#TransRightsAreHumanRights, Vaccines, My Dog, Working on My Site and Creating Animated Images
Hope you had a great week! Where I am it's Independence Day 🇿🇼 and things are starting to get chilly 🥶. Not like the Midwest I lived in, but still. This week, I'll say trans rights, talk about my dog, COVID vaccine, a cool video I watched, the work I did on my site and a post I'm working on.
Trans Rights Are Human Rights
Against my better judgement, I've been peeking at American news. From that, I'm really worried about the lives of trans people. Seemingly out of nowhere, there are numerous bills that seem to try to drive trans women out of civic life with invasive, draconian laws.
I won't go into a lot of detail on this, but I'm really disheartened at the level of ignorance and vitriol leveled against such a small population. Scary thing is, I'm worried this will grow further and further. Not just in America and TERF Islandthe UK, but around the world.
Though my country (Zimbabwe) isn't the most accepting of the LGBT+, those issues aren't at the forefront for now, but I'm worried such a vitriol will come here as well and people will be hurt because of it. For now, the courts are willing to acknowledge trans rights, but that might not last in the future.
Biggest of all, I'm worried it will spread beyond trans people to LGBTQ+ as a whole and even other groups. The whole poem of not speaking up until they came for me comes to mind. One thing fueling the trans panic is the notion that trans people are incredibly powerful, partaking in censorship of swatches of society—like how Nazis burnt books. Funny how the books the Nazis burnt is rarely brought up because if they were, you would find that they burnt books on trans research.
Discussing this is a big tangent from my newsletter, but I'm writing this to show my support for trans folk. I don't know what I can do to help them, so I'm leaving a link to a couple local LGBT+ rights groups: GALZ and HQ Collective.
Trans rights are human rights.
Personal News
This is out of place, but I'm not ready to put my personal website and blog online right now so here's some brief personal news.
I Got My First Dose of The COVID-19 Vaccine
I'll elaborate more once I get my second dose, but I'm happy to finally get one. It's not one of those fancy mRNA vaccines (far from it), but it'll do a good job slowing down the pandemic.
My Dog Is Back Home
In January, my dog got attacked by the other neighborhood dogs after it snuck out at night and it got badly hurt. We expected it to take three weeks to heal, but it took a whole 3 months. Issue was that it had a massive chest wound that was hard to heal since the way it was doing it would cause infections.
I was really worried about the bill since we had gone from a vet to the SPCA since we couldn't pay for stitches and now we racked up an estimated $500 from here. Fortunately, the vet agreed to $100. If you can, please donate to the SPCA. I hope to reach the point where I can give the remaining $400 the wrote off.
What I Worked On
This week, I worked on fixing up my site and how to create animated images with FFmpeg.
Refactoring My Site
I spent some time refactoring my site's SCSS to use the 7-1 pattern (hard to do with the new @use
rule) and adding some components. Honestly, I'm tired of constantly working on the same site over and over again, and I intend to focus more on writing and making project instead from now on. I'll work on the site here and then, but I don't expect it to be all finished up front like I used to.
Much A Do About GIFs
I planned to do a post on why you shouldn't use GIFs last week, but there were some issues with my methodology. I'm still working on it, but for now I've written Converting Videos To Animated Images and Other Video Formats with FFmpeg (Mostly).
Once this is done, I'll also have bonus content.
Things I've Seen
Not a whole lot, just a video on The Layers of the Web by Jeremy Keith (VIDEO: 42:47). In short, he explains why we should build the web in a layered approach, building off a solid base and using higher layers for experimentation.
I have more thoughts on this but I'll save them for the conference Keith spoke at (Web Stories Conference) since it has a lot of interesting talks.
What's Up Next Week?
I didn't accomplish any of my goals from last time, but this week I want to:
- add colors to my site,
- make a site extracting RSS feeds from YouTube,
- add data for some projects,
- make an image uploader demo,
- write the commissioned post,
- finish post on not using GIFs
- write on how to add alt text to videos.
866 Words Later...
Thanks for reading! Support my work if you can! Till next week.