Metaplanar Babel

Here’s a scary statistic for us Americans: Average Number of Vacation Days Around the World Per Year

Cruinh wrote a post the other day about a recent article by the well-known game designer Raph Koster. Surprisingly, Mr. Koster actually left a comment. Isn’t blogging fun?

Sometimes I find myself thinking about strange things. Today, I was reading an old article from ALA that used the word snarky in the first paragraph and inspired this post.

For reasons I don’t entirely comprehend, I love the word snarky. I love the brand of humor it inspires, I love characters who could be described by it, I love the way it sounds. Weird, ne? So, I find myself curious. Does anyone else have a favorite word? If so, what do you like about it?

Yes, you’re seeing correctly. Babel has a new look (yes, again). I’m pretty proud of this one, amazingly. As usual, the kinks in IE haven’t been worked out yet. One of these days I’ll actually do that rather than starting up a new design.

Anyway, this site was the major inspirational push that got this new design going. I don’t think I ripped it off overly much (I hope), I just really dig the wing silhouette idea. The wing graphic I used for the outline is borrowed from Exile Designs, because my graphics skills are minimal at best.

Other than the graphics and color scheme, not much has changed. I’m not sure this is really a step forward, from a coding standpoint, because I had to use a few not-quite-kosher (from a semantics standpoint) constructions to make things work, but overall, I find the look very pleasing. I’m not 100% sure that the asides column works, since I don’t tend to write massively long posts, but we’ll see. For now, we’re going to put two posts on the main page to see if that helps balance it a bit.

As always, opinions are welcome.

Yes, we even make bottled water for our dogs, now. Am I the only one who finds this a little weird?

A guy going by the name Dayne over on the WoW warrior boards posted a great guide to being a warrior. I have taken his words to heart. Beware.

Quoting the full text below the “fold” so it doesn’t get lost to forum pruning at some point in the future.

(Continued..)

For those who care, there is a beta of Internet Explorer 7 available. The technical overview says the preview is to enable devs to test compatibility, but you aren’t prompted for an MSDN login to download, so I guess it’s really open to everyone. Have fun~

Unfortunately, it requires validating your windows install, so if you have any “issues” with that, you won’t be able to install the beta.