Missives
One a month, to the Armchair Collective.
Keep track of what's happened since you were last here with the newsletters and the changelog.
January 31, 2023
Changelog
New article on how much of our knowledge seems to come from just the easiest measurements. Two examples close to my heart: brain science and therapy.
In other news, I added to the site a symbol I drew to explain the credenda to someone. I like it. Do you?
A bit more streamlining of the various projects and blurbs and whatnot in response to reader feedback. Should be easier to work out what’s on the site, and what it’s for.
Fixed some issues in the layout that have bothered me for a while. Also, all the images on the site are now way better. They look the same, but trust me, back here it’s way better.
January 12, 2023
Changelog
New article: everything is choice architecture.
I removed the parrot from the home page. It lasted two months. I’ll try something else another time.
All content titles now indicate what kind of content it is (e.g. article, marginalium, etc).
Marginalia will now be published at least daily, since it’s easier to actually publish them.
December 30, 2022
Changelog
New articles this month: abstractions as gods and obscuring banalities. A related set of ideas that extends states of mind, everything is ideology, and spirituality of mind to their natural conclusion. I’d prefer them to be more fleshed out, but a draft will do.
November 23, 2022
Changelog
New article: trans-opportunism is boring.
Over the past couple weeks:
- restyled analects
- finished up the site copy updates
- added a little parrot to the home page (we’ll see how long that lasts)
November 10, 2022
Changelog
New article: the colour of the inhuman world
Also, some considerable work on the articles pages. All my articles are markdown files, and lots of features went unparsed when they get rendered as HTML. But now, we have linkable headings, a table of contents, a properly working footnotes feature, and the ability to see the ideology and summary at the top of each page. Very pleasing.
October 13, 2022
Changelog
Now publishing the front-end changes—a little more dramatic. Most obvious would be a crude darkmode, with a toggle button at the bottom left. Lots here to be unhappy with, particularly the flicker on some page transitions. But it works well enough for viewing the site at night. Colourscheme changed slightly to better accommodate.
Also a scroll to top button at the bottom right—particularly useful when reading the articles!
Both are javascript only, unfortunately.
October 12, 2022
Changelog
More backend site updates published. No more mailto links (too many bots, now with a new improved pretty Ukrainian refugee women flavour). RSS feeds split by type so you don’t have to get everything. Donation links centralised. But the main thing was an auto-drafting of newsletters, pulling in new marginalia and articles (many tears shed—more, even, than extracting the marginalia from the database yesterday).
October 11, 2022
Changelog
Finally published some substantial site upgrades that have been going on in the background for some time. Here’s a summary:
Some streamlining of the site, largely in response to feedback. The old Anthologies page is replaced by the Analects in preparation for new kinds of content, and to be more coherently aligned to the manifesto. Missives (newsletters and changelog) are now combined wherever they appear, rather than split across javascript tabs (less javascript!). Articles tab on the home page now displays a random selection of two curated, and three latest articles. Home page about section provides more pointers around the site (and about what the site is doing). Projects updated.
Then, just for myself, extracted the Marginalia from the database and printed them as markdown files so I can add and edit them like the rest of the site content. The old way (entering via front end) was very time consuming and unpleasant, but the prospect of printing and messing with the database was extremely distressing. Yet through adversity we grow and here we are. Hopefully this will mean I actually curate the Marginalia properly now, and all my saved links will finally get published. We’ll see.
Upgraded to TailwindCSS 3.0 (from 1.0!). Some subsequent new visual features and code tidying that will probably please no one but me.
September 22, 2022