kfitz

Expedient

I mentioned yesterday that I'm doing a bunch of fun reading on this mini-vacation, but failed to note (unless you happen to follow my Bookwyrm self) that a key chunk of the reading I'm doing is catching up on the parts of Robin Sloan's universe that I've previously missed, in preparation for reading his latest, Moonbound. I got my pre-ordered copy the other day and can't wait to dive in.

Now, however, it's Sourdough. Which I'm thoroughly enjoying, and which has me longing to start a culture (or clone someone else's) and get started baking, even though we really don't eat a lot of bread at home.

As I was reading yesterday, though, I was taken by his use of the term "expedient," which comes up one time after another across the story of life in the tech-dominated Bay Area. Our heroine purchases stuff at "an expedient internet retailer" and "the expedient big-box home-supply store." She gets a ride from "the expedient internet car service" and gets information from "the expedient search engine." And more besides.

I was fairly sure I got what was meant here, but reading on the iPad as I am, I finally paused to check, and was gifted with the following definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary:

(of an action) convenient and practical although possibly improper or immoral.

Convenient, I had totally expected, with a little bit of "perhaps not the best choice, but what are you going to do" behind it. But that edge of "possibly improper or immoral" casts a whole new light not just on the term but on my own utterly unthinking uses of those services, a light I too often find it pretty inconvenient and impractical to consider.

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  1. By: Ryan P. Randall
    On this pageFlock of the WeekViewingUgly BettyStar Trek: DiscoveryStar Trek: Picard and Lower DecksBookWyrmSite Refinements of the WeekWeekly Whaaa…? Flock of the Week A family of wild turkeys has apparently taken up residence in our neighborhood. I’ve seen them strolling, scratching, and insect-buffeting their way through our yard twice, and also seen them a few streets away on an evening walk. Two adults, plus about seven offspring. I’m used to our many geese neighbors, but the turkeys were quite a surprise the first time I saw them! The cat has seemed even more surprised both times he’s seen them. Viewing Ugly Betty We somehow tore through all of Ugly Betty in the last few months. I never caught it during its initial airing, but at least to me, it certainly doesn’t seem as outdated as its age might suggest. Star Trek: Discovery We also made it through the first couple seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, the first of which was much more of a slog. Although I can definitely get why it’s a compelling idea to put a jumble of redemption narratives at the center of interlocking stories set in the Star Trek world, I honestly don’t comprehend what audience they had in mind for the repeated torture sequences involved in one of these storylines. We almost gave up on watching it—multiple times! Thankfully, the second season rediscovers excitement at the prospect of strange new worlds, and decides to be far less hostile to the viewer. Star Trek: Picard and Lower Decks As part of our Viewing Alpha, we’re watching all the series and movies in release order. At this point we’ve also watched the entire—and quite fun—first season of Picard and are partially through Lower Decks. They’re both much more pleasant than Discovery’s first season, and Lower Decks in particular is very rewarding considering the way we’re doing such an extended speed-run of everything. BookWyrm Seeing Kathleen Fitzpatrick mention BookWyrm on her blog provided just enough of a nudge for me to start trying it again. I went ahead and made lists from the books in my exam reading lists, and I’m hoping that the extra potential for interaction on BookWyrm will give me more inertia on both the lists and using that site in general. Of course, I’m still going to keep tracking my reading here, especially since I’ll be able to annotate articles and add my own extended notes and posts. If you’re on BookWyrm and want to connect, please do. If you’re not, why not give it a try? It’s a nice, gentle introduction to some of the core ideas of the “Fediverse” (the collectively-owned network of platforms like Mastodon). Site Refinements of the Week Did you know that, by default, Jekyll’s “related posts” are actually just the most recent posts, not posts more meaningfully related to the content of a post? Yeah, that’s bugged me for years. And I’ve finally done something about it. After a bit of searching, I found this post from Webjeda, which is written to work either by tag or by category. I use both here, so I’ve been slowly weaving the two together. Currently I prioritize tags as more meaningful than categories, so if a post has both tags and a category, its tags will determine what goes in the “related” section. (I do still want to work out what to display when a post has neither tags nor categories. Probably I’ll extend my current set of if statements into a larger set of if/elsif/else statements.) I also improved on the Webjeda code by using actual semantic elements. Why use a bunch of
    elements when you’re really making an unsorted list? Accept
      and
    • as your friends already, developers! Finally, I made the tags and categories functional links. And, since the list of tags could quickly become unruly, I hid those within a
      disclosure widget. I’ve thus far only ever used a single category at a time (and plan to continue that), so those always remain visible at the bottom of each related post’s excerpt rather than requiring extra interaction. As far as I can tell, this is all done accessibly. To reduce repeated content for screen readers—and to lower cognitive load for everyone—I also removed the author sidebar from most posts and pages. If you have any feedback on any of this, I’d appreciate hearing from you! Kudos Did you enjoy this? Let me know: Perhaps even leave a comment below?