Do I find other people attractive and wonder what it would be like to have sex with them? Occasionally. Do I get jealous

I’ve worked in Big Podcast for as long as one can work in Big Podcast (I think?). This isn’t something to brag about, but it’s true. An old boss called me the Zelig of podcasting. But I prefer to think of myself as the Beetlejuice of podcasting. I’ve been hanging around my model graveyard for the past 10 years, waiting for someone to say my name three times. After that happened, I’d show up to work at your company. And many of you, thank you, have come calling.,The lesson is this. Americans let the basics of life, decade by decade, turn into luxuries only affordable for the richest few — because they were too busy punching one another down to do what the rest of the rich world did: make those very basics of life ever cheaper and cheaper, until they became necessities provided for everyone. Yesterday’s luxuries becoming tomorrow’s basics, freely provided to all, is what the growth of a society really means — but America, perversely, got this backwards — today’s basics became tomorrow’s luxuries, rendering life itself less and less livable, year by year.,The last thing you can try is to add a 1p inner border with some transparency to your shape. It simulates the glass-edge and can make the shape stand out more from the background. Experiment! While elements of this style like blurred backgrounds have been around for many years now, it is just now growing in popularity, so there’s still a lot of cool, creative effects to explore here.,I’d worked myself into a tailspin. I wasn’t able to listen to podcasts — literally my only hobby — because I was made so anxious by the prospect of the making of the podcasts. I told my bosses — the ones who reminded me of my loyalty — that I needed help getting work done, that they needed to split my position, that I couldn’t do it all alone, that I wanted to have a family someday. They ignored me. Trump got elected. I started losing weight and losing my hair, deciding the way to grow it back was via these shark pills I heard about on the only podcast I could listen to, Bitch Sesh, which was made by a different network. The shark pills worked, but my pleas to help make this job workable fell on deaf ears. In retrospect, why would they want to improve the situation? They were getting multiple people’s jobs out of me, paying me one wage, and paying me the free lip service of how my loyalty would eventually benefit me. I spoke to an older colleague at the company about the issue, who said “they have a women problem.” I went out, got noodles, and started looking for another job.,Do I find other people attractive and wonder what it would be like to have sex with them? Occasionally. Do I get jealous over my partner? Yes, sometimes I do. Do I let these things infiltrate my partnership? I try my absolute best not to.,When I was 22, I left Chicago and moved to New York. No one in my family lives further east than Indiana. I didn’t know anyone. I had $700 and I wanted to figure out how to get a job at WNYC, New York Public Radio. I somehow got one of those freelance jobs that turned to permalancer that turned to, miraculously, a full-time job. When I was 27, I heeded my first call out of my podcast Beetlejuice graveyard, and got a job as the first employee at a then-new podcasting network.,Because I was actually making a living wage and because I finally had dental insurance, I quickly determined that my entire life would live or die based on how I performed at this new podcast job. My entire identity quickly formed around my ability to answer emails at all hours, to attend meetings even if I was in the hospital (and to be scolded for not attending in person, after revealing my whereabouts), to come to work the day after getting married to record a podcast, etc.. To be invaluable. Not valuable, but invaluable. I needed this job more than it needed me, I thought, and literally couldn’t afford to lose it — financially, but also from an identity perspective. And after all, my then-bosses reminded me, you were the first employee. You were invested. I was also literally vested in some type of phantom equity no one quite understood. And, I had a lot of it, as the first employee.,Just as with Neumorphism, this style is likely not as accessible, as let’s say default Material Design. The main rule from Neumorphism also translates to here — if you have good, functional hierarchy, your on-screen elements should be able to work without the backgrounds. That will ensure people with vision problems will be able to still understand the UI.,In the example above we have the exact same background blur value of 8, yet the images look completely different. When the fill opacity is at 100%, it doesn’t matter how low the object opacity is. We simply won’t get the desired blurred background.,But before Big Podcast. Before my well-tended graveyard. Before the anxious period as I waited to show up at your podcast company: I was 14 years old, burning audio onto CD-Rs from the website of WBEZ Chicago, my local public radio station, and listening to episodes of This American Life while shelving books at my local children’s library — a job I got after winning the children’s reading contest for as many years as it takes to get a job from winning the children’s reading contest. These were stories told from Chicago, near where I was. But, these stories, piped directly into my impressionable ears, were one of the first pieces of media that made me feel like there was a world outside of the small one that I knew. A world that was — without getting into it — a hard one for me to live in.,It’s important to remember, however, that you don’t make the entire shape transparent — only its fill. Most design tools when having the fill at 100% and the object transparency lower will simply disable the background blur.,This may be the reason why Apple chose a colorful background as the default wallpaper for Mac OS Big Sur. Those easy to discern tonal differences are also easy to see when a blurry-transparent-surface sits on top of them.,I even, somehow, made it into a Prologue of a This American Life episode during this time. TAL was, to me, it — in terms of story-telling, but also in terms of a way out of the circumstances I was born into.,Backgrounds play an essential role in making this effect shine (quite literally). They can’t be too simple or dull, or the effect won’t be visible. They also can’t be too detailed,And it has changed my life. Not to mention the listening and the being heard. That shit is real. That’s what I decided to devote my entire life to. I met my husband because he heard me on a podcast, too. It was great — I literally didn’t have to do anything!