India.Arie – That Magic (Official Video)

Uncategorized, Videos

Download & stream “That Magic” : https://ift.tt/2Qvrq3X

Director: Maori Karmael Holmes
Director of Photography: Lendl Tellington & Rashid Zakat
Lead Talent: Lyriq Bent
Production Company: Karmalux
AD: Patrice Worthy
Production Designer: Diana Rice
Stylist: Sami Martin Sarmiento & Dapper Afrika
Makeup: Daryon Haylock
Editor: Aidan Un

Follow India.Arie:
Facebook: https://ift.tt/2Bjh3Wk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/indiaarie
Instagram: https://ift.tt/2QANLgA

via YouTube

Web Browser Ecology After Microsoft Ditches EdgeHTML for Blink

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

In re: https://css-tricks.com/the-ecological-impact-of-browser-diversity/

I think the issue of ecological diversity as you presented in your post is complicated by the issue of open- and closed-source web browser engines.

MacOS would not have existed in the first place if Apple had not acquired NeXT and its partially open-source, BSD-derived OS NeXTSTEP, nor would Safari have accomplished basic compliance with W3C specs if they had not used KHTML and other web utilities from the KDE project. Similarly, Android and Chrome would not have gotten anywhere near what they have become if they hadn’t used Linux and WebKit as a launching pad.

I know that you wrote this post months before Microsoft announced that they were ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium/Blink, but I don’t know whether to feel sorry or a sense of schadenfreude over this moment.

If Opera had open-sourced Presto or Microsoft had open-sourced EdgeHTML, Trident or even Tasman (for IE for Mac), maybe those platforms would have seen a longer future of investment from interested developers like Gecko and KHTML/WebKit/Blink all have. Maybe Microsoft would have had a better experience in developing Trident and not need to fork it into EdgeHTML after years of neglect. Maybe they would have had a better competitive fight against the monoculture which now trends in Google’s direction. I wish that they would had finally opened up their browser development to the open source community and continued their evolution.

But they’ve both cut themselves off from their own proprietary engines to use the popular open-source one that anybody can use. That makes sense for the bottom line and is good for extending Blink and Chromium into more hardware applications, but it’s shameless and sad that the open-source community will never get to see/build/extend/distribute Presto nor Trident/EdgeHTML into longer-lasting, more evolved engines; it’s even more shameless given how Microsoft spent so many years trying to defend IE from both Firefox and Chrome using unethical practices.

I also expect that MS will eventually fork Blink, just like Google forked it from WebKit and Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, since the open source ecosystem allows for this to happen in a way that would take place differently with closed-source regimes. But I think the dynamic open source developer community has been denied a massive opportunity to further the evolution and competition of browser engines with this forced exit of EdgeHTML into obscurity. 

A Need for Validation

Uncategorized

I’m pretty sure that my “crybaby” shading of South Georgia is going to be a liability of some sort someday.

But it’s not like I’m in the place to run for anything anytime soon.

What I’ve done this year was mostly a volunteer effort, a labor of love (and revenge) in the best year and with the best candidate(s) to do it, but in the worst area to do it in and against the worst bunch of opponents (and their base) to do it against and at the significant disadvantage of time and money to start doing it. But a labor of love that I don’t regret.

But throughout this campaign, a lingering feeling that both Valerie and I had was that, besides the Stacey Abrams campaign, we were not receiving the validation that we needed from outside of this campaign, at least not until the last minute.

I’ve felt validation from Valerie, Summer, Ellen and our campaign team in so many ways. I’ve felt validation from the Caffe Amici Dems, especially when they bought that birthday cake for me at the John Barrow event at the UU. I’ve felt validation from the campaign staff this year at the field office.

But outside of the $107.99/month that I get paid for maintaining the website (everything else I do for their PR is for free, I guess), I haven’t felt all that validated by the county committee for a long time.

In fact, except for Saundra, I feel like I’m intruding and making a mess of the post committee’s palaver, just as I have since 2014.

So why do I keep doing this?

Because 1) Local organizations here do a poor job of their own media/PR unless they hire good help, local Dems need all the help they can get in media/PR, and Laura and I can only do so much 2) I hate the current shape of this state, and I’ve felt like I’m obligated to try to improve it 3) I’ve felt like web design and content management is still relevant 4) I want to be paid for my work.

But at some point, I’ve got to give it up. I’ve got to delegate this to more people, train more people to eventually take over the website, media and PR for the county committee.

And, contrary to what I’ve felt, it’s apparent that web design is becoming a dead-end profession. And the tech sector increasingly disturbs me.

And the more I feel that my work goes without validation from this organization, the less invested I feel about the importance of public relations and media for this organization.

And the more that we lose, the less faith that I have in the Democratic Party of Georgia to ever fix this state’s stupid, aristocratic culture.

And the more I feel like this, the more radicalized, cynical, pessimistic and nasty I become.

But for as long as I stayed in this area, this was going to happen anyway, right?

Post-Reconstruction White Republicans in the South

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

Fannin, Pickens, Gilmer and Towns counties in Appalachian Georgia are Deep-red counties which I can respect. They’ve consistently voted for Republicans since the 1870s, and their ancestors, like East Tennesseeans, were more sympathetic to the Union. Fannin, in particular, was the ONLY county in the entire Deep South and West South Central states to not vote for FDR, only voting for Democrats William Jennings Bryan (1900) and Jimmy Carter (1976) since 1868.

Similarly, East Tennessee – the most mountainous and least plantation-friendly region of the state – contained the most solidly-Republican congressional districts – CD-01 and CD-02 – in the ex-Confederate South. They have always elected Republican representatives – and never elected a Democrat – to Congress since 1870. They also had a history of seeking separation from Tennessee over the issue of Confederate secession.

They are literally the only counties whose white people can say “I’m a Republican because my great-great-great-great grandpapa voted Republican, none of them were slaveowners, the Confederate bastards killed my 3rd cousin x-times removed for desertion or draft resistance, and we resisted their children’s kleptocratic Dixiecrat rule by holding the only Republican primaries in the whole state”.

They were likely racist, too (of course!), but perhaps not to the extent that the Dixiecrats in plantation-land were. Maybe they didn’t feel so much of an impulse that poor white people should vote with the rich white people for the same party to preserve the Deep South’s pecking order.

So they were OG Southern Republicans – Appalachian folk who resisted outside governance and monied aristocrats alike – who voted that way loooooong before the Second Reconstruction made the Democratic brand less popular among the Dixiecrats’ descendants and made it hip to vote GOP.