For each question, name a song you've been listening to recently.

<b>The most... touching song:</b>
<b>The most... musically beautiful (sad) song:</b>
<b>The most... musically beautiful (happy) song:</b>
<b>The most... enjoyable comedy, parody or funny song:</b>

<b>The song that... took a long time to grow on you:</b>
<b>The song that... someone recommended to you:</b>
<b>The song that... brings back good memories:</b>
<b>The song that... you wish wasn't associated with past regrets:</b>

<b>Your first choice... for relaxation:</b>
<b>Your first choice... to get you in the mood:</b>
<b>Your first choice... to cheer you up:</b>
<b>Your first choice... to sing!:</b>

My results follow: read more...

Might as well ask on here, since it typically gets quicker response times than the boards. So we've got some movement in the membership (Erin rejoined and brought a kittybug, and Ree's going to have time for us soon) and I want to capitalise on that.

What kind of new boards would you like to start, or what old ones would you like to dust off?

Supposedly current boards include The Consultant, the saga of negotiating waiting lists and crazy old coot receptionists in order to see the Archmage Algernon, and Spin Me A Yarn, a nice quiet storytelling-within-a-story board in which characters get to tell bits of their histories in their own words.

We've got a couple of votes for Big Bother, the daft Big Brother parody thing, already. Another one with Lance and Weft in it, as well as Pasht, was Someone Else's Shoes - a silly body-swapping storyboard (unfortunately given the mechanics, it's a bit hard to add or remove writers, but that's not a big problem - we'll probably need to retcon anyway). Then there was Holding The Fort, the storyline about shrunken heroes being collected by a mage as toys for her son. Basically there are too many old storylines to mention, but feel free to cast a vote for anything you remember, no limit on how far into the past!

New boards! Apart from that I'd like to get our Lady/Hrian/Green three-way moving, I'd be happy to do anything with my fantasyesque critters, insane furred things or even Dawnsgate. Perhaps even something new.

(The Great War isn't suspended, by the way; there just isn't anyone posting to the discussion.)

Another wiki fix this morning that I forgot to do last night - this time cleaning up something else (making script insert <span> tags instead of putting them in the text file, which had only ever been a temporary solution to make the previous task simpler), requiring me to learn how to concatenate strings (dots!). Only one compilation error this time, then one not-doing-what-I-wanted error, and now it works.

You can join strings to variables etc by doing return 'string of text or html in this case'.$variable.'another string or html closing tag'; — which I was reasonably sure of already, but looked up just to be sure.

Now to change the common css so it no longer says indent when I meant margin-left, and we're good to go. At some point need to check all the alternative styles don't look shite with it - I could've let them all define their own style for the disclaimer text, but the idea was to make it look the same across everything, and I might change my mind on that anyway. (edit: except I see it is a margin-left already - damn, I thought that would indent the whole thing.) (edit2 making it a [paragraph-level] div instead of [sentence-level] span tag fixed it as I jolly well should have guessed.)

I'm also a ditz, therefore relieved.

I've just tweaked the wiki again, this time for efficiency rather than to get it working. And the tweak is working, so I should be psyched. Well, I am psyched, no question, but it's tempered by an entry of Ree's that I just saw. It's from eleven days ago so no idea why it didn't show up on my friendslist before, but anyway; haven't seen her since then, I don't think, so it's moot.

Major edit: phew, I'm an idiot! (Phew because that's a better outcome than my buddykitty being annoyed, really.) Thanks to Julius friggin' Caesar and me not understanding the Gregorian - well, basically, I misread "June" as "July", so the entry in question came before we hashed these difficulties out and compromised. Which makes a whole lot more sense. It was only a non-updating feed causing all this confusion. /edit

Anyway. Yes! I did clever things with the wiki! Happiness.

It begins with one of these less-funny-than-veiled-nastiness jokes... (if you find the joke funny, good for you and stop reading at the end of it!)

read more...

WORKING!

NO TIME EVEN TO ADD THE TAGS!

http://twine.hellhound.net/Monach (also see text at bottom of edit page)

*runs off*

Much, much crazy love to all at Perl.

It's being ripped to shreds by wonderful helpful people on a Perl community. Squee! Already lost half the dead-weight code.

It compiles and runs! Doesn't do what I want it to yet, but it opens, reads and closes the file correctly and doesn't break!

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First of all I failed utterly in adding a $CommonStyleSheet variable and have resorted to just putting the url in the middle of the code, which is horribly inelegant, but I plead stupidity; I played around with doing it the proper way for a while, even deleted it all and started anew from my backed-up version of the script once, but after correcting all the stupid mistakes I could find it still didn't get anywhere. So I rolled back to the working version again and did things the cop-out way. The purpose of all of this was just to define a style class for the REAL work of the evening, 'boilerplate' tags.

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This has it all, at least from my point of view; machine personalities, realistic and utterly alien aliens, harsh xenoecology, some humans or something somewhere and a couple more elements that would be mildly spoilerish to mention so I won't. Suffice to say that it has just about all of my favourite things that you can conceivably fit into one book and generally absolutely blew me away.

Ahem. I meant to sound a bit more intelligent and less fancreatureish there. The Skinner is very much in the tradition of Iain M Banks (another top-class science fiction writer, heathens) and very, very highly recommended.

I don't know what this sex business is all about, but it can't be anything like as good as this book.

Ensconced within a gnaw-made nest of straw
A year's best part in torpid slumber spent
As small a ball of dream-curled ear and paw
As e'er a rustle to a cornfield lent;
Just as the dormouse, cosy and content
To miss the parties proffered while he napped
Will squall and windy buffet circumvent
Pipecleaner tail 'round whiskered bonce bewrapped,
So does my lust lie dormant and unflapped
By lovely laugh or sly reveal of thigh;
My breath is not by writhing hips entrapped;
No perfect breasts arrest my beady eye.
Until my frozen innocence should melt
I hibernating lie, so much unfelt.

___
A couple of the puns pointed out for non-French/Latin-speakers (highlight with the cursor): [party/buffet, depending how you pronounce it (in my defence, I wrote the lines before I noticed); wind/vent]
I couldn't decide between "beady" and "sleepy", and "display" would have been more obvious in place of "reveal" but didn't feel as nice. At first I wanted to rhyme thaws and paws for the last lines, but it woulda been a repetition... the finalised ending couplet crept up on me; I didn't plan for the lines to be serious at all (or slyly suggestive, either).

The credit and blame for inspiring me to write this should go to my favourite sonneteer, Demiurge. He is almost as cute as a dormouse.

Dream last night was crazed. It was a fairytale with me and my bro and our mum as the evil witch (I am NOT making this up, yo).

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Our "Discussion in Poetry" is an oft-neglected board, but, since I had occasion to write in it today, I thought I'd share some of the older stuff.

Some good, some rubbish (my contribs have a fair amount of both?), some rhyming, some non, some haiku - it'sa it'sa DIP!

A less happy dream last night, in which my mother - who, I should point out for clarity, is not a vet - was operating on "our dog" (we don't have a dog, but I think it was an amalgam of former dogs, mainly Apricot) for a twisted stomach.

She was doing this on the floor with the dog on its back, and had the abdomen cut open and the organs neatly pulled out. She turned to me and mentioned that there was blood flowing everywhere (although the visuals didn't actually show that).

I wondered why she wasn't acting to complete the operation and stop the dog bleeding to death. She said she wouldn't continue until I found her a diagram of a mushroom's stomach (yes, mushroom, not dog - I'm not sure why she needed this for reference, and it didn't even make sense in the dream logic). I was worriedly searching high and low through all the internet photo sources I know, and finding nothing, because such a thing does not exist.

My dream the other night was... interesting. Satisfying while dreaming, and then, upon waking, seemed merely disturbing.

Two people, one loosely based on my brother and someone meant to represent a friend of his, were planning to perpetrate assault and violence upon someone representing my mother. I overheard the planning, waited until they started (my dream self tends to give people every opportunity to back down of their own free will) and then summoned a dog, which was an amalgam of dogs I've owned and met. At my command it attacked and brought the two idiots down.

I then gloated at them. All this took place in what was meant to be our kitchen at home. I told my mother about it the next day, leaving out the same parts I'm omitting in this report, and she rather bemusedly thanked me. Heh. And you'd think after all these years I'd be dreaming about eviscerating her, not saving her. Glad I can still surprise everyone. Anyway, it was nice to see Bracken again.

I'm generally overjoyed when people want to play with me at Pro, but this weekend was something else again. I got to plot with two of my favourite people in the whole world, one of whom I don't get to talk to very often. (Well, I don't see either of them as often as I'd like.)

Know the feeling when you're getting tons of stuff done, you're all in tune to the extent that you're anticipating each other's thoughts, and it's all just incredible amounts of fun?

When I'm happy I like to let everyone know about it, real and denizens of my headspace alike.

Here's the storyline we're working out.

You know what else? My cowriters have been reading our encyclopaedia! Isn't that fab? (It still makes me excited when I mention "by the way, goblins eat lying down" and people go "I know".)

Over the weekend my brother and I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. It was pretty high quality all the way through and lots of fun - you could tell they had fun writing and making those action scenes, too. I was in awe of the CGI and design on many of the characters. Hmm - Disney's logo at the beginning wasn't bad either. Showoffs.