holidays, more learning, new company

Posted on Friday, November 9th, 2012

I find it so hard to come up with titles. Well, elections over so NPR is now turning its talk to scary projections of the "fiscal cliff" and the way Republicans are re-examining their strategy and the "changing demographic." I heard someone on the radio say today something to the effect of: (paraphrase) the party has a way of talking that is very aggressive towards gays, women, minorities, poor, etc. and it's a habit, like smoking. The party was filled with too many cliches, talking points. And what they need to do is apply something akin to "the patch," and really stop that line of rhetoric. I heard that and thought to myself-- this analogy doesn't really describe the situation. The nicotine that a smoker inhales is an external poison that a user allows into his or her system, and the patch helps that person overcome the addiction to the foreign substance they've allowed to compromise their bodies. What the person on the radio is describing is a more inherent ugliness, I feel, that is present in the class of people he is referring to. They say these things, they spread this rhetoric, not because it's a drug that they're addicted to, but because it's a part of what they believe and it's a part of their perceptions of the world. When he says they need "the patch," what I'm really imagining is a mask. If the rhetoric changes to look and sound better to a broader collection of people, it's not because there is some cure taking effect-- it's because a mask is being created to mitigate the ugliness in the mindsets of these people who will continue to think of these groups of people as "less than." Anyway, that's my little political rant. I've been able, for the most part, to avoid the Facebook battlefield, but when I heard that on the radio this morning I knew I had to write something about it. In other news, just put together a design for The Migration Depot, which I plan to build out in Drupal. Apparently we are already raring to go, so a website needs to be up asap, so I opted for something simple in both the website and the logo. Also awesome: after last weekend's BADcamp, I played around with Panels and it is awesomeee. I already laid out the front page of Enableher using Mothership as a base theme and without writing a lick of CSS. I also heard about SCSS up the wazoo that weekend and if you're not using you're doing it wrong, so I installed it to see what "right" feels like. We shall see... Still haven't really found a good solution to switch up the Panel layout when on a mobile device-- I don't really like device/browser detection yet and still like media queries, so I'll continue to use CSS as my device detection for now. Wasn't that impressed with Mobile Tools but maybe I'm missing something. Just saw Wreck It Ralph, of which I had seen/heard nothing except this fairly nondescript poster that says nothing of the storyline: I just didn't know how awesome it really was going to be. Excellent storyline, and such an absolute pleasure to watch and reminisce haha. Alright bedtime.

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