Lady @Lady@cat.family

@Satsuma @aschmitz yeah “being online" is arguably one even if “computers” more generally is not

the best computer people are not very online

@aschmitz leftism

@Satsuma no i have fixed my trauma, the problem is i have nowhere to go that isn’t full of traumatized or evil people unless i just, idk, find a better hobby??

help i have developed my identity around a hobby that only people who are either evil or traumatized do. now the only spaces i can go to talk about it are full of people who are either evil or traumatized. how do i fix this

today i opened my terminal and typed ‹ find . '!' '(' '(' -name '.?*' -o -name 'spec' ')' -a -prune ')' -a -name '*.rb' | xargs -E '' sed '/^ *\(#.*\)*$/d' | wc -l › and you’ll never guess why

sometimes you have to interact with a software you are NOT tech lead of and those be dire times

@SportsGoblin if Las Vegas doesn’t somehow sabotage it

@gaditb yeah a·i responds to the user in the first person which means i feel it would always be on the verge of slipping into those training weights if it misread its own context

a·i is worse at writing first person, right? it would have to be, right?

@gaditb (i understood your intention dw)

@gaditb well, the thing here is that text is linear. if you want to get into the tree-ness of the HTML tree, really, you have to be breaking up the linearity of the text. otherwise, text on the internet gives the illusion that you are looking at something no different than an RTF document (which is not tree-based) or a PDF document (which is not tree-based) or…

and maybe that is what web brutalism is, but i think that requires going a lot further than just styling some elements consistently with readers intuitions. you have to ask “what makes the materiality of the webpage different from that of a LaTeX document?” and bare that open. meaning, if a webpage looks not all that different from a PDF generated with LaTeX, it is probably not brutalist?

@gaditb from Wikipedia:

« Stylistically, brutalism is a strict, modernistic design language that has been said to be a reaction to the architecture of the 1940s, much of which was characterised by a retrospective nostalgia. Peter Smithson believed that the core of brutalism was a reverence for materials, expressed honestly, stating "Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of material", and "the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand." »

so i would argue that Web Brutalism, then, is (1) not driven by nostalgia for a bygone era but fully embracing modern technologies, tools, and design languages, but to its own ends, and (2) very interested in foregrounding the textiness (as a sequence of Unicode grapheme clusters encoded as bytes) of text, the screenness of the computer screen, the mousiness of the mouse, the linkiness of the link, in a way which does not make them seem like something they are not (i·e, rejecting skeuomorphism and attempts to replicate the experience of printed materials) but cherishes what they are (digital elements comprised of pixels and interacted with via the mediation of a browser)

@aschmitz @gaditb i think “no CSS selectors other than bare element selectors (perhaps with qualifiers like :hover)” is an interesting constraint i could get behind (altho i think it is also very possible to make websites which are definitely NOT brutalist within that constraint)

@gaditb well, i think it is an open question what the materials of a website are, but the practice of web design is a practice of typing characters into a terminal/text editor/IDE. so i think there is a fair argument that a brutalist design is one which foregrounds the typewritten nature of the characters.

perhaps the extreme end along this vein are those websites which use CSS to display their markup inline with their content, so a rendered title begins with <h1> and ends with </h1>. but then there is an open question whether tags are materials or embellishments. it is not as though “paint” is not a material, but brutalist architecture still used unpainted concrete. this is why i am calling the second option romanticism, because if you allow colour and styling so long as the underlying structure is apparent, i think you are still allowing many things brutalism eschewed.

maybe brutalist web design is a web of plaintext documents? gopher protocol? probably it has as much to do with document structure as technologies employed (after all, technologies are materials but design is what you do with them)—no menus, lots of links pages…

@gaditb i think people voting the second option are overromanticizing brutalism

i’m not sure it needs no JS though; i think minimal CSS is the trademark

brutalist buildings were functional, they were just “unstyled”