Jonathan Schofield

Cycling, designing,
coding, over-thinking.
Bit sweary.
Portsmouth, UK.

Luddite trying not to be po-faced
in the face of so much po💩

A JS trying to make his JS, CSS and HTML lean and kind.

“The times are urgent.
Let’s slow down.”
—Bayo Akomolafe

Header image is a panoramic view of Southsea seafront from the groyne built from imported Norwegian granite to protect the beach from longshore drift.

Profile image is a 50-something me behind a card box that says “Fragile, this way up”.

Micturition interpreter: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113175303993039170
Phallic nugget messenger: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116272147977155021

Last Notes

2025-09-20 16:34:50 UTC

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revisited this and your pushback was the right way to go! Cheers :)

2025-07-30 12:19:54 UTC

Went to a bank branch today to make a payment I have to make in person due to various factors.
Was waiting to be seen and overheard a conversation between a bank employee and another customer. The employee was dumbstruck by the customer not having internet access and therefore struggling to suggest next steps.
We are storing up *so* much trouble. Building systems that are failing people

2025-06-21 08:42:16 UTC

Thanks to the work of [@ed_hawkins](https://fediscience.org/@ed_hawkins ) and his team at Reading, it’s #showYourStripes day.
These stripes below are for Portsmouth, UK, a city that was instrumental in kick-starting the Industrial Revolution – https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114607596979451211 – and where I have lived for the last 24 years.
I’ve overlaid 4 generations of oldest siblings in my lineage to try and give a sense of lives led inside this crazy path we’re on: https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111284511932083107
Find your stripes at https://showyourstripes.info
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/720/435/962/206/965/original/bdbf6072e016e704.png

2025-05-16 14:34:05 UTC

Pet peeve:
web app ‘links’ that are a button when they *should be a link* because they migrate the user from an edit view back to a list view.
Mailchimp 👀
#webDev

2025-05-03 11:46:39 UTC

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in the 90s the scale of content came to exceed the wayfinding tech’s capacity, until Google came along. It promised not to monetise its solution and then it did.
And now the scale of content is orders of magnitude larger than the entirely monetised wayfinding tech’s capacity.
When things get too big… 🤔
@npub1rnv…wy64

2025-03-21 17:15:40 UTC

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the domestic/foreign and public/private composition of the debt matters too, right?

2025-01-24 09:20:39 UTC

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thanks. But I’m never going there on account of https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113866106356317622

2025-01-24 09:14:16 UTC

Petty vacant:
I rarely drive a car these days but when I do I inevitably use some of the roads where Portsmouth Council long ago introduced a 20mph limit. And I always enjoy sticking to the limit to piss off as many people behind me as possible.

2025-01-15 08:26:56 UTC

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…“‘I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years’, the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year.
‘I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm’.”

2024-08-22 07:57:10 UTC

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I accept your “perfect should not be” point but here are some alternatives.
Put solar on roofs, every roof, because buildings are infrastructure we generally want to preserve.
Drive down car use through all kinds of policy. And rip up car parks and turn them into urban farming plots, because parking is generally infrastructure we want to be rid of as soon as possible and we’ll need significant space to grow food locally *far* more than we think we do at this point

2024-06-20 16:10:01 UTC

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at risk of inaccurately summarising him / over-simplifying, his key tenets are:
1. Find thematic entry points that UA (Unwilling Inactivists) feel strongly about – ideally ones that are not obviously to do with decarbonisation
2. Avoid/defer/minimise making the context overtly about decarbonisation as much as possible – and steer clear of political partisanship
3. Entertain / gamify / make fun the nature of the engagement…

2024-06-20 16:00:17 UTC

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also perhaps of interest…
A friend of mine has what he calls a “climate action taxonomy”: https://seethroughnews.org/our-target-audience-for-climate-activism
1. Effective activists: ~0.1%
2. Ineffective activists: ~1%
3. Unwilling inactivists: ~75%
4. Willing inactivists: ~24%
and concludes…
“forget #4, target #3, be gentle with #2
I don’t think it’s as clear cut as he does, but I agree about #3 being the opportunity

2024-06-20 15:44:19 UTC

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…what I’m trynig to get at is shining a light on the psychology of collective action vs protest

2024-06-20 15:43:32 UTC

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This may be off topic but I’d really like to see sentiment analysis of how people feel who have been through any kind of deliberative democractic process to do with the metacrisis and/or communal project such as neighbourhood energy or urban farming
To what extents do they feel empowered, frustrated, scared, hopeful?
How does this vary subject to their starting perspective?