My girlfriend's father John is an archtypal narcissist; everything is about him. He also tends to be racist, sexist and occasionally homophobic.

These are his stories.

John is in the hospital getting some diagnosis. I shit you not, this is an actual email after Sister #2 phoned him; and he's being sincere...

From: John
To: Sister #1, Sister #2
Subject: re: visit

Wow! Having a discussion about the Marxist concept of the superstructure with you, my daughter! What a hoot! To tell you the truth, I have often wondered if you and SISTER1 really know and really realize how goddamned smart I really am. I am DAMN smart, and since that's probably the primary way by which I identify myself, I like people to know it. No modesty here! One of the reasons I enjoyed getting a rather exhaustive neurological workover by a doctor here named REDACTED was that I thought I had met someone who might have a higher IQ than I do. She certainly was much more autistic than I am--not that I mean I'm autistic at all, but she was like a machine in her single-mindedness. I always enjoy meeting people that I think are more intelligent than I am, but they are few and far between.

Changelog

2023-10-03 – initial

Sometimes we get stuck in a bog. Everything seems impossible, insurmountable, too much. No motivation, no energy, why bother? where to start? The school of No More Zero Days simplifies things down to a single binary. Do one thing, no matter how trivial – make it a Not Zero Day – and you win. Because anything at all is better than nothing.

Many years ago this got posted to the sub-reddit /r/GetDisciplined by user /u/ryans01 in response to a user's post (since deleted) about having a tough couple of days and beating themselves up about it.

This shot to the front page, and even spawned memes, motivational posters, video anaglyphs, and a dedicated sub for disciples at [https://www.reddit.com/r/NonZeroDay/]

It has been perhaps one of the biggest crutches in my day to day life since then, and it has been a huge help to the ADHD neurospicy girlfriend.

TL;DR – No More Zero Days

The Rules:

1. No More Zero Days

Promise yourself that you will do one thing every day that takes you one step closer to your goal(s)

2. Be Grateful To The Three "You"s

Past Self: Thank your past self for the favours they did for you
Present Self: Do your future self a favour - they deserve it!
Future Self: Your absolute best friend, and a great person.

3. Forgive Yourself

It's okay to fuck up. Forgive your past self, and be a better friend for your future self.

4. Exercise and Books

Get your heart rate up and try to read when you can. Also the easiest way to avoid a Zero Day!

Since social media sites seem to be melting down faster than the glaciers these days, I thought I'd archive it here in case Reddit implodes. But all credit is due to [https://www.reddit.com/user/ryans01].

Changelog

2023-07-03 – initial

The anti-woke, anti-EDI Stop SOPs lost the election, but they're still up to their dickish ways.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the epic battle leading up to this year's quadrennial Law Society of Ontario bencher election. Every four years, all 57k lawyers and 10k paralegals in the province elect “benchers” to their governance board.

On one hand, you have the Bencher Good Governance Coalition which wants to do/keep doing “good” things like support and enforce a statement of principles, promote and support Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives and outreach programs to bring legal supports to marginalized communities. You know, to fight the legacy of the law profession is a bunch of straight old white dudes, where you can't be openly gay, trans, female, or not white.

On the other hand, you have the Stop SOP team. Anti-woke, anti-.. well.. everything. Who feels that EDI programs and adherence to a statement of principles (to not be racist, hateful, phobic dicks) is compelled speech... and it costs money they don't want to spend. And generally just like complaining about everything. If we were south of the border, they'd be Republicans. And their biggest supporter is Dickimus Prime himself, Jordan Peterson.

Well, I am pleased to say that the BGGC won. All 45 slots (20 from Toronto, 20 from outside, and five paralegals).

Like.. it wasn't even close. Here are the votes from the LSO's election results page, vs. the BGGC's slate of candidates (the Stop SOP slate has been removed from their dank website, almost as if they're embarrassed by their shellacking). The red lines are where the BGG slates end.

Now, since the election results, a few of the Stop SOPers have been promoted to fill vacancies in the benchers – one bencher became the new “Treasurer” (the LSO “president” if you will), and three were appointed to actual benches aka be judges.

One of the “promoted” Stop SOP dudes, Murray Klippenstein, is suing the LSO over that 2016 survey/report that was the genesis of the LSO's proposed Statement of Principles.. complaining amongst other things that:

1. respondent rate was low, at 6%
2. respondents were self-selected
3. didn't differentiate between lawyers and paralegals
4. the actual report was never released outside of the LSO committee on equality and diversity (who crafted the SOP)

Yeah – doesn't like the SOP, so let's attack the statistical validity of the report that suggested its necessity. But Murray needs to stay in his lane on this one.

1. any statistics wonk will tell you that 10% of your sampled population is the most practical up to a sample size of 1000; anything more than 1000 samples is overkill. 6% of 57,000 lawyers + 10,000 paralegals is – I know math for lawyers is hard, lemme see – 4,020. So way more than 1000 is required for statistical rigor.

2. So fucking what – if a subset of LSO members feel sexualized, racialized, discriminated, or marginalized, and a subset doesn't.... and if the former are the only ones who respond to a survey on EDI, does it matter if the latter does not? Of course not. The former is saying there's a problem; just because the latter isn't aware of a problem doesn't make the problem not exist. Ludicrous.

3. Again, so fucking what – does it matter if someone is a lawyer or a paralegal when they're being racialized, sexualized, discriminated against, or marginalized? Of course, it fucking doesn't.

4. This is the only one where Murray may have a point. But, usually when survey reports aren't openly distributed, there are good reasons. Personal testimonies or unique characterizations that might doxx individuals for one. Yeah, this can be sanitized, but that costs money, and Murray and the SSoP heads are already whining about how $wasteful$ the LSO is. Maybe he should join the EDI committee.

Oh no wait, he doesn't believe it's necessary to have an EDI committee.

Changelog

2023-07-03 – initial 2023-07-03 – bork link line 1

You like the style of my blog? It only took me all afternoon. I may have some work catch-up to do this weekend.

So one of the reasons I broke up with WordPress, other than it was heckaspensive to host a domain, and it was over featured, and I wanted to self-host, etc., etc. – was because I couldn't futz with the stylesheet for this blog without paying even more money. That's dumb.

I mean all I wanted was monospaced text for snips of code, is that too much to ask for?

#WriteFreely on the other hand, lets you muck with your #CSS directly. However, it's not quite as simple as it would seem. For one, the last time I futzed with Cascading Style Sheets, #webrings were still a thing and everyone still used #ICQ. CSS has come a long way and is a lot more powerful – at the same time a lot more complex.

Out of the box WriteFreely CSS customization

So drill into your Blog's customization menu either from your blog's landing/index page: or from your account's Blogs page: and scroll down until you see Custom CSS. Then, all you have to do is paste in your custom CSS, save and go check it out right?

Not quite. Throw in some basics like an h1 or a a:hover and you'll find it will work in some instances but not others.

What happens is, the custom CSS you paste in there has to compete with the site/WriteFreely's default stylesheet. THAT bad boy is linked over here. No, that's no mistake; and yes, it IS a big glob of CSS with no formatting or whitespace or comments – good luck reading that; that's the form its served up from WriteFreely's statics folder.

The reason that's a big glob is because it's rendered – during WriteFreely install – on the fly from some LESS scripts; LESS is a CSS pseudo language, and there's a LESS node.js tool that compiles them into CSS. So the source of the stylesheets are easier to maintain for the WF/Write.As developers, but makes it a bit thicker for us trying to twiddle with our blog styles.

CSS Specificity Sucks

The problem we bang up against is CSS Specificity – to whit, the more specific, or narrow in scope your style declaration is, the higher precedence it will have. For example, we could use this CSS

h1 {
 color: blue
}

but then have the HTML

<h1 style="color: pink">The heading yo</h1>

and the latter would win (in the CSS engine Battle For Supremacy) because its more specific.

So this is the same WriteFreely default stylesheet from above, but run through the nice CSS Formatter at cleancss.com. Look at all those very specific styles! For example, we could be trying to change the font-size and padding of every h1, but we'd get clobbered by

body#subpage #wrapper h1{
    font-size:2.5em;
    letter-spacing:-2px;
    padding:0 2rem 2rem;
}

.. that is any h1 tag in the HTML that is a descendant of a body tag (with an id=subpage) or any element with id=wrapper.

The helpful link – below the box where you paste your CSS – to the CSS customization page over at Write.As gives you a few hints of what you have to cover, but not much.

UGH. HTML. I still have that Dreamweaver 3 CD around somewhere..

What you have to do is delve into the HTML that WF spits out and see what's there. OR, you can use a tool (like I do) that lets you load the webpage and analyze all the CSS stylings. I use Skybound's Stylizer for Windows, it lets you click on page elements and see what style rules/declarations from where are affecting it, and you can tweak or suppress any declaration, then copy-paste your new styles into your new stylesheet.

There are two main pages we care about in our WF blog: the blog's index page – this is the landing page for that blog; and a “post” page for each WF post entry. Diving into the HTML for the index we see:

BODY#collection
 HEADER    <-- pinned posts, the byline from the Customize page
  H1 <blog title - link to this page>
SECTION#wrapper   <-- the list of individual post titles
 ARTICLE     <-- each one is wrapped in one of these
 H2 <article title>
 TIME <post date>
 DIV 
  <article content>

and on each blog post's individual page or direct URL

BODY#post
 HEADER
  H1 <link back to index page>
 ARTICLE

so you see, if you tweak the style for an element, say <p>, it will get clobbered if there is a more specific ruling for the same attributes for a <p> that shows under a <BODY id=post> or <BODY id=collection> tag.

So – either you make overriding style declarations for everything:

body#post,body#collection p {
    <CSS for p>
   }

but unless you're a CSS guru (I am NOT), WriteFreely's paste-your-CSS widget (which has a nice syntax checker) might complain about those tags already being defined which was a real hassle for me. Or you can use the allowed, but probably-not-the-best-way method, the !important directive.

h3 {
    color: #FFCC00 !important;
}

The !important directive tells the CSS engine yeah, I know a more specific style declaration may take precedence, but I really want THIS attribute in this declaration to take priority.

So the !important directive lets us pull a trump card and force our attribute declarations over the ones in the default stylesheet. But what about where we don't even want an attribute to be specified? Well, the sad news is you have to overwrite each attribute to their “null” or “default” state. For example, the default style for preformatted or pre tags is:

BODY#collection PRE, BODY#post PRE, BODY#subpage PRE
{
	max-width: 100%;
	margin: 0;
	background: #F8F8F8;
	border: 1px solid #CCC;
	padding: 0.375em 0.625em;
	font-size: 0.86em;
	-webkit-border-radius: .25em;
	-moz-border-radius: .25em;
	border-radius: 0.25em;
}

I didn't wan't the rounded border, the padding or any of that stuff, but I had to overwrite all the attributes:

pre {
    
    border: 1px solid #FFCC00 !important;
    padding: 10px !important;
    line-height: 1 !important;
    max-width: 100% !important;
	margin: 0 !important;
	background:#222222 !important;
	font-size: smaller !important;
	-webkit-border-radius: 0 !important;
	-moz-border-radius: 0 !important;
	border-radius: 0 !important;
}

Not a huge deal; it's just an annoyance is all. Depending on what type of attribute, the “null” or “default” value could be 0 (for most dimensions, thickness, pixels, %s) “none” or “auto”.

In any case, here's the final stylesheet for this blog – Not super awesome (and not documented yet) but it covers all of the Markdown styles that WriteFreely supports, that I cover over in my WriteFreely Markdown Cheat Sheet.

If you are a Master In The Way Of Exploding Stylesheet and can point out how I'm pretty stupid and there was a totally easier – or more elegant from a legit CSS cascading sheet way to do this, I would be totally grateful for your wisdom.

References

• [https://guides.write.as/customizing/#custom-css] <– WF customizing guide
• [https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.php] <– CSS selectors: tags, ids, classes, attributes etc.
• [https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_specificity.asp] <– specificity
• [https://www.cleancss.com/css-beautify/] <– Dan's Tools CSS Formatter
• [https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/tree/develop/less] <– WriteFreely stylesheet LESS source

Changelog

• 2023-06-23 – initial revision

is the whole post mono? thats dumb.

Heading 1 (must include space)

heading 2

heading 3

italics

bold text

• bullet 1
• bullet 2
  • sub bullet 2
• bullet 3

1. list1
   1. sublist 1
2. list2
3. restartnumber

Sample Link to somewhere

quoted text l1 quoted text l2

this is code in backticks

this is gated multiline
code that should all be 
left alone even if it includes <div class="blah">formatting</div>

If you live in #Ontario #Canada and aren't a #lawyer you probably are not aware of the monumental battle going on right now in the province's legal circles. But you should be.

The Law Society of Ontario, #LSO, is the regulatory body for all lawyers and paralegals in the province. All of them: 57k lawyers, 10k paralegals. Uniquely, its one of the few provincial regulatory agencies with no government representation (why? because how can you litigate against the gov. if you're professionally regulated by it).

So they are entirely self-governing. And for the past few weeks they have been conducting their every-4-year LSO Bencher election. i.e. 20 lawyers from Toronto, 20 from outside and 5 paralegals who set the executive direction of the LSO. These are the benchers. Last day of voting is Friday.

What makes THIS bencher election so critical is that there are two cliques formed in LSO members. The BGGC or Bencher Good Governance Coalition... and the StopSOP or “Full Stop”. Or as I call them, the Good Guys (they even have Good in their title) and the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dickhole Lawyer Brigade, respectively.

Law is still a white old boys club

In 2016, following a report on LSO members, “Law Society of Upper Canada Challenges Faced by Racialized Licensees Working Group Final Report” (link courtesy Ontario Bar Association), the LSO discovered (confirmed, really) that female, racialized and LGBT+ members were still facing systemic bias and disadvantage in the Ontario legal profession:

The report revealed, after extensive consultations, that “notwithstanding their increase in representation, racialized lawyers face challenges in the practice of law.” In the report, racialized legal professionals described being categorized as “unskilled employees, interpreters, social workers, students or clients.” Some professionals reported being excluded from client meetings or from working on certain cases on the basis of their personal characteristics. Some expressed concern that the dominant culture of law firms felt alienating from a racialized perspective. At one extreme, some respondents “were associated with terrorism” on the basis of their countries of origin. Notably, forty percent of racialized licensees considered their ethnic or racial identity a barrier to entering the legal profession, compared with only three percent of non-racialized licensees.

Vegan Lawyer GF has told me countless stories about white, male, usually older lawyers that make me want to start punching faces. The legal profession in Ontario, all of Canada, is still very much a old straight white dudes club. And ethnicity, gender and orientation bias is very real. LGBT+ lawyer friends of hers who aren’t already open, typically will never even talk about it at work and pretend to be straight.

What kind of profession is that to work in?

So one of the recommendations of the report was to create and adhere members to a new Statement of Principles. Something like:

As a licensee of the Law Society of Upper Canada, I stand by the following principles:

A recognition that the Law Society is committed to Inclusive legal workplaces in Ontario, a reduction of barriers created by racism, unconscious bias and discrimination and better representation of Indigenous and racialized licensees in the legal professions in all legal workplaces and at all levels of seniority;

My special responsibility as a member of the legal profession to protect the dignity of all individuals, and to respect human rights laws in force in Ontario;

A commitment to  advance reconciliation, acknowledging that we are collectively responsible to support improved relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Ontario and Canada; and,

An acknowledgement of my obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally and in my behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.

You know. “I promise not to be a racist, sexist, (hateful)phobic dickhole”. RSHD for short.

Makes total sense. As a professional engineer I take a vow not to make or build things that, or through negligence, hurt people. Doctors and nurses take a vow not to hurt people.

But I like being a racist dickhead.

Well. The racist, sexist, hateful dickhead lawyers were having non of that. And their excuse was the old standby: telling us that we have to say this obligation out loud or in writing is compelled speech. The same bullshit excuse Jordan Asshat Peterson used when whining about having to use student’s prefered pronouns, or when the Ontario College of Pyschologists says he should probably not say hateful things about transgendered people.

And no its not compelled speech. You don’t have to say it. But neither is your continued membership in this association a Charter right. So if the the association you voluntarily maintain membership in says “yeah we should all do this” and you don’t wanna, well they’re right to kick you out.

Unfortunately it turns out there were enough anti-woke RSHD StopSOP lawyers elected to the LSO bench in 2019 that after many debates and votes, they repealed the SOP requirement.

Instead, they said LSO members are expected to state their obligation to “respect the requirements of the human rights laws in force in Ontario” every year in their annual reporting to the LSO (its a thing Ontario LSO members have to do every year to keep their license).

Problem is, that’s copy/paste (actually its checking a box on a webform). Expected... but not required to. If the need to make an explicit statement of adherence to a Standard of Practice isn’t codified in your bylaws or rules of professional conduct its not enforceable is it?

You can’t bring a complaint against your boss for making offensive sexist comments to you. “Ahah! I SAID i adhered to the SOP but if you observe carefully I did not actually write that part down check the box in my LSO report, so I’m free to a sexist dickhead. Lol.”

How the hell did THAT come to pass, all the StopSOP idiots being elected benchers in 2019, you ask? VLGF says same reason Trump got elected President. These chuckleheads were so outlandishly racist, sexist, homophobic dickheads, noone thought they would actually win. So there wasn’t an organized campaign against them. And they won. Whups.

The StopSOP eats it this year

So, if you look at the BGGC website, one of the things you notice is that you have to go to their Vision page before there’s any mention of the EDI thing. And even then, its not explicit they’re going to bring back the Statement of Principals and its mandatory adherence. But their whole vision is “we strive to be better lawyers, better people”. Meanwhile, the StopSOP idiots are all anti-Woke, anti-SOP, and anti... well everything really. “We hate everything” Sound familiar?

Its a battle between “we want to be racist, sexist hateful dickheads” vs. “we would like NOT to be that.” Its as simple as that.

Lawyer Chris Horkins (https://twitter.com/chorkins) has been doing the good work and is digging into each one of the StopSOP bencher candidates (look how many are white dudes!).

These people are blatant assholes:

More vile anti-Semitism from @FullStopTeam – this time from @JChiummiento, who shared tweets comparing COVID vaccine mandates and quarantine hotels to "nazism" and "concentration camps"... more proof that Joe and FullStop are unfit to serve at Convocation. Vote @BGG_Coalition! pic.twitter.com/HixgdTJaQq

— Chris Horkins 🇺🇦 (@chorkins) April 19, 2023

Seems to be a pattern of anti-Semitism from @FullStopTeam – here’s @JeanDesgranges calling Zelensky a “Nazi” and comparing Saskatchewan’s promotion of vaccines to “Geobbles”. @bnaibrithcanada may wish to denounce this rhetoric from those who aspire to lead @LawSocietyLSO pic.twitter.com/dF23GuoByx

— Chris Horkins 🇺🇦 (@chorkins) April 19, 2023

Chris is worth a follow (if you can stand Twitter these days), but here are a few of the good StopSOP bencher breakdowns:

1. Kara Johnston
2. Stéphane Sérafin
3. Lisa Bildy (radical anti-trans
4. Geoff Pollack (defended that BBQAnon whacko, lied about experience)
5. Duncan J Brown
   

.. and his breakdown of their campaign video.

Voting results aren’t made public until voting closes, but the indications so far would indicate that the BGG Coalition is doing pretty well. They certainly have the endorsements from other Canadian legal associations:

Criminal Lawyers’ Association (CLA) Canadian Defence Lawyers (CDL) Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) Association des juristes d'expression française de l'Ontario (AJEFO) Association of Community Legal Clinics of Ontario (ACLCO) Black Female Lawyers’ Network (BFLN) Canadian Association of Black Lawyers (CABL) Canadian Hispanic Bar Association (CHBA) Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association (CMLA) Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers (Ontario) (FACL Ontario) Filipino Canadian Lawyers' Network Group of Racialized (Ontario) Women Litigators (GROWL) Huron Law Association ITLNCA NetworkS Mental Health Legal Committee (MHLC) National GC Network Korean Canadian Lawyers Association  Roundtable of Legal Diversity Associations (RODA) Society of United Professionals (Legal Aid Ontario local) South Asian Bar Association (SABA) South West Region Women's Law Association (SWRWLA) Women General Counsel Canada Women’s Law Association of Ontario (WLAO) Young Women in Law (YWL) Ontario Trial Lawyers’ Association The Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers Thats... like all of them.

Meanwhile, StopSOP has just two of note. You guessed it, Jordan Asshat Peterson:

The @BGG_Coalition couldn't have asked for a better endorsement than this. pic.twitter.com/TKefMHpkPQ

— Chris Horkins 🇺🇦 (@chorkins) April 20, 2023

The other is Conrad Black. lol.

The LSO Bencher isn’t getting much press, which is a shame. Except in Frank magazine (sorry, I lifted the paywalled article).

So if you’re not a lawyer or paralegal in Ontario, there’s not much you can do. But if you KNOW an Ontario lawyer or paralegal, remind them to go vote ok? Cause otherwise our province’s law society will be run for another 4 years by racist, sexist, hateful-phobic dickheads and I dunno about you but I don’t want that.

Spoiler: the BGG won this year

Update HERE – the Good Governance Coalition filled every. single. spot.

Changelog

2023-04-26 – initial 2023-06-29 – update with results.