I also hope there’s some sort of middle ground, which is that it’s an interesting premise, currently infeasible, and could continue on in a different form.
If anyone’s squirming with anticipation, here’s the idea. It’s called Your Town. Your Town is an alternate reality game, wherein players act as policymakers in a fictional version of their hometown, and by passing the laws that they believe are best, the game makes them feel the effects of their policies.
Some examples
Of course all the data supporting the effects of these policies would be researched with care. I have - and would have - no particular political agenda. My premise is, people are emotional in their political beliefs, and… that’s bad. Politics, in my rampantly idealistic opinion, should be based in reasonable conclusions about how to organize society. If you were, then, to present people with the “actual” real-world implications of their political beliefs (enacted because they are playing policymakers) that delta between belief and reality could close. Not by rational argument, but by emotional experience.
You might have already come to this conclusion: this idea is absurdly infeasible; the scholarly database alone about policies and their effects is the work of several lifetimes. The creative implementation of each effect through smart phones or various media is an engineering feat of a multi-million dollar startup. And all of that comes on top of a backdrop of the first question, can you map policies and their effects on the real world so cleanly? In so many situations, randomness, non-linear dynamics are far more meaningful to Why Things Happen than a given policy.
So I can’t think of any other option than to file this one away. I still feel there’s an interesting project to be undertaken in the realm of political belief, emotion, and gaming, but it’s not this one.
]]>So much of this CSS tool works the way I want a tool to work: I want to set a container element, like a div, and define generally how its nested elements should behave. Then, I want to, for each item, define CSS rules to describe specifically how it should act.
This is how front-end web developers think. We don’t think in terms of mathematical dryness like “margin: 5px 0 10px 0;”. We want to say something like, “ok all you list-items, start out pushed up against the right side of your container, and extend leftward as far as you can go.”
P.S. That would be ul { display: flex; justify-content: flex-end; }
It strikes me that the irony is, it took a few decades in order for the W3C to define how developers and designers have been thinking this whole time. It makes me wonder if it was a matter of browser sophistication, or it took that governing body a while to figure out how best to implement it.
The matter of exploring how a governing body of a technology or suite of software operates ought to be the subject of another post.
]]>The closest thing I have heard of, is writing. So here I am, blogging about what I know, and do not know, about programming and web development. In so doing, my hope is to write about my continuing discovery process of the things would like to learn. I’ll be describing what I think I know, and what I still don’t yet.
My suspicion is that some people will balk at the notion of admitting ignorance. It’s not done often in our culture; the trends towards self-branding ego stroking are too strong. Moreover, am I putting my weaknesses on display for the world to ruthlessly mock? Yes possibly. But here we are.
And here we go.
Some things about which I don’t know, but would like to know more, are as follows (in no particular order):
The things I know a little bit about, but would like to get much better at, are these:
These two lists could go on quite comedically, but I’ll stop there. The next post will likely be a little bit about Git.
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