& A Bonus Acoustic Version Of Bless Ur Heart Which Never Fails To Get Me To Cry When I Feel Like I Need

A tutorial for my 196 refugees still figuring everything out. (I ran out of rantsonas at the end)

My tattoo design

It represents wave particle duality which is a great metaphor for my gender: I am both a probabilistic wave and a discrete particle. I am constantly collapsing into a particle when I’m observed (you either know my position or my velocity but not both). When I’m not being observed I am a probabilistic wave of possibilities.

The two particles — one in the middle and another up and left from the center — represent why I continue to do anything, my reasons for existing:

The middle dot stands for understanding how the universe and everything in it fundamentally works — an aspiration that the fractal theory of everything helps me with.

The other stands for mutual unconditional love — especially the love I have toward my partner who is the first person I felt mutual unconditional love with.

I look forward to adding many more dots over my lifetime whenever I find a new achievable goal to strive toward. I hope eventually I will find both fixing the increase in societal inequality over time and fixing the increase in global warming achievable.

As of present both of those issues are far out of reach for me due to the immense inertia that both of them have and I don’t want to spend time fighting for one small shove against those boulders rolling down a mountain, a shove that might crush me in the process. I would rather figure out how to meaningfully change their paths for the better. Maybe that involves exploding the boulders. Maybe that involves flattening the hill. Maybe that involves adding a ramp to the hill so the boulders fly away, never to be seen again. Maybe that involves learning to be a Jedi so I can use the force on the boulders. I’m not sure what the solution will be but I know I’m not at the point where I can have a meaningful impact on either of them so instead for my well-being I would rather focus on issues that I do feel I can make a significant impact on today, in the hopes that eventually I will have enough wisdom and power to make a meaningful difference on those two big issues at hand.

the truth is, i do not think that it is useful nor helpful to treat rape and sexual abuse of any kind as singularly evil things that will damage and destroy victims forever and leaves them unworthy of life, and whose perpetrators are also singularly evil people who were born evil and need to be erased from society in order to get rid of rape existing at all. i do not think it is helpful to anybody including victims to tell them that rape and sexual abuse has damaged them permanently and that they have less worth as a human being for having been through that specific kind of abuse/assault. i do not think it is useful to treat sexual violence as completely different from other forms of violence, something that must remain taboo and that has no link to any other form of abuse and violence that might be perpetrated. it is especially not helpful when the very existence of transgender women is treated as sexual violence and a violation to protect cisgender women and children from. it is not helpful when victims of sexual violence are treated as damaged goods, when the sexual violence they've been through is either/both so taboo it cannot be spoken out loud, or something that marks them out as a potential perpetrator of said violence bc they have been forever broken by it.

Background decorative elements

I felt like the placement of your background images within the body tag to the top and bottom of your main content div is pretty intuitive overall. The only thing I could think of to improve the vines would be to make them pseudo elements (another YouTube video by Kevin Powell) of the body element so that way you don't have to have empty divs cluttering your html for them. Pseudo elements are useful for purely decorative elements because they're created purely out of CSS; no HTML required!

Now for color: below the fold bc hyperfixation go brrr

TLDR: Color contrast is hard; especially with the current color systems we have today (HSB/RGB) since the numeric incantations of popular color systems don't line up with how our eyes actually perceive color, especially when it comes to brightness. Google made a new color system (along with a tool based on that color system to generate color palettes) that lines up better with how humans perceive color but it still isn’t perfect. IMO using tools like palettte.app (with 3 t’s) and hand-selecting colors numbered by how light they are - more about that below - works best and gives projects more of a hand-made feel but Google's tool works well enough for making a quick and professional looking color palette.

Now for a very colorful rant:

Making CSS variables with the format

colorName-brightnessValue

makes it easier to meet contrast standards when coding up a website. I'll usually organize my colors to range from 0 to 1000 exclusive where 0 is black and 1000 is white. I usually use 100, 300, 500, 700, and 900 the most so I have those 5 shades of each main color ready to go whenever I start a new project. (I use the same 4 colors for all my projects so it's easy to copy and paste the colors from the last project into the new one!)

That way if I know my background is violet-100 and my text color is violet-700 that the text will be legible because of the difference in brightness values is 600 just based on the variable names alone. Generally a difference of at least 500 (assuming you go linearly in perceived brightness) is enough to get AAA contrast levels.

For an example, here are my css variables for zephiris.me:

Others do the numbering of the shades differently. Here's how tailwind does it:

Tailwind CSS color guide's section on making a custom color palette has links to some helpful tools on how to hand-pick several shades of a set of colors so that the brightnesses of the colors decrease with the numeric value in a way that actually lines up with people's perception of color.

On that same page, tailwind also has all those color palettes shown above free for you to steal use in your projects!

Google's Material 3 design framework has shades of every color go from 0 to 100 for brightness instead of my 0-1000 brightness or Tailwind's 0-1000 darkness.

Google also has a nice resource which will automatically generate a color palette for you (I like doing it manually with palettte.app [with 3 t's] but if you just need a quick and easy palette that meets contrast standards, Google’s resource works pretty well).

Google actually has a very interesting blog post on why it’s so hard to make accessible colors and get the right amount of contrast with current color systems like HSB/RGB etc.. To fix this, they created a new color system, HCT (Hue Chroma Tone), which helps solve that problem by having HCT's Tone value better match our human perception of brightness.

Wrangling Several Colors to Work Together

My main advice for overall UI design is to pick three colors: a primary color (for background colors), a secondary color (for card backgrounds/text colors), and a tertiary color (for any elements that should be interacted with like buttons and links). I made a site to try out various combinations of colors and share those palettes with others a while ago (apparently November of 2021, thanks GitHub!)

Recently Juxtopposed made a more professional version of what I made called realtimecolors.com along with an accompanying video. Her website also features a palette generator where you just enter in one color and it will generate a set of palettes off that one color!

Unfortunately neither mine nor Juxtopposed's websites support multiple shades of each key color, so to get those additional shades make sure to either use Google's generator or one of the tools mentioned by Tailwind once you have a general set of colors that you feel works well together.

Color Palette Inspiration

What works best for me is to pick colors based on environments which I enjoy to be surrounded by. I based my color palette for zephiris.me on:

the night sky's bluish-purple hue (maybe I wear rose-tinted glasses ok?)

greenish-blue seafoam from ocean waves

golden rays of sun filtering through pine trees

Lastly, I used the trans flag colors to describe my gender for obvious symbolic reasons - I also like being next to a particular shark :p

Conclusion

Meeting color contrast standards can get way easier by numbering your colors based on how light they are. There are plenty of ways to get a set of colors labeled by lightness:

using palettes already made from Tailwind

Have Google do some math wizardry to generate you a custom palette

Use tools like palettte.app to create your own set of colors to play with

Regardless of what option you choose, the overall added structure of numbering colors' brightnesses makes it dramatically easier to make incredibly legible, accessible, and colorful designs.

Colorful rant over!

i like your website! it looks very nice

especially the gradient colored text!! you used a separate font to make it more legible

whenever i try to do something like that, it always becomes really hard to read... maybe i should learn some basic web design?

my website looks like this and it took two days of fiddling with css

Thank you! The biggest thing with making text legible is making sure there is enough contrast between the text color and the background or make the text big enough that it’s legible even if there isn’t that much contrast. The best guide on color contrast that I know of is the Mozilla docs! If you scroll down to the solution part there it has many tools to check text contrast.

Since your website has a warm bright canvas background darker colors and gradients would work better and end up being more legible.

If you’re looking to learn more about web development and especially CSS I strongly recommend Kevin Powell on YouTube! His videos on flexbox and grid are very helpful in understanding those new browser features and making responsive websites (websites that look great on any screen size). For example, I used grid for the nickname table and for my projects so that on desktop those elements would be wider and shorter while on mobile they’d get narrower and taller.

I love your site too, especially the canvas theme with the green branch/orange leaves and the clever span box to show your favorite color complete with a title tag featuring the hex code!

To be clear my site took me at least 20 hours of fiddling and development to make. Feel free to look at the site code (and my commit history) on GitHub!

i stay silly :)

(why am i learning about fucking gluons)

A girl without her noise cancelling headphones is like an angel without its wings

The atmosphere is one giant chandelier, lit up every morning by the sun from the east, scattering the sun’s warmth across the earth. Even looking west on a morning, you can still feel the sun warming your face, thanks to the atmosphere.

Please?!!!

microdosing on estrogen by only consuming the blood of other transfems