the soapbox

This is how you make your country great: #BienvenueAuCanada pic.twitter.com/rUhrIXiFcR — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2017 For that matter, replace “country” with any word that represents a community. Because the way you make any kind of community better is with love, not hate. Fighting hate with hate only creates more hate. The way you […]

I’m reading an article in December’s WIRED (look at that, 2017 Goals ? ) about the three days in a row last summer where there were 3 fatal shootings in a span of 72 hours, each of them livestreamed via social media. During the protests following the first two, police approached the protesters in riot gear. […]

I’m not one for making resolutions as typically they end up being things that get forgotten by February. That said, 2016 was rough all around for most people. Personally, I had a pretty good year (new job, new house) but there were a lot of things I’d like to improve upon. Resolutions are not powerful […]

Mashable thought this was pretty funny: This seems like a pretty typical reading of an alien encounter and a live sketch where Ryan Gosling couldn’t keep it together. Hilarious, right? Except there’s one thing that is particularly disturbing. Why are we just okay with the narrative here? Taken at face value, we have three individuals […]

I tweeted out a post on Mashable this morning. I wanted to elaborate on why it’s important.

I’ll make a confession. I’m pretty anti-gun. I watched G.I. Joe and other violent TV shows as a kid and I’ve spent hours playing violent first person shooters, but I’ve never been in the military and guns in real life terrify me. I can honestly say that I have never touched a gun, never wanted […]

Trigger warning: This post talks a lot about the sexual assault that happens, frequently, on Game of Thrones. If these topics are personally distressing to you, please don’t read this post. TL:DR; What happens to Sansa is horrible no matter who it happens to. This is my first post ever about Game of Thrones and it’s […]

Hey Wizards of the Coast. I have a request. Let’s see more female creatures, yeah? Depictions of women in Magic are not entirely uncommon. It’s often enough that a deck will have at least a couple. And yet, when I think about creatures — specifically non-human creatures — almost always they are shown as masculine. […]

I’m going to throw an idea out there, and that is that the single, most important contribution that WordPress has made to open source software as a whole is documentation. When I first started using WordPress 8 or so years ago, that was the biggest difference between WordPress and other platforms. You could search for […]

I know a lot of people who couldn’t care less about the World Cup. Some of them watch other sports. Some avoid all sports. I’ve had a few direct conversations with a couple of them, but I decided to share why I care and why I’m watching. The thing is, I was right there, too. […]

I admit. I got sucked in. I read the glowing article in last month’s Wired about bitcoin. Thus far, I’ve been pretty oblivious. Future of currency, blah blah blah, whatever. The way it’s been built on open source software is interesting, though, the value is, of course, appealing, and that there are more PayPal-like services to […]

Tomorrow is Solstice — during which we won’t be using electricity (at least as much as possible) — and then we’re driving up to Washington. Before I go offline for the next couple days, I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge a historic event that happened today in Utah. A Federal Supreme Court Judge […]