I’m as sick to death as the rest of you of seeing this rapist’s image, but there’s something I just can’t get past, so I’m spitting out here with a visual prophylactic to protect us from the visage of child sex trafficker.

What bothers me most about the image is that it could be a reality. He could be the person that he used AI to imagine him to be. He could use his energy to heal people and improve the lives of the people he’s meant to govern. At any moment he could decide to help us instead of hurting us. It’s so frustrating to see him visually fantasize about using his power to help others, but turn around and yank funding from immigrants and orphans because someone disagrees with him.

I know that he posted this image for attention, that this fantasy of his is simply about being worshipped and adored constantly as a distraction from the horrors that haunt his every minute. I know he doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and I guess that’s what’s so heartbreaking.

I had the opportunity to build a WordPress theme from the ground up recently, which was really exciting, and also very frustrating. The last theme I built was in 2025, and given the timeline I went with the old trusty _s (aka underscores), which I’ve used for years, and I was able to make a good, useable theme with. But as of Sept. 5th, 2025 _s is no longer being actively supported, with the attention now focused on block themes.

With that in mind, I did a fresh search for WP starter themes and began picking through the Reddit and blog posts to find what people are using these days, and here’s what my experience was trying to use these themes.

Barebones

Barebones was the first theme that I looked it, because of its intense minimalism packaged with a lot of great starter plugins that I use when developing custom themes, including:

• Yoast SEO

• Advanced Custom Fields Pro

• Regenerate Thumbnails

• Classic Editor

• Simple History

But a quick check on the GitHub repo showed that it hadn’t been updated in a year, which was a yellow flag for me ⚠️, so I passed on it, not wanting to get stuck in a quagmire of NPM commands trying get deprecated and abandoned scripts to work via command line.

air-light

I had a great feeling about air-light. Everything about the notes on its GitHub page made me thing that this was a well-maintained theme with a full suite of backend tools that would help me develop more quickly. Sadly, I was wrong. The quagmire that I avoided with Barebones was exactly where I ended up with air-light.

Its instructions are good, but insufficient, and even following them to the letter, I was unable to get the theme up and running in a timely fashion. There were a number of non-documented errors and the level of customization within the theme docs was too high, forcing me to troubleshoot consistently, and use Gemini to solve obscure NPM errors.

air-light had potential, but the updates required for every new project were too time consuming, and I wasn’t interested in using their bespoke command line function.

Flynt

Flynt, on the other hand, worked right out of the box. I was very happy with everything about the Flynt setup. It was well documented, and it worked almost exactly as expected. Getting composer installed on my Mac turned out to be a bit of a challenge, but thankfully with Gemini’s help I was able to get it installed. But once I got to the WordPress dashboard and the page creation process, I was met with some very unfamiliar dashboards.

The Flynt page creation process is very modular, but also very customized, and looks nothing like the typical WordPress backend interface that my clients were expecting, which was a real negative, since the DX for Flynt was exceptional. But, give my existing familiarity with the traditional WordPress backend, both classic and Gutenberg, and given that I wanted to stay as close to WordPress block development as I could, I made the hard choice to find something else.

Blockbase

At this point I just gave up, deciding that my way of coding WordPress themes was in the past, and that I needed to modernise. With that in mind I gave in and tried the Blockbase theme, which is WordPress’ own basic block building theme. I’d avoided these in the past because I didn’t want to deal with the theme.json learning curve, and didn’t feel like learning full site editing, because it’s the opposite of a developer experience for me. It doesn’t feel like coding.

Nonetheless, defeated by all my previous attempts I downloaded Blockbase and I gave it a shot, following the directions in its README file, and it cratered. I tried the classic npm install, npm run build, and npm start, but nothing happened, I just got another string of errors from the command line, so I moved on from Blockbase.

_tw

I’m not sure what list finally led me to _tw, but I’m grateful for it, wherever it is. _tw is a starter theme based on Automattic’s _s (underscores), but updated for use with Tailwind CSS. As with the previous themes I walked through the traditional set up steps and…it just worked! Everything was in place working as expected, and I was able to just start developing, which was absolute bliss after the frustration of dead end after dead end that I’d encountered previously.

_tw still has a few wrinkles that I haven’t explored to my content yet, but as far as a starter theme goes, I’m very happy with it, and grateful that _s lives on, and I have a new starter theme that I can depend on (for the next year or so 😂).

My biggest takeaway is that I wish I’d given up sooner

The state of WP starter themes hasn’t changed much in the last 10 years in the sense that there are a few out there that do close to what I want and quite a few out there that do nothing close to what I want. Documentation is still very poor; it’s incomplete and outright wrong, which leads to a very frustrating experience.

Which is the biggest lesson: quit sooner. I spent too much time trying to make broken themes work for me, which is reflective of my own inner belief that I’m not smart enough to make them work, that I’m not a good enough developer to understand the way these themes were built. The truth is that I’m smart enough and experienced enough to know a sour theme when I test one, and should trust myself more when I feel like I should give up.

When I was a senior frontend developer at my previous employer my position existed in a structural limbo. Financially I was a shared expense, without explicitly being a part of the shared services group, and initially I reported to the COO, but his tenure there was so short that I ended up in marketing, the team I did the majority of my work with, which was a nice fit.

Still, there was tension. Since I relied on IT for support on a variety of my tasks there was grumbling about the fact that marketing was draining IT services for non-crucial items, and as IT’s red-headed step-child all of my projects were last in line for support. Conversations happened around me, but not with me until finally I met with Director of Engineering to discuss what I did and how I might fit into the IT org.

It was a friendly conversation where we reviewed my skills and background, and then he said something I’d never heard in any of the professional conversations I’ve had since I started Pixelsmith Design in 2008: “You’re a self-taught developer, no?” And it wasn’t just what he said, but the way he said it that made it clear that this made me less valuable to him. I don’t remember what I said or how I replied, I just remember feeling like I’d gotten in trouble for something I hadn’t realized I’d done. It was a terrible feeling.

This wasn’t the first time I’d run into this prejudice, but it was the first time that someone had said it out loud. Part of it is ageism: a ton of frontend devs are self-taught because there were no frontend programs or classes when we started coding in the ‘90s. I just had to learn it from friends and books. Looking back now I see the ways that I’d cherished the mythology that built around starting as a developer in my friend’s garage, learning HTML and Photoshop in order to build a website to post my poetry online. The is the Ur myth of technology, the scrappy, self-taught outsider making good on those early childhood experiments.

And now, here, this gate-keeping stranger uttered the phrase, “self-taught developer” and its condescension sheared all of the mythology that I’d built up around my identity in my 16 year career as a frontend dev, leaving only the imposter syndrome behind.

I didn’t move to IT, which I ended up being grateful for. Another fantastic contributor did move from our utilities group to the IT group, and within 6 months he was gone. His new supervisor, the same man who’d called me self-taught, gave him a terrible performance review and sent him packing after 7 years of top performance in his previous business unit. Scuttlebutt was that the supervisor had him teach all of his duties to a contractor and then got rid of him. Maybe he was self-taught too.

The phrase still haunts me. Don’t get me wrong, being a self-taught freelancer has disadvantages, imposter syndrome being the biggest among them. Then there are times I still struggle with names for common programming patterns or array structures because I’ve learned them experientially, not academically. When someone talks about object oriented programming (OOP) I get really anxious, but then when I read the code, I know what’s going on.

The thing that frustrates me the most about the illusion of the self-taught developer every single developer is self-taught, even if they aren’t only self-taught. Nobody comes out of school knowing how to do the job that they end up getting. They have to learn that on the job. And technology doesn’t stand still, but moves rapidly, requiring developers to continually self-teach to stay relevant. The implication that I’m less valuable as a developer because I don’t have a computer science degree is ludicrous, and reflects the way in which our implicit biases can blind us to the talent staring us in the face.

Lastly, a huge thanks from a self-taught designer/developer to some my fantastic teachers over the years who’ve contributed to the success of this self-taught designer, whether they knew it or not: Mike Montiero, Debbie Millman, Eric Meyer, Jeffery Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Cedarholm, and Steve Krug

One of my favorite books is Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” 📖 . It’s tightly packaged sci-fi detective thriller that coalesces a variety of my interests: Alaska, Judaism and chess. It’s also notable for having predicted Trump’s attack on Iran ( ⚠️ Spoilers ahead! ⚠️)

While the details don’t match exactly, the plot of Chabon’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning book is that a cabal of Jewish and American groups fly explosives and red heifers into Jerusalem in order to bring about the end times prophesied in Revelation, which is a great plot for a detective thriller, not so much actual historical events. So when I heard that US government is reportedly selling this war with Iran to its troops as a religious war being fought explicitly to trigger armageddon in the Holy Land I was flabbergasted.

Living in a time when the U.S. government is explicitly stating that it is actively trying to bring about the biblical end times is absolutely mind-blowing. The US has quickly adopted the guise of a theocratic government, the inevitable evolution of the cult that the GOP formed around Trump, which is a poisoned parody of the church itself: A demonic leader vomiting lies onto an ecstatic congregation writhing joyfully in his filth.

Honestly, I do hope that this is Armageddon, but in the most secular way possible. May these prayers for an end to Christianity be answered. May this be the end of this ancient, blood-soaked superstition and the beginning of something new and sustainable. May we see as a people that the literal embrace of ancient religions leads too often to hate, pain and bloodshed. May the jealousy, covetousness and violence of the 10 commandments finally fall away to be replaced rightly with the compassion of the beatitudes. May the people see the patterns of exploitation and violence in the rule of men in government and religions, tear them down and hold them accountable for their narcissism, their gluttony and their cruelty.

I know from experience that it’s foolish to bet against ignorance and selfishness of human beings, but my hope is that this new installment in the tiring pattern of never-ending war is a pulling-away of the veil for as many people as possible. That this superstitious violence can be seen by the whole world, and we can stop chasing the phantoms of ancient Abrahamic “prophecies” and start following the precepts of the revelatory figures in our traditions, like Jesus and Buddha.

The world is aching for enlightenment, for freedom from these oppressive, male regimes who exploit and spoil whatever they touch for their own gain. Armageddon, capitalism and AI are linked like never before with Peter Thiel giving lectures on the imminent approach of the anti-christ. They are all different tentacles of the same beast, clinging desperately to power, seeking to dominate and consume, panicking as their efforts become more and more obvious, and as the little fish they’ve kept separate for so long are waking up and organizing.

I hope this is a time where we finally see how these pathetic, desperate old men are sacrificing our friends, our families, our children and our futures for their own pitiful need for relevance and power, and choose ourselves and our communities over the hypocrisy and filthy lies of men who believe wrongly they are gods.

On the surface it sure seems that way. Turning down work as a freelancer trying to keep the calendar full with paying work is a tough, tough choice. But I know from previous experience that it's the right one.

Here's why: Three of my first interactions with the client were bright yellow flags and left me with a puddle anxiety in the pit of my stomach.

⚠️ When I asked them to email me their website address they told me they couldn't, because someone who managed the current site has access to their email and might see our correspondence.
⚠️ After reviewing their site I texted them and asked them to send me a quick overview of the work they'd like done on the site. Instead of texting back they called twice and left no message.
⚠️ They trashed their previous developers, saying they ripped the client off, which didn't match with what I saw on the client's site.

All three of these together form a pattern that shows this is not a client worth taking. Refusal to put things in writing is always a yellow flag, and generally foreshadows ballooning scope creep that they will refuse to pay for.

Which likely contributed to the last yellow flag: The previous developers couldn't manage the ever-changing client requests and fired the client, who felt victimized by the boundaries that their developers felt, and trashed the developers behind their backs. If a potential client trashes their previous employees to you, they will absolutely trash you to the next person they try to hire.

Could I talk myself into this work? Absolutely. I'm not desperate for work, but having too many clients always feels like just enough when I'm freelancing. But what I know from experience is that the money I get from clients like these never ever pays for the exhaustion and frustration of trying to satisfy their endless list of grievances.

Have you turned down clients before? Have you ever wished you had?

A friend of mine posted the above meme this morning, and it got under my skin. Not because I necessarily disagree with the sentiment of the post, but because it’s a weak scarecrow (formerly straw man) argument that fundamentally misunderstands the values of the people that support the regime. Understanding the values of contemporary conservatives explains how they can continue to be a part of what amounts to an apocalyptic white nationalist death cult in the face of obvious intellectual contradiction that drives the rest of us crazy.

There’s no hypocrisy or double standard for cultists in believing that everyone should have a right to carry a firearm and that Alex Pretti was executed for having one. The reason that it’s not a double standard for them is because critical thinking is not a value of cultists, obedience is. Their leaders have told them what to believe, and it doesn’t matter that it may directly contradict what the leaders told them to believe yesterday.

Cultists can’t decide one way or the other whether owning a gun is right or wrong, because doing so would compromise their obedience, and endanger their place in the hierarchy. Their rigidly hierarchical social structure means that they’ll wait to be told what to believe and obediently following that decision from their superior IS the best moral outcome.

There are two things that make this difficult to perceive in the US right now. First is that free and independent thought is central to the liberal identity (whether it’s practiced is a different story), and as such liberals believe that it is central to every identity, which it is not.

Second, and more crucial to our American flavor of cultish populism, is the central tenant that members of the cult are ‘mavericks’. Cultists believe that they are rogue cowboys who go against the grain to find the real truth, hence the popularity of “doing my own research.”

Renée Good’s killer Jonathan Ross is a perfect example of this. A murderous cultist working for the American government as a gestapo enforcer who allegedly had a Gadsden flag (representing freedom from government tyranny) flying at his house .

Anyone with an iota of critical thinking ability would blanche at the hypocrisy of a government employee violently infringing on individual American’s right flying a flag that says the government shouldn’t do that. But the hypocrisy is invisible to cultists like Ross because he continues to be obedient, and his obedience allows him to indulge other appetites that are far more important to him than intellectual consistency.

Thinking for themselves and displaying consistent beliefs is vilified in conservative social circles bc independent thought leads to disobedience, disrupting the social hierarchy. Even at the highest levels of the government, the Supreme Court, obedience is primary. It’s the job of cultist judges to find a way to follow orders, not to prove that the orders make sense or are consistent with what the orders were yesterday, or 250 years ago.

Mitch McConnell et al didn’t choose these justices because they were intelligent, free-thinkers who would advance American values through intellectually consistent jurisprudence, but because they were obedient people who would use their intelligence to reinforce the hierarchy (and conveniently their place in it) in any way possible, even through sheer numbers. The 6 conservative Supreme Court justices (at least 2 of whom are illegitimate) gang up on the history of American jurisprudence like ICE thugs on helpless women, justifying their judicial violence about as convincingly as Greg Bovino justified the killing of Alex Pretti. But it doesn’t matter if it’s convincing. It just has to send the message to the cult, and they’ll take it from there.

So if these calls to conservatives are genuine, they’re are a waste of time, because they challenge a value that non-cultists highly prize, but that cultists spurn. If they’re preaching to choir (which has great value!) about the intellectual dishonesty of cultists and conservatives (who can tell the difference anymore?), then there are better ways to do it.