What started optimistically as the Year of Health (in the eat healthy, exercise more sense) ended up turning into a bit of a Year of Health Hell with not one, but three new chronic conditions added to the list of ailments I’m probably going to be managing for the rest of my mortal days. Improving my personal wellbeing (and other ambitions) ended up falling to the wayside, focusing instead on maintaining what wellbeing I already had, both physically and mentally. 2025 probably could have been a better year, but there are a couple of highlights I’d like to focus on here. ## I got out a bit more My family and I did an awful lot of travel when I was a young 'un. Holidays in the UK or Ireland happened at least once a year, with some ocean (or globe) spanning journey happening every two to four years. > This has made for the funny fact that, despite living in Europe for about 97% of my life, I’d visited more countries outside of Europe than within it. Once out of the family home and into university, this naturally declined due to the logistics of living far away and being in a job that didn’t pay well enough to have enough for “savings” or “foreign holidays”. My ability to travel became even more limited when coming out as transgender. A mismatched passport is a red flag at border control and many will deny entry to trans individuals anyway. Wonton LGBT+ discrimination is very much alive and real. And for a long while, I didn’t really mind. I’d already gotten to experience dozens of times being abroad, more than many might have in their entire lives, and it was a point in my life where it might be more sensible to build up my domestic life a bit. I could lay off going away for a while. But in 2024, after eight years of never leaving British soil, that itch to go places started coming back again. In February, I went to Malmö for NordicFuzzCon, and I enjoyed Sweden so much that I went back again at the end of June—to Stockholm this time—to colonise the holiday of my fellow noodlethings, Finch and Tux. > Who are both _delightful_ , by the way. Domestically, I tried to get around a bit more than I might normally do as well. In addition to the usual ConFuzzled in May, I visited Cardiff more often than I have for years, attended the London e-Prix in July, went to gigs and stage shows, and made multiple day trips to London (not all for work this time!) Getting out and about a bit more is something I’d like to keep up, though I have no particular plans for 2026 other than heading to Glasgow for Scotiacon. It’s a city I only briefly visited a very, very long time ago now (like… over 15 years?) so it’d be neat to have more of a chance to check it out. My current big wish is to go interrailing around Europe one day, but for now, that remains a dream. > I’m obviously a masochist who wants to experience getting Deutsche Bahn’d for myself. ## I started learning Swedish So much did I enjoy my sojourns to Sweden that, along with a healthy dose of the dismal backslide of LGBT+ rights in the UK, I decided to take up trying to learn the Swedish language. There’s probably not a huge amount more to the why that wasn’t already mentioned in my initial blog post about it. Since then I’ve intentionally slowed down a little, Duolingo being a… less than stellar tutor, so I can prioritise recognition and revision rather than rote repetition. Jag lyssnar och skriver svenska okej men pratar är inte bra. (I wrote that entirely from memory so if it’s janky then… well, it’s janky.) I’m quite proud of having put myself out there and kept it up for nearly six months now, especially given how much I struggled with, and generally disliked, learning languages in my school days. I’d quite like to find a good alternative to Duolingo, but it’s something I want to keep up! > Is Babbel any good? Let me know! ## Wrapping up the Year of Health Just because I’ve not given a proper update on the Year of Health since April, I feel obliged to provide _some_ update on what has happened before the year is out. I was given a CPAP device for dealing with sleep apnea back in June. I didn’t, and still don’t, really get on with it—sleeping whilst wearing a mask is a bit claustrophobic and unpleasant—but the drastic improvement in sleep quality otherwise speaks for itself. Hypertension continues to run amok a little. It’s significantly lower than it was at the start of the year, when it was in the “you could literally have a stroke at any moment” territory and generally stable, but still higher than it should be despite an ever increasing mixture of prescriptions to try and control it. One side effect of these medications, and the only one that I seem to have fallen victim to, is muscle cramps. This has put a lid on doing any activity, be it walking, carrying heavy shopping, or even washing the dishes, for more than about 15 minutes without getting aches. I’m going to be starting a third medication in the new year to try and bring my blood pressure down further, and I’m still on the waiting list for the hypertension clinic. On the transition front, I’ve had half of my NHS funded laser and speech therapy appointments. Both have been reasonably effective so far! I’m still on a fairly restricted supply of HRT due to hypertension, which is sad, but at least progress is happening elsewhere. ## A musical interlude I don’t know if there was something special about 2025, but I found myself _really enjoying_ a lot of music that was released this year. Before we finish, he’s a few bops from the last 12 months that have jammed themselves in my brainhole. “I Don’t Wanna Talk” is one of the singles from Daði Freyr’s upcoming album, due to be released early next year. Like so much of Daði’s music, it takes a cosy subject, in this case being so comfortable around a loved one that you feel no need to even speak, and sets it to upbeat, electronic-funk-y music in a way that just makes me feel happy. “Ice Water” is the first track on _Lonely Magic_ , the second album by _Steven Universe_ creator (and major _Adventure Time_ contributor) Rebecca Sugar. A powerfully upbeat, autobiographical track about being in love and pursuing creative passion. It’s a wonderful companion to “Hill to Die On” from later in the album, which speaks about the cost of success in those creative endeavours. Sugar’s album ends on “This is a Love Song”, an unrestrained, angry tune about escaping an unhealthy relationship. In that same vein, another song I’ve really vibed with this year is “talking shit” by Montagne, from the album _it’s hard to be a fish_. Montagne represented Australia in Eurovision in 2021, and was due to do so in the aborted 2020 contest, but her entries in Eurovision does not speak to her ability. Those tracks were neutered compared to a newly independent Montagne. Her music is delightfully eccentric, brash and personal in all the ways that I love music to be. This year, Pulp released _More_ , their first studio album in 24 years. It’s very like Pulp, which is to say that I like it on occasion, but it’s not the kind of thing I want to have all of the time. > This is a lie. I love pulp in my OJ. I cannot have enough pulp. I want it thicker than magma. Regardless, the lead single from _More_ , “Spike Island”, is… nice. It too is very Pulp, being about lead singer Cocker’s discomfort with fame, but what set this track apart in my mind is the music video. It’s AI generated. But it uses it to actively criticise the output of AI generation, showing how it takes beautiful photography (originally taken in 1995), hallucinates badly, and bastardises the original work in its attempt to create something new. The video ends with a pointed message about how creation is important, as is the process behind it, and that’s what I find beautiful about it. ## 2026 is the Year of… The Year of Health could very well have continued into 2026, but frankly, it’s not something I really _want_ to keep thinking about, much less keep as my yearly theme. Instead, 2026’s theme has already been a few months in the making. 2026 is the **Year of Service**. My current job and life situation is fairly stable right now. I make enough money to pay for what I need to and have some spare for luxuries. I have enough free time that I can stop and rest a few times a year before I need to start running to survive again. My health could be better, but the bits that need improvement are being managed and mitigated against. At the same time, a lot of people—a lot of people I know, even—cannot say the same. The job market sucks, the housing market sucks, the tech industry sucks, the political climate sucks, the _actual_ climate sucks. A lot of people are struggling and it’s hard to not feel guilty that my still meagre life is so comfortable by comparison. Over the last year, I’ve given about £1,850 to various charities, non-profits, mutual aid organisations, and independent creators. That number’s probably going to go up in 2026. At the same time, I’m looking for more volunteering opportunities. I’ve recently been brought onto the IT crew for ConFuzzled (I’m gonna help make things accessible!) in addition to running an event at the convention’s next outing, and I’m taking over as the primary steward of the Encyclopedia Robotica wiki, which I should really work on. Basically, next year, I want my focus to be on trying to help others a bit more. Hopefully that plan doesn’t end up backfiring too.

First up, read the last blog post if you haven’t already. Done that? Good. As you might expect, all semblances of a “diet plan” or an “exercise routine” go out the window when you end up as a hospital inpatient. Only a couple of days of feeling well recovered did I then jet off to Malmö in Sweden for NFC—NordicFuzzCon—for which I (justifiably, I think) permitted myself to let loose from following anything too strictly. And literally the day after returning from Malmö, I came down with food poisoning that took up the rest of the month. So February was a fucking disaster. Let’s just roll the tape. ## Diet Probably followed it decently at the start of the month, but was naturally derailed after that. Hospital portions almost certainly constituted a smaller calorie intake than normal, so maybe that’s something? Same too, being too food poisoned to actually eat anything substantial for four days, although malnourishment is hardly a healthy diet plan. I didn’t particularly follow the diet at all while at NFC, barring one day of eating fairly light and healthily simply because I was so tired of fast food and convenience foods. Hopefully the rest was offset by the increased physical activity. ## Exercise Yeah, not much of that outside of NFC either. Furry conventions are, perhaps, surprisingly active times. You practically spend all day on your feet and walking around places. My Apple Watch rings loved it. ## Mental health Increasingly hot garbage. NFC was excellent, of course, but everything before and after it was miserable. The hospital stay had some novelty to it, derived from having never actually been in an ambulance or stayed overnight in a hospital before, but the novelty certainly wears thin after the first few days. All of the medical investigations and proddings are still ongoing, and the sheer amount of stuff being looked at now is sorta depressing in itself. This shit does not please the robot or Olive in the slightest. We know there’s no benefit in just being aimlessly miserable about it all, but it sucks and it feels inescapable right now. ## Medical stuff Following the hospital stay and prognosis of asthma (am I using that word right?), I’ve since been given some new routines to follow. Namely, an inhaler I have to use twice a day and a lung capacity test I need to do three times a day. I was briefly prescribed medication to tackle my high blood pressure, but this has already been paused on the doctor’s orders due to concerns about my kidney function. Yep, we got another potential health issue for the list! Thankfully, the food poisoning has mostly made its departure already, so I’m “only” waiting for: * bloodwork and urine testing to double-check my kidney function. * an ultrasound, also to check what my kidneys are up to. * outpatient appointments to formally test and diagnose asthma. * a check-in with the gender identity clinic. * a referral to a speech therapist. * a referral for laser hair removal. * a referral for a sleep study to investigate sleep apnea. * a potential referral to a dermatologist for psoriasis issues. * potentially, eventually, resuming treatment for high blood pressure. It feels that I may just have to pivot away from the diet and exercise parts of The Year of Health just for my own sanity. The sheer weight of so much medical nonsense is hard enough to deal with without also being paranoid about calorie goals. And hey, health is still health. I’m so tired.

In the last couple of years, there’s been a growing distaste amongst the more techy crowd towards Google Chrome and the prevalence of other Chromium project-based web browsers. And for good reason, Chromium’s Blink engine utterly _dominates_ the browser engine landscape by this point. The only thing that’s stopped it being a near total monopoly is Apple’s requirement to use the WebKit engine on iPhones and iPads—a restriction that’s now being legislated against in parts of the world—paving the way for Blink’s market share to only grow. Chromium is also the basis upon which Electron apps are built, which is already a widespread means of easily building cross-platform applications. This has led to some folks boycotting browsers and programs that use Chromium, which is fair enough. People can boycott whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. What bugs me (and some others, based on my Mastodon feed) is that some of these folks have also opted to ban Chromium-based browsers from accessing their websites entirely. I’m here today to say: please maybe don’t? ## Chromium is kinda-sorta-technically the best browser engine Sorry to burst your bubble, but Chromium isn’t popular _just_ because it’s owned by Google. For many people, it is the fastest browser engine they have access to—often trouncing Gecko-based browsers in benchmark tests. It has the largest extensions ecosystem. And if they’re using Google’s other products anyway, the additional data sharing isn’t a big deal. Browser developers frequently comment that Chromium is much easier to work with and extend than Mozilla’s Gecko and Apple’s WebKit. Chromium also has the best support for web standards, I write with a wry, knowing grin. Thar be caveats here. The main reason I dislike Google’s near-monopoly is the amount of influence it has given Google over web standards. It’s not uncommon for Google engineers to draft entire specifications and launch them in Chrome before there has been any consensus on whether the specification is a good idea or not. This has happened time and time again. The draft Portals specification was authored entirely by Google engineers, published in May 2019 and included in Chrome 85 in August 2020, having not received input or revisions from any other browser manufacturer. The draft Web Bluetooth API is edited entirely by Chrome engineers, published March 2015, and has been in Chromium since January 2017. No other browser engine has implemented it, with Mozilla and Apple both claiming it lacks the necessary protections to maintain the privacy of users. The same story happens over and over again. The Web USB API (in Chromium since September 2017), Keyboard Map and Keyboard Lock APIs (July 2018), WebXR API (December 2019), Serial API (March 2021), Idle Detection API (September 2021), and probably many more… all predominantly or entirely created by Google staffers, all implemented in Chromium despite a lack of input from, if not outright objections by, other browser vendors. And this sucks for web standards, because something being included in the most popular browser means that a sizeable chunk of developers immediately treat it as widely available, and begin implementing it into things, which makes changes to the specification even harder for other vendors to contribute. Google isn’t the only browser vendor guilty of this kind of behaviour, mind. Apple’s tendency towards utmost secrecy until something has been publicly announced at an Apple Event means that their draft specifications typically aren’t published until something is already in Safari’s beta track too. Google just does it much more brazenly. Some, like the Topics API (formerly known as the FLoC API, or Federated Learning of Cohorts API)—which would have the browser itself collect information about users to share with advertisers—has so far received enough high-profile pushback to not even be implemented in Chromium. And this is _incredibly frustrating_ , because yes, it does mean that technically Chromium is the most capable and well-supported browser engine, but Google also engineered the circumstances that put them in that position. It does bug me. A lot. ## Chromium is pretty good for accessibility, actually Chrome’s Blink engine is, generally, one of the better engines when it comes to accessibility in the first place. The accessibility tree is comprehensive and functional, without requiring much developer intervention to make it that way. The expansive Chrome Web Store means that users can often find accessibility tools easily and more cheaply than commercial alternatives, such as using the first-party Chrome Screen Reader (also known as ChromeVox) instead of having to spend nearly £1000 for software like JAWS, or using the relatively extensible Dark Reader instead of their operating system’s more restrictive forced colour settings. And, unlike operating system-based accessibility tools, Chrome extensions can be easily synchronised across multiple devices. I don’t have any particular evidence of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome’s raft of hardware APIs also gives it better support for alternative hardware devices, such as Braille displays or the Xbox Adaptive Controller. Ultimately, given Chromium’s popularity in the browser market, a user is quite likely to already have a Chromium browser set up for their specific access needs. At least 72% of screen reader users use a Chromium-based browser. Forcing a user to change browser to access a single website or service could mean forcing them to re-learn their entire way of using a web browser. It’s not a mild inconvenience. It’s not a small barrier that’s trivial to step over, it’s a wall. ## There isn’t necessarily an alternative If you’re on an Apple-made piece of hardware, you always have Safari as an alternative. Safari is fast and fits the Apple ecosystem nicely. It generally lags behind other browsers in terms of features and support for web standards (with the previous caveats), and it lacks a comprehensive library of extensions. Many will point to Firefox as the preferable alternative to Chrome, but Mozilla, the organisation that owns Firefox, has been subject to its own unpopular decisions lately: laying off staff and shutting down projects while paying their CEO millions, pushing unpopular LLM-based assistants in both their browser and websites, tracking users without consent, and is under investigation for internal discrimination. The simple fact is that some people just don’t trust modern-day Mozilla to work in their interests. Firefox may be an alternative _now_ , but for how much longer? There are minor browsers based on Firefox’s Gecko engine, such as LibreWolf and Zen Browser, that are further outside of Mozilla’s control and may work for some. Personally, them being restricted to desktop computers is a bit of a dealbreaker. I like using the same browser across devices, darn it. Sometimes, the thought of changing browser is a daunting or frightening one, particularly amongst less technology savvy users. Sometimes, the user interface or features that work best for someone isn’t available outside of the ecosystem of Chromium browsers. (And yes, I’m still an Arc user.) ## Not everyone has a choice in the first place In days of yore, corporate IT would require employees to use Internet Explorer. This practice survived a horribly long time, effectively only ending when Microsoft forced IE into retirement in mid-2022, preventing it from being used in Windows 10 and removing it completely in Windows 11. So what does corporate IT require now? Edge, of course! Microsoft’s Chromium-based replacement for IE. Educational institutions that issue Chromebooks will naturally force users to use Chrome. Organisation issued-Android devices may have no choice but to use Chrome or Samsung Internet. As above, some may technically have the freedom to use another browser, but find that only a Chromium browser provides the user experience they want or require. ## In conclusion I’m all for webmasters using their personal websites in whatever ways they wish; what I want to do here is highlight the unintended issues they may be creating for groups of people, and disabled people especially, in the process. Instead, consider putting something like a nag banner instead. Bring back some of that good “Please for the love of god stop using Internet Explorer” energy the internet had back 10–15 years ago (and make sure screen reader users can skip it). Maybe, just maybe, don’t block users entirely.

Someone decided to waste taxpayer money complaining about this post. You can probably find an unredacted version of it on your web archive service of choice. Content warnings for mentions of sexual and physical assault, suicide, sexism, and transphobia. Transphobia is sexism. Transphobia is sexism. This content has been redacted for legal reasons.████ ██ ██ █ █████ █ ███ █████ ████ ███ ██ transphobia is _fucking sexism_. Unlike what many a headline is choosing to claim, this wasn’t just an affront to transwomen, but This content has been redacted for legal reasons.██ ██ against non-binary people, intersex people, and all men and women—trans and cisgender. The This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███ pretty much entirely ignores the status of transgender men (so-called ‘biological’ women). Are _they_ allowed into women’s only single-sex spaces? You remembered trans men exist, right? They make up like 50% of all trans people in the UK. More than 50% by some measures. Maybe if any sort of trans advocacy group was consulted you’d have thought about that. Biological sex isn’t binary. Intersex people exist, more than you might imagine. A lot of intersex people don’t even know they were born intersex because it’s standard procedure in the Western world to genitally mutilate them at birth. Like seriously, was a single medical professional specialising in this area consulted? But really, the thing that peeves me off the most is that it’s blatant sexism, against both women and men. The entire argument about bathrooms is based on the notion that men are naturally more predatory and aggressive in a way that women are not, and somehow are unable or unwilling to control those urges for more than five minutes. The idea that transwomen have an unfair advantage in sports (note: they don’t) is based on the notion that women are naturally slower and weaker than men. Even some tournaments where physical differences, like competitive chess, seem convinced that transwomen are somehow at an advantage, tacitly making a statement that men are supposedly more intelligent than women. I repeat: _Transphobia is fucking sexism._ Cisgender women assault people. Cisgender women rape people. Cisgender women are more than capable of the same individual horrors as men. More than is ever reported to police, because big manly-men don’t want to admit that they were taken advantage of by biologically weak, stupid women. You know, because of sexism. Oh hey, you know what other group of people are overwhelmingly subjected to assault, rape, and discrimination on the basis of their biological status, by both men and women? **✨ Transgender people! ✨** And where are the support services and networks for them? After yesterday, _fucking nowhere_. When asked, transgender people will tell you that the worst part of being transgender is the way society treats you. That they lose friends and family, that it’s harder to access healthcare and support services, that you’re more freely discriminated against, that sometimes it’s hard to leave the house for fear of being harassed or assaulted. People who ‘regret’ transition overwhelmingly do so because their quality of life goes down, not as a result of being trans, but because of society’s response to it. Some of those people end up killing themselves. Better to be dead than to live in a world hostile to their true selves. Do you ever think that so-called ‘gender critical’ campaigners consider the blood they have on their hands? This content has been redacted for legal reasons.████ ██████ ███ █████████ █████████ ██ ███ █████████ ████ ███████ █████████ █████ ████ █ █████████ █ ██ ██ ███ █████████ ██████ █ ██ █████████ ██ Do you think that the embers of their vitriol die down just before they sleep, and they actually consider the question “Am I the baddie?” Maybe that level of critical thinking is too much to ask from people who haven’t realised they just fought for transgender men to be in their spaces instead. Transmasc fashion models Arthur Macnair, Ethan DeNadai and Tai Hattingh. (Nicked from Lydia Garnett/Attitude.) Unless… it was never about ‘biological women’ in the first place? Isn’t it interesting that in 2017 we had This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███ ██ █ █ █████████ █████████ █████████ █ █ ███████ █████████ █████████ █████████ ███████ ██ ███ █████████ █████████ █ ██████ ? That the tide of public opinion seems to have shifted so rapidly in favour of oppressing an already oppressed minority? Gosh, it’s almost as if this whole thing is just a manufactured culture war, invoked by groups with a vested interest in degrading the rights of both women and queer people. Like transphobia is being used as a gateway to normalising further bigotry. Almost like _transphobia is sexism_.

Someone decided to waste taxpayer money complaining about this post. You can probably find an unredacted version of it on your web archive service of choice. This content has been redacted for legal reasons.██ █████████ ███ █ █ ██ █████████ ██ ████ ██ █████████ ██ █████████ █████████ █████████ █ █ ███████ █████████ █ █████ ███. At least as best I can remember it. * * * Hi, I’m beeps. I’m agender and use it/its pronouns. After a 10 year wait I finally started HRT in December. It shouldn’t have taken that long. I’ve had a few days now to ponder how I feel about this whole thing, and I’ve written it on a placard here. For those who can’t see it, it says "What awful world has been made that living genuinely is a radical act." How awful it is that we fight merely for the right to exist as ourselves. What awful people see those who are already oppressed, who want nothing but the right to exist, and decide to punch down. Do you think that as they lay down for the night, the embers of their vitriol subsiding, that they consider the thought "Am I the baddie?" This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█████████ █ ████████ █████████ █████ █████████ ██ ████ █████████ ██ ███████ Do they ever think of the blood they have on their hands? Does thinking that they think about it give them too much credit? This This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█ ██ sets a dangerous precedent not just for trans men and women. It erases intersex people and non-binary people. It erodes the rights of lesbian women who date trans women, and gay men who date trans men. It erodes the freedoms of cis women who look a little too ‘butch’ and cis men who look a little too ‘fey’. How far we have fallen when less than 10 years ago we had a This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█████████ ████ that had our backs. What an awful world has been made that living genuinely is now a radical act. **Keep living genuinely.**

Things are still a bit of a mess. As last month, the whole ‘diet and exercise’ part of this gig has fallen to the wayside a bit. I mean, I’m still eating more veggies than ever beore, but doing it as an actual concerned effort has been secondary to everything else. ## Physical health I officially have a diagnosis of asthma now. The neat thing is that it doesn’t seem _terribly_ bad asthma, being fairly situational and avoidable with lifestyle choices (e.g. not running around like a loon). I’ve got a maintenace inhaler that I’ll probably be using for the rest of my life, but that’s about it. I’ve been put back on blood pressure medication, and had more medication added to my prescriptions, as my blood pressure readings began climbing again a short while after stopping. I’m also getting referred to a hypertension clinic for it. Last month’s scare about kidney function issues seemed like a false positive triggered by the food poisoning. Follow up tests had function back to normal, but they’re still planning to ultrasound my kidneys to see if there’s an issue with blood flow to them, which could be a contributing factor to the hypertension. I had a fresh eye test to see if hypertension was affecting my vision at all, and it seems it hasn’t. Little victories. I have dates given for my sleep apnea study too, which is happening in early May. Not too soon either, I’ve felt utterly _exhausted_ lately. Some days I just can’t even last until bedtime without an extra three or four hours of sleep. I miss caffeine. So, drumroll for the list please, 🥁🥁🥁🥁. I’m waiting for: * probably another half a dozen doctor’s appointments and blood tests. * an appointment with the hypertension clinic. * an ultrasound to check on my kidneys. * a referral to a speech therapist. * a referral for laser hair removal. * the sleep study. The dermatologist referral has dropped off the list for now, at my request. I’m dealing with enough medical shit as it is, and that one is minor enough that I’d rather deal with it later rather than keep it in the mix. ## Mental health Not great. It’s almost as if months of being told that you could have a stroke at any moment contributes to heightened medical anxiety. This doubly sucks because having medical anxiety makes having that stroke _even more likely_. I had my first check in with my gender doctor since shit first went down in February, and it was their opinion that I stop taking HRT until my blood pressure is back under control too. They don’t think that HRT is actually contributing to it, because it’s apparently been so ineffective that my hormone balance is barely different to what it was before, but in the interests of safety, that’s the advice. So little progress made so far, and no progress at all to be made in the near future. That news just left me despondant. On top of that, the news around the Supreme Court and difficulties in home life have just compounded how stressed out I feel about everything. Honestly, it feels like the universe is trying to kill me, and it’s slowly succeeding. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I need to take an extended break from work, maybe I need to go on holiday for a month, maybe I need a butler to do all my housework for me, so that I can focus my energies on actually getting better. It certainy feels more and more like something needs to change.

I can’t sleep. On the other paw, I sleep too much. So I finally had that sleep study and have been diagnosed with what I am affectionately going to call **extremely super bad severe** obstructive sleep apnea. For those not in the know, obstructive sleep apnea is a respiratory disorder where a person’s airways repeatedly constrict whilst asleep, causing disruptions to breathing. An hypopnea is a period of 10 or more seconds where breathing becomes at least 30% shallower than normal; and an apnea is a period of at least 10 seconds without breathing at all. Collectively, these are measured by the Apnea–Hypopnea Index (AHI), which is an average of how many apnea or hypopnea events take place within an hour during sleep. An AHI of 5 or less is completely normal and healty. 30 or more is considered severe. I recorded an average AHI of 97. _NINETY SEVEN._ On an average night, I will have difficulty breathing or will stop breathing entirely for 10 or more seconds every 37 seconds. This, effectively, forced my body to keep waking itself up again to breathe, preventing me ever entering slow-wave or REM sleep and never having a restful night… basically ever. No wonder any day I wasn’t drinking a ludicrous amount of caffeine, I was napping or experiencing microsleep. I’ve since been loaned a CPAP machine by the NHS. CPAP, short for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine, is almost a kind of specialised respirator that I’m supposed to wear when I sleep. It detects if I’ve stopped breathing and responds by forcing air into my body to try and force the obstruction open. So far I’ve not gotten on with it. Wearing a mask all night is claustrophobic, sometimes enough to feel suffocating. Having a machine decide when you should be breathing and suddenly enforce it is, in itself, disruptive to trying to fall or stay asleep. My first few days trying to use it were ironically pretty devoid of restful sleep as a result. It’s all a bit pants, really, and the severity of the diagnosis makes me think that surgical remedies might be in my near future. My medical anxiety is gonna love that. At the very least, this is a very likely candidate as to why I’ve had such severe hypertension as well. I just need to make friends with the machine, first. * * * I’d really quite like to write about web development and design stuff on here again, but… oof, the many medical maladies I’ve been dealing with lately have been sapping my motivation to do much more than the bare minimum (which is to say, my job). Hopefully things will improve.

Today, the Government Digital Service (GDS to its friends) is launching the refreshed GOV.UK brand. The old logo and colourway versus the new. The likes of Reddit and tabloid news outlets picked up on this a few days ago, but this shouldn’t really be news. In fact, the initiative to update the brand was announced well over a year ago, including the reasons for it happening, and that the costs for it would be taken from GDS’s normal operating budget. Still, it’s now news, and I think a lot of people have questions about it that probably won’t get answered in the official press release, so I wanna put down some thoughts on it. But first… > Any views expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent my employer or colleagues. This blog post has not been authorised by or reviewed by anyone at my employer. Let’s get underway, shall we? ## Wait, who are you? Hi, I’m beeps! This is my website. I’m also a furry, which I feel obliged to point out because the last time I wrote about work, this was apparently a surprise to people. I’m a frontend developer on the GOV.UK Design System team, where I’ve been involved in quite a few neat projects like making components localisable, building the Exit this Page component, and launching King Charles III’s Tudor Crown. I like to code, but I also have a bit of background in design. Most pertinently, I’ve been involved in the GOV.UK brand refresh work since September, initially as a ‘consulting developer’ (to maximise the Sherlock Holmes vibes) advising on the feasibility of the concepts being presented, and later as one of the team prototyping and implementing those concepts. I’ve had my fingers in this pie for a while. ## Why change, and why now The GOV.UK website has been around for 13 years now, and it hasn’t really changed all that much—it’s been a mostly black-and-white website with a crown and a wordmark for all that time. What has changed is everything around the website. Generations that have lived their entire lives with the Internet available to them have come of age, bringing with them a melting pot of… stuff. A lot of them are technically savvy and expect digital services to integrate better with their expectations. Many of them are politically disconnected or disenfranchised and will avoid interacting with the government unless it’s completely necessary. Our user research found that many of them see GOV.UK as something monolithic, unfriendly, and even intimidating. Alongside them, smartphones and wearable devices have become far more ubiquitous, as have apps and the capabilities available to them. You can have your ID on your phone, have a live activity giving you real-time updates on something, and digital assistants can plug into app intents and do things on your behalf. GOV.UK was only ever designed to be a website. A place where you come if you need information or to do a specific task, and then don’t visit until you need more information or to do a specific task again. Because of that limited scope, the GOV.UK brand never really had a reason to be more than a logo and a typeface. The two overarching motivations behind the brand refresh are: 1. To expand the GOV.UK brand to provide flexibility across multiple platforms, such as apps, video, and social media. 2. To tackle the perception among younger generations that GOV.UK looks unfriendly and intimidating, without devaluing the existing trust in the service. This doesn’t mean the website is being left behind. It’s a well-established rule that a good service should meet users where they are, and today that’s on platforms, not websites. GOV.UK wants to put more emphasis on effectively advertising itself on those platforms, but the end result is still that the bulk of information and services are web-based. > Opinion zone: I personally don’t find the second motivation to be a particularly solid one. I don’t expect government services to be friendly and bright. In a way, I don’t particularly want them to be. > > Still, based on the user research findings, I understand why things have swung in the direction they have. ## It’s a refresh, not a rebrand We’ve been keen to emphasise that this isn’t a rebrand, and it was never intended to be. GOV.UK has a pretty great reputation as far as government services go, and we don’t want that to change. This work is intended to be an evolution and expansion of what already exists, not tearing down and starting over. There’s a lot more that has changed than just the logo. The updated brand encompasses a massively expanded colour palette, animation and visual assets, and a design language that is intended to be shared across a number of platforms, many of which will not see the light of day for a while. Today’s launch is just square one of a process that’s going to continue for many more months. ## We’re blue now And we always were. Heck, the GOV.UK homepage has been majority blue since November 2023. The blue used on the refreshed brand is _exactly_ the same one that has been used on GOV.UK for several years; we’re just leaning into it more. Contrary to some commentators’ beliefs, it’s not meant to represent the Conservative Party. Blue, in western colour theory, evokes feelings of trust, safety, and stability, which is why it’s rather a useful colour to have on government services. The cyan (it’s not teal) dot is also not a reference to a political party of any stripe, but instead half a reference to GDS’s new parent organisation, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (whose colour in the Government Identity System is cyan) and half a ‘poppy’ accent to the brand blue. All of the colours in the new palette have an equivalent ‘poppy’ version; this just happens to be the blue one. > I hate that I used the word ‘poppy’ to describe a bright colour… twice. > > Opinion zone: I don’t care for the cyan. It’s too oversaturated for my liking. ## Hello, Dot The raising of the gov-dot-UK dot into an element separate from the wordmark, has similarly raised some eyebrows. I call her Dot. (This is literally just me—it’s not an official thing.) The first reason was simply to make the wordmark look less like a web address, as people will now be seeing content from and interacting with GOV.UK services in places that aren’t the GOV.UK website. The bigger reason was to create a new visual leitmotif that can be used across mediums. Dot is going to appear in contexts detached from the rest of the logo much more in future, such as in motion graphics and user interface elements. Having Dot gives us a flexible, consistent element to play with. > For the curious, the way to write GOV.UK in prose remains the same. It’s **not** GOV · UK. ## Oh, and about the cost A bit of hubbub has been made about the cost of the brand refresh, lamenting that a chunk of change (about half a million) was given to an agency to ‘only’ change a colour and move Dot. This perspective only focuses on the logo, and completely ignores the other additions to the brand that are being introduced over time. It ignores that everything was tested, prototyped, refined, and tested again dozens of times with members of the public. It might not be obvious from a single side-by-side graphic, but a lot of time went into interrogating what we had and experimenting with what could be added. It was the full-time salaried efforts of dozens of design, development, and delivery specialists for more than a year. By that metric, it’s actually quite cheap. The place we landed was well-considered and intentional. Just because the destination of that journey was a logo that intentionally looks quite similar to the existing one doesn’t mean that the money was wasted, or that creating something radically different would have been better value for money. A holiday isn’t a waste of money just because you return home at the end of it. > And hey, we could’ve spent £100,000 on utter dogshit instead. ## What’s to come All of this work is out in the open. You can read the brand guidelines yourself, you can download and play with the assets as you please. As mentioned before, today is just square one of what’s to come. On the website, it may not seem like much has changed, but this is literally the MVP of the refreshed brand elements, and it’s going to take a bit of time for what’s new to bubble through to 13 years of existing stuff. Changes on social media will probably happen quite quickly, by comparison, and the GOV.UK App and GOV.UK Wallet will be launching with the new look as well. And this doesn’t mean we’re going to be stuck with this logo and this colour scheme for the next 13 years either. Nothing is fixed; everything is fluid. Maybe one day we’ll tweak the hues or lower the saturation of Dot, but that isn’t today. ## And so I ponder I don’t live in some civil service bubble. I understand why this might be controversial, and I raised those concerns during the process. Despite my reservations, I am pretty proud of having worked on this. It’s kind of a big deal, maybe the biggest deal I’ll be involved with in my entire professional career, and I’ve done my level best to make it a reality. > And believe me, as the ‘consulting developer’, I helped avoid so many worse ideas from happening. And that’s been true of pretty much everyone involved. Everyone has done great work against limited time, limited resources, and tireless pressure—many of us while _also_ doing our usual work—against a backdrop of reorganisation within GDS that also added daily stress. I fully expect it to evolve in the future, and in the near term, I’m probably going to remain part of that evolution. I’m excited to see how it goes!

I wasn’t great at languages (or ‘modern foreign languages’ as it was officially called) in school. Part of this was circumstantial. I moved cities partway through secondary education, from a school where French was the foreign language of choice to a school where German was, forced into doing a German GCSE with three fewer years of German knowledge than my fellow pupils. I ended up scraping a D, for Deutsche. After school, I didn’t really pursue French, German, or any other language. I was _bad_ at them, after all; the education system had said so. Conversely, my highest grades were in English language and literature, which just gave me more reason to double down the one language I was really good at. _But change is afoot!_ Last week, I installed the Duolingo app and started learning Swedish. And it’s been… actually really fun! It turns out I’m actually half-decent at learning languages. Who knew? Part of this is just out of a general desire for self-improvement, of which learning a language is one avenue (another is to exercise more, as was part of my yearly theme before health issues steamrolled everything). But why Swedish? * I’ve been to Sweden twice so far this year: Malmö in February and Stockholm in June. Both times I’ve found the language _decently_ easy to pick up, probably because quite a lot of everyday words are similar to their English equivalents. * They’ve also just generally been really nice places. Malmö especially, as a compact, former industrial port city with a famous bridge and a reputation for being rough around the edges, really speaks to me as a Bristolian. * The stuff that isn’t like English trends towards being similar to German, which I at least have a rudimentary understanding of. * I have friends who already speak Swedish, including one of my partners. * Fluency in English is extremely common in Sweden, so I always have a fallback available to me if I falter in practice. The more serious reason is that I’m increasingly pessimistic about having a future in the UK. For the last decade, there’s been a feeling of regression, culturally and economically. Perhaps the thing that has most recently triggered this feeling was the release of this year’s IPSOS LGBT+ Pride report, which shows the UK backsliding on virtually all aspects of gay and transgender rights. Less and less does this feel like a place where I can be safe or secure. If I cannot be myself while being treated as an equal, if I cannot afford a home without moving a hundred miles away, if the best outcome I can hope for is the maintenance of a (shitty) status quo, then the best thing for my own mental health is just to leave. I don’t _want_ it to come to that, but I’m tired of hoping. It’s time to join so many of my peers and make an escape plan. Sweden is that escape plan. So I’m learning the language, just in case I do need to say hej då to the UK some day.

Back in January, I did a little bit of renovating in the open, during which I stripped things back and changed a bunch of things around over a period of a few weeks. This week, I’ve made some more changes. Consider it a continuation of that work, or don’t, but some people _really_ hate change, so I feel inclined to defend changing anything. ## Lost in space For the first time in a very long time, this site is no longer typeset in Space Grotesk, having replaced it with GitHub’s Hubot Sans. This isn’t so much that I prefer Hubot Sans, but that I’ve been increasingly frustrated by Space Grotesk’s limitations, particularly around how it renders italic text. For the typographic normies reading this, not all italics (or ‘obliques’) are made equally. When a typeface has specifically designed italics, we call that ‘true’ italics. When those are missing, browsers and image editing software will try to create italics by skewing the default letterforms, creating ‘faux’ italics. Serif typefaces, like Baskerville, usually show the differences much more clearly. True italics are pretty much always preferable to faux italics, because true italics _are specifically designed for that purpose_. Faux italics can often look a little out of place, because they were never intended to exist. Space Grotesk has never had true italics, and when it comes to writing prose, like blog posts, the lack of true italics is very annoying to me in particular. Hubot Sans has true italics. It also has more variations of weight and width than Space Grotesk, which I’ve made some use of in the new design. Some headings are wider than their surrounding text and some are narrower. It’s a neat effect that I’d like to play with more. ## Good vibrations Colours across the board have been updated. It’s still the purple and green of the last couple of redesigns, but the exact colours have been changed. This is most notable in the dark theme’s purple, which is significantly more vibrant and now meets the minimum ratio for accessible non-text contrast, expanding how it can be used. The light theme also now uses a light grey background rather than pure white, so hopefully it’s a little less blinding. ## Not so square, now The dynamically generated squares that appeared on the homepage and OpenGraph images, and in animated form on the 404 page, have been removed. It was neat, but it was also a little buggy and involved loading a whole bunch of JavaScript just to add some background texture. This one’s really just a sacrifice on the altar of performance and tidy code. ## And the other stuff The homepage has been lightly redesigned. I ended up removing two of the amazing Ash images by TuxedoDragon in the process, but I want to add them back somewhere soon! Before and after comparison of the homepage. Blog posts and generic content pages have had their layouts reversed so that the primary content is on the left and supplemental information is on the right. These pages now use CSS grids for layout as well, somewhat deviating from one of my old rules about how I build the site, but y’know, times change, and also… Templates and pages can now have their own CSS bundles, so doing this kind of only-in-one-place layout coding is simple and still very performant. Thanks Eleventy bundles. There’s a mega pull request with all of these changes included, plus some others, if you’re interested in looking at the code. ## Coming soon? I’ve wanted to rewrite and redesign the about section for quite a while now. I’ll probably prioritise doing that next. I’ve also been thinking about adding some new sections, such as a ‘stash’ of interesting links or a repository of handy code snippets. I’m a little worried about the amount of upkeep involved in keeping them relevant, so I’m probably going to sit on those ideas until I feel more sure of them.

Can we get straight to the point here? Generative AI is kind of bad. Bad as in it’s not good, for basically 99% of use cases that people keep using it for. **Large language models work entirely on mathematical probabilities.** They will never readily produce something that isn’t the washed-out average of what the majority of the human-provided training data could be summarised to. Generative AI art is, frankly, not art at all. Art is about so much more than the art itself: it’s about intent, process, history, and interpretation. Generative AI cannot make art because it doesn’t have the ability to have intent, to devise and iterate upon a process, or to practically understand what it’s doing. There’s a reason that generative AI art is so often either a mangled attempt at photorealism, or a pale imitation of someone else’s work. (And not just because it’s often trained on stolen content.) Generative AI’s attempts to write are so often painfully average or incredibly exaggerated as to be unreadable. It’s attempts to summarise information are often totally incorrect because it doesn’t understand the semantics of anything that is input or output. My vague attempts to use coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Cursor (because I’m going to try and use a tool before decrying how useless it is) didn’t even last half an hour, because they would only ever suggest the wrong thing. Having incorrect suggestions appearing constantly, each time requiring me to stop to review them to make sure they were still incorrect, massively slowed down doing any actual work. Taking an existing thing and slapping an ‘AI chat’ interface onto it is not an act of innovatation, it’s a tascit admission that your existing thing was too rubbish for people to be able to use it as intended. That AI chat bot probably needs a disclaimer pointing out that it’s going to be wrong a bunch of the time anyway, because, again, generative AI does not understand the semantics of what it’s doing or saying. Generative AI only works properly when it has a sizeable data set to train from, and that has inevitably meant either stealing content from the open web in flagrant violation of copyright law, or farming the content of willing participants and leaking personal details and corporate secrets in the process. There is an incredible environmental cost to training AIs in the use of electricity, water, and the resources needed to build the data centres and millions of high-performance servers necessarily. All this seems to be utterly ignored, even against the backdrop of a rate of climate change that’s still far from being controlled. And there is the human cost too. Generative AI has poisoned people, killed people, made a mockery of the legal system, negatively affected mental health and perceptions of reality, enforced discrimination, proliferated conspiracy theories, stolen jobs, and replaced human relationships in some rather unhealthy ways. It doesn’t even make you more productive. You could argue that these issues derive from the people and not the tool, but that ignores that the _makers_ of these tools actively obfuscate that generative AI is sycophantic and stupid by design. They’re promoted as being omniscient assistants, not digital yes-men with memory banks filled with Reddit comments. I don’t think there’s a person in my life who isn’t already sick of generative AI being forced on them at work, on their phone and computers, by random websites and software that never needed it before now. People in multiple industries, with different levels of technical ability, have all tried these things and **uncompromisingly found them to be useless.** They’re tired of every company that has a profit motive to push and every person who is trying to sell themselves as a changemaker is repeating the mantra that “This is the future, you’ll be left behind if you don’t use it,” like suckers who have already dumped all their savings into a grand pyramid scheme. You know, the same thing they said about the metaverse. And NFTs. And cryptocurrencies. They probably said the same thing about microwave ovens in the 70s. Why on earth would you cook food yourself, spending hours toiling over a recipe book and hot stove to make a lasagne, when microwaving a frozen lasagne is so much faster and more efficient? Because, like generative AI, microwave lasagne is a washed-out average of the source material it’s based on. Like generative AI, it lacks intent, process, history, and interpretation. Because, like generative AI, microwave food is kind of bad. Generative AI is not the future, at least not in the form that everyone pushing it down your throat says that it is. It’s shit. It’s a net contributor to human mystery and environmental collapse. Can we please stop pretending like it’s actually good for anything? The sooner that Big Tech’s bubble of delusion bursts, the better off we’ll all be for it, and I’ll happily be one of those holding a pin.

Someone decided to waste taxpayer money complaining about this post. You can probably find an unredacted version of it on your web archive service of choice. This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█████████ ████████ ████ ████████ ██████ █ ███████ ███ ██████ █████████ ████████ █████████ ███ ████████ ██████ ███ ██. At least as best I can remember it. * * * Hi, I’m beeps. I’m agender and use it/its pronouns. After a 10 year wait I finally started HRT in December. It shouldn’t have taken that long. I’ve had a few days now to ponder how I feel about this whole thing, and I’ve written it on a placard here. For those who can’t see it, it says "What awful world has been made that living genuinely is a radical act." How awful it is that we fight merely for the right to exist as ourselves. What awful people see those who are already oppressed, who want nothing but the right to exist, and decide to punch down. Do you think that as they lay down for the night, the embers of their vitriol subsiding, that they consider the thought "Am I the baddie?" This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█████████ █████ █ █████████ ███ █ █████████ ████ █████ ████████ █ ███ ███████ Do they ever think of the blood they have on their hands? Does thinking that they think about it give them too much credit? This This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███ sets a dangerous precedent not just for trans men and women. It erases intersex people and non-binary people. It erodes the rights of lesbian women who date trans women, and gay men who date trans men. It erodes the freedoms of cis women who look a little too ‘butch’ and cis men who look a little too ‘fey’. How far we have fallen when less than 10 years ago we had a This content has been redacted for legal reasons.██████ ███████ that had our backs. What an awful world has been made that living genuinely is now a radical act. **Keep living genuinely.**

First up, read the last blog post if you haven’t already. Done that? Good. As you might expect, all semblances of a “diet plan” or an “exercise routine” go out the window when you end up as a hospital inpatient. Only a couple of days of feeling well recovered did I then jet off to Malmö in Sweden for NFC—NordicFuzzCon—for which I (justifiably, I think) permitted myself to let loose from following anything too strictly. And literally the day after returning from Malmö, I came down with food poisoning that took up the rest of the month. So February was a fucking disaster. Let’s just roll the tape. ## Diet Probably followed it decently at the start of the month, but was naturally derailed after that. Hospital portions almost certainly constituted a smaller calorie intake than normal, so maybe that’s something? Same too, being too food poisoned to actually eat anything substantial for four days, although malnourishment is hardly a healthy diet plan. I didn’t particularly follow the diet at all while at NFC, barring one day of eating fairly light and healthily simply because I was so tired of fast food and convenience foods. Hopefully the rest was offset by the increased physical activity. ## Exercise Yeah, not much of that outside of NFC either. Furry conventions are, perhaps, surprisingly active times. You practically spend all day on your feet and walking around places. My Apple Watch rings loved it. ## Mental health Increasingly hot garbage. NFC was excellent, of course, but everything before and after it was miserable. The hospital stay had some novelty to it, derived from having never actually been in an ambulance or stayed overnight in a hospital before, but the novelty certainly wears thin after the first few days. All of the medical investigations and proddings are still ongoing, and the sheer amount of stuff being looked at now is sorta depressing in itself. This shit does not please the robot or Olive in the slightest. We know there’s no benefit in just being aimlessly miserable about it all, but it sucks and it feels inescapable right now. ## Medical stuff Following the hospital stay and prognosis of asthma (am I using that word right?), I’ve since been given some new routines to follow. Namely, an inhaler I have to use twice a day and a lung capacity test I need to do three times a day. I was briefly prescribed medication to tackle my high blood pressure, but this has already been paused on the doctor’s orders due to concerns about my kidney function. Yep, we got another potential health issue for the list! Thankfully, the food poisoning has mostly made its departure already, so I’m “only” waiting for: * bloodwork and urine testing to double-check my kidney function. * an ultrasound, also to check what my kidneys are up to. * outpatient appointments to formally test and diagnose asthma. * a check-in with the gender identity clinic. * a referral to a speech therapist. * a referral for laser hair removal. * a referral for a sleep study to investigate sleep apnea. * a potential referral to a dermatologist for psoriasis issues. * potentially, eventually, resuming treatment for high blood pressure. It feels that I may just have to pivot away from the diet and exercise parts of The Year of Health just for my own sanity. The sheer weight of so much medical nonsense is hard enough to deal with without also being paranoid about calorie goals. And hey, health is still health. I’m so tired.

In the last couple of years, there’s been a growing distaste amongst the more techy crowd towards Google Chrome and the prevalence of other Chromium project-based web browsers. And for good reason, Chromium’s Blink engine utterly _dominates_ the browser engine landscape by this point. The only thing that’s stopped it being a near total monopoly is Apple’s requirement to use the WebKit engine on iPhones and iPads—a restriction that’s now being legislated against in parts of the world—paving the way for Blink’s market share to only grow. Chromium is also the basis upon which Electron apps are built, which is already a widespread means of easily building cross-platform applications. This has led to some folks boycotting browsers and programs that use Chromium, which is fair enough. People can boycott whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. What bugs me (and some others, based on my Mastodon feed) is that some of these folks have also opted to ban Chromium-based browsers from accessing their websites entirely. I’m here today to say: please maybe don’t? ## Chromium is kinda-sorta-technically the best browser engine Sorry to burst your bubble, but Chromium isn’t popular _just_ because it’s owned by Google. For many people, it is the fastest browser engine they have access to—often trouncing Gecko-based browsers in benchmark tests. It has the largest extensions ecosystem. And if they’re using Google’s other products anyway, the additional data sharing isn’t a big deal. Browser developers frequently comment that Chromium is much easier to work with and extend than Mozilla’s Gecko and Apple’s WebKit. Chromium also has the best support for web standards, I write with a wry, knowing grin. Thar be caveats here. The main reason I dislike Google’s near-monopoly is the amount of influence it has given Google over web standards. It’s not uncommon for Google engineers to draft entire specifications and launch them in Chrome before there has been any consensus on whether the specification is a good idea or not. This has happened time and time again. The draft Portals specification was authored entirely by Google engineers, published in May 2019 and included in Chrome 85 in August 2020, having not received input or revisions from any other browser manufacturer. The draft Web Bluetooth API is edited entirely by Chrome engineers, published March 2015, and has been in Chromium since January 2017. No other browser engine has implemented it, with Mozilla and Apple both claiming it lacks the necessary protections to maintain the privacy of users. The same story happens over and over again. The Web USB API (in Chromium since September 2017), Keyboard Map and Keyboard Lock APIs (July 2018), WebXR API (December 2019), Serial API (March 2021), Idle Detection API (September 2021), and probably many more… all predominantly or entirely created by Google staffers, all implemented in Chromium despite a lack of input from, if not outright objections by, other browser vendors. And this sucks for web standards, because something being included in the most popular browser means that a sizeable chunk of developers immediately treat it as widely available, and begin implementing it into things, which makes changes to the specification even harder for other vendors to contribute. Google isn’t the only browser vendor guilty of this kind of behaviour, mind. Apple’s tendency towards utmost secrecy until something has been publicly announced at an Apple Event means that their draft specifications typically aren’t published until something is already in Safari’s beta track too. Google just does it much more brazenly. Some, like the Topics API (formerly known as the FLoC API, or Federated Learning of Cohorts API)—which would have the browser itself collect information about users to share with advertisers—has so far received enough high-profile pushback to not even be implemented in Chromium. And this is _incredibly frustrating_ , because yes, it does mean that technically Chromium is the most capable and well-supported browser engine, but Google also engineered the circumstances that put them in that position. It does bug me. A lot. ## Chromium is pretty good for accessibility, actually Chrome’s Blink engine is, generally, one of the better engines when it comes to accessibility in the first place. The accessibility tree is comprehensive and functional, without requiring much developer intervention to make it that way. The expansive Chrome Web Store means that users can often find accessibility tools easily and more cheaply than commercial alternatives, such as using the first-party Chrome Screen Reader (also known as ChromeVox) instead of having to spend nearly £1000 for software like JAWS, or using the relatively extensible Dark Reader instead of their operating system’s more restrictive forced colour settings. And, unlike operating system-based accessibility tools, Chrome extensions can be easily synchronised across multiple devices. I don’t have any particular evidence of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome’s raft of hardware APIs also gives it better support for alternative hardware devices, such as Braille displays or the Xbox Adaptive Controller. Ultimately, given Chromium’s popularity in the browser market, a user is quite likely to already have a Chromium browser set up for their specific access needs. At least 72% of screen reader users use a Chromium-based browser. Forcing a user to change browser to access a single website or service could mean forcing them to re-learn their entire way of using a web browser. It’s not a mild inconvenience. It’s not a small barrier that’s trivial to step over, it’s a wall. ## There isn’t necessarily an alternative If you’re on an Apple-made piece of hardware, you always have Safari as an alternative. Safari is fast and fits the Apple ecosystem nicely. It generally lags behind other browsers in terms of features and support for web standards (with the previous caveats), and it lacks a comprehensive library of extensions. Many will point to Firefox as the preferable alternative to Chrome, but Mozilla, the organisation that owns Firefox, has been subject to its own unpopular decisions lately: laying off staff and shutting down projects while paying their CEO millions, pushing unpopular LLM-based assistants in both their browser and websites, tracking users without consent, and is under investigation for internal discrimination. The simple fact is that some people just don’t trust modern-day Mozilla to work in their interests. Firefox may be an alternative _now_ , but for how much longer? There are minor browsers based on Firefox’s Gecko engine, such as LibreWolf and Zen Browser, that are further outside of Mozilla’s control and may work for some. Personally, them being restricted to desktop computers is a bit of a dealbreaker. I like using the same browser across devices, darn it. Sometimes, the thought of changing browser is a daunting or frightening one, particularly amongst less technology savvy users. Sometimes, the user interface or features that work best for someone isn’t available outside of the ecosystem of Chromium browsers. (And yes, I’m still an Arc user.) ## Not everyone has a choice in the first place In days of yore, corporate IT would require employees to use Internet Explorer. This practice survived a horribly long time, effectively only ending when Microsoft forced IE into retirement in mid-2022, preventing it from being used in Windows 10 and removing it completely in Windows 11. So what does corporate IT require now? Edge, of course! Microsoft’s Chromium-based replacement for IE. Educational institutions that issue Chromebooks will naturally force users to use Chrome. Organisation issued-Android devices may have no choice but to use Chrome or Samsung Internet. As above, some may technically have the freedom to use another browser, but find that only a Chromium browser provides the user experience they want or require. ## In conclusion I’m all for webmasters using their personal websites in whatever ways they wish; what I want to do here is highlight the unintended issues they may be creating for groups of people, and disabled people especially, in the process. Instead, consider putting something like a nag banner instead. Bring back some of that good “Please for the love of god stop using Internet Explorer” energy the internet had back 10–15 years ago (and make sure screen reader users can skip it). Maybe, just maybe, don’t block users entirely.

I can’t sleep. On the other paw, I sleep too much. So I finally had that sleep study and have been diagnosed with what I am affectionately going to call **extremely super bad severe** obstructive sleep apnea. For those not in the know, obstructive sleep apnea is a respiratory disorder where a person’s airways repeatedly constrict whilst asleep, causing disruptions to breathing. An hypopnea is a period of 10 or more seconds where breathing becomes at least 30% shallower than normal; and an apnea is a period of at least 10 seconds without breathing at all. Collectively, these are measured by the Apnea–Hypopnea Index (AHI), which is an average of how many apnea or hypopnea events take place within an hour during sleep. An AHI of 5 or less is completely normal and healty. 30 or more is considered severe. I recorded an average AHI of 97. _NINETY SEVEN._ On an average night, I will have difficulty breathing or will stop breathing entirely for 10 or more seconds every 37 seconds. This, effectively, forced my body to keep waking itself up again to breathe, preventing me ever entering slow-wave or REM sleep and never having a restful night… basically ever. No wonder any day I wasn’t drinking a ludicrous amount of caffeine, I was napping or experiencing microsleep. I’ve since been loaned a CPAP machine by the NHS. CPAP, short for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine, is almost a kind of specialised respirator that I’m supposed to wear when I sleep. It detects if I’ve stopped breathing and responds by forcing air into my body to try and force the obstruction open. So far I’ve not gotten on with it. Wearing a mask all night is claustrophobic, sometimes enough to feel suffocating. Having a machine decide when you should be breathing and suddenly enforce it is, in itself, disruptive to trying to fall or stay asleep. My first few days trying to use it were ironically pretty devoid of restful sleep as a result. It’s all a bit pants, really, and the severity of the diagnosis makes me think that surgical remedies might be in my near future. My medical anxiety is gonna love that. At the very least, this is a very likely candidate as to why I’ve had such severe hypertension as well. I just need to make friends with the machine, first. * * * I’d really quite like to write about web development and design stuff on here again, but… oof, the many medical maladies I’ve been dealing with lately have been sapping my motivation to do much more than the bare minimum (which is to say, my job). Hopefully things will improve.

Things are still a bit of a mess. As last month, the whole ‘diet and exercise’ part of this gig has fallen to the wayside a bit. I mean, I’m still eating more veggies than ever beore, but doing it as an actual concerned effort has been secondary to everything else. ## Physical health I officially have a diagnosis of asthma now. The neat thing is that it doesn’t seem _terribly_ bad asthma, being fairly situational and avoidable with lifestyle choices (e.g. not running around like a loon). I’ve got a maintenace inhaler that I’ll probably be using for the rest of my life, but that’s about it. I’ve been put back on blood pressure medication, and had more medication added to my prescriptions, as my blood pressure readings began climbing again a short while after stopping. I’m also getting referred to a hypertension clinic for it. Last month’s scare about kidney function issues seemed like a false positive triggered by the food poisoning. Follow up tests had function back to normal, but they’re still planning to ultrasound my kidneys to see if there’s an issue with blood flow to them, which could be a contributing factor to the hypertension. I had a fresh eye test to see if hypertension was affecting my vision at all, and it seems it hasn’t. Little victories. I have dates given for my sleep apnea study too, which is happening in early May. Not too soon either, I’ve felt utterly _exhausted_ lately. Some days I just can’t even last until bedtime without an extra three or four hours of sleep. I miss caffeine. So, drumroll for the list please, 🥁🥁🥁🥁. I’m waiting for: * probably another half a dozen doctor’s appointments and blood tests. * an appointment with the hypertension clinic. * an ultrasound to check on my kidneys. * a referral to a speech therapist. * a referral for laser hair removal. * the sleep study. The dermatologist referral has dropped off the list for now, at my request. I’m dealing with enough medical shit as it is, and that one is minor enough that I’d rather deal with it later rather than keep it in the mix. ## Mental health Not great. It’s almost as if months of being told that you could have a stroke at any moment contributes to heightened medical anxiety. This doubly sucks because having medical anxiety makes having that stroke _even more likely_. I had my first check in with my gender doctor since shit first went down in February, and it was their opinion that I stop taking HRT until my blood pressure is back under control too. They don’t think that HRT is actually contributing to it, because it’s apparently been so ineffective that my hormone balance is barely different to what it was before, but in the interests of safety, that’s the advice. So little progress made so far, and no progress at all to be made in the near future. That news just left me despondant. On top of that, the news around the Supreme Court and difficulties in home life have just compounded how stressed out I feel about everything. Honestly, it feels like the universe is trying to kill me, and it’s slowly succeeding. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I need to take an extended break from work, maybe I need to go on holiday for a month, maybe I need a butler to do all my housework for me, so that I can focus my energies on actually getting better. It certainy feels more and more like something needs to change.

Someone decided to waste taxpayer money complaining about this post. You can probably find an unredacted version of it on your web archive service of choice. Content warnings for mentions of sexual and physical assault, suicide, sexism, and transphobia. Transphobia is sexism. Transphobia is sexism. This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█ █████████ █ █ █ ██████ █████████ ████ transphobia is _fucking sexism_. Unlike what many a headline is choosing to claim, this wasn’t just an affront to transwomen, but This content has been redacted for legal reasons.██ ██ against non-binary people, intersex people, and all men and women—trans and cisgender. The This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███ pretty much entirely ignores the status of transgender men (so-called ‘biological’ women). Are _they_ allowed into women’s only single-sex spaces? You remembered trans men exist, right? They make up like 50% of all trans people in the UK. More than 50% by some measures. Maybe if any sort of trans advocacy group was consulted you’d have thought about that. Biological sex isn’t binary. Intersex people exist, more than you might imagine. A lot of intersex people don’t even know they were born intersex because it’s standard procedure in the Western world to genitally mutilate them at birth. Like seriously, was a single medical professional specialising in this area consulted? But really, the thing that peeves me off the most is that it’s blatant sexism, against both women and men. The entire argument about bathrooms is based on the notion that men are naturally more predatory and aggressive in a way that women are not, and somehow are unable or unwilling to control those urges for more than five minutes. The idea that transwomen have an unfair advantage in sports (note: they don’t) is based on the notion that women are naturally slower and weaker than men. Even some tournaments where physical differences, like competitive chess, seem convinced that transwomen are somehow at an advantage, tacitly making a statement that men are supposedly more intelligent than women. I repeat: _Transphobia is fucking sexism._ Cisgender women assault people. Cisgender women rape people. Cisgender women are more than capable of the same individual horrors as men. More than is ever reported to police, because big manly-men don’t want to admit that they were taken advantage of by biologically weak, stupid women. You know, because of sexism. Oh hey, you know what other group of people are overwhelmingly subjected to assault, rape, and discrimination on the basis of their biological status, by both men and women? **✨ Transgender people! ✨** And where are the support services and networks for them? After yesterday, _fucking nowhere_. When asked, transgender people will tell you that the worst part of being transgender is the way society treats you. That they lose friends and family, that it’s harder to access healthcare and support services, that you’re more freely discriminated against, that sometimes it’s hard to leave the house for fear of being harassed or assaulted. People who ‘regret’ transition overwhelmingly do so because their quality of life goes down, not as a result of being trans, but because of society’s response to it. Some of those people end up killing themselves. Better to be dead than to live in a world hostile to their true selves. Do you ever think that so-called ‘gender critical’ campaigners consider the blood they have on their hands? This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█████████ ████████ █████████ ██ █ ███████ ███████ █████████ ████████ █████████ ██████ ███████ ███ █ █████████ ████ █████████ ████ ██████ ███ Do you think that the embers of their vitriol die down just before they sleep, and they actually consider the question “Am I the baddie?” Maybe that level of critical thinking is too much to ask from people who haven’t realised they just fought for transgender men to be in their spaces instead. Transmasc fashion models Arthur Macnair, Ethan DeNadai and Tai Hattingh. (Nicked from Lydia Garnett/Attitude.) Unless… it was never about ‘biological women’ in the first place? Isn’t it interesting that in 2017 we had This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███ ████████ █████████ ██████ █████████ ██████ █████████ ██ ██ █ █████████ █████████ █████████ ███ ██ █████ █████████ ██████? That the tide of public opinion seems to have shifted so rapidly in favour of oppressing an already oppressed minority? Gosh, it’s almost as if this whole thing is just a manufactured culture war, invoked by groups with a vested interest in degrading the rights of both women and queer people. Like transphobia is being used as a gateway to normalising further bigotry. Almost like _transphobia is sexism_.

Today, the Government Digital Service (GDS to its friends) is launching the refreshed GOV.UK brand. The old logo and colourway versus the new. The likes of Reddit and tabloid news outlets picked up on this a few days ago, but this shouldn’t really be news. In fact, the initiative to update the brand was announced well over a year ago, including the reasons for it happening, and that the costs for it would be taken from GDS’s normal operating budget. Still, it’s now news, and I think a lot of people have questions about it that probably won’t get answered in the official press release, so I wanna put down some thoughts on it. But first… > Any views expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent my employer or colleagues. This blog post has not been authorised by or reviewed by anyone at my employer. Let’s get underway, shall we? ## Wait, who are you? Hi, I’m beeps! This is my website. I’m also a furry, which I feel obliged to point out because the last time I wrote about work, this was apparently a surprise to people. I’m a frontend developer on the GOV.UK Design System team, where I’ve been involved in quite a few neat projects like making components localisable, building the Exit this Page component, and launching King Charles III’s Tudor Crown. I like to code, but I also have a bit of background in design. Most pertinently, I’ve been involved in the GOV.UK brand refresh work since September, initially as a ‘consulting developer’ (to maximise the Sherlock Holmes vibes) advising on the feasibility of the concepts being presented, and later as one of the team prototyping and implementing those concepts. I’ve had my fingers in this pie for a while. ## Why change, and why now The GOV.UK website has been around for 13 years now, and it hasn’t really changed all that much—it’s been a mostly black-and-white website with a crown and a wordmark for all that time. What has changed is everything around the website. Generations that have lived their entire lives with the Internet available to them have come of age, bringing with them a melting pot of… stuff. A lot of them are technically savvy and expect digital services to integrate better with their expectations. Many of them are politically disconnected or disenfranchised and will avoid interacting with the government unless it’s completely necessary. Our user research found that many of them see GOV.UK as something monolithic, unfriendly, and even intimidating. Alongside them, smartphones and wearable devices have become far more ubiquitous, as have apps and the capabilities available to them. You can have your ID on your phone, have a live activity giving you real-time updates on something, and digital assistants can plug into app intents and do things on your behalf. GOV.UK was only ever designed to be a website. A place where you come if you need information or to do a specific task, and then don’t visit until you need more information or to do a specific task again. Because of that limited scope, the GOV.UK brand never really had a reason to be more than a logo and a typeface. The two overarching motivations behind the brand refresh are: 1. To expand the GOV.UK brand to provide flexibility across multiple platforms, such as apps, video, and social media. 2. To tackle the perception among younger generations that GOV.UK looks unfriendly and intimidating, without devaluing the existing trust in the service. This doesn’t mean the website is being left behind. It’s a well-established rule that a good service should meet users where they are, and today that’s on platforms, not websites. GOV.UK wants to put more emphasis on effectively advertising itself on those platforms, but the end result is still that the bulk of information and services are web-based. > Opinion zone: I personally don’t find the second motivation to be a particularly solid one. I don’t expect government services to be friendly and bright. In a way, I don’t particularly want them to be. > > Still, based on the user research findings, I understand why things have swung in the direction they have. ## It’s a refresh, not a rebrand We’ve been keen to emphasise that this isn’t a rebrand, and it was never intended to be. GOV.UK has a pretty great reputation as far as government services go, and we don’t want that to change. This work is intended to be an evolution and expansion of what already exists, not tearing down and starting over. There’s a lot more that has changed than just the logo. The updated brand encompasses a massively expanded colour palette, animation and visual assets, and a design language that is intended to be shared across a number of platforms, many of which will not see the light of day for a while. Today’s launch is just square one of a process that’s going to continue for many more months. ## We’re blue now And we always were. Heck, the GOV.UK homepage has been majority blue since November 2023. The blue used on the refreshed brand is _exactly_ the same one that has been used on GOV.UK for several years; we’re just leaning into it more. Contrary to some commentators’ beliefs, it’s not meant to represent the Conservative Party. Blue, in western colour theory, evokes feelings of trust, safety, and stability, which is why it’s rather a useful colour to have on government services. The cyan (it’s not teal) dot is also not a reference to a political party of any stripe, but instead half a reference to GDS’s new parent organisation, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (whose colour in the Government Identity System is cyan) and half a ‘poppy’ accent to the brand blue. All of the colours in the new palette have an equivalent ‘poppy’ version; this just happens to be the blue one. > I hate that I used the word ‘poppy’ to describe a bright colour… twice. > > Opinion zone: I don’t care for the cyan. It’s too oversaturated for my liking. ## Hello, Dot The raising of the gov-dot-UK dot into an element separate from the wordmark, has similarly raised some eyebrows. I call her Dot. (This is literally just me—it’s not an official thing.) The first reason was simply to make the wordmark look less like a web address, as people will now be seeing content from and interacting with GOV.UK services in places that aren’t the GOV.UK website. The bigger reason was to create a new visual leitmotif that can be used across mediums. Dot is going to appear in contexts detached from the rest of the logo much more in future, such as in motion graphics and user interface elements. Having Dot gives us a flexible, consistent element to play with. > For the curious, the way to write GOV.UK in prose remains the same. It’s **not** GOV · UK. ## Oh, and about the cost A bit of hubbub has been made about the cost of the brand refresh, lamenting that a chunk of change (about half a million) was given to an agency to ‘only’ change a colour and move Dot. This perspective only focuses on the logo, and completely ignores the other additions to the brand that are being introduced over time. It ignores that everything was tested, prototyped, refined, and tested again dozens of times with members of the public. It might not be obvious from a single side-by-side graphic, but a lot of time went into interrogating what we had and experimenting with what could be added. It was the full-time salaried efforts of dozens of design, development, and delivery specialists for more than a year. By that metric, it’s actually quite cheap. The place we landed was well-considered and intentional. Just because the destination of that journey was a logo that intentionally looks quite similar to the existing one doesn’t mean that the money was wasted, or that creating something radically different would have been better value for money. A holiday isn’t a waste of money just because you return home at the end of it. > And hey, we could’ve spent £100,000 on utter dogshit instead. ## What’s to come All of this work is out in the open. You can read the brand guidelines yourself, you can download and play with the assets as you please. As mentioned before, today is just square one of what’s to come. On the website, it may not seem like much has changed, but this is literally the MVP of the refreshed brand elements, and it’s going to take a bit of time for what’s new to bubble through to 13 years of existing stuff. Changes on social media will probably happen quite quickly, by comparison, and the GOV.UK App and GOV.UK Wallet will be launching with the new look as well. And this doesn’t mean we’re going to be stuck with this logo and this colour scheme for the next 13 years either. Nothing is fixed; everything is fluid. Maybe one day we’ll tweak the hues or lower the saturation of Dot, but that isn’t today. ## And so I ponder I don’t live in some civil service bubble. I understand why this might be controversial, and I raised those concerns during the process. Despite my reservations, I am pretty proud of having worked on this. It’s kind of a big deal, maybe the biggest deal I’ll be involved with in my entire professional career, and I’ve done my level best to make it a reality. > And believe me, as the ‘consulting developer’, I helped avoid so many worse ideas from happening. And that’s been true of pretty much everyone involved. Everyone has done great work against limited time, limited resources, and tireless pressure—many of us while _also_ doing our usual work—against a backdrop of reorganisation within GDS that also added daily stress. I fully expect it to evolve in the future, and in the near term, I’m probably going to remain part of that evolution. I’m excited to see how it goes!

Back in January, I did a little bit of renovating in the open, during which I stripped things back and changed a bunch of things around over a period of a few weeks. This week, I’ve made some more changes. Consider it a continuation of that work, or don’t, but some people _really_ hate change, so I feel inclined to defend changing anything. ## Lost in space For the first time in a very long time, this site is no longer typeset in Space Grotesk, having replaced it with GitHub’s Hubot Sans. This isn’t so much that I prefer Hubot Sans, but that I’ve been increasingly frustrated by Space Grotesk’s limitations, particularly around how it renders italic text. For the typographic normies reading this, not all italics (or ‘obliques’) are made equally. When a typeface has specifically designed italics, we call that ‘true’ italics. When those are missing, browsers and image editing software will try to create italics by skewing the default letterforms, creating ‘faux’ italics. Serif typefaces, like Baskerville, usually show the differences much more clearly. True italics are pretty much always preferable to faux italics, because true italics _are specifically designed for that purpose_. Faux italics can often look a little out of place, because they were never intended to exist. Space Grotesk has never had true italics, and when it comes to writing prose, like blog posts, the lack of true italics is very annoying to me in particular. Hubot Sans has true italics. It also has more variations of weight and width than Space Grotesk, which I’ve made some use of in the new design. Some headings are wider than their surrounding text and some are narrower. It’s a neat effect that I’d like to play with more. ## Good vibrations Colours across the board have been updated. It’s still the purple and green of the last couple of redesigns, but the exact colours have been changed. This is most notable in the dark theme’s purple, which is significantly more vibrant and now meets the minimum ratio for accessible non-text contrast, expanding how it can be used. The light theme also now uses a light grey background rather than pure white, so hopefully it’s a little less blinding. ## Not so square, now The dynamically generated squares that appeared on the homepage and OpenGraph images, and in animated form on the 404 page, have been removed. It was neat, but it was also a little buggy and involved loading a whole bunch of JavaScript just to add some background texture. This one’s really just a sacrifice on the altar of performance and tidy code. ## And the other stuff The homepage has been lightly redesigned. I ended up removing two of the amazing Ash images by TuxedoDragon in the process, but I want to add them back somewhere soon! Before and after comparison of the homepage. Blog posts and generic content pages have had their layouts reversed so that the primary content is on the left and supplemental information is on the right. These pages now use CSS grids for layout as well, somewhat deviating from one of my old rules about how I build the site, but y’know, times change, and also… Templates and pages can now have their own CSS bundles, so doing this kind of only-in-one-place layout coding is simple and still very performant. Thanks Eleventy bundles. There’s a mega pull request with all of these changes included, plus some others, if you’re interested in looking at the code. ## Coming soon? I’ve wanted to rewrite and redesign the about section for quite a while now. I’ll probably prioritise doing that next. I’ve also been thinking about adding some new sections, such as a ‘stash’ of interesting links or a repository of handy code snippets. I’m a little worried about the amount of upkeep involved in keeping them relevant, so I’m probably going to sit on those ideas until I feel more sure of them.

I wasn’t great at languages (or ‘modern foreign languages’ as it was officially called) in school. Part of this was circumstantial. I moved cities partway through secondary education, from a school where French was the foreign language of choice to a school where German was, forced into doing a German GCSE with three fewer years of German knowledge than my fellow pupils. I ended up scraping a D, for Deutsche. After school, I didn’t really pursue French, German, or any other language. I was _bad_ at them, after all; the education system had said so. Conversely, my highest grades were in English language and literature, which just gave me more reason to double down the one language I was really good at. _But change is afoot!_ Last week, I installed the Duolingo app and started learning Swedish. And it’s been… actually really fun! It turns out I’m actually half-decent at learning languages. Who knew? Part of this is just out of a general desire for self-improvement, of which learning a language is one avenue (another is to exercise more, as was part of my yearly theme before health issues steamrolled everything). But why Swedish? * I’ve been to Sweden twice so far this year: Malmö in February and Stockholm in June. Both times I’ve found the language _decently_ easy to pick up, probably because quite a lot of everyday words are similar to their English equivalents. * They’ve also just generally been really nice places. Malmö especially, as a compact, former industrial port city with a famous bridge and a reputation for being rough around the edges, really speaks to me as a Bristolian. * The stuff that isn’t like English trends towards being similar to German, which I at least have a rudimentary understanding of. * I have friends who already speak Swedish, including one of my partners. * Fluency in English is extremely common in Sweden, so I always have a fallback available to me if I falter in practice. The more serious reason is that I’m increasingly pessimistic about having a future in the UK. For the last decade, there’s been a feeling of regression, culturally and economically. Perhaps the thing that has most recently triggered this feeling was the release of this year’s IPSOS LGBT+ Pride report, which shows the UK backsliding on virtually all aspects of gay and transgender rights. Less and less does this feel like a place where I can be safe or secure. If I cannot be myself while being treated as an equal, if I cannot afford a home without moving a hundred miles away, if the best outcome I can hope for is the maintenance of a (shitty) status quo, then the best thing for my own mental health is just to leave. I don’t _want_ it to come to that, but I’m tired of hoping. It’s time to join so many of my peers and make an escape plan. Sweden is that escape plan. So I’m learning the language, just in case I do need to say hej då to the UK some day.

Can we get straight to the point here? Generative AI is kind of bad. Bad as in it’s not good, for basically 99% of use cases that people keep using it for. **Large language models work entirely on mathematical probabilities.** They will never readily produce something that isn’t the washed-out average of what the majority of the human-provided training data could be summarised to. Generative AI art is, frankly, not art at all. Art is about so much more than the art itself: it’s about intent, process, history, and interpretation. Generative AI cannot make art because it doesn’t have the ability to have intent, to devise and iterate upon a process, or to practically understand what it’s doing. There’s a reason that generative AI art is so often either a mangled attempt at photorealism, or a pale imitation of someone else’s work. (And not just because it’s often trained on stolen content.) Generative AI’s attempts to write are so often painfully average or incredibly exaggerated as to be unreadable. It’s attempts to summarise information are often totally incorrect because it doesn’t understand the semantics of anything that is input or output. My vague attempts to use coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Cursor (because I’m going to try and use a tool before decrying how useless it is) didn’t even last half an hour, because they would only ever suggest the wrong thing. Having incorrect suggestions appearing constantly, each time requiring me to stop to review them to make sure they were still incorrect, massively slowed down doing any actual work. Taking an existing thing and slapping an ‘AI chat’ interface onto it is not an act of innovatation, it’s a tascit admission that your existing thing was too rubbish for people to be able to use it as intended. That AI chat bot probably needs a disclaimer pointing out that it’s going to be wrong a bunch of the time anyway, because, again, generative AI does not understand the semantics of what it’s doing or saying. Generative AI only works properly when it has a sizeable data set to train from, and that has inevitably meant either stealing content from the open web in flagrant violation of copyright law, or farming the content of willing participants and leaking personal details and corporate secrets in the process. There is an incredible environmental cost to training AIs in the use of electricity, water, and the resources needed to build the data centres and millions of high-performance servers necessarily. All this seems to be utterly ignored, even against the backdrop of a rate of climate change that’s still far from being controlled. And there is the human cost too. Generative AI has poisoned people, killed people, made a mockery of the legal system, negatively affected mental health and perceptions of reality, enforced discrimination, proliferated conspiracy theories, stolen jobs, and replaced human relationships in some rather unhealthy ways. It doesn’t even make you more productive. You could argue that these issues derive from the people and not the tool, but that ignores that the _makers_ of these tools actively obfuscate that generative AI is sycophantic and stupid by design. They’re promoted as being omniscient assistants, not digital yes-men with memory banks filled with Reddit comments. I don’t think there’s a person in my life who isn’t already sick of generative AI being forced on them at work, on their phone and computers, by random websites and software that never needed it before now. People in multiple industries, with different levels of technical ability, have all tried these things and **uncompromisingly found them to be useless.** They’re tired of every company that has a profit motive to push and every person who is trying to sell themselves as a changemaker is repeating the mantra that “This is the future, you’ll be left behind if you don’t use it,” like suckers who have already dumped all their savings into a grand pyramid scheme. You know, the same thing they said about the metaverse. And NFTs. And cryptocurrencies. They probably said the same thing about microwave ovens in the 70s. Why on earth would you cook food yourself, spending hours toiling over a recipe book and hot stove to make a lasagne, when microwaving a frozen lasagne is so much faster and more efficient? Because, like generative AI, microwave lasagne is a washed-out average of the source material it’s based on. Like generative AI, it lacks intent, process, history, and interpretation. Because, like generative AI, microwave food is kind of bad. Generative AI is not the future, at least not in the form that everyone pushing it down your throat says that it is. It’s shit. It’s a net contributor to human mystery and environmental collapse. Can we please stop pretending like it’s actually good for anything? The sooner that Big Tech’s bubble of delusion bursts, the better off we’ll all be for it, and I’ll happily be one of those holding a pin.

First up, read the last blog post if you haven’t already. Done that? Good. As you might expect, all semblances of a “diet plan” or an “exercise routine” go out the window when you end up as a hospital inpatient. Only a couple of days of feeling well recovered did I then jet off to Malmö in Sweden for NFC—NordicFuzzCon—for which I (justifiably, I think) permitted myself to let loose from following anything too strictly. And literally the day after returning from Malmö, I came down with food poisoning that took up the rest of the month. So February was a fucking disaster. Let’s just roll the tape. ## Diet Probably followed it decently at the start of the month, but was naturally derailed after that. Hospital portions almost certainly constituted a smaller calorie intake than normal, so maybe that’s something? Same too, being too food poisoned to actually eat anything substantial for four days, although malnourishment is hardly a healthy diet plan. I didn’t particularly follow the diet at all while at NFC, barring one day of eating fairly light and healthily simply because I was so tired of fast food and convenience foods. Hopefully the rest was offset by the increased physical activity. ## Exercise Yeah, not much of that outside of NFC either. Furry conventions are, perhaps, surprisingly active times. You practically spend all day on your feet and walking around places. My Apple Watch rings loved it. ## Mental health Increasingly hot garbage. NFC was excellent, of course, but everything before and after it was miserable. The hospital stay had some novelty to it, derived from having never actually been in an ambulance or stayed overnight in a hospital before, but the novelty certainly wears thin after the first few days. All of the medical investigations and proddings are still ongoing, and the sheer amount of stuff being looked at now is sorta depressing in itself. This shit does not please the robot or Olive in the slightest. We know there’s no benefit in just being aimlessly miserable about it all, but it sucks and it feels inescapable right now. ## Medical stuff Following the hospital stay and prognosis of asthma (am I using that word right?), I’ve since been given some new routines to follow. Namely, an inhaler I have to use twice a day and a lung capacity test I need to do three times a day. I was briefly prescribed medication to tackle my high blood pressure, but this has already been paused on the doctor’s orders due to concerns about my kidney function. Yep, we got another potential health issue for the list! Thankfully, the food poisoning has mostly made its departure already, so I’m “only” waiting for: * bloodwork and urine testing to double-check my kidney function. * an ultrasound, also to check what my kidneys are up to. * outpatient appointments to formally test and diagnose asthma. * a check-in with the gender identity clinic. * a referral to a speech therapist. * a referral for laser hair removal. * a referral for a sleep study to investigate sleep apnea. * a potential referral to a dermatologist for psoriasis issues. * potentially, eventually, resuming treatment for high blood pressure. It feels that I may just have to pivot away from the diet and exercise parts of The Year of Health just for my own sanity. The sheer weight of so much medical nonsense is hard enough to deal with without also being paranoid about calorie goals. And hey, health is still health. I’m so tired.

In the last couple of years, there’s been a growing distaste amongst the more techy crowd towards Google Chrome and the prevalence of other Chromium project-based web browsers. And for good reason, Chromium’s Blink engine utterly _dominates_ the browser engine landscape by this point. The only thing that’s stopped it being a near total monopoly is Apple’s requirement to use the WebKit engine on iPhones and iPads—a restriction that’s now being legislated against in parts of the world—paving the way for Blink’s market share to only grow. Chromium is also the basis upon which Electron apps are built, which is already a widespread means of easily building cross-platform applications. This has led to some folks boycotting browsers and programs that use Chromium, which is fair enough. People can boycott whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. What bugs me (and some others, based on my Mastodon feed) is that some of these folks have also opted to ban Chromium-based browsers from accessing their websites entirely. I’m here today to say: please maybe don’t? ## Chromium is kinda-sorta-technically the best browser engine Sorry to burst your bubble, but Chromium isn’t popular _just_ because it’s owned by Google. For many people, it is the fastest browser engine they have access to—often trouncing Gecko-based browsers in benchmark tests. It has the largest extensions ecosystem. And if they’re using Google’s other products anyway, the additional data sharing isn’t a big deal. Browser developers frequently comment that Chromium is much easier to work with and extend than Mozilla’s Gecko and Apple’s WebKit. Chromium also has the best support for web standards, I write with a wry, knowing grin. Thar be caveats here. The main reason I dislike Google’s near-monopoly is the amount of influence it has given Google over web standards. It’s not uncommon for Google engineers to draft entire specifications and launch them in Chrome before there has been any consensus on whether the specification is a good idea or not. This has happened time and time again. The draft Portals specification was authored entirely by Google engineers, published in May 2019 and included in Chrome 85 in August 2020, having not received input or revisions from any other browser manufacturer. The draft Web Bluetooth API is edited entirely by Chrome engineers, published March 2015, and has been in Chromium since January 2017. No other browser engine has implemented it, with Mozilla and Apple both claiming it lacks the necessary protections to maintain the privacy of users. The same story happens over and over again. The Web USB API (in Chromium since September 2017), Keyboard Map and Keyboard Lock APIs (July 2018), WebXR API (December 2019), Serial API (March 2021), Idle Detection API (September 2021), and probably many more… all predominantly or entirely created by Google staffers, all implemented in Chromium despite a lack of input from, if not outright objections by, other browser vendors. And this sucks for web standards, because something being included in the most popular browser means that a sizeable chunk of developers immediately treat it as widely available, and begin implementing it into things, which makes changes to the specification even harder for other vendors to contribute. Google isn’t the only browser vendor guilty of this kind of behaviour, mind. Apple’s tendency towards utmost secrecy until something has been publicly announced at an Apple Event means that their draft specifications typically aren’t published until something is already in Safari’s beta track too. Google just does it much more brazenly. Some, like the Topics API (formerly known as the FLoC API, or Federated Learning of Cohorts API)—which would have the browser itself collect information about users to share with advertisers—has so far received enough high-profile pushback to not even be implemented in Chromium. And this is _incredibly frustrating_ , because yes, it does mean that technically Chromium is the most capable and well-supported browser engine, but Google also engineered the circumstances that put them in that position. It does bug me. A lot. ## Chromium is pretty good for accessibility, actually Chrome’s Blink engine is, generally, one of the better engines when it comes to accessibility in the first place. The accessibility tree is comprehensive and functional, without requiring much developer intervention to make it that way. The expansive Chrome Web Store means that users can often find accessibility tools easily and more cheaply than commercial alternatives, such as using the first-party Chrome Screen Reader (also known as ChromeVox) instead of having to spend nearly £1000 for software like JAWS, or using the relatively extensible Dark Reader instead of their operating system’s more restrictive forced colour settings. And, unlike operating system-based accessibility tools, Chrome extensions can be easily synchronised across multiple devices. I don’t have any particular evidence of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome’s raft of hardware APIs also gives it better support for alternative hardware devices, such as Braille displays or the Xbox Adaptive Controller. Ultimately, given Chromium’s popularity in the browser market, a user is quite likely to already have a Chromium browser set up for their specific access needs. At least 72% of screen reader users use a Chromium-based browser. Forcing a user to change browser to access a single website or service could mean forcing them to re-learn their entire way of using a web browser. It’s not a mild inconvenience. It’s not a small barrier that’s trivial to step over, it’s a wall. ## There isn’t necessarily an alternative If you’re on an Apple-made piece of hardware, you always have Safari as an alternative. Safari is fast and fits the Apple ecosystem nicely. It generally lags behind other browsers in terms of features and support for web standards (with the previous caveats), and it lacks a comprehensive library of extensions. Many will point to Firefox as the preferable alternative to Chrome, but Mozilla, the organisation that owns Firefox, has been subject to its own unpopular decisions lately: laying off staff and shutting down projects while paying their CEO millions, pushing unpopular LLM-based assistants in both their browser and websites, tracking users without consent, and is under investigation for internal discrimination. The simple fact is that some people just don’t trust modern-day Mozilla to work in their interests. Firefox may be an alternative _now_ , but for how much longer? There are minor browsers based on Firefox’s Gecko engine, such as LibreWolf and Zen Browser, that are further outside of Mozilla’s control and may work for some. Personally, them being restricted to desktop computers is a bit of a dealbreaker. I like using the same browser across devices, darn it. Sometimes, the thought of changing browser is a daunting or frightening one, particularly amongst less technology savvy users. Sometimes, the user interface or features that work best for someone isn’t available outside of the ecosystem of Chromium browsers. (And yes, I’m still an Arc user.) ## Not everyone has a choice in the first place In days of yore, corporate IT would require employees to use Internet Explorer. This practice survived a horribly long time, effectively only ending when Microsoft forced IE into retirement in mid-2022, preventing it from being used in Windows 10 and removing it completely in Windows 11. So what does corporate IT require now? Edge, of course! Microsoft’s Chromium-based replacement for IE. Educational institutions that issue Chromebooks will naturally force users to use Chrome. Organisation issued-Android devices may have no choice but to use Chrome or Samsung Internet. As above, some may technically have the freedom to use another browser, but find that only a Chromium browser provides the user experience they want or require. ## In conclusion I’m all for webmasters using their personal websites in whatever ways they wish; what I want to do here is highlight the unintended issues they may be creating for groups of people, and disabled people especially, in the process. Instead, consider putting something like a nag banner instead. Bring back some of that good “Please for the love of god stop using Internet Explorer” energy the internet had back 10–15 years ago (and make sure screen reader users can skip it). Maybe, just maybe, don’t block users entirely.

Someone decided to waste taxpayer money complaining about this post. You can probably find an unredacted version of it on your web archive service of choice. Content warnings for mentions of sexual and physical assault, suicide, sexism, and transphobia. Transphobia is sexism. Transphobia is sexism. This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███ ████ ██████ ███ ████ ███████ ███ ██ transphobia is _fucking sexism_. Unlike what many a headline is choosing to claim, this wasn’t just an affront to transwomen, but This content has been redacted for legal reasons.████ against non-binary people, intersex people, and all men and women—trans and cisgender. The This content has been redacted for legal reasons.██ █ pretty much entirely ignores the status of transgender men (so-called ‘biological’ women). Are _they_ allowed into women’s only single-sex spaces? You remembered trans men exist, right? They make up like 50% of all trans people in the UK. More than 50% by some measures. Maybe if any sort of trans advocacy group was consulted you’d have thought about that. Biological sex isn’t binary. Intersex people exist, more than you might imagine. A lot of intersex people don’t even know they were born intersex because it’s standard procedure in the Western world to genitally mutilate them at birth. Like seriously, was a single medical professional specialising in this area consulted? But really, the thing that peeves me off the most is that it’s blatant sexism, against both women and men. The entire argument about bathrooms is based on the notion that men are naturally more predatory and aggressive in a way that women are not, and somehow are unable or unwilling to control those urges for more than five minutes. The idea that transwomen have an unfair advantage in sports (note: they don’t) is based on the notion that women are naturally slower and weaker than men. Even some tournaments where physical differences, like competitive chess, seem convinced that transwomen are somehow at an advantage, tacitly making a statement that men are supposedly more intelligent than women. I repeat: _Transphobia is fucking sexism._ Cisgender women assault people. Cisgender women rape people. Cisgender women are more than capable of the same individual horrors as men. More than is ever reported to police, because big manly-men don’t want to admit that they were taken advantage of by biologically weak, stupid women. You know, because of sexism. Oh hey, you know what other group of people are overwhelmingly subjected to assault, rape, and discrimination on the basis of their biological status, by both men and women? **✨ Transgender people! ✨** And where are the support services and networks for them? After yesterday, _fucking nowhere_. When asked, transgender people will tell you that the worst part of being transgender is the way society treats you. That they lose friends and family, that it’s harder to access healthcare and support services, that you’re more freely discriminated against, that sometimes it’s hard to leave the house for fear of being harassed or assaulted. People who ‘regret’ transition overwhelmingly do so because their quality of life goes down, not as a result of being trans, but because of society’s response to it. Some of those people end up killing themselves. Better to be dead than to live in a world hostile to their true selves. Do you ever think that so-called ‘gender critical’ campaigners consider the blood they have on their hands? This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█████████ ████ █████████ ███ █ █████████ ██████ ███████ █████████ ██████ ████████ █████████ █████████ ██ █████████ █████████ ████ ████████ Do you think that the embers of their vitriol die down just before they sleep, and they actually consider the question “Am I the baddie?” Maybe that level of critical thinking is too much to ask from people who haven’t realised they just fought for transgender men to be in their spaces instead. Transmasc fashion models Arthur Macnair, Ethan DeNadai and Tai Hattingh. (Nicked from Lydia Garnett/Attitude.) Unless… it was never about ‘biological women’ in the first place? Isn’t it interesting that in 2017 we had This content has been redacted for legal reasons.█ █ ████ ██ ██████ ████ ████ █ █ ██████ █████████ █████████ █ ███ █████████ █████ █████████ ██ █ ████████ ███ ██ ███████ ██ █ ███ █ ██? That the tide of public opinion seems to have shifted so rapidly in favour of oppressing an already oppressed minority? Gosh, it’s almost as if this whole thing is just a manufactured culture war, invoked by groups with a vested interest in degrading the rights of both women and queer people. Like transphobia is being used as a gateway to normalising further bigotry. Almost like _transphobia is sexism_.

Someone decided to waste taxpayer money complaining about this post. You can probably find an unredacted version of it on your web archive service of choice. This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███████ █████████ █████████ █████ █████████ █████████ █████████ ███████ █████████ █████████ ███ ████████ ███ ██ ██. At least as best I can remember it. * * * Hi, I’m beeps. I’m agender and use it/its pronouns. After a 10 year wait I finally started HRT in December. It shouldn’t have taken that long. I’ve had a few days now to ponder how I feel about this whole thing, and I’ve written it on a placard here. For those who can’t see it, it says "What awful world has been made that living genuinely is a radical act." How awful it is that we fight merely for the right to exist as ourselves. What awful people see those who are already oppressed, who want nothing but the right to exist, and decide to punch down. Do you think that as they lay down for the night, the embers of their vitriol subsiding, that they consider the thought "Am I the baddie?" This content has been redacted for legal reasons.████████ ████ █ █████ ████ ███ █ ██████ ██ █████████ █ █████████ █████████ █ █ █ Do they ever think of the blood they have on their hands? Does thinking that they think about it give them too much credit? This This content has been redacted for legal reasons.███ sets a dangerous precedent not just for trans men and women. It erases intersex people and non-binary people. It erodes the rights of lesbian women who date trans women, and gay men who date trans men. It erodes the freedoms of cis women who look a little too ‘butch’ and cis men who look a little too ‘fey’. How far we have fallen when less than 10 years ago we had a This content has been redacted for legal reasons.████ ████ █ ████ that had our backs. What an awful world has been made that living genuinely is now a radical act. **Keep living genuinely.**