Yes! #SaucerCountry is finally going to be completed!It’s about a presidential candidate who believes …

Yes! is finally going to be completed!

It’s about a presidential candidate who believes she’s been abducted by aliens, and it weaves in and out of every aspect of mythology you can think of.

They’re crowdfunding a complete collection, as well as a book of just the concluding chapter. It ran something like 3 story arcs at Vertigo starting in 2012, then IDW picked them up a few years later. It was cancelled halfway through the concluding arc.

The Completed Saucer Country! And New York Signing this Sunday!

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Responsive Email

I was going to put together a post complaining about #email #newsletters that still assume you’re reading on a desktop and send out layouts that rely on a wide screen size and end up with 2pt type on a #mobile phone – you know, where most people read their email these days.

Then I stumbled on this #usability article by Jakob Nielsen.

From 2012.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-email-newsletters/

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The funny thing is that #HTML is #responsive by default. In the very early days, it was *always* responsive except when you added preformatted text. Once you got a little more rendering capability (tables, images and image maps) you had people designing websites who were accustomed to fixed-size media, and the paradigm stuck.

Build for 800×600. Build for 1024×768. Hey, we have widescreen now. What do you mean the window isn’t always fullscreen?

And so on.

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Being able to apply relative sizes to everything, and being able to tweak the layout based on the logical screen size instead of physical pixels is an amazing improvement in the flexibility of anything formatted in HTML+CSS.

(And of course higher-definition displays, but a responsive layout can still make itself usable on some of those older screen sizes.)

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I agree with a lot of the comments about losing complexity, but I don’t have as much of a problem with…

A response to @matthewjmandel asking my thoughts on A Comparative Book / Movie Review of LES MISÉRABLES

It’s interesting. I agree with a lot of the comments about losing complexity, but I don’t have as much of a problem with the character changes (partly because I’m used to the stage version, where Gavroche is less political & the the Thenardiers are funny, but still dangerous)

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Eponine’s probably the biggest change that isn’t just a simplification, but I think her role in the story still works, even if the details have been changed.

I do have a problem with the finale, because it’s *not* Jean Valjean’s heaven by any stretch of the imagination. It works better on stage, where it’s more like a curtain call for all the characters who have died.

The main place I disagree with the post, though, is about the theme and title. Listening to @readlesmispod talking about how the word is perceived in French makes it clear that *all* of the main characters are “miserables” and Hugo is linking the sympathetic wretched like Valjean and Fantine with the clearly evil wretched like the Thenardiers because, as far as society is concerned, they’re the same. Society looks at Fantine and thinks she’s just as depraved as Thenardier.

And Hugo is arguing that they *all* deserve compassion, that they *all* should have a better life, that society should treat them *all* better, whether they turn to evil when they fall or not.

So the musical is less of a complete inversion of the theme and (once again) more of a simplification.

Fiction can’t *prove* a point about about reality, but it can make you *think*…

Something I wrote after my third time through #LesMiserables:

Fiction can’t *prove* a point about about reality, but it can make you *think* about it, and consider connections or perspectives that you might not have considered before. And that’s a very valuable thing.

https://hyperborea.org/les-mis/about/third-time-through/

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This is kind of hilarious. Conservation groups asked California to protect 4 species of bumblebees…

This is kind of hilarious

Conservation groups asked California to protect 4 species of bumblebees. The agriculture industry objected on the grounds that the state’s endangered species law doesn’t cover insects. But the state fish & game code, in trying to cover all its marine life bases, defines a fish as “wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, or amphibian.”

So technically, bumblebees as invertebrates are eligible for protection as fish.

#law #weird #nature

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/bumblebees-can-be-protected-as-fish-california-court-rules

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The state supreme court ruled in favor, because that’s technically what the law says, and pointed out that the legislature “is in a position to make whatever statutory amendments it may regard as necessary or useful” to resolve ambiguities

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Expanded slightly on my blog, along with a link to another interesting bee-related article I saw this week.

Wait, Bees are…Fish?

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Thanks, Trending Topics, for yet another example of a prominent conservative shouting about persecution when he discovers he’s subject to the same rules and economic consequences as everyone else. Like all the other comics canceled by the same conglomerate.

Thanks, Trending Topics, for yet another example of a prominent conservative shouting about persecution when he discovers he’s subject to the same rules and economic consequences as everyone else. Like all the other comics canceled by the same conglomerate.

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