Purely Random

[Found this and just had to put it up...]

["Duel monsters is power Yami. Knowledge just gives me a headache." - Yugi, in Aww, craps! by Dragoness of Power]

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Under the Influence...of Insanity

[Hmmm...well, it's been a semi-productive day, at least. I updated and modified my Xanga blog (that's the more public one, where I tend to stay more happy and stuff...), and made a new front for my personal homepage.]

[Didn't, however, finish my book like I was supposed to, or write anything new...oh well. That's why there are two days in the weekend, right?]

[At any rate. Off to go find more good fanfics...lata!]

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Random Quote of the Day:
I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.
- Fran Lebowitz

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Testing... [part II]

[Going for a new look here... Restructuring the basic look of the posts, and then I'm gonna play with colors. Too bad I can't do all this without re-publishing every other minute o.O;;]

[Well, this is coming along, at least... I'm going through and editing each post so they're all in something resembling a format. However, I'm doing so without the benefit of previewing each post, so if I screwed something up please let me know. And I'm going all of the HTML and stuff by hand, so anything I don't know implicitly is liable to be incorrect or malfunctional.]

[I'm also going to play with another, more asthetically pleasing way of writing the main post text. This is great and all, but it does break things up a bit, and for long posts it looks funny. But it'll work for now, I guess...]

[The poem below is something I wrote a few months back. It was inspired by something a friend said they had to write for her English class - something about bubbles or some such. She read hers (frankly it sucked, but was I about to say so? Only if I had a death wish), and I couldn't manage to write one without essentially rewriting hers (comes of a long habit of editing peoples' stuff for them), so I ended up letting it take its own course.]

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Making Diamonds

Some people pay thousands of dollars

for a little piece of carbon,

all because it catches the light and sparkles.

Some people spend their lives

underground in the black dirt and ancient rock

chipping away at the walls, just to uncover the miniscule chips

of earth-bound starlight.

But I...

I sit on my dock and swing my feet in the water,

and instantly I am rich, wealthier than the greatest tycoon,

and the air is filled with the worlds greatest diamonds.

Not just clear, either.

They are the green of the sea,

the blue of the sky,

and when they fall before the sun they are red,

the bleeding red of sunset,

and the sun itself is captured in the crystalline drops.

Let them have their carbon,

let them have their diamond rings and bracelets,

let them shove rods of steel and aluminum and silver through their ears.

Leave me my murky water,

leave me my salt and my seaweed and my oystershells,

leave me my bare feet, calloused as they are,

leave me my unadorned fingers and toes and wrists and ankles.

For I make my diamonds.

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Random Quote of the Day:
"Coffee's not supposed to be - "
"Boiled? I know, William. I know."
- First Lieutenant Busch to Captain Hornblower of the Hotspur

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Waking Thoughts

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Just thought I'd get what I could of this out before I have to leave for school.... It's a farewell letter from Gear to Static (yeah, I know. Weird, huh? Why in hell would I be writing Static Shock stuff? I don't know, I really don't. I just woke up with it in my head.).

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[as yet untitled]

Virg,
I'm not going to be able to make it to the game this weekend. Or to the one next weekend, or the one after. Something's come up, and I can't stick around any longer. There's a box on the counter in my workstation. It's yours. Sorry I can't give you the other JSD tape; I lent it to a friend, and it was still in his VCR when he threw it out a window. (Shattered a coffee cup on top of it, too - a full one.) Watch it with someone that'll do you good. A good voice recording ought to do.
I really wish I didn't have to leave things like this. Don't try to contact me, it'll just get you in trouble. Take care of yourself.
I guess this is goodbye,
Richie

[Whoa....most definitely weird o.O;; That wasn't quite how it went in the dream. Now I wish I'd just scribbled it down instead of waiting to get dressed first...but whatever. I've kinda got a plot going now, too. Maybe this'll really turn into something...but I doubt it...]

Testing...testing, 1...2...3...

Just testing the time thing, and the title...
Trying again...

Finally getting around to making this thing somewhat presentable. I'm trying to redo and link all of my (numerous) sites over the course of the next few months, so expect a myriad of small changes... But since I'm only doing it in my free time don't expect them to all happen at once.

Anyways, it's late and I've wasted the entire evening (again), so...night, all!

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E-mail me!

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Random Quote of the Day:
"You're not Gollum, you're Frodo."
"Why?"
"Because I'm Sam."
- Kreeno and Mikoto

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Y'know, this is getting scary. I have two blog-things, and I update both of them fairly regularly (when I update at all). I have this one here, where I put my less opimistic stuff and random bits of writing, and then I've got another one at Xanga, where I sound like some hyper little kid all the time...

Speaking of randomness. I just took the "longevity test" (don't ask, it was for school), and it said I'm expected to live to 86. Woohoo! ^_^

...Yeah. On that rather strange note, I'm gonna move on to the fun part...

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As It Is, part IV
The Joys of Webmastering

Tap tap. Tap. Tap-tap-taptap-tap taptaptap tap. Tap tap. Tap. Click.
Silence.
"Damn!" A sigh of frustration; a curtain of hair falling around a grimacing face. Another murmured curse. Long fingers danced over the keyboard again, this time to a more productive end. The boy's face lit up in a wide smile. "Got ya, ya bugger," he murmured.
"Got what?" someone asked.
"Huh? Oh, I've been trying to get this color scheme to work," he said, not sparing a glance to see who was talking to him. He didn't have to. It was her. His voice was as calm and controlled as he could make it, but he couldn't master the flush rising up his cheeks, so he kept his face turned squarely to the screen in front of him.
He heard a chair scraping back, and then she was there, leaning over his shoulder to look at the page. "Hmmm... Have you tried making that background a shade darker? With, I don't know, maybe a pale yellow text? That'll make it easier on the eyes, and it'll fit your graphics better."
The boy shook his head. "I've tried that. I can't find the right name. It always gives me these weird oranges."
"Here, let me try." He stood and gave her the chair, watching with more than a little curiousity as she typed in the school homepage.
"What are you doing?"
"There's a really nice color chart I know of, that I think will really help," she said, not looking up. "Let's see...ah, here it is. You click on the colors you want, like this, and it'll bring them up off to the side and overlay them for you. That way you can see what it looks like before you go change all your code."
The boy gave an appreciative nod as she clicked a handful of blues and yellows. "The second and third ones go well," he said, leaning in for a better look.
The girl's shoulders tensed, and he straightened quickly. His cheeks turned another shade of red.
"Er, yeah... Where's your source code?"
"It's on Geocities," he stammered. "First window on the left..." She pulled it up and replaced some of his text with seemingly random series of letters and digits. He let out an appreciative whistle when she refreshed his page. "Wow...that's a huge improvement already."
She nodded. "Yeah. Now all you have to do is replace the light blue and gold tags with the colors on this one, and you should be good."
He winced. "Guess I should get started then. I've got about ten pages, and they're all tables and stuff..."
"Ouch."
"Yeah."
She tapped her finger on the mouse thoughtfully, skimming over the page. "Have you ever tried CSS?"
"What's that?"
"Cascading Style Sheets. It's basically a slightly fancier version of HTML. It's kinda weird at first, but once you figure it out it's great. I use it all the time. You can set it up so that you only have to change one page to change your entire site, and if you have a part that you want to be different you can change just that part too. Here, let me show you." She opened up the Geocities window again and selected Create New, typing in "style.css" as the filename.
"Okay, here's how it works. You've got a body tag, just like in HTML, except that you use the curly brackets instead of the arrow things. You can put in background color, scrollbar properties, font face and size, all sorts of stuff... And then down here you can play with your links. You know, get rid of the underline, change all the colors, give it a background when you roll the mouse over it, all that fun junk that the better sites have. And if you want a special look for, say, your tables, you can add that in up here, above the body tag." There was a minute or two of furious typing, and then she clicked Save. "And all you have to do to put it into your pages is link to it, like this..." She put in a short string of code that the light-haired boy didn't follow.
"That's awesome," he said, looking at the page. The colors were all off - for sake of demonstration she'd used colors like "rose" and "fireorange," and the overall effect was extremely tacky - but even so he could see how much faster the page had loaded and how many fewer errors there were.
"Isn't it, though?" she said, sounding rather proud of herself. "I'll e-mail you some good links tonight, so you can go learn how to do it. For now just go ahead and play around with what I already wrote; copy and paste the link into the other pages and get rid of the extra tags, and you should be home free. What's this for, anyway?"
"Oh, it's just something a friend asked me to work on," he replied. "Eventually it's going to be his fanart archive. But he's even more clueless about HTML than I am, so he asked me to make the page for him."
The girl opened her mouth to say something, but the bell cut her short. She glanced at her watch. "Crap! I've got to go - my class is on the other end of the building, and I'm usually there by now!" She snagged her bag and nearly ran for the exit.
"Hey, thanks," he called to her retreating back. "You really helped me a lot."
"Anytime," she said over her shoulder, giving him a small half-wave as she blew through the door.
Making a conscious effort to wipe the stupid grin off his face, he logged off first Geocities and then the computer, and made a beeline towards his first period class.

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E-mail me!

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Random Quote of the Day:
"I must remember to honor the power of the Off Switch!"
- Omi from Xiaolin Showdown

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Eh...not been on in ages... But now that I have internet in my room again, I may be updating a lot more. I certainly hope so, anyway...especially seeing as how I'm almost back into the mood to write.

But not tonight... So I'm just gonna go find another short angsty YGO fic and be happy. Or sad. Or something.

...heh heh heh...so much for not writing ^_^ This is inspired by the Benchmark writing prompt, "Write an essay explaining how one experience has the power to affect a person's life in a positive way." The character is heavily based on me, as I was last year; the whole session thing is very very close to being true, except that I added the violinist and the tin whistle player, and the bodhran player and the guitarist are in reality one and the same... o.O;; This is why I shouldn't be allowed to have a computer in my room...

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There's A Method Behind the Madness

Sophie Taks sighed and placed her elbows on her knees, holding her head in her hands and shaking it slowly. After a moment she looked back up and glared balefully at the piece of music on the stand in front of her. She raised her flute to her lips and began to play; four bars in her mind wandered back to the math test she'd failed earlier in the week, and her fingers hesitated just long enough to throw the entire melody out of rythym. She growled and put the flute back in her lap. She turned an evil eye on the offending papers. The music wasn't complicated, per se, but it wasn't intuitive, and so she had to concentrate in order to play it properly.
That being the problem.
"Why," she groaned to herself. "Why, why, why... I can't finish my art project on time, the computer dies in the middle of writing my report, I fail two tests in one week, and I can't learn my solo...aghhh!" The only thing that saved the flute from a sudden introduction to the far wall was the sound of footsteps on the bare floor behind her.
"Sophie? Time to go," her mom's voice said.
The brunette looked up, a confused look on her face. "Go? Go where?"
"The session's tonight, remember?" Sophie repressed a sigh. Great. Just what I need. To make myself look like a fool in front of people I don't even know...
"I guess it's too late to cancel, isn't it," she said wearily. "All right, just let me grab my wooden flute, and my shoes..."
The drive to the session was short, but it seemed to drag on into eternity. Sophie's hands were sweating; her flute's corduroy-like casing was already damp. When they arrived she felt more like she was walking to a court than to a friendly session.
Of course, the first few tunes did nothing to alleviate that feeling. Her and her mom's flutes were terribly out of tune; her fingers and forearms were already tired from playing her other flute earlier in the afternoon; on the rare occasion that she could remember the tune her fingers always missed their places, and every note she played sounded strangled and forced. Several times she could have sworn she'd seen the violinist wince.
"What's up next?" the tin whistle player asked when Foxhunter's Reel finally faded to a less-than-pleasant end.
The guitarist flipped through his sheet music, hunting for one they all more or less knew. "What about Star of Munster?" he asked. Sophie's heart sank; she'd never even heard the name before. Nevertheless she raised her flute and waited for someone to start. She could at least try to pick up a few notes here and there.
The tin whistle was the first to play. The whistle's high shriek quickly spiraled down to less piercing notes, and the other instruments quickly jumped in. Halfway through the first bar old memories of other, more professional sessions began to arouse themselves in Sophie's memory, and her fingers began to move of their own accord. The guitar strummed; the violin sang; the bodhran gave its customary deep-throated but quiet roar; the whistle skirled around her feet; the other flute leaped from note to airy note, and her own low powerful tone followed the melody, straight and true. The flautist's mind was wonderfully empty. Her fingers danced across the wooden tube on their own, while the few thoughts that dared pass through her head wrapped themselves around the simlicity of it all.
The fiddler's bow slipped, and the resulting squeal sent him into a fit of laughter. The small symphony fell apart, but still Sophie played, unwilling to just let the tune die; by the time she brought it to a close everyone had rejoined, and the melody swept along to a final note worthy of the Chieftans themselves.
There was a short moment of silence, and the tin whistle player groaned. "No! I didn't get that on tape..."

The next morning rolled around all too quickly, and Sophie bit back a fluent stream of foul language when she found out she had a pop quiz in her chemistry class. The mintutes ticked away; she put her pencil down in exasperation, unable to remember even one of the answers. She put her head on her desk and let her hair fall around her face in a sort of dark curtain.
She had barely closed her eyes with the half-formed intention of sleeping through the rest of the test when Star of Munster suddenly started running through her head. For half an instant she could almost hear it; then it faded, leaving behind only a miraculously quiet, intensely concentrated mind. She glanced over the test again, absentmindedly picking up her pencil as she did so. As she read off the questions, the answers appeared in her mind's eye one by one. Tiny details she'd long since forgotten rose up and slapped her across the face, and her hand seemed to be moving of its own violition, inscribing answers she almost didn't understand. She scribbled in the last one just as the bell rang.
Her next two classes passed quickly; by bringing her mind back to the tranquil state it had been in at the session the previous night, she found, she could more or less quell the random thoughts that so often distracted her, and with them gone her work didn't seem so daunting. Band was the last period of the day, and it was with a rising sense of nervousness that she pulled out her solo to practice. Her fingers felt strangely sluggish at first, but when she lifted her eyes from the paper and just let her fingers do the walking they took on a life of their own.
"Hey, Sophie," her friend said, leaning over and pointing to a particularly difficult section, "could you play that part again, more slowly? I can't get it right." Sophie grinned and raised her flute again, closing her eyes and letting her mind wander as her fingers followed the now well-known pattern.


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E-mail me!