way before the series popularized the Metroidvania genre, and is instead a classic linear side-scrolling platformer. Like Ghosts ‘n Goblins, part of why this game was hard was because of how it handles jumps. You can’t change your trajectory in the middle of your jumps, and while that is absolutely realistic, none of the other aspects of the game is chasing for realism, so this seems like a design choice that is made to make your play sessions harder. However, this game has one neat trick that you can keep to heart to make things easier. When you acquire the holy water, hold on to it like your life depends on it. It will make quick work of most enemies within the game. All that’s left for you to do is to practice your jumps. You’ll be beating Dracula in no time.

SUPER MARIO BROS.: THE LOST LEVELS 📷When both launch and landing are problems only game in this list that was both difficult to finish and difficult to acquire, this Japan-only release is the actual sequel to the original Super Mario Bros. The reason why Nintendo never gave this game an international release was because of how absurdly hard it was, to the point that one of Nintendo’s consultants in the west back then called the game an undeserved punishment. However, this spike in difficulty was by choice, as the game was sold with a label that said it was a game “For Super Players” and plenty of tricks for infinite lives were included in the opening levels to provide additional room for players to breathe in the latter levels with insane difficulty spikes. Obviously, none of that helped in easing the game’s difficulty, and up to this day, The Lost Levels remains one of the few blotches of the Super Mario franchise. Still, there are people who regard the game as fun and clever and view it with fondness. While there’s no denying Nintendo’s excellent level design is at work here, there’s also no doubt that this is one of the hardest games in their entire catalogue.

MIKE TYSON'S PUNCH-OUT!! 📷He’s the least of your problems while not as notoriously difficult as The Lost Levels, Nintendo also had you reeling in terms of recovering from its punches with this game, later changing its name to “Punch-Out!!”. This is the easiest game on this list, with the different opponents that you face having distinct patterns that you need to figure out in order to beat them. However, people still remember it as one of the hardest Nintendo has ever released due to how you would need to restart the entire game from the beginning if you get knocked out in the middle of a fight against any of the fighters. Besides, if you experienced this game at a younger age, would you even think that boxing is a cerebral experience? You probably wouldn’t even think to see if your opponents are fighting with a pattern. You’d just mash the punch button in hopes of getting a hit in. That would most likely be the reason why people remember Punch-Out!! as one of the harder games to have ever existed. Still, I wouldn’t count out the times when one was able to identify Mike Tyson’s pattern and still be hit with one of his uppercuts that will instantly knock you out. That kind of experience is infuriating, and even so when it brings you right back at the beginning of the game.

BATTLETOADS 📷Prepare to crash over and over again And finally, we come to the one game on this list that is definitely considered by many to be the hardest game to have ever existed. Battletoads’ main problem is not in its controls or how friendly fire is enabled throughout the game, but in how it was designed. If you have noticed, most other games will give you an idea of what’s coming before it happens. For example, enemies would appear at a significant distance from your character, which gives you an ample amount of time to react appropriately before they do some damage to you. The problem with Battletoads is that it skips all of that. Enemies and obstacles inadvertently appear at a near-instant speed, which turns the game less of an exercise in hand-eye coordination and more of an exercise in memorization.If you’re absolutely convinced that you can finish Battletoads, though, you’re in luck. The game itself is fairly short, so memorizing the patterns of each level is easier than, say, memorizing all the names of stars within Capricornus. You just need to prepare yourself to lose some hair in the process.

HOLY ROLLER While people play games for different reasons, there are a certain magic too difficult games, especially when you are able to overcome the seemingly insurmountable odds associated with them. There is a reason why difficult games have been on the rise recently, with games like Cuphead or Celeste taking centre stage. These modern games are now unhindered by the technical limitations of the olden times. So with plenty of ways to adjust these games’ accessibility while also keeping true to their word for the gluttons for punishment, these games have truly transcended the barriers between being a game only the hardcore can muster and a game for everyone. However, despite the inherent difficulty that comes so often with older games, the design practices have evolved along with them, paving the way for all of the newer games in terms of designing for a larger audience in mind, and in turn, growing the industry. Which of these games have you finished? Or maybe we missed out on something harder to finish than any of these games? How about you let us know via our Twitter Page or head on over to our Youtube Channel to see more retro gaming goodness.

[housebeleren]

Guilds of Ravnica Draft Format Review

Even though it’s now War of the Spark time, I wanted to officially tie up my thoughts on the previous two Ravnica sets, as we leave the guilds behind. My draft format evaluations are comprised of the following dimensions:

Speed - Consisting of its Tempo, Aggression, and Explosiveness

Variety - Consisting of its balance between the Colors/Archetypes, Threats to Removal, & Deck Strategies

Depth - Consisting of the depth within individual cards, within archetypes, and within the metagame as the whole

Fun - Consisting of the Flavor & Theme, the Gameplay itself, and the amorphous “X-Factor”

I’ll also go through my thoughts on the themes & mechanics, any noteworthy decks, notes on draft strategy, and give it a final grade.

Art: Milivoj Chen

Seriously. What card better exemplifies this format than the hawk?

Speed

Tempo - Fast. The presence of Boros in this format means that aggressive decks with lots of low drops can snowball out of control pretty quickly. So even if you aren’t playing a fast deck yourself, you need to have a plan for how to deal with early threats. I’d consider this a start by turn 2.5 format. You don’t want to have nothing to do until turn 4 for risk of getting run over.

Aggression - The format is pretty average on aggression. The Mentor mechanic skews very aggressive, but it’s somewhat balanced out by the presence of several good blockers and the fact that mechanics like Jump Start & Surveil reward a slower, more deliberate game plan. Also, the Auras, Equipment, & combat tricks in Guilds are generally weaker than in other recent sets, so the aggressor isn’t always as advantaged.

Explosiveness - Izzet in particular has the potential for wins that come out of nowhere, with a few cheap Jump Start spells and some good payoffs like Wee Dragonauts. And, as noted, Boros can snowball very quickly, though it’s a little easier to see coming. Both Boros & Izzet share Cosmotronic Wave at Common, which is a crucial spell for aggro versions of both guilds to push through damage once slower decks have stabilized. There are definitely some cards that can run away with the game if left unchecked, most notably at Common with Healer’s Hawk, though most of the truly disgusting cards are at high rarities.

In general, this is a format that leans fast. Games tend to go quickly, even the control mirrors. Lots of good evasion prevented board stalls from being all too common, and the pace was kept pretty brisk.

Variety

Balanced Colors/Archetypes - At first, Guilds felt really unbalanced, with Izzet & Dimir the clear popular choices. But then people figured out how to build Boros and it became one of the top picks. Eventually Golgari caught up as the sleeper guild and the format mostly balanced out. Selesnya still feels slightly underpowered, but overall the format ended up feeling much closer to balanced than it seemed at first.

Balanced Threats to Removal - Guilds of Ravnica has amazing removal. There’s plenty of cheap conditional removal for the early threats, and pure unconditional removal for the late game. Every color combination has access to solid answers, and it allows for decks of all types to flourish

Balanced Deck Types - More so than many recent formats, the types of deck builds are all viable. Boros can be brutal pure aggro, while midrange builds of Selesnya & Golgari work. You can build tempo or control versions of both Izzet & Dimir. There is a Gates-matter deck that’s technically viable, but it’s pretty rare to get all the pieces necessary to make it work. I’d like for one or two more really solid offbeat decks to round out the format, but overall it feels pretty balanced.

Overall, Guilds of Ravnica succeeded in being a fairly evenly balanced format. While the guilds tended to be fairly linear, there wasn’t any one guild or strategy that completely dominated. 

Depth

Individual Card Depth - Most of the cards are fairly straightforward, but most of them slot nicely into multiple decks without too much issue. There are a few completely dead cards, which can make it difficult to get as many playables as you want if others are in your colors. But overall, this feels about average for a normal expansion.

Depth Within Archetypes - This is where the Guilds draft truly shines. There are a number of viable options for each archetype. Even seemingly straightforward guilds like Boros can be drafted in a few different directions. Selesnya is probably the most narrow build, but Dimir & Izzet can be quite deep. There are a lot of subtle deckbuilding decisions that make the format stay fresh for longer, and reward players who continue honing through practice.

Metagame Depth - The metagame shook out pretty quickly, so it’s pretty easy to figure out how to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Guilds succeeded in achieving a pretty average amount of depth for a format. There were some twists and turns as new strategies unfolded, but it ended up pretty straightforward and approachable. I’d say it’s a pretty decent set for newer players to jump into, while still keeping fresh enough for established players to enjoy, at least for a while.

Fun

Flavor & Theme - This was probably the most successful trip to Ravnica so far from a flavor perspective. The guilds are the most thought out they’ve ever been, and everything clicks, from the art to the flavor text to the mechanics. What’s especially well done is how the mechanics really evoke the feelings of the guilds in the gameplay. One of the best marriages of flavor & mechanics I’ve ever seen.

Gameplay - The gameplay is strong, with a lot of fun interactions. Most games feel competitive, with a lot of opportunity to catch up from early setbacks. The games don’t seem to stall out all that often, due to the high quality of fliers and evasion in the set. It definitely could feel frustrating going against one Boros aggro deck after another, but that’s par for the course sometimes.

The X-Factor - This set is definitely fun. There are a few balance issues, and it can be disappointing when too many people try to draft the same colors, but in general, it’s a really fun set.

All told, I think Guilds of Ravnica stands up pretty well. It’s biggest weakness is that the guilds figure themselves out pretty quickly, so the replay value factor diminishes more quickly than I’d like. It’s a good set for beginners and veterans alike, and it’s a huge amount of fun diving into the mechanics and flavor of the world.

Themes & Mechanics

Mentor - This was a surprise, but Mentor may have been the best Limited mechanic in the set. It played really well, and had a great snowball effect where cards would mentor each other one right after the other. It gave Boros decks a lot of fun decisions while still staying true to their aggressive strategy.

Jump-Start - My other favorite mechanic was Jump-Start. It led to deep & complex gameplay with a lot of interesting decisions. Things were never boring playing against an Izzet deck, because cards could come out of nowhere to change the tides.

Surveil - Surveil isn’t splashy, but it’s a workhorse. It gave Dimir decks a great way to smooth out their draws, helping them draw into gas and even keep subpar hands more often than usual. The few Surveil Matters cards were all great inclusions to keep it interesting.

Undergrowth - This one was somewhat hit or miss. While the premise was good, and there were several great designs, there were a number that just didn’t do enough without having at least 3-4 creatures in the yard, and there weren’t enough good enablers to self-mill cards there. It seems like a hard mechanic to balance, since too many enablers would make some of the better cards too good.

Convoke - The true tragedy of the set is that the one returning mechanic had probably its worst showing since it was first introduced. There weren’t enough cheap playable creatures or token makers to really enable it. If there had been more cards that rewarded you for convoking, it might have been a better use of the mechanic.

Gates Matter - This was mostly a tiny sub-theme, but there were a few cards that rewarded you for going deep on gates. That said, some of the cards that cared about gates weren’t really that great of payoffs, or were in strange colors for it. (Boros, really?) I would have loved one more good Uncommon payoff in Green for this to be a truly viable theme. As it was, it pretty much never paid off.

The good news is, I would love to see all of the themes & mechanics explored again at some point in the future. While Undergrowth & Convoke could have been executed better, I think they have potential with better enablers. I would very much like to see Mentor, Jump Start, & Surveil again.

Noteworthy Decks

Grixis Explosion Control - A base Dimir control deck that seeked to stall out the game with lots of removal, eventually culminating in a huge casting of Expansion/Explosion to win the game.

Dimir Devious Control - A Dimir deck with tons of removal, seeking to win the game by naturally milling out the opponent, using multiple copies of Devious Cover Up to prevent yourself from decking.

Boros Gonna Boros - The most aggressive form of Boros decks, featuring low aggressive curves that snowball out of control with Mentor. Healers’s Hawk is your ideal starting card, while Boros Challenger and Sunhome Stalwart are linchpins of the deck to ensure explosive starts. All the 1 & 2 drops ever.

Strategy Notes

When starting a Guilds of Ravnica draft, it’s critical to figure out which guilds are open than try to force a guild that multiple other people are drafting in the pod. If only one player is drafting Golgari, they’ll get their pick of the packs while everyone else is fighting over the one Luminous Bonds that gets opened at the table. Look for signals early and often, and consider adjusting your strategy based on them. Obviously, this is less important in Arena draft than in person, so you can force guild choices a little easier in Arena.

Generally speaking, you’re going to end up in a 2 color guild deck, with the occasional deck splashing for additional removal or bombs. Despite all the fixing with Guildgates in every pack, very few true 3 color decks exist in the format. The Gates deck is a trap. The tempo of the format is set by the presence of Boros, which is hyper aggressive. That doesn’t mean all decks need to be aggressive, but all decks need to have a plan for how to deal with a fast start. If you have literally nothing to play until turn 4, you’ll be real sorry with your life choices real quick. It’s also important to have early plays against control strategies, so you can get under their counterspells and force them to trade down on mana against your early drops. That said, control is real in this format, so try to have a plan to address both ends of the spectrum, and pay attention to your sideboard options. The games are often decided by fliers & creatures with evasion (don’t underestimate Passwall Adept), so make sure you have a strategy for the air, since the ground game gets gummed up often.

Overall Grade & Final Thoughts

Well, I think I’ve pretty much said it all. Guilds of Ravnica is a good, above average draft format. It’s a nice, gentle step up from a Core Set experience for newer players, but with enough interest to keep enfranchised players happy. The set is a slam dunk on flavor & the worldbuilding, so even just opening the packs is a joy. The only place it falls short is on the long-term replay value, but all and all, a solid format. 

Overall Grade: B

[suzanneshannon]

Design v17

We rolled out a new site design on January 1! This is the 17th version of CSS-Tricks if you can believe that. The versions tend to evolve a decent amount beyond the initial launch, but we archive screenshots on this design history page. Like I said in our 2018 thank you post:

This is easily the most time, effort, and money that's gone into a redesign since the big v10 design. There are a lot of aesthetic changes, but there was also quite a bit of UX work, business goal orientation, workflow tweaking, and backend development work that went along with it.

This is a big one! The reception so far has been pretty great, but please know that we'll be refining it and squishing a lot of bugs here in the early days.

Here are some notes about who was involved, how it happened, and things to notice.

Kylie led this project

Kylie Timpani was the lead designer and really whole project lead on this.

I first reached out to her in April 2017, we chatted in May, and kicked off the work in June. From my perspective, this was a pretty casual process, as I had no particular deadlines and fairly loose goals. Let's make an attractive site that does better in all ways than we do them now.

Kylie was super organized and had a very thoughtful process around every aspect of this. Just in the first block of time that Kylie allocated for this project she:

Took a complete content inventory

Dug into analytic data to understand users, traffic, and usage at a high level

Created, distributed, and analyzed a reader survey to understand readers better and answer specific questions she had for them

Chatted with all the staff members of CSS-Tricks to understand their roles, workflows, and ideas

Kylie's obviously not the kind of the designer that just whips open a design tool and starts noodling around. As great of a visual designer as she is, the work was highly informed. She went on to speak with our advertising agency, clearly identify the site's current strengths and weaknesses, and do light wireframing.

I've been using Figma for visual design stuff, and Kylie was happy to use that as the design tool. That was nice since we both have Team level access and were able to use it collaboratively. For me, it was mostly useful for being able to see and reference everything, and make notes on the designs.

We also used Asana to track what was being worked on and ultimately as a place to track bugs and places where the design implementation needed attention.

Thanks so much, Kylie for all your excellent work on this project! If anything is a bit off or buggy about the site, it's my poor implementation. And good luck! ⤵️

⚡️ So! Speaking of big life changing news... in just a couple of weeks I'll be moving to San Francisco! I'm so SO excited to be joining @nrrrdcore and her truly incredible team over at Apple! 👩🏻‍💻✨

— Kylie Timpani (@kylietimpani) January 7, 2019

Design Stuff

I'll let y'all explore the design for yourself to find all the little touches we put in, but I'll give a shout out to a few of them where there is a technical detail you might enjoy.

Orange-to-pink

Clearly, we went all dark mode on this design. It's nothing to do with the new media query, although that reminds me we might consider alternations for those who specifically set prefers-color-scheme: light;.

The brand/accent/action colors are orange and pink, which looks quite striking against the darkness but works on light backgrounds as well.

I made a quickie little Sass @mixin that allowed me to use those colors (with variations, if needed) at different angles as backgrounds:

@mixin orange-to-pink($deg: to right, $col-1: $orange, $col-2: $pink) { background-image: linear-gradient($deg, $col-1, $col-2); }

And on text as well wherever we needed (most often as for :hover and :focus):

@mixin gradient-text() { background: linear-gradient(to right, $orange, $pink); -webkit-background-clip: text; -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent; }

We also needed the gradient to be applied to fills and strokes in SVG, so I plopped that into the document to use wherever it was needed.

<svg width="0" height="0" class="visually-hidden"> <defs> <linearGradient id="orange-to-pink" x1="0" x2="0" y1="1" y2="0"> <stop offset="0%" stop-color="#DA1B60" /> <stop offset="100%" stop-color="#ff8a00" /> </linearGradient> </defs> </svg>

Fixed header

There is something about headers that always bring out more complexity than you might expect. I recently went through this with the new CodePen header/sidebar and it as complicated for this site. Part of what complicated this one was:

It has its own set of unique breakpoints. The header is pretty full, so the breakpoints are pretty specific and unique to it.

We wanted a fixed-position (but minified) header that showed up as you scroll down.

When you're logged in, there is a WordPress admin bar also fixed to the top of the page. I wanted to accommodate for that.

At one point, it was getting pretty messy and I wound up deleting all the CSS for the entire thing and re-wrote it, taking all the states into consideration, and writing media queries that used logic to clearly specify styles in each of those states.

The idea of a not-always-fixed-position header is interesting in and of itself. It means that:

You need to determine when to apply the fixed position

You need to make sure the shift from not-fixed to fixed (and back) doesn't cause layout shifting

I was dead nervous about attaching an onscroll listener and doing math and such to determine when to do the switch. I'm sure it can be done responsibly, but I haven't had great luck with that. Instead, I placed a tiny one-pixel element to the screen and attached an IntersectionObserver to it and reacted to that. That gave me the power to adjust where that is in CSS, which was a nice little touch.

Here's the very basics of that code:

See the Pen Fixed Header with IntersectionObserver by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Mixup

One very cool feature of this design is the Mixup area on the homepage. It was one of Kylie's ideas to show and remind people of the variety and depth of content that is here on CSS-Tricks.

The line that goes through it needs to depend on the height of the HTML content in each of those boxes. The boxes are set on a CSS grid, but they can and should still expand as needed for titles and such. Rather than try to SVG this somehow, the line is essentially stitched together though border and border-radius on individual boxes. To make it line up, I occasionally had to nudge them around with transform.

There was some z-index involved too. It was fun making mistakes along the way:

Cards

I'm kinda in love with native scroll snapping. The cards kinda have a fun animation on desktop, revealing the entire card on hover/focus, and then on mobile you can see the whole card, but are easy to thumb through:

Thanks, Amelia!

The design called for these curved line separators:

I have a small degree of confidence with the SVG path syntax, so I took the first crack at it. I was able to design it in a way that it could draw that line OK and keep the stroke at the desired width, but it didn't scale quite right.

See the Pen Lighted Path by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

I brought in SVG expert Amelia Bellamy-Royds to help me get it right. Feel free to inspect the site to see how it was done. It involves masking and nested SVGs and rectangles and transforms and all sorts of fun stuff. Amelia actually created four variations of the code and carefully noted all the pros and cons of each one. Ultimately, we went with this:

See the Pen Lighted Path by Amelia Bellamy-Royds (@AmeliaBR) on CodePen.

Another thing Amelia helped with was the "circle of text" design element. Kylie had these instances mocked out and I thought they were so cool and I definitely wanted to pull it off. There is a really elaborate way to do it by splitting the characters in to spans and transforming them, but that's a bit messy compared to SVG's <textPath>. I knew I wanted to go the SVG route, but perhaps abstract it away into a reusable component so that it wasn't a heaping pile of code every time I want to use one.

It occurred to me that a web component might be the best way to go here because I can kind of invent the API myself. What I wanted a circle-of-text component to do:

Pass in the text to set on the circle

Declare the radius of the circle

Rotate the circle so I can start the text at any point along the circle

That makes perfect sense as a web component:

<circle-text r="3em" rotate="-90deg"> CSS is super fun & cool & I like CSS!!! </circle-text>

My expertise with web components is limited, so I reached out to Amelia again who is great both with web components and SVG—a perfect match! This is what she was able to do, which I easily integrated easily into this design.

Thanks, Ana!

Another design thing that Kylie cooked up that I was a bit perplexed by was this line:

I thought maybe SVG again, but I really wanted to nestle regular HTML content in there nicely. I was hoping to pull it over with borders or something CSS-y. I reached out to Ana Tudor who is fantastic at tricky design situations and solving them with native browser tech. Ana was able to whip up a good solution here using multiple gradient backgrounds in the main area and a border for the top right bit that flies off.

See the Pen nav by Ana Tudor (@thebabydino) on CodePen.

Thanks, Zach!

Fonts are a unique part of the loading experience of websites in that their presence (or lack of), how they appear, and how they change all play major roles in the perceived performance of the page.

I've had the good fortune of being able to chat with Zach Leatherman about font loading before, but I still don't feel entirely comfortable with what the best practices are in any given situation. For this design of CSS-Tricks, I made the call to use the system font stack for most of the body copy. That has the major benefit of being instantly available to render and aesthetically seems to work well on a technical site, not to mention generally pairing well with Rubik, our header font.

But we still needed to deal with Rubik. There will be an upcoming article from Zach going into this in more details, but the gist is:

Create a minimal subsetted version of Rubik that handles the majority of usage

<link rel="preload" ... > it

Use it with @font-face using font-display

Load a more robust version in an async second stage

Nice job everyone that worked on the @css relaunch!

Look at those web fonts showing up on that 2.09s Fast 3G first render 🎉

(full disclosure I helped a wee bit with the font loading here 😇) pic.twitter.com/Ih7zJhelQQ

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) January 1, 2019

Some areas of the site are somewhat deprecated

The Forums is such a complicated area of the site to design and maintain, what I've done is just loaded the default bbPress styling for them, instead of trying to override things or start from scratch. I think that'll be the best route going forward.

There is a Gallery section of this site, but I'm not even linking to it anymore as we didn't really keep it up to date very well nor did it get used much. The URL's still work though. Maybe it can make a return someday, but for now, I'm enjoying the reduction of some technical and content debt.

Tech stack

It's somewhat boring. It's about the same thing I've done forever. It's a stock install of WordPress with a custom theme, a dozen or so plugins, and a bit of custom-coded functionality, like having the images powered by Cloudinary. It's running on a custom Media Temple-built box so it can have PHP 7 and MySQL 5.6, plus a firewall that also acts as a CDN. It's nice to have a pretty snappy foundation, so it's on me as a front-end dev to keep it that way.

I used SVG for the icons, Sass for the styling, and Babel to write jQuery-based functionality in ES6. I wrote up a Gulp file to do all that processing and run the local BrowserSync dev server. Local WordPress via Local by Flywheel.

I'm actually pretty happy with the stack as it felt quick and productive to me. But I admit, part of me wishes I dug a little harder into new tech, like building webpack-based processing or trying to go all-in on a server-rendered and React-powered headless WordPress via GraphQL kinda thing. The reason I didn't is because boring has served me so well and time is a major factor since I'm developing alone (my budget doesn't exactly make available a whole development team). My guess is a major front-end infastructure overhaul would have tripled the dev time for questionable benefits. It still sounds like fun and might open up future doors, but hey, another time.

My last regret is that I wish I had spun up a real pattern library system from the start. I think I did OK in breaking things up into reusable parts, but the site isn't truly componentized. As I approached the finish line, I started to see how this could have gone a bit smoother for me should I have worked with true components that accepted data and had variations and such. Native PHP isn't great for that, so it would have forced me into some kind of templating system, and I probably wouldn't have regretted it. If I stay in PHP next time, maybe I'd use something like Timber and Twig for all the components, and then Fractal for the pattern library since it supports Twig. I kind of dig the way Timber abstracts the data stuff from the views.

I hadn't heard of this app until now, but check out Project Wallace:

Project Wallace is a project aimed at gaining insights in your CSS over a longer period of time. It started a couple of years ago as a frustration with existing CSS analyzers that only do a one-time only analysis. As time went by, more and more features were added and now Wallace is place to go for developers who want to know if their complexicity has increased or for a designer who wants to know if all the correct colors and fonts are being used.

Bart Veneman set it up to watch CSS-Tricks, and you can see a before/after comparison and charts over time. Bart blogged about the numbers for us as well. Thanks Bart!

There are more interesting stats in that blog post.

CodePen embeds

The true usefulness of CodePen Embed Themes came out here. The whole point of an embed theme is that you can use them to match the design of where the Pens will be embedded, and if you need to change that design, you can change them all in one fell swoop. There are probably thousands of embedded Pens on this site, and they all got updated at once with one theme change.

There are a few special things that I've done with CodePen embeds on this site:

The are resizable from the bottom right corner. Used jQuery. Like this.

They have a placeholder height. When you embed a Pen, you can choose how tall you want it to be. That's how tall the <iframe> will come in as. But I've adjust it so that the <p> that is there before the iframe comes in will be that same height, so there is no reflow jank.

I regex'd that sucker myself like this:

function codepen_reflow_fix($content) { $content = preg_replace('/data-height=(\'|")(\d*)(\'|")/', 'data-height="$2" style="height: $2px;"', $content); $content = preg_replace('/data-theme-id="\d*"/', 'data-theme-id="1"', $content); return $content; } add_filter('the_content', 'codepen_reflow_fix', 10);

We're gonna bring that feature to CodePen itself real soon. Notice in that RegEx above I'm also forcing the theme id. That way, all embedded Pens definitely have the correct theme, even if we forget.

Achievement unlocked: The custom scrollbar is the new feature that everyone either loves or hates

If there has been one constant in every CSS-Tricks design, it's that there's at least one feature people either love or hate. This time, I'm happy to announce it's the custom scrollbar. In a sense, it's for myself. I manually use scrollbars quite a bit and it feels both fun and highly usable to grab onto this big beefy chunk of pink love.

It's also a little inspired by VS Code, which features a pretty beefy scrollbar itself:

There are general usability considerations about custom scrollbars for sure, but I don't feel like they've been breached too heavily here, if at all. I've heard some "don't mess with my browsers UI" feedback, which I sorta get, but does that mean we shouldn't style any form controls, or even use CSS at all? (LOL.) And don't scrollbars come from the system, not the browser?

Anyway, I'm not faking them or anything. I'm just using ::-webkit-scrollbar and friends. There is official scrollbar styling stuff on the way, per the CSS specs. I didn't use any of that stuff/ I think I'll wait for at least one browser to support it.

We have plenty of bug fixing and polishing to do still on this design. If you've emailed or tweeted or communicated with us in some way about it, I've probably seen it and have been log it all to make sure it's all addressed the best we can. Plus stay tuned for some fun new features!

If you have thoughts, free to leave comments here if you like, use our contact form, email at team@css-tricks.com, or chat it up in our new Spectrum community.

The post Design v17 appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Design v17 published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[siliconwebx]

Design v17

We rolled out a new site design on January 1! This is the 17th version of CSS-Tricks if you can believe that. The versions tend to evolve a decent amount beyond the initial launch, but we archive screenshots on this design history page. Like I said in our 2018 thank you post:

This is easily the most time, effort, and money that's gone into a redesign since the big v10 design. There are a lot of aesthetic changes, but there was also quite a bit of UX work, business goal orientation, workflow tweaking, and backend development work that went along with it.

This is a big one! The reception so far has been pretty great, but please know that we'll be refining it and squishing a lot of bugs here in the early days.

Here are some notes about who was involved, how it happened, and things to notice.

Kylie led this project

Kylie Timpani was the lead designer and really whole project lead on this.

I first reached out to her in April 2017, we chatted in May, and kicked off the work in June. From my perspective, this was a pretty casual process, as I had no particular deadlines and fairly loose goals. Let's make an attractive site that does better in all ways than we do them now.

Kylie was super organized and had a very thoughtful process around every aspect of this. Just in the first block of time that Kylie allocated for this project she:

Took a complete content inventory

Dug into analytic data to understand users, traffic, and usage at a high level

Created, distributed, and analyzed a reader survey to understand readers better and answer specific questions she had for them

Chatted with all the staff members of CSS-Tricks to understand their roles, workflows, and ideas

Kylie's obviously not the kind of the designer that just whips open a design tool and starts noodling around. As great of a visual designer as she is, the work was highly informed. She went on to speak with our advertising agency, clearly identify the site's current strengths and weaknesses, and do light wireframing.

I've been using Figma for visual design stuff, and Kylie was happy to use that as the design tool. That was nice since we both have Team level access and were able to use it collaboratively. For me, it was mostly useful for being able to see and reference everything, and make notes on the designs.

We also used Asana to track what was being worked on and ultimately as a place to track bugs and places where the design implementation needed attention.

Thanks so much, Kylie for all your excellent work on this project! If anything is a bit off or buggy about the site, it's my poor implementation. And good luck! ⤵️

⚡️ So! Speaking of big life changing news... in just a couple of weeks I'll be moving to San Francisco! I'm so SO excited to be joining @nrrrdcore and her truly incredible team over at Apple! 👩🏻‍💻✨

— Kylie Timpani (@kylietimpani) January 7, 2019

Design Stuff

I'll let y'all explore the design for yourself to find all the little touches we put in, but I'll give a shout out to a few of them where there is a technical detail you might enjoy.

Orange-to-pink

Clearly, we went all dark mode on this design. It's nothing to do with the new media query, although that reminds me we might consider alternations for those who specifically set prefers-color-scheme: light;.

The brand/accent/action colors are orange and pink, which looks quite striking against the darkness but works on light backgrounds as well.

I made a quickie little Sass @mixin that allowed me to use those colors (with variations, if needed) at different angles as backgrounds:

@mixin orange-to-pink($deg: to right, $col-1: $orange, $col-2: $pink) { background-image: linear-gradient($deg, $col-1, $col-2); }

And on text as well wherever we needed (most often as for :hover and :focus):

@mixin gradient-text() { background: linear-gradient(to right, $orange, $pink); -webkit-background-clip: text; -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent; }

We also needed the gradient to be applied to fills and strokes in SVG, so I plopped that into the document to use wherever it was needed.

<svg width="0" height="0" class="visually-hidden"> <defs> <linearGradient id="orange-to-pink" x1="0" x2="0" y1="1" y2="0"> <stop offset="0%" stop-color="#DA1B60" /> <stop offset="100%" stop-color="#ff8a00" /> </linearGradient> </defs> </svg>

Fixed header

There is something about headers that always bring out more complexity than you might expect. I recently went through this with the new CodePen header/sidebar and it as complicated for this site. Part of what complicated this one was:

It has its own set of unique breakpoints. The header is pretty full, so the breakpoints are pretty specific and unique to it.

We wanted a fixed-position (but minified) header that showed up as you scroll down.

When you're logged in, there is a WordPress admin bar also fixed to the top of the page. I wanted to accommodate for that.

At one point, it was getting pretty messy and I wound up deleting all the CSS for the entire thing and re-wrote it, taking all the states into consideration, and writing media queries that used logic to clearly specify styles in each of those states.

The idea of a not-always-fixed-position header is interesting in and of itself. It means that:

You need to determine when to apply the fixed position

You need to make sure the shift from not-fixed to fixed (and back) doesn't cause layout shifting

I was dead nervous about attaching an onscroll listener and doing math and such to determine when to do the switch. I'm sure it can be done responsibly, but I haven't had great luck with that. Instead, I placed a tiny one-pixel element to the screen and attached an IntersectionObserver to it and reacted to that. That gave me the power to adjust where that is in CSS, which was a nice little touch.

Here's the very basics of that code:

See the Pen Fixed Header with IntersectionObserver by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Mixup

One very cool feature of this design is the Mixup area on the homepage. It was one of Kylie's ideas to show and remind people of the variety and depth of content that is here on CSS-Tricks.

The line that goes through it needs to depend on the height of the HTML content in each of those boxes. The boxes are set on a CSS grid, but they can and should still expand as needed for titles and such. Rather than try to SVG this somehow, the line is essentially stitched together though border and border-radius on individual boxes. To make it line up, I occasionally had to nudge them around with transform.

There was some z-index involved too. It was fun making mistakes along the way:

Cards

I'm kinda in love with native scroll snapping. The cards kinda have a fun animation on desktop, revealing the entire card on hover/focus, and then on mobile you can see the whole card, but are easy to thumb through:

Thanks, Amelia!

The design called for these curved line separators:

I have a small degree of confidence with the SVG path syntax, so I took the first crack at it. I was able to design it in a way that it could draw that line OK and keep the stroke at the desired width, but it didn't scale quite right.

See the Pen Lighted Path by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

I brought in SVG expert Amelia Bellamy-Royds to help me get it right. Feel free to inspect the site to see how it was done. It involves masking and nested SVGs and rectangles and transforms and all sorts of fun stuff. Amelia actually created four variations of the code and carefully noted all the pros and cons of each one. Ultimately, we went with this:

See the Pen Lighted Path by Amelia Bellamy-Royds (@AmeliaBR) on CodePen.

Another thing Amelia helped with was the "circle of text" design element. Kylie had these instances mocked out and I thought they were so cool and I definitely wanted to pull it off. There is a really elaborate way to do it by splitting the characters in to spans and transforming them, but that's a bit messy compared to SVG's <textPath>. I knew I wanted to go the SVG route, but perhaps abstract it away into a reusable component so that it wasn't a heaping pile of code every time I want to use one.

It occurred to me that a web component might be the best way to go here because I can kind of invent the API myself. What I wanted a circle-of-text component to do:

Pass in the text to set on the circle

Declare the radius of the circle

Rotate the circle so I can start the text at any point along the circle

That makes perfect sense as a web component:

<circle-text r="3em" rotate="-90deg"> CSS is super fun & cool & I like CSS!!! </circle-text>

My expertise with web components is limited, so I reached out to Amelia again who is great both with web components and SVG—a perfect match! This is what she was able to do, which I easily integrated easily into this design.

Thanks, Ana!

Another design thing that Kylie cooked up that I was a bit perplexed by was this line:

I thought maybe SVG again, but I really wanted to nestle regular HTML content in there nicely. I was hoping to pull it over with borders or something CSS-y. I reached out to Ana Tudor who is fantastic at tricky design situations and solving them with native browser tech. Ana was able to whip up a good solution here using multiple gradient backgrounds in the main area and a border for the top right bit that flies off.

See the Pen nav by Ana Tudor (@thebabydino) on CodePen.

Thanks, Zach!

Fonts are a unique part of the loading experience of websites in that their presence (or lack of), how they appear, and how they change all play major roles in the perceived performance of the page.

I've had the good fortune of being able to chat with Zach Leatherman about font loading before, but I still don't feel entirely comfortable with what the best practices are in any given situation. For this design of CSS-Tricks, I made the call to use the system font stack for most of the body copy. That has the major benefit of being instantly available to render and aesthetically seems to work well on a technical site, not to mention generally pairing well with Rubik, our header font.

But we still needed to deal with Rubik. There will be an upcoming article from Zach going into this in more details, but the gist is:

Create a minimal subsetted version of Rubik that handles the majority of usage

<link rel="preload" ... > it

Use it with @font-face using font-display

Load a more robust version in an async second stage

Nice job everyone that worked on the @css relaunch!

Look at those web fonts showing up on that 2.09s Fast 3G first render 🎉

(full disclosure I helped a wee bit with the font loading here 😇) pic.twitter.com/Ih7zJhelQQ

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) January 1, 2019

Some areas of the site are somewhat deprecated

The Forums is such a complicated area of the site to design and maintain, what I've done is just loaded the default bbPress styling for them, instead of trying to override things or start from scratch. I think that'll be the best route going forward.

There is a Gallery section of this site, but I'm not even linking to it anymore as we didn't really keep it up to date very well nor did it get used much. The URL's still work though. Maybe it can make a return someday, but for now, I'm enjoying the reduction of some technical and content debt.

Tech stack

It's somewhat boring. It's about the same thing I've done forever. It's a stock install of WordPress with a custom theme, a dozen or so plugins, and a bit of custom-coded functionality, like having the images powered by Cloudinary. It's running on a custom Media Temple-built box so it can have PHP 7 and MySQL 5.6, plus a firewall that also acts as a CDN. It's nice to have a pretty snappy foundation, so it's on me as a front-end dev to keep it that way.

I used SVG for the icons, Sass for the styling, and Babel to write jQuery-based functionality in ES6. I wrote up a Gulp file to do all that processing and run the local BrowserSync dev server. Local WordPress via Local by Flywheel.

I'm actually pretty happy with the stack as it felt quick and productive to me. But I admit, part of me wishes I dug a little harder into new tech, like building webpack-based processing or trying to go all-in on a server-rendered and React-powered headless WordPress via GraphQL kinda thing. That likely would have tripled the dev time for questionable benefits. I would have just done it because it would have been fun and possibly open some interesting future-doors.

My last regret is that I wish I had spun up a real pattern library system from the start. I think I did OK in breaking things up into reusable parts, but the site isn't truly componentized. As I approached the finish line, I started to see how this could have gone a bit smoother for me should I have worked with true components that accepted data and had variations and such. Native PHP isn't great for that, so it would have forced me into some kind of templating system, and I probably wouldn't have regretted it. If I stay in PHP next time, maybe I'd use something like Timber and Twig for all the components, and then Fractal for the pattern library since it supports Twig. I kind of dig the way Timber abstracts the data stuff from the views.

I hadn't heard of this app until now, but check out Project Wallace:

Project Wallace is a project aimed at gaining insights in your CSS over a longer period of time. It started a couple of years ago as a frustration with existing CSS analyzers that only do a one-time only analysis. As time went by, more and more features were added and now Wallace is place to go for developers who want to know if their complexicity has increased or for a designer who wants to know if all the correct colors and fonts are being used.

Bart Veneman set it up to watch CSS-Tricks, and you can see a before/after comparison and charts over time. Bart blogged about the numbers for us as well. Thanks Bart!

There are more interesting stats in that blog post.

CodePen embeds

The true usefulness of CodePen Embed Themes came out here. The whole point of an embed theme is that you can use them to match the design of where the Pens will be embedded, and if you need to change that design, you can change them all in one fell swoop. There are probably thousands of embedded Pens on this site, and they all got updated at once with one theme change.

There are a few special things that I've done with CodePen embeds on this site:

The are resizable from the bottom right corner. Used jQuery. Like this.

They have a placeholder height. When you embed a Pen, you can choose how tall you want it to be. That's how tall the <iframe> will come in as. But I've adjust it so that the <p> that is there before the iframe comes in will be that same height, so there is no reflow jank.

I regex'd that sucker myself like this:

function codepen_reflow_fix($content) { $content = preg_replace('/data-height=(\'|")(\d*)(\'|")/', 'data-height="$2" style="height: $2px;"', $content); $content = preg_replace('/data-theme-id="\d*"/', 'data-theme-id="1"', $content); return $content; } add_filter('the_content', 'codepen_reflow_fix', 10);

We're gonna bring that feature to CodePen itself real soon. Notice in that RegEx above I'm also forcing the theme id. That way, all embedded Pens definitely have the correct theme, even if we forget.

Achievement unlocked: The custom scrollbar is the new feature that everyone either loves or hates

If there has been one constant in every CSS-Tricks design, it's that there's at least one feature people either love or hate. This time, I'm happy to announce it's the custom scrollbar. In a sense, it's for myself. I manually use scrollbars quite a bit and it feels both fun and highly usable to grab onto this big beefy chunk of pink love.

It's also a little inspired by VS Code, which features a pretty beefy scrollbar itself:

There are general usability considerations about custom scrollbars for sure, but I don't feel like they've been breached too heavily here, if at all. I've heard some "don't mess with my browsers UI" feedback, which I sorta get, but does that mean we shouldn't style any form controls, or even use CSS at all? (LOL.) And don't scrollbars come from the system, not the browser?

Anyway, I'm not faking them or anything. I'm just using ::-webkit-scrollbar and friends. There is official scrollbar styling stuff on the way, per the CSS specs. I didn't use any of that stuff/ I think I'll wait for at least one browser to support it.

We have plenty of bug fixing and polishing to do still on this design. If you've emailed or tweeted or communicated with us in some way about it, I've probably seen it and have been log it all to make sure it's all addressed the best we can. Plus stay tuned for some fun new features!

If you have thoughts, free to leave comments here if you like, use our contact form, email at team@css-tricks.com, or chat it up in our new Spectrum community.

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