Metaplanar Babel

Who knew that Stars Wars could be cute? Bit of an eyestraining color scheme (warning for Jon, it’s *really* pink), but check out the comics, they’re hilarious. Especially this one

I am a Japanese School Teacher
:: A website with some interesting editorials written by an American teaching school in Japan. The first few I read were pretty funny.

That must have been what Christopher Nolan, director of the new movie Batman Begins, was saying going into this project. Amazingly enough, he pulled it off. One of Bruce Wayne’s lines from the movie pretty much sums it up:

Well, you know, a guy who goes around dressed like a bat’s got to have some issues..

And we finally get some insight into them.

cruinh seems to think I have some spoilers here, so I’m gonna break the page now. Don’t read if you haven’t seen and don’t want it spoiled.
(Continued..)

I made up a flickr site the other day to host screenshots from my time in WoW. Is it sad that this is my alternative to photos with friends and family?

This Colorgenics thing looks somewhat interesting, but alas, it doesn’t seem to work anymore.

As Brendan notes, the site tweaking/redesign bug seems to be catching. Something he said that I thought was interesting:

That is one of the more odd blogisims I feel - it seems everyone tends to perform a code or ‘look’ update within days of each other, often not aware of the seemingly ‘hive mind’ appearance of half a dozen blogs changing the shop window at the same time.

I’ve pretty much redone a lot of babelv2, jumping it up to babelv2.5. Same general color and graphical scheme, but different layout. And contrary to appearances, not entirely stolen from Brendan, honest. I’d been mulling over putting the miniblog in the sidebar for a while, but I couldn’t quite figure out in my head how it would work. Then I ran into this nifty blog, and it finally sunk in. My version is fluid-ish, because I have this odd reluctance to make a fixed-width design. I suspect it’s because I don’t like having to full-screen my browser, which means if it’s designed for anything bigger than ~800×600, then it’s too big. I like having screen real estate outside of my browser (and was Firefox’s tabbed browsing ever a huge thing for me). Anyway, I realize that I could just design for that size, but I like the idea of a resize-able layout, so that’s what I tried to do. I like what I ended up with, but I’m obviously biased. There’s still one a few very minor glitches in IE that I’ll hopefully work out soonish, but we’ll see. I’m always curious to know what other folks think, so feel free to comment, even if it’s just to say you hate it.

Possibly the best thing ever said on the WoW general forum, referring to female dwarves:

People who don’t find them attractive need to grow up a bit and realize that REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES. You can keep your bony-ass pointy-kneed elf bimbos.

We’ll just ignore the fact that 90% of our guild is comprised of said bony-ass pointy-kneed elf bimbos.

An amusing post about the life of a developer/gamer/computer geek’s girlfriend (or boyfriend, it works both ways).

Maybe you’ve seen the movie. I don’t usually get up in arms about political stuff, because so much of it is opinion that can’t really be resolved, but what’s happened to this guy and kids like him is inexcusable. The story is showing up all over the place.

Basically, this guy knows that he’s gay and, thinking he can trust them, tells his parents about it. Their response is to ignore the issue for a few weeks so he can finish up school, then plan to ship him off to the Refuge, a Christian “clinic” “…designed to minister to adolescents struggling with broken and addictive behaviors such as pornography, drugs and alcohol, sexual promescuity, and homosexuality.” That’s an interesting categorization.. broken and addictive. I have to wonder what percentage of the basic public would fall into that somewhere. Anyway, I’m not linking to the damn place. Maybe it truly has its clients’ best interests at heart, but I have my doubts.

I guess I was lucky. I can’t imagine my parents doing something like that to me. Oh, I feel certain there would have been some unhappiness all around, but .. sending me off to be brainwashed? No, I don’t see that happening. I can hardly imagine what it would feel like not to have that trust anymore. This is sad.

On the other hand, seeing the general response thus far has been somewhat heartening. Complete strangers from the internet have formed a protest and are trying to help this kid out. I hope somehow things will work out for him.. People deserve better than this. I’m sure the parents felt they were just doing the best thing, but still..

Anyway, Saved! is a good movie, despite the controversial topics. The parallels between the movie and this real life story are a bit scary, though. Sorry I don’t have anything more profound to say, but I really think most of the other stories sum it up pretty well.

I’ve been a little blah lately. My job’s been less than fun, thanks to problems with our book vendor, understaffing, and the entrenchment of certain individuals in their “kingdoms”. That doesn’t make sense to you guys, I’m sure, but it’s very frustrating how overly suspicious, resistant to change, and prone to bitching about the same old problems many of the people here are. Anyway, my blah-ness seems to be subsiding, somewhat, but, in typical Jena fashion, it’s leaving behind an urge to redo my site design yet again, despite never really finishing the most recent one. I am the queen of almost-but-never-quite-finishing-projects. It’s absurd, and I know it, but I never can seem to shed this tendency. I don’t really want to bore you with the details, but if you’re ecstactically waiting to be bored (why else would you still be reading my blog, ne? )..