Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the…
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Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organisation was simple: To advocate for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story. From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate…
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The CSS property -webkit-text-stroke is a curious beastie. MDN gives a big scary warning saying "Non-standard: This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web." And yet, it works everywhere. All modern browsers support it. Except on Emoji. Here's how it work. -webkit-text-stroke:…
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Twitter can be amazing sometimes... I was reading about "L'Inconnue de la Seine". The face of a young woman found drowned in the river Seine in the 1800s. Her death mask was enormously popular - with copies of it appearing all over the world. Her smile was compared to the Mona Lisa and her face…
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This is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born. It tells of Vietnam, of the lasting impact of war, and of his family's struggle to forge a new…
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I've recently launched TweeView - a new way to visualise Twitter conversation threads in 2D and 3D. Sadly, I don't have a Virtual Reality system - feel free to buy me one! - but I have the next best thing. A web browser! Demo! Using the awesome power of A-Frame, here's a demo of how…
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I run lots of automated Twitter accounts - "bots" in common parlance. But there's no way for people to know that these are automated accounts. This leads to slightly odd situations where people try to have conversations with them. It sure looks like a shade of purple to me. 🤔 — 🇺🇸 Elections Matter 🇺🇸…
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Scratching my own itch. Here's how to make a "beta" ribbon in CSS. Place this HTML at the end of your document: <hr id="beta" aria-label="Warning this page is a beta."> (Doesn't have to be <hr> - use whatever makes sense in your design.) Then, add this CSS: #beta { float: left; top: 1.5em; left: -3em;…
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Magic is forbidden in Myrsina, along with various other abominations, such as girls doing maths. This is bad news for Gretel Mudd, who doesn’t perform magic, but does know a lot of maths. When the sinister masked Huntsmen accuse Gretel of witchcraft, she is forced to flee into the neighbouring Darkwood, where witches and monsters…
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Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just…
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