bad art is so critical for being a healthy human being. you gotta see some awful movies or read some dogshit books or play a horrendous video game every now and then. I'm not talking about "I like it despite its flaws" I mean fuckin bad. just to keep your tastes well-calibrated you know?

describing art as "degenerate" because it expresses sexuality is not just classic American Puritanism, it is full-on Nazi shit

It's also quietly racist (as Nazi stuff tends to be when it's not being loudly racist) to frame an archetypically Japanese genre as intrinsically icky. I know present-day Kotaku is even more of a rag than it was historically, but this is particularly disgusting.

it's such a brilliant and hilarious commitment to the bit in Players to write a TV script with approximately two "fuck"s per minute, air it on a streaming network without any censorship, and bleep every single curse anyway

I guess there isn't much about this up anywhere particularly easy to find, is there? Sure, let's get into the history.

It All Starts with Haml

So, before Sass (not SASS), there was Haml. Haml was created way back in the summer of 2006 by Hampton Lintorn-Catlin^[1], when Ruby on Rails had lit the web development world on fire and everyone was rushing to invent cool new ways of writing server-side-rendered web applications with light AJAX support. Rails used YAML for its configuration and Hampton liked the terseness and indentation, so (as he once described to me) he took a template written in ERB (the dominant templating language at the time) and just deleted redundant characters until he got something that felt more DRY. After some tweaks, the result looked essentially like modern Haml:

%section.container
  %h1= post.title
  %h2= post.subtitle
  .content
    = post.content

That fall, just as Haml was released to the public, I was in college taking a Software Design and Development course^[2] in which the instructor encouraged us to get involved with open source projects. Rails being the big thing at the time, I hung out on the mailing list^[3] looking for good opportunities to dip my toes in. When Haml got announced, it was a perfect opportunity: it was still small and easy to understand, and it had a number of clear tasks that needed doing. I started sending patches, and pretty quickly (at least in part by virtue of having a lot more free time between classes than Hampton did with a full-time job), I became the de facto lead developer.

Sass Emerges

Haml quickly becomes quite popular in the Rails world. Writing HTML closing tags by hand kinda sucks, it turns out, and we're not the last to try to solve this in various ways (although we may have been the first). Hampton is a big ideas guy, and he's always excited to find another big thing to dig into. By this point we're working together pretty closely, so at some point in late 2006 he messages me about his idea for "Haml for CSS", which he wants to call "Sass".

That was the original pitch Hampton sold to me: just like Haml was basically just a different syntax for HTML (or more accurately, for ERB, since it did include the ability to inject Ruby code), Sass was going to be just a different syntax for CSS. The first…

I cannot believe they got away with this

if I were in charge of UI design for a text editor, I'd add a context menu item that shows up when text is selected called "Make Poetry". it doesn't change the text at all but the act of selecting it recontextualizes the text for anyone watching so that in that moment it becomes, in a presentational sense, poetry

genuinely I think one of the best features of Death Stranding is that you can get likes from people and from NPCs and even from the little half-stillborn fetus you carry on your chest, and in this unbelievably systems-dense game there is absolutely no reward for it beyond the satisfaction of a job well done.

and then on top of that in case you were getting too invested in them the game has an entire class of enemies whose origin story is "they cared so much about getting likes for deliveries that it drove them insane"

on the one hand, the quotidian joys of being embodied—sun on my face, fresh air in my lungs, embracing a loved one, aching legs after a long walk—are among the things I consider most holy about being human. on the other hand, the embodied need for sleep and food are among my fiercest enemies. life is contradiction

This month's film is another lighthearted one that I suspect people may not have heard of. I ran across Jeffrey (1995) last year and I found it to be a charming and offbeat examination of the psychological fallout of AIDS. It's full of gleefully expressionistic directorial choices, and it's got Patrick Stewart playing an old gay interior decorator. It's a lot of fun!

• What: Jeffrey
• When: 11AM on Sunday the 25th of May
• Where: The Beacon in Columbia City, 4405 Rainier Ave S. It's about a 15 minute walk from the Columbia City station, and the 7, 9, and 50 stop right outside the door.
• RSVP: At this link! The theater seats 48, so we shouldn't run out of space, but please RSVP nevertheless!
• Price: If you can send $10 to @nweiz on Venmo to help keep these going, I'd appreciate it, but if you can't afford it please come anyway.

COVID precautions: Please wear a mask (N95 or better) and run an over-the-counter test day-of or the night before. If you can't afford one, Mask Bloc Seattle can probably hook you up. Outsider Comics in Fremont usually sells them at-cost as well. The theater will be selling concessions, but we ask that you eat them outdoors rather than during the film. The theater itself is not a masks-required space at other times, although we will be the first event of the day and I'll ask the person running the show to mask and test as well and I will be bringing a large portable air filter.

Hope to see you there!