Welcome to {{title}}
- - diff --git a/src/index.md b/src/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e3c9439 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +--- +layout: layout.njk +--- +# Hello, World! diff --git a/src/posts/2022-02-18-allowing-things-to-break.md b/src/posts/2022-02-18-allowing-things-to-break.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..8cefc92 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/posts/2022-02-18-allowing-things-to-break.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: Allowing Things to Break +--- +# Allowing Things to Break + +I have long toyed with the idea of creating a personal web page that I can use to express myself in a more liberal form than social media platforms allow. It makes sense for Twitter and others to be rigidly regulated, but for me it also takes a lot of the fun out of computing. It makes the universal machines much less universal, and less approachable to experimental exploration than they allow for. + +It is hard to predict what something ends up being when you are just at the start of it, but I have an idea of it that may show in a small thing I've been working on in the last few days. + +## The Situation We're In + +Where I live we're nearing the third year of significant restrictions of daily life for the purpose of countering the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. New virus strains have shown to be less harmful and calls for reopening get louder by the day. + +I am not an expert in virology and not in managing a pandemic on a national scale. I do know that common psychological mechanisms in facing crises make it hard to see the impact of what exactly happens while it is still happening. It makes it easier to muster up the courage to carry on. The prospect of returning to a life as it was before promises the comfort of habit, of life as we already know it. + +## Trying to Grasp + +I think it is worth trying to take a step back and make yourself aware of the sheer scale of the crisis. There is loss and mourning that is not captured in countless dashboards and the meticulous data-gathering of vaccination rates. I did the most stupidly simple thing I could imagine: Count out the numbers. Not aggregate them, or try to make sense of them, deduce some clever insights to show myself how well prepared I am to cope with it. Just count them out. + +I did this in the way I know how to do those things, by creating a small web page that is as self-contained as possible. You can find the result at https://arnes.space/pages/dimensions-of-covid + +It is a single HTML-file without any external resources like stylesheets, fonts or images. The data is regularly fetched from [https://covid-19.datasettes.com](https://covid-19.datasettes.com/covid/johns_hopkins_csse_daily_reports), which provides a simple way to query data which is gathered and provided by the [Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering](https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data). The data is saved in a local SQLite database and queried in a Lua-script, which draws one dot for each person that died globally. + +A large number without any context are often problematic and I am uncertain whether this works for anyone by me, but I found the effect that this naive approach had on me quite profound. A couple of observations that I made while creating this: + +- The numbers are crunched and the page is generated quicker than I care for. Rendering the document takes most of the time and broke on my mobile phone, which appeared to load the page endlessly. +- The resulting document has a size of roughly 15MB for _just text_. +- Scrolling breaks in multiple ways and makes navigating hard. It probably makes no sense to navigate at all in something which seems endless. +- The text disappears and reappears in Chromium-based browsers while trying to move around on the page. +- The patterns formed by the dots cause slight optical illusions. +- … + +I am quite fond that the artifact that resulted from this process has properties mirroring the crisis and its effects, and my felt disability of trying to come to terms with it in my day-to-day. It is also quite unlike many other websites in that it forces everything to slow down around it instead of speeding it up. + +## And now? + +The data will continue to be updated daily and I plan to keep the website up and running. I hope to continue to find time and for small experiments like these. It is probably not the last crisis. diff --git a/src/posts/posts.json b/src/posts/posts.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5c1b921 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/posts/posts.json @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +{"tags": "post"}