In addition to A Crayon Haiku #28 -- which really must be seen to be believed -- the main and content pages are now active in their table-free CSS and PHP form, and the same goes for all articles starting now. It's kinda sad to see the tables go -- I've had a ten year love affair with those special little tags -- but ah well, times change. Besides, it's not like anyone'll be able to tell the difference! I've also set up a little redirect thing, so visitors to the old blog should automatically end up here now. (If that's you, welcome!) And that's about all I've got for now. Ja!

Quick post before I run off to the bookstore (man, these next two weeks are going to go by soooo slowly). Just wanted to apologize to everyone for having been so bad with e-mails and contacts and whatnot lately! So here's the deal. Since I started the new blog, I'm not really sure who's with me here. (The old Blog of Wes is still getting new comments and referrals, but not so much over here -- probably because other folks' links haven't been updated yet. Speaking of links, don't worry if yours was on the old blogroll but hasn't made it over here yet -- I'm doing it as a gradual thing to make sure I keep up with the "maintenance" around here. Though I should mention that not all of the old links will be coming over -- namely because I want to maintain a lighter tone over here than I did when I first started the old blog, even though I'll continue to write serious entries from time to time.) There are folks who used to comment on the old blog who don't say too much these days (who haven't said much in a while, actually), and there are some newer folks (welcome!) who I'm not quite familiar with and would be interested in knowing a little more about. (more...)

I live under a rock, so I wasn't too up on the details of the March 21 shootings carried out by one Jeff Weise on the MN Red Lake Reservation, but a recent link from Stefan has piqued my curiosity with respect to the incident. Apparently, back in October (two days before my birthday, no less), Weise posted what might now be viewed as a prelude to slaughter -- a Flash animation depicting a gunman shooting down a handful of people before blowing up a police car and finally committing suicide himself. It's actually pretty well-animated -- though admittedly Newgrounds is filled with similar shorts -- but of course what makes this particular cartoon significant (and frightening) is that Weise actually more/less carried out the events depicted therein. According to folks assessing the situation after the fact, Weise's animations (another of which features a demonic clown), artwork, and fiction, which apparently depicted images of zombies and death, constituted definite warning signs and that, had they been properly addressed, this tragedy might have been prevented. And I suppose that in this case, that might be true. (more...)

I was pretty anxious about doing it, which is why I waited until now, but I actually found the experience to be fairly painless! And assuming it gets approved and everything went well, I should be getting a nice return in the neighborhood of $700! Which will come in handy since I recently handed in my 2-week notice at the bookstore. No, I haven't heard any good news from the company I interviewed with a couple of weeks ago, but I finally decided that I'd had enough of being treated like shit day in and day out for minimal wages while in the employ of a company that obviously doesn't appreciate its workers. Anyway, more on that later. (more...)

That it is, along with a new piece -- Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #36. Poor guy. 🙁

In other news, CSS and PHP are awesome! I've moved well past the "hey, this is useful!" phase and have entered the world of "holy shit, look what I can do!", in which one plays around with the code to achieve nifty results simply because one can. Take a look at the following mockups: print-css.php, dphell-css.php, and main3-css.php. Now I haven't replaced the articles to fit the appropriate pages or done anything with the bottom area yet -- that's the easy part -- but look at the header and the page titles. Pretty standard, right? But here's the kicker -- with the exception of one or two variables specified at the top of each document, these three files are exactly the same. They all call upon a header -- the same header -- that's filled with fun PHP that basically says, "If this variable equals 'Main' (thus marking it as the main page), print the 'What is... ???' text and don't hotlink the title graphic." And for each of the archive links, the PHP says, "If this variable equals 'Print' (and this is the Print link), don't output the link HTML." And since all of the linking and image rollover stuff is defined via the CSS, that results in the graphic text remaining highlighted. Even the document titles are controlled in this way! So I feel pretty accomplished right now -- PHP is pretty sweet stuff and though I'm doing relatively simple stuff (includes, if/else statements, etc.) I think I'm getting the hang of it. Expect me to be using more of it on SC in the near future. 😈

Hope you didn't find that to be too boring, minna-san! Ja!