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Okay, someone is looking for accessibility focused reading and it's been so long since I started from zero, I'm going to crowdsource it. My accessibility network, what work would you point a newer person to in 2026? (Please feel free to spread! I know the accessibility focused community isn't a monolith and would also love works outside my corner.)

Youtube has changed the closed captions. The text is _much darker_ against the. . . black background. The yellows even! Like, CC needs to be _maximum contrast_ who approved this?

Advice for community managers: Use the Olivia Hill rule. It's surprisingly easy to enforce: Fascists get really upset and will talk to you about why the rule is bad. You then ban them. That's it, that's all the work it takes!

You ever notice the sleight of hand where companies laying off, reducing hours, or literally stealing pay is expected and normal. But a speculator not getting the fully anticipated return is a "loss?"

So I had a bad thought, and went and tested it. Want the jquery node lookup syntax but want to use the browser APIs directly? `let $ = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document)` You won't get the mutation methods or the animations, but you do get: `$("#my-cool-thing")` which returns a NodeList. Do with this cursed code as you will. #javascript #vanilla

Last post: Okay, the tech is neat, but don't use anything that only works in Chrome. Their hit rate for standards is weakening every year.

Shout out to the time I discovered the project `panopticon` at a job. It literally was tracking every engineers commits. Both for the company and for open source, fun, personal projects. The readme made it clear management found it hilarious. But being questioned on why I had more commits in my off hours than at work has left a sour taste in my mouth since. (No shit, my weird creative coding projects with lots of experimentation ended up generating more commits than rebuilding systems that absolutely could not fail. Funny that.)

I am, yet again, poring over a decade of texts on the right way to do django auth and I would love for there to be a one stop shop that gives me the steps _in order_ with decision points. Instead of the "yes, django auth.User is bad, but you'll need to read my blog post (which also has a tiny sliver of the problem) for details." Anyone in my network have the "new django auth best practices" primer? I'm probably going to use django-allauth, but I have reasons to want things like non-sequential ids for users as well and want to know how to support that effectively.

Today a woman shared an experience with me of a man at a mixed gender event talked to her around three times, and then after the event came up to her inebriated and asked her out. (I understood this to be "last week" as its a weekly event.) She was feeling apprehensive about attending today. I've worn "community management" hats long enough that my very first piece of advice is simple: Tell the organizer. She thought that was "making too big a deal of the situation." So I'm going to be direct with folks here on fedi: Community management is hard. But the big secret is we're all human and we can't be everywhere all the time. This situation is exactly the kind of situation we need to know is happening. If someone makes you uncomfortable you need to feel empowered to talk to the organizers. Don't get me wrong, I've had spurious and racist reports in my time. But there's an entire class of community organization problem that you can only solve with lots of moderate reports over time. So please: Tell your organizer.

So money is. . . not good right now. I technically have a patreon but it is zero rewards and mostly aimed at funding ppb work. I'd much rather offer my skill set for folks who have more money than time for weird custom work. Various skill sets: * python generally * css editing/fixing * web design (see piper.thunstrom.dev and teahouse.cafe for previous work) * javascript/typescript (mostly with react) * tech writing * creative non-fiction (A girl can hope) * general editing of English work * structural editing of fiction (It's been a minute) Email me, my fedi handle at gmail.com for discussion. PNW US locale. #GetFediHired