Timewaster's Guide Archive

yes. Yes you are.

BBCode, consisting of an extremely limited set of tags that are pretty intuitive, and all of which have buttons above for them, doesn't distract from your ability to learn HTML

For a link, click on that picture of the world with a file in front of it. if you hover over them and look at the info field at the very bottom of the browser window, it will tell you what each does (though most are obvious).

This has been my official "holier than thou" post for the day. Glad to get it done so much sooner.

Ah...I was expecting alt text from the button images. I should have checked the bottom as well. Thanks for the tip.

As for the other, I've been involved with various boards over the years and since almost all of them had the HTML enabled to a limited extent, I never bothered much with the BBCode myself. I'm sure I can figure it out if I apply myself though.



Spriggan: Hehe. Thanks for the offer. I am appropriately shamed by my tabled layout. The truth is, I threw it up super quick, over a year or so back, and then never bothered to relay it out in CSS. I actually play with CSS every day, and I keep thinking that I should fix the things you've mentioned, but my current job has kept me busy enough that sometimes I just shudder at the idea of coming home and working on web design.

(The problem with the colours is.....well, it's not that I have an awesome monitor. Quite the opposite. I designed it on the only computer I had at the time. A two year old laptop. The colour is scheiss. On my work computer, I can tell that the colours are too dark. I'm saving up, hoping to get a new computer soon and better monitors.)

I need to get around to seeing Just Like Heaven. My two stand-by chick flicks are "Drive Me Crazy" and "10 Things I Hate About You"

Both excellent movies.

Oh, stand-byes....let me think. (Is that the correct plural of stand-by?)

Favourite chick flicks evar and/or girlie indulgences:

- Pride and Prejudice (just about ANY version, although some I naturally prefer over others)

- Newsies (my friends refer to this as Teenaged Girl Porn)

- Truly, Madly, Deeply (When I fell in love with Alan Rickman)

- The Scarlet Pimpernel. (Because you know, they seek him here, they seek him there...etc.)

- The Princess Diaries   (I love the books too. Meg Cabot continually makes references to the movies in the books, and makes Mia grouse about how they made Grandmere TOO NICE in the movies, when everybody knows she's really EVIL.)

- French Kiss  



When I'm feeling really girly and want to drive my boyfriend from the room with the power of estrogen alone, I get out my nail polish, paint my toes, and watch my Jem and the Holograms DVDs.

Yeah, I was just looking about for the handy guide and somehow missing it. There's usually a pop-up link next to the reply panel somewhere, but I'm am not finding it.

I don't think that video games are dead. I do, however, think that a lot of them seem to be stuck in some extended adolescence.

Casual gaming, as I see it, isn't a death knell for the industry, any more than indy comics killed the superhero genre. (They haven't, I mean.) If anything, it brought more gamers in, people who considered themselves gamers despite their obvious lack of nerdhood. When I attended the Women in Gaming* conference this spring in San Francisco, the statistics on women who gamed casually were pretty interesting. (I wish I could find my notebook from that. Linden Labs and some other companies were running numbers off right and left.) A fair number of college-educated, professional women considered themselves casual gamers. They were attracted to games that allowed them to game in small chunks of time, and which would also allow them to feel that they were being educated while they were being entertained. It's not your sweaty, t-shirted, teenaged male that a lot of people view as the gaming demographic--but that's a lot of people who don't necessarily pick up a first person shooter or an RTS, but consider themselves gamers.

Ditto for Madden. Much as I dislike the Madden titles, and EA for putting out what seem to be essentially next years expansion pack as a new game, they bring a lot of people into the gaming fold. A guy might pick up Madden for the Xbox, and then pick up UC2 or Halo or some other game when he gets bored of his football. (Or he might not. It might not be to his taste.)

(BTW, when exactly did we have good stuff coming out every few weeks? Is it possible you are conflating all the great games from your childhood into a period of a few months?)

Yeah, the mega corporations CAN BE part of the problem. I've seen what happens when design by commitee occurs. It ain't pretty. Design by focus group? Ditto. You end up with some bland stuff.

But then too the mega corporations still need the smaller companies to produce games for their platforms. And occasionally new platforms come along. (And sometimes when they do, they fall flat on their face. Did anybody see the horror that was the N-Gage?) In short, the industry is always changing. Sure, it's not the blissful summer when you first discovered Diablo or Quake or Civilization (hey, I have my favourites too!) but new games with new twists on old good ideas are often coming out. And sometimes, if we're really lucky, an amazing brand new idea emerges from the ether and generates a whole new genre.


* conference link http://www.womeningamesinternational.org/past_events/feb06.html

** Someday very soon, I will figure out the BB code you guys have here.

Yeah, the die hard fans of the series seem to be all about the Achmed. (Me, I couldn't get over his name. Nor over Rhapsody's, for that matter.)


Ah, yes, the time jumping:


There's a prologue starting with Rhapsody barely turning fourteen and boinking her Soul Mate, who has been yanked out of time by mysterious forces.

Soul Mate comes from a future a thousand years after the destruction of Rhapsody's homeland. Seven years later, she's done her speed courses in prostitution and super mad Naming magic and beating up guys twice her size. (There seem to be a whole slew of chronological mishaps concerning these seven years, as sometimes she implies that she's been out of prostitution for a certain period of time. I get the dates from the chapter headings though.)

Rhaps travels along a temporally whacky tree root through the center of the earth with her two Bolg buddies. At some point she becomes a born-again virgin after travelling through dragonfire or something like that. Then she picks up a mythical and magical and totally-lost-in-the-mists-of-time sort of sword called the Clarion Daystar.

However, when Rhapsody ends up down in the core of the earth and travelling along some time-warping tree root, she pops out 1400 years after destruction of said homeland. Soul Mate should be about 400 years old, which shouldn't really be a problem as he is conveniently half-Lirin too, and his grandmama is an immortal dragonspawn, but still, he happens to be best friends with a 58 year old lord who can conveniently remember a childhood where the Soul Mate and Ye Olde Lord played as children. Similar chronological inconsistencies abound.

If you followed that....well, you are a better person than I am. I had to double check chapter headings repeatedly to put it all together. The author pulls this chronological whackiness all the time, maybe because it is Cool(TM).

Does anybody here follow the Comics Curmudgeon?

http://joshreads.com/

They review print strips online. Some of their commentators have entire communities dedicated to For Better or For Worse or Mary Worth.

Anyway, recently Mary Worth has been having stalker woes. And I couldn't be happier.

I always HATED Mary Worth. As a child, I would sort through my comics, and save the best for last, and usually that meant Mary Worth was the first one read, or skipped altogether. It was a blight upon the comics page, an anachronistic eyesore where the world stopped in the 70s, and I hated it. I hated Mary with her meddling ways and her beady little eyes and her finger in every pie in her apartment complex. She was boring and meddlesome and spoke in dusty cliches. (To be fair, she was no worse than Rex Morgan, MD. Mrfl.)

So the <a href="http://joshreads.com/?cat=8">recent commentary on Mary</a> delights my evil evil soul. As does <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7nCEPAZWGY&eurl=">this.</a>

SuperE: Alright, it was semantically injudicious of me to stick to "re-create" when all I meant was there were Sandman before Gaiman's Sandman, and that you'd have to be daft and blind to confuse 'em all.

Skar: Sandman is the work that made him famous, yeah. At least among the comics crowd, but a lot of people kept handing it off to their non-comics reading friends, going, "Ya gotta read this." At least one of my girl friends has a crush on Dream because I made her borrow my graphic novels.

I have to admit when I first picked up Sandman, it was because Dave McKean was doing the covers. I read a small portion of the graphic novel of Preludes and Nocturnes, easily the most horror driven of the batch, I think, and it was not my cup of tea at first. And then I hit issue 7 or 8--SuperE and other fans will know which one I refer to, if I mention it's the one where Sandman's sister shows up. And that was it.

I read them very much out of order, but at the time I didn't have internet access, and Dragon's Keep in Provo (where I got my comics at the time) was having a hard time getting the graphic novels in. I was just too impatient, so I ended up reading the Kindly Ones (the penultimate arc, if you count the Wake as the last) in single issues about the time I got my hands on Season of Mists (third). This should totally have spoiled a lot of things for me, but instead, I just wanted to find out where the missing pieces of the story went. I don't particularly recommend this, but you may find your mileage varying over the series, because he does play with a lot of different themes and sub-genres.

Ironically, the classes I normally play, Hunter and Druid, haven't had their talents announced yet. But yes, I understand the Warlocks are getting some neat stuff. My boyfriend is excited--he's got a lvl 52 'lock he's been levelling and I think he wants her to be his expansion character. (He also has lvl 60s warrior and rogues.)