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Less Meat
by JamesOne of my recent quests in life is to reduce the amount of meat that I consume. There isn't a single reason why, but rather it feels like a manifestation of slow culmination of thoughts and beliefs.
Whether it be literal less i.e. physically driving less or buying less junk or less in the sense of slow, the idea of less has always had an appeal to me. Better living with less. This thinking is counter to a lot of those I grew up around and was a constant source of conflict.
Why now? Why meat? I can't give can exact reason for why now, other than, why not now? Why meat? The answer to that is more complex.Each burger we consume comes with a at least of costs baked in: the direct cost of a life of the animal and environmental (cutting down forest to make room for cows, shipping animals across an ocean to get processed in a foreign country, just to be shipped back to their origin for sale).
The first is true no matter what. I'm mostly fine with that cost. It's the circle of life. I'm glad it's not me that has to do it. If it were, I'd probably be vegan. The second, the environmental costs, can be controlled, or at least managed by our consumption choices. Do we go for the cheap back of mince from the super center or do we go for the grass-fedΒ at Whole Foods?
The Power of Defaults
When I was in my teens I was massively overweight. I was well over 100kg and only 172cm. While 172cm hasn't changed, but I'm currently in the low 70's (still too high, but I digress). What made this possible wasn't exercise, but learning about the power of defaults. Β
If you can change your default, you can make substantial changes with significantly less effort. So if your goal is to lose weight, it's less work to reduce consumption rather than burn off excess calories consumed. By changing my default from burger, fries, and a coke to burger and a diet coke or just burger or maybe the chicken sandwich could shave off 600+ calories, which is at least an hours worth of running. And since it's just a default, if I really wanted fries or a coke that day, I could, but I had to make the decision.
Likewise, I've changed my defaults for meat. As beef as it has a higher CO2 footprint per kilogram than pork or chicken, I mostly stopped buying beef and replace it with pork or chicken. Default changed to not beef. The other default I've been working on default: no meat.
Changing DefaultsMy default breakfast has changed from toast with eggs, and maybe some sausage or bacon to toast with peanut butter and a banana. I can still eat an egg if I want, but I usually don't.
Lunch is harder to default for me, but I've been defaulting to less or no meat dishes. I'll have some pasta (either a butter-soy-garlic Japanese style pasta, or a Naprotian (sans bacon as is traditional)), taco rice (with beans instead of meat or just little meat), or onigiri with a Japanese style omelette (tamago-yaki).
Dinner still typically has some kind of meat or fish component, but it's no longer the main. It's used more like a spice. To replace the gap we've been increasing the variety of vegetables that we buy and eat in it's place.
I don't have a particular goal of becoming vegetarian or vegan (though many creatives I respect are e.g. Moby, Casey Neistat etc..), but I may end up there.
For now it's just a journey of exploring life with less meat. A life with less harm. A life with more veg. A life with different defaults. -
by JamesI shipped some nice quality of life improvements around webmentions with Tanzawa. There were a few issues with the design that didn't become apparent until I'd used it for a while, especially with older posts.
Pending webmentions was toggled closed if you had 4 or more webmentions pending moderation. My theory was that drafts and recent posts take priority over moderating, and a long list of webmentions would get in your way.
As each webmention was triggering a full-page reload, any time you a large queue of webmentions (in my case, anytime I check in somewhere), approving them all was slow and required too many clicks (click to open the webmention list, move the mouse, click to approve, wait for a full reload, move the mouse to open the list, repeat). Moreover a N+1 query snuck into the dashboard, so as webmentions increased the page load got slower, making the entire dance more frustrating.
Next I noticed that it was difficult to know which page the webmention was referencing. This usually isn't an issue as they are usually referencing the latest post. But sometimes I'd get one referencing older posts and it was a struggle to find it. Initial designs of webmentions had a permalink link but I removed it to keep things cleaner.
How'd I fix things?
First, I've added a link to the post back to the moderation view, but without an emoji and in my "help-text" font to reduce visual noise.Updated Webmention Design
Second, I fixed the N+1 query on the dashboard (and post detail). The dashboard is now 7 queries regardless (including session checking etc.). I might be able to make it 6, but it's good enough for now.
Third, the webmention moderation queue is opened by default, regardless of the number of webmentions pending moderation.
Lastly, webmentions moderation no longer triggers a full page-reload. Rather it just reloads the list of pending webmentions. And since it's always open, you don't even need to move your mouse to approve the next item in the queue, just click click click. I posted a video on twitter so you can see it in action. -
Response to
by JamesI'd donate to you for a theme decoupling. This is high on my list! :)
I appreciate the sentiment π. It's not money that's preventing me, it's time.
I've been thinking about how to handle theming for Tanzawa properly. It's a big task, but not impossible. There's 2 different ways to think of theming: 1) css only changes theme support, 2) complete theme support (i.e. colors and layout). The move from css only changes wouldn't be much less work than allowing full customization.
Roughly here's what I think would be required:- Extract all mentions of tailwind colors from templates/public (e.g. bg-negroni-700 ) and replace them with a common name β perhaps role based?
- Create a record / setting somewhere ( django-admin?) to track the active theme.
- Create a custom template loader (or other shim) that will prioritize rendering with the selected theme's public themes.
- Set Tanzawa to only include the css of the selected theme.
- Document how to make a custom theme.
Theming isn't my top priority, but it's not low either. If anyone is interested helping before I have a chance to get to it, I'm happy to answer questions / provide direction and so forth. Β -
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