There hasn’t been one of these for a while, at least in the sense that no topic is off-topic. I’ll start…
FIRST SNOW! We got about five inches overnight. We were within ten days of the record for latest first measurable snow of the season.
GftNC ordered a buckwheat hull pillow, but I don’t recall that she ever said if it worked out well for her. I’ve used one for many years now and love mine, because I never wake up with a sore neck.
First snow…
The novel variations in winds around the pole are having consequences in lots of places. In California, we’ve had some unseasonably warm spells. But the serious issue is rain/snow. Lack of. Last winter we got enough to refill the reservoirs. But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
A proper Open Thread! Oh frabjous day!
Michael, I did get the pillow, and I can see why it works perfectly for you and many others. And it sometimes works well for me, but not always. I can’t really say why. I had to take a fair amount of the hulls out because it was too full and unwieldy to begin with, and since then I use it intermittently. In fact, I alternate between three pillows, changing when the pain starts coming back. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it was.
On other matters, unfortunately I was too late for the Black Friday Apple TV deal, but I will be keeping my eye on it. I may cancel my Netflix sub after I finally get round to watching The Ballad of Wallis Island, since I normally watch nothing on there from one month to the next, and if I do I’ll probably get Apple.
lj, is it your belief that ObWi would be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
I wish it were summer…
Would ObWi would be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
I realize that you weren’t asking me. But IMHO anything over 1 per day is way excessive. There might be special cases. But in general there really aren’t enough of us commenting here to make it necessary.
More threads aren’t needed.
What I mostly want is to be able to easily find if there are new comments, and read them.
So: too much stuff at the top of the page, requiring scrolling down a page or two, and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color, making it harder to tell if there are new comments beyond what was previously read.
Nit pickery! It’s all nit-pickery! Maybe I should demand a refund!
It’s about that time of year…
…and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color…
Visited vs unvisited link color changes are traditionally a browser preference setting. (Keeping track of it server side across logins and sessions and addresses is hard, and doing a lookup for every link included in every generated page is expensive.) In the current version of Firefox on Linux it’s buried in Edit/Settings/General/Contrast Control.
More threads aren’t needed.
What I mostly want is to be able to easily find if there are new comments, and read them.
This pretty much sums up my attitude. I think the number of threads we’ve been having can be a real distraction, and disrupts the easy flow of conversation we’ve tended to have in the past. Also, IMO, what’s in most of them can just as (or more) usefully go in Open Threads. And although historically I may possibly have been the worst at thread discipline, it’s become obvious that I am not alone.
In addition to Snarki’s nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it’s distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
Anyone else’s MMV on all of this, of course.
[W]ould [ObWi] be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
Please, don’t strive to be LGM. Four prolific front-pagers (Loomis*, Campos, Lemieux, and Farley), one not-so-prolific but usually more than once-a-week (Rofer), and some others less frequently. Enough comments that threading (and Disqus) is absolutely mandatory. Gods help them, there are even people commenting there who follow me.
I quit reading BJ because they wouldn’t rein in the overuse of Xitter links on the front page. Also, last time I looked, they have enough comments that they really ought to be threading.
* Loomis makes me exhausted. In addition to the political commentary, he does his “Erik visits an American grave” series (more than 2,000 posts), a monthly music post grading new albums and listing what he listened to, an irregular monthly post of his reading list, a weekly college football post during the season, and appears to read every comment that goes up. Plus teaching, book writing, etc.
In addition to Snarki’s nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it’s distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
I took the liberty of bumping up the number of comments per page.
At another site, I maintain a WordPress plugin that provides the most comment-centric view of a blog that I’ve ever seen. The guy who originally wrote it turned it over to that site to do with as they see fit when he abandoned it. Since that turned out to be “Mike keeps it running across new versions of WordPress and PHP”, my working assumption is that I am free to install it here. To reassure lj, it doesn’t interact with any other settings or plugins, just provides a different view of what’s in the database.
It seems to me that every thread on ObWi has been more or less open in the 17 years I’ve been hanging around. In fact, my general sense is that “open” threads tend to stay on a single topic more than others do. In that spirit, let me say this on the page-layout theme:
Showing 20 Recent Comments would be better than the current 12.
If paging the Comments is really necessary, I’d appreciate more comments per page, at least.
One trouble with too-frequent posts is that conversations in Comments sometimes fizzle out prematurely, as people move on to comment under the latest post.
Please excuse my nitpicking. Carry on.
–TP
But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
When I moved to Colorado 38 years ago, the two big snow months were November and March. I don’t do detailed statistical analyses of the history, but my perception is that has shifted to December and April. Maybe only two-three weeks rather than a full month. Spring rain also seems to be later: the foothills used to be much browner by July 4 than they have been in recent years. The monsoon is all over the place. I actually read technical papers about the North American Monsoon, as (a) it’s dependent on enough fine-grain details that the models aren’t reliable and (b) it’s an important part of how the climate actually changes in the Southwest. The best guesses so far seem to be that it will be slightly stronger and later than now.
Charles’s summer version of the picture is surprisingly accurate, less details that are concealed by the snow. The rock/bushes/edging is very much typical of the Front Range Colorado urban corridor; was the AI guessing, or did it have some location information? I wish I saw neighbors’ windows lit as much as in the holiday picture. The townhouses’ interiors are laid out so that the kitchen and living rooms are away from the front windows.
lj, is it your belief that ObWi would be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
I’m not sure about the enforced binary here and it ignores the underlying dynamics of this site and the sites mentioned. Both LGM and BJ have a stable of frontpagers, so it is not simply a question of more threads, it is more viewpoints. Also, both of those sites have istm a commentariat that is pretty US-centric. It’s a bit silly to compare because I think the numbers are so different, but I think the non-US commentators here provide a pretty good counter balance for discussions. With that in mind (and sounding selfish), I want to have enough posts that allow them in particular (as well as everyone in general) to give their viewpoints on things that interest me. That is balanced with a desire not to troll anyone, which I think is an easy thing to slip into.
As far as posting frequency, I feel like I need to post around 2-3 things a week, though it’s getting to term end and the weekend music post had me listen to a bunch of stuff and not get it out until (I hope) tomorrow. If that’s too many, I can certainly pull back, if people think there need to be more, it might be tough to pull off. This is because there is a ton of stuff to post about the US, but it’s getting to the point where it takes me to the point of physical disgust to write about some of the stuff that is happening.
I agree with Tony P’s point that all threads are generally open, (and I’ll try to get to his suggestions, thanks for those) and they are open because we generally don’t have people trying to distract or avoid questions by engaging in what-abouterry.
Anyway, that’s my current thoughts.
Oh, and my eye skipped over Michael Cain’s 2nd comment, no objections to the plugin or experimentation on the site.
lj: I think ObWi is infinitely preferable to LGM and BJ, so I definitely don’t think there should be more threads, and I also agree that the non-US commenters add interest (but then, to quote Mandy Rice-Davies, I would, wouldn’t I?). But I’ve always been far more interested in e.g. American politics etc than British, to the consternation of some of my friends, so the balance on ObWi seems excellent to me.
One trouble with too-frequent posts is that conversations in Comments sometimes fizzle out prematurely, as people move on to comment under the latest post.
This of Tony P’s is something I’ve noticed as well, so I guess I prefer fewer threads. The great thing about our open or open-ish ones, IMO, is that people introduce new subjects during them, which may or may not get talked about, and then people can circle back to prior subjects as they get around to catching up, or have time to think about them. There’s something about the less staccato rhythm of that which seems more relaxed to me, and more conducive to an atmosphere like friends hanging out together and talking about what interests them, and generally chewing the fat.
But the old ObWi was the site which formed my (first and only personal) experience of blogs, so I guess a lot of it is personal taste and familiarity.
The rock/bushes/edging is very much typical of the Front Range Colorado urban corridor; was the AI guessing, or did it have some location information?
It does use general and specific information from outside the images it processes. And it just flat-out guesses a lot.
I gave it a Monet painting to interpret. The result was startling. I thought there was no possible way it could create the result just from the image of the painting I gave it.
I asked for and got an explanation. Here’s the interpretation and explanation.
Monet’s Japanese bridge.
Open thread –
I live in MA, where we definitely have winter, but I live pretty near the ocean, which has a mind of it’s own as far as seasonal cycles of warm and cold go.
Net/net, we get less snow than places even as close as 10 miles away.
And that’s the way I like it.
To me, snow means I have to drag my sorry behind out there in the wet and cold with a shovel before I can go anywhere. It means half the parking spaces are not available again until April or May.
In short, it’s a PITA.
Basically, I’m over the romance of snow.
My wife tells me it’s good for the plants – helps insulate them from a hard freeze while they are dormant. So i’ll put up with it.
But not gracefully.
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/altering-link-appearance-throughout-the-site/
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
I visited the site cleek pointed to. Just for the record, the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier. I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user. As I’ve said in other places, “If there’s some aspect of your page’s styling that is so critical the user must not be allowed to change it you ought to be using PDF.”
the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier.
it recommends altering the ‘visited’ pseudo-class (one colon, not two as with a pseudo-element)
a:visited {color: purple !important; text-decoration: underline !important;}I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user.
“make it easy for the user to modify the DOM” is a requirement that no front-end developer will ever encounter.
On other websites, “clicked links” have a color change, with the same browser. So perhaps there’s a super-sekrit browser setting for “change those colors NO MATTER WHAT the server wants”, but I haven’t found it yet.
But then again, I still haven’t found the “click this button on the browser to make this webserver crash and burn”, so maybe it’s my own fault.