Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Buddhist Vacuum Cleaners Falter Because They Lack Attachments

2023-Sep-08

We have quite a bit of templating changes for the folks at home checking up on the website. It’s all in the /about_me section if you care to look. I repurposed the styling of the unused sections of that CSS/JS package I’ve been cannibalizing into some dynamic graphic stuff. I’ve yet to get the JS stuff to work. All the subtle graphical changes in the browser are purely CSS. I’m thinking of adding a much more long-winded ‘about me’ page that teeters into the autobiographical. Or at least expounds upon my pre-tech career bio and how those ideas continue to influence me and my STEM pursuits.

There is also a footer now on most pages that points to my professional social media accounts. Adding it was seamless. I hope to refactor a lot of templates soon so that they’re easier to manage, with looking more ‘clean’ and uniform being a pleasing side effect from that.

On the book front, I made an effort to read a historical fiction novel about an American debutante socializing in 1940s Europe who becomes a valuable espionage effort for The Allies. The action dawdled in the twenty or so pages I ventured; with personal stuff about the protagonist rather than WW2 intrigue.

My attention strayed over into the historical non-fiction section of my library app where I found a book about the somewhat unpublicized dark(er) area of US history right after WW1. Apparently there was a forgotten hysteria at that time based on premises that still affect the general American populace, especially in the time since the polarizing effect of Trump’s demagoguery winning the 2016 presidential election because of a statistically dormant population- of what could be called ‘deplorables’- who haven’t voted for a president since Reagan in ‘84.

I remember being tantalized by this subject when the author appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I hope it delivers as well as the author did in that interview.