Thought I'd weigh in on the Schiavo case -- briefly, because I don't have a whole lot to say about it. Let me start by saying that until very recently (like, last night), I knew next to nothing about the case. I'm usually at work or asleep when the news is on, and when I'm in the house I'm generally at my computer doing something or other for Scary-Crayon. I wouldn't even have known about the case at all were I not a fairly regular reader of Dawn's blog, but of course the information one gets there is highly biased. Some things mentioned with respect to the case are flat out untrue; others are intentionally misleading and downright strange (there was a very cruel letter to Terri, supposedly penned by Michael Schiavo but actually written by Dawn's mother -- I still haven't been able to figure out the purpose of that, given that this "satire" appears to be lacking in satirical value). So first things first: before you bother forming an opinion about the case and getting all emotional, get the facts first, because there are some really important ones that you're probably not hearing. (more...)

Okay, I just had my interview... and while I hope that it actually went better than I think it did, I'm not sure it went too well. Granted, I was nervous as all hell, and I hope they take that into account when assessing the conversation, but man! To my mind, I sounded a lot like President Bush talking about "fiscal sanity" -- rambling on and on and saying the same things and not really driving home a clear point. But then, he got reelected, so maybe the American people who work at the magazine headquarters will see fit to give me a chance. I've no doubt that I could do the job -- and do it well at that -- I'm just not sure that I convinced them of that during this phone interview. I mean, I've got the writing and editing part down, but admittedly I'm not the ubergamer that I once was, with my hardware being too old and my schedule being too packed and my income being too low to allow me to enjoy the latest and greatest titles at length. I do try to kinda keep up with what's coming out, though, and I'd love to get back into the swing of things! Among other things, Resident Evil 4 looks pretty sweet, and I can see very easily getting hooked on one of these MMORPGs. Anyway, I think that my lack of total immersion in the gaming world at the moment might have made appear me less attractive as a potential writer/editor. Sigh.

There's always Scary-Crayon, though! For my devoted readers, here's a preview: Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #34. Enjoy, and thanks for all of your support and well-wishes. 🙂

Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #33 is up. Enjoy!

And after an episode of Buffy ("When She Was Bad" -- I'm rewatching Season 2 now!) and another bit of tweaking to the new blog, it's off to bed for the Wes. Depending on how things go today, in less than twelve hours I'll either be very, very happy or very, very sad -- or perhaps bouncing between both extremes because I'm not really sure how it went. But here's hoping it goes well. Man, that would be swell. I'm anxious... can you tell? Too much rhyming -- bloody hell!

Ja ne, minna-san! 🙂

Okay, I'm actually starting to enjoy this now that I kinda understand what I'm doing here. Following a link from the lovely Tina, I downloaded a few themes created by Theron Parlin and have been examining his code as compared to his output to figure out how/what he did to achieve certain effects. Borrowing some code here and adjusting values there, I ended up with this result -- and I've gotta say I'm pretty pleased with it. Note the sidebar pulldown menus! Fun fun. 🙂

I'm still a little confused about the purpose of those links at the bottom, though, which I left in for now but will probably eventually remove. I get that they're used for validating the page's XHTML and CSS, but why are they there for all to see and do? For that matter, why are they there in the first place? I think it's kinda weird.

And now I must be off to the bookstore. Ugh. But in less than 24 hours things may be looking up! *fingers crossed* Ja ne, minna-san.

So I totally meant to cheat and use tables for the mock wesoteric layout, but I ended up playing around with the divs some more and read up on CSS tricks and "hacks" and actually kinda got something that mostly works in both Mozilla and IE. Like with this blog here, there's a two pixel difference that I don't see any getting around, but ah well -- them's the breaks. Feel free to check out the page in your browser and tell me what you see -- it should look kinda like the Scary-Crayon main and content pages without all of the graphical splender. Don't start frequenting that place just yet, though. As you can see, we're still in a testing phase, and the full "post" on there is yesterday's entry here -- I just posted it so I could see how a full post would look. Anyway, the layout over there will change quite a bit -- different color scheme, the addition of graphics, more template tweaks, etc. -- but this is a pretty good indicator of how the Scary-Crayon blog will eventually look, assuming I don't decide to just keep the page uniform and paste the post PHP into the current layout. Which would certainly work!

But for the time being, I must rest. G'night, minna-san.