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!

Not technically a Scary-Crayon update, but since we're talking SC design stuff, I've marked it as such. Read on if that sort of thing interests you! (more...)

The horror!

New short "comic" for the masses -- a little something I like to call Cereal Noir. Hope you enjoy it! Especially since I'm considering doing more pieces along these lines in the future. I also wrote a lengthy blurb in the Site Talk box on the main and content pages, for those of you with really good eyesight who don't mind squinting at the tiny text. And, of course, Wesoteric has been linked over there now. 😀 (more...)