These last two weeks, I’ve lacked inspiration and I’ve had little time to do much besides getting the new Starrynight website ready to go live. I still have a lot of content to move but I don’t anticipate the style and navigation to change drastically. Unless of course, some tells me that hate so-and-so and that I need to change it or else they won’t love me anymore (Tim, I tweaked the orange color–hopefully, it’s less painful now). I’ve had fun with this redesign. I even got brave and played with a little php. I have no idea what I’m doing but my changes didn’t seem to break anything. So, success?
I’ve listened to about three-quarters of Northanger Abbey. It’s… different. I feel absolutely nothing for any of the characters. I know Austen is writing satirically but I’m not a big fan of the genre that is being mocked to begin with. Austen is not being nearly as ruthless as I’d like. I want horrible things to happen to Catherine Morland. I’m probably not meant to feel that way about the heroine. She’s just so damn clueless and she keeps making the same mistake over and over. Every character in this book could die and I’d clap and cheer. They’re all too two-dimensional–even for satire. All of you. Die.
In other news, The Cavaliers just announced their 2010 program, or parts of it, at any rate. Interesting concept. I immediately thought of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World but that film has nutty, vaguely carnivalesque theme music, which judging from the show logo is probably not what The Cavies are going for. In any case, I look forward to June!
In OTHER other news, my microwave may not be malfunctioning after all. Russ has used it a few times with absolutely no problems. He is convinced that there were small bits of metal in the green beans I was reheating. Oh, I feel much better now that I know the microwave won’t EXPLODE; however, there was METAL in my GREEN BEANS. Russell could not understand why I would not be consoled on this matter.
Playing in Puddles 
3 replies on “Life, a Miscellany”
Site looks good. I’m having some problems loading parts of it (whatever’s in the big rectangle under the menu bar, and the video), but that may be an under-construction problem or it may just be that some stuff (*coughYouTubecough*) is blocked from work. I like the design, though–simple and clean while retaining enough “busy-ness” to be interesting.
Northanger Abbey I thought was a riot, but then I was specifically not looking for anything resembling depth. I’ll admit that the only character I had any fondness for was Henry Tilney, and even that was mostly because I found his uncomplicatedness rather a refreshing change. He’s just… a guy. Not a guy with a past, or a problem, or whatever, just… a guy. I doubt I’d want to read anything more about him, though; his uncomplicatedness might be refreshing, but also I guess does make him kind of uninteresting in the long run. ::shrug:: I dunno. I guess I kind of just got caught up in the story being told (or maybe the one being mocked), and this is one of those situations where character development kind of just wasn’t something I was that concerned about.
That said, if I read it now I don’t know what my response would be. I seem to have gotten more critical in my reading lately, something I didn’t realize until I was talking with Dad about Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series (which I found rather poorly-written) and he was doing basically the same thing I’m doing here: “Well, I, uh, liked it and I guess I just wasn’t really reading it critically, just having fun reading…” Which made me go, “Huh. When did I start reading like that?” Not that I think it’s a bad thing.
Meh. I babble…
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Thanks for the feedback! What browser are you using at work? There’s a YouTube video next to the news feed, which I threw in there just to test media load-times on the front page. I’m more worried about the jQuery slider (right under the menu bar) that is hiding from you…
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I’m using IE8 at work. (Which I’m not happy about, but.) I thought it was surely just a work thing (wouldn’t be the first weird error that seemed to happen here but nowhere else), but… I checked it out at home in our various browsers, and oddly enough found I had the same problem in Google Chrome 5. The rest of the page loads just fine, but then the browser just sits there telling me there’s one item left and it’s waiting on the server. The framing around the jQuery slider is even there–I can see the arrows pointing left and right, and the “Taming the Banshee” and “Writers Wanted” titles below. It’s just the actual content of the slider that’s hanging up; I’ve got a big white box where the content should be.
Safari and Firefox work great and it looks wonderful, though!
I’m wondering if there’s some kind of security thing going on with the javascript that runs the slider. I think that’s out of my hands at work, but I’ll try to remember to poke around with Chrome tonight and see if I can find anything.
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