Lady @Lady@cat.family

@alyssa @Satsuma have you watched Todo sobre mi madre

@RussSharek some info on font licensing in the united states [this is not legal advice. just background info]

1. US copyright law holds that you cannot copyright the alphabet. It is not possible to copyright the shape of letterforms. For printed material or images, every font is unencumbered from the standpoint of the viewer, because the shapes of letters are always in the public domain.

2. What is copyrightable in the US is the PROGRAMS used to generate text (which is to say, the font files). Even though the design of the letterforms cannot be copyrighted, the font code that is used to generate those letterforms can. This means that embedding fonts, including in a PDF, has stricter copyright concerns than rendering them to a flat image or printing them.

3. Font programs are typically licensed, not sold. That means that you can only do things with them that their license allows. This allows fonts to be a little more restrictive in allowed uses because you can potentially violate the license even if you are not violating copyright by redistributing the font.

4. When it comes to “open” fonts, virtually all of them use the SIL Open Font License. This license allows you to use the font for whatever you want and redistribute it freely. It lets you make changes to the font, but may require you to change the name of the font when you do so (if the font author requested it).

Any font on Google Fonts uses the SIL OFL as do many others here and there on the internet. If you want a font that is truly fully unencumbered and public domain, the options are pretty slim.

@inherentlee (a different approach to this which would be closer to your initial attempt, and so maybe more “obvious”, would be to use an SVG instead of a unicode character. that would not have the font problems i mentioned and should work in any environment. i just find SVGs to be kind of a pain to deal with personally, so usually resort to CSS hacks instead, even though they are a little wonkier)

@inherentlee or you could update it :) it is not a bad thing to learn in public

@inherentlee here is what i am getting

if it is confusing to you how this works, i recommend getting out a piece of paper and trying to render it by hand so that you understand what the computer is doing

@inherentlee i forgot a position: absolute on the ::before and ::after is the issue

@inherentlee why not use characters? because it depends on font support and users have a wide variety of fonts available on their computer. users might have font size or letter spacing variation as well, for accessibility or personal aesthetic reasons. you have hardcoded a border size of .095rem and a offset of -.34rem but these values only work on your machine. they do not necessarily work on other peoples. here is what your table of contents looks like on my computer

@inherentlee i wouldn¦t use box drawing characters for this; css is already very good at drawing boxes

in this case you need to draw two boxes, one shaped like an L which is half the height of a line, and one shaped like an I which extends for the entire list item (unless it is the last list item)

so

li{ Position: Relative; Padding-Inline-Start: 1EM }
li::before,li::after{ Display: Block; Box-Sizing: Border-Box; Inset-Block: 0 Auto; Inset-Inline: 0 Auto; Inline-Size: .75EM /* or whatever */; Border-Inline-Start: 1PX Solid }
li::before{ Block-Size: .5LH; Border-Block-End: 1PX Solid; Content: "" }
li:Not(:Last-Child)::after{ Block-Size: 100%; Content: "" }

[note: above code is untested, i just threw it together to demonstrate the idea, it may not entirely work]

the biggest lesson personally for me has been that the people who pour the most energy into hospitality are usually abusers. hospitality is a great way to build followings and social capital. and when i think of the people who had the biggest impact on early mastodon, many of them did eventually end up hurting a lot of people and crashing out and splitting on the platform. for you know, diagnosed personality disorder reasons. the ones that didn¦t, who were stable and goodhearted, were usually the targets. so you know. gotta figure out how to fix that

i think the most annoying piece of cognitive dissonance with the fediverse today is that there is no reason why it couldn¦t be good. when mastodon first launched it was an oasis in a sea of techbros and edgelords and outright nazis and there was one timeline and none of the good and useful features you take for granted today. but people still built a strong and resilient community, because they wanted to

you could do that now. you could make a server and be welcoming and hospitable and build a strong and resilient community, and be an oasis in a sea of techbros and edgelords and outright nazis, and if like five servers did that you would have roughly the same constellation that was the fediverse in its heyday that everyone misses. but nobody wants to, because it isn¦t new and interesting anymore. it is just work. the end

the fediverse sucks because all the hospitality workers burned out and never sought replacements, or were evil people to begin with, or stopped caring once all their friends were on the platform

did @coriander write this comic

if you ever wonder why millennials are all like this the answer is because we all read Frindle