Front-end Developer. Digital hermit. Ersatz cartoonist. All-around average dad.
Evan Dorkin recently published an omnibus edition of Beasts of Burden — the Eisner award winning comic he wrote about a ragtag band of pets investigating the supernatural — and a decades-spanning collection of Milk & Cheese , Dork , and The Eltingville Club under the title Nerd Inferno: The Essential Evan Dorkin . All of this comes on the heels of younger fans on TikTok rediscovering the…
I had been using Aaron Parecki's indieauth dot com as my IndieAuth server, but hadn't been doing much of anything with it. When I recently tried to sign in to An IndieWeb Webring , I received an error indicating some cryptic problem with the issuer. I reached out to Marty McGuire on the IndieWeb chat, and he pointed me in the right direction, correctly surmising that it was a disconnect related to…
It's long past time I stop compartmentalizing my life and being anonymous in all directions. I'm a web developer, but I'm also an artist and a classicist. I've forgotten more about Greek verbs, metrics and prosody than some of my professors ever knew, and you know what? I'm happier as a dilettante than whatever they expected me to be in those days. I'm also an artist, and I'm going to stop waiting…
I'm not sure why this was saved, but one of the many lost sites I made over the years was one called the Omnivorous Iconoclast, which I think I hosted on my personal web space while an undergraduate at UMass way back at the turn of the century. For some reason I have this one post and a very short story saved in an old folder called "HTML Tests." Come to think of it, I likely grabbed those to use…
Intellegentiae Artificialis Osor Sum a.d. VII Kal. Sept. MMXXV Intellegentiae Artificialis osor sum, quod incivile habetur. At non curo, quoniam osor sum. Ut Intellegentiam Artificialem civiliter loquaris, infitiationes reprehensioni anteponis: nempe non ex omni parte adversor! fortasse post paucos annos, quando—! forsitan finibus mutatis, autem—! Mos est ut disputemus quando et quomodo usitandum.…
I took a break from Bertolt Brecht and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa for most of the week and read more Adrienne Rich and Ernest Hemingway, with an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin and a story China Mieville. Nov. 30 to Dec. 6 Sunday: Poem: Adrienne Rich, “In the North” (1963) Essay: John Berger, “I would softly tell my love” (2002) Story: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Writer’s Craft” (1924) Monday: Poem: Adrienne…
Fiction By Den McHenry ( March 15, 2012 ) A dog walked down the road. It could have been a thousand dogs on a thousand different roads. It made no difference. He didn't know how to feel about that. He sort of wanted it to matter, and wanted to wonder where the dog came from and where it was going. He wondered about that kind of stuff all the time. Where did that scrap of paper come from, getting…
I stuck with Mr. Bradbury's advice and continued reading a poem, an essay, and a short story every night. I mostly stuck with the bilingual edition of Selected Poems of Bertolt Brecht for the poetry, supplemented by Adrienne Rich. For essays, since I finished Why Look at Animals , I moved on to another Berger collection, Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible . For stories, I started mixing…
In an unlikely turn of events, I was doomscrolling through Instagram reels because I'm human and fragile like everyone else. I landed on a video of Ray Bradbury imploring screenwriting students to read one poem, one essay in any field, and one short story every night. So for the past week, I've done that, working through three books I'd started or half-started: Selected Poems , Bertolt Brecht (A…
Someone wondered on Mastodon about the fact that .getMonth() returns a zero-based number while no other Date method does, but this turned out not to be a fact. Most other methods do return a zero-based number, and there's a simple logic to it. The confusion really arises not from the fact that .getMonth() returns a zero-based number, but that .getDate() doesn't. It's natural to assume that…
Have you ever neglected your personal site for, oh, I don't know — nine months? And then when you take a look at it, you wonder why it's the way it is, and how you set it up, and what it says about you as a developer? Personal sites are like blinking neon signs that say, "Fraud here!" Or that's how it seems. This time I cloned my repo and and tried to deploy without any changes, and just couldn't…
I tend to fixate on little details and can't move on till I find the answer. The latest cause was trying to understand the meaning of the h-prefix in h-cards and other class names in microformats. The documentation has this to say about prefixing conventions: h-* for root class names (e.g. h-card) p-* for plain text properties (e.g. p-name) u-* for URL properties (e.g. u-photo) dt-* for date/time…
It occured to me after fiddling around with nonsense and making silly mistakes all day that the cleanest way to keep favicon files together and away from my main image folder would be to put them into their own directory and pass the contents of that directory to root. Whenever I decide to change my favicon, I can clear out the local directory and replace its contents with the new files, and won't…
Sometimes you start a new thing and fumble something silly and want to hide under a rock. But trying to hide under a rock would make you look even sillier, and soon you can laugh at your mistakes and take pride in learning from them. Sometimes you spend a quarter century noodling with the web and then, just like that, you go blank writing an at-rule you’ve written countless times before, like…
I've never wanted to push my kids into doing things, and especially not to do them the way that I do. I've always drawn, but I don't want to give my kids tutorials in how to draw 'the right way' or in my style. I want them to have fun, and to figure things out, and if they want to do something, to learn it organically. I think that if they develop skills in this way, they'll have a deeper, more…
I won't be so presumptuous as to say that this is information architecture without tears, for non-specialists, made-easy, and certainly not "for Dummies." (I've never liked that phrase, and don't think it's helpful.) This is more or less a simple model for myself to get closer to feeling comfortable with information architecture — an inroad to the discipline that doesn't pretend to say anything…
Not exactly, but who can resist writing a "considered harmful" article when you can get away with it? The real harm is that you can very easily conceal the semantics conveyed by font-weight depending on the font that's rendered, which is not always in your control. This all depends on how you define the base weight to which your relative values refer, and (1) whether that base weight is actually…
When I was a Latin teacher, I used to love coming up with mnemonic devices to help students remember novel or difficult things, like the order of the Roman kings, or the endings of verbs. But as I think about it, it's a technique I use for myself all the time. Example: I just came up with a simple mnemonic device to remember the falsy values in JavaScript. falsy values == N0 FUN N0: NaN 0 or -0 or…
The first key to really understanding relative URLs is to recognize that they refer to the current URL and do not reflect the actual folder structure on disk. The notation used is analogous to file navigation, but in this context you're not traversing the physical structure: the browser constructs the new URL from the current URL value using a simple but surprisingly robust set of symbolic…
Sometime in the 90s — between 1993 and 1995 — I was given something that changed my life in small but probably important ways. My aunt's boyfriend worked at a junkyard, and it was a good thing for the family, because we'd get car parts for free when we needed them. And we'd also get other things, like a banjo or an old autoharp, which I still have. So one day my aunt gave me a travel case for…
One thing I've finally learned is that whether you're running bash or zsh in your terminal, the file where you customize your instance ends with rc , which stands for "runcom," or "run commands," dating way back to 1965 in the early days of UNIX. .bashrc is the file that contains commands to be run when the bourne again shell (bash) starts up, and .zshrc has the commands to be run when the z shell…
I hadn't gotten around to reading Remy Sharp's command line book yet, so I bought his terminal training course when he put it on a flash sale. One of the new things he introduced me to there was changing my terminal's shell, and though he uses zsh (and gets to that next), he starts you with something I've never seen, but that's really cool: fish. First, let's get one thing squared away: what's a…
Back in 1992 I was a high school sophomore with a reputation as a cartoonist, drawing caricatures of teachers, bizarre little adventures featuring a certain odd friend as an anthropomorphic rat, stick figures making epically improbable dunks, or dragons and elves (though, strangely, I have never in my life played Dungeons and Dragons). One day in math class a kid named Dylan complemented a drawing…
Here's a new comic inspired by sketching with my son this past weekend.
Here's a rarity: something good that came out of Twitter. A while back somebody was tweeting about the best albums of their lifetime, one for each year they've been alive. I've been thinking about for probably a few months by now, and it's been a long series of tough choices, but it's also been rewarding and helped me to discover things I can't believe I ever lived without. For the year of my…
This popped up on Twitter a while back, and I realized I had to think about it a little bit. Then it got lost in drafts when I decided I'd rather write it up than get caught trying to craft a tweet like a nerd. The idea is that you list a favorite movie for each letter in your name, so here goes. Dark City (dir. Alex Proyas, 1998) Escape from New York (dir. John Carpenter, 1981) Night of the…
This is a brief list of certain types of conference attendees drawn from my very limited experience. It is, therefore, perfectly accurate and wholly unassailable in both its characterizations and its conclusions. That framework’s documentation isn’t here to stand up for itself. If I don’t speak up, who will? The Advocate The speaker is still in the early stages of the talk and gives a brief…
Baby, it’s cold outside, but we’ve got some excellent reading material for you. Photo credit: Matt Popovich We may never return to those halcyon days of listservs and forums that built communities and shared knowledge in the early days of the web, but newsletters are back in vogue. The best of them perform a great function in the new, massively multi-channel social web. They’re focused, curated by…
Not that kind of class struggle. I’m talking CSS classes, which — Whoa! What was that?! Wait a minute. Important message incoming. You need a second level heading, text in red, in 60 seconds or this bus will explode. What do you do, hotshot? WHAT DO YOU DO? Welp, it’s go time! So, if you’ve followed a Web tutorial or a popular framework I guess you go ahead and create a class called .red-text .…
While focusing on JavaScript to level up my web dev skills over the last several months, I’ve waged a silent war in my head over how everyone else seems to pronounce certain things. Well, here at last is my declaration, and I will countenance no disagreement and no appeals to sensible arguments or respected authorities. var rhymes with bear, not bar var bear = true, bar = false; tuts rhymes with…
When you're the hero of an action movie, you're going to find yourself killing — or at least subduing — people in increasingly novel ways. And you can't do that unless you find a clever way to punctuate it. So what should you say if you ever have to stab a bad guy in the throat with a paper clip? I'm glad you asked, because I've compiled a list. 7 Things to Say in an Action Movie when Offing a Guy…
When I was 13 my cousin I were walking along the county highway that stood in for a town center in our little suburb outside of Philly. From a McDonald's to a 7-11, to a bowling alley, it had it all. In the McDonald's parking lot we saw a woman cornered in a phone booth by a large, angry man. A small crowd of twenty-somethings sat comfortably nearby on parking bumpers as if they were watching…
Plateau By Den McHenry ( 2013 ) 'Won’t be long now.’ They sat on the bluff looking out over the town below and past the mountains in the distance. The old station wagon a few yards away had long since gone cold as they watched the sky through so many still hours. ‘Won’t be long now’ he said again, but they were running out of darkness, and if it wasn’t now then it wasn’t going to happen. Jim…
NOTE: This started as a series of quick notes for a friend who’s a writer. I quickly realized that he shouldn't be bothering himself with things like dictating panels to an artist, but wanted to get the thoughts out of my head and clarify them a bit for myself, so I kept writing. I was about to apologize for it, but fuck it. I t seems like a small thing, but it’s important to be able to read the…
F rom time to time I notice that I’m holding myself back, either because I’m afraid of fucking up or terrified of being noticed, and I start to talk to myself as if I’ve gotten over it and made all kinds of great shit, and now I’m on some podcast passing on the wisdom I’ve attained. That kind of thing repeats often enough because the little game in my head tricks a part of me into thinking that…