Life. Goes On. // VOID-STAR.NET

First off, thanks to everyone who offered their condolences about my grandfather. For those of you who missed the Tweet, he had a massive stroke on Saturday night and was rushed to hospital. There’s not a lot the doctors can do for him — he’s like, 90-something — and there’s not a great deal of hope that he’ll pull through.

So, yeah. We’re mostly just waiting now. No, scrap that; mum just called to tell me he passed away this morning at about 3am. So.

Funeral’s probably this Saturday.

In less sober news, my review at PSGR came up the other day. Go me.

I have been a sporadic visitor to your website for a while now. Not so much for your blogs as the content doesn’t particularly interest me, but for the aesthetically pleasing layout you have up.

I have to admit this line threw me a bit. It’s just… someone visiting multiple times just for the layout? Bizarre.

what I’m going to assume is fanart used in your header image

For the record, it’s Ulfrun; my Troll Shaman character in World of Warcraft. So it’s fanart, but fanart of… myself.

The only thing I can suggest here is that you link to the page about log.code from your comment form.

Yeah, I keep telling myself that. The reason I haven’t is technical; the space where the link would logically ‘go’ in the comments form isn’t part of the template, it’s hard-coded into a function. Linking the log.code page from there decreases that portability I keep kidding myself the code has in it, since the log.code page is a custom page and thus theoretically won’t be the same between installs. I probably need to add a line in the template or something, but I just… haven’t. Bad me.

First, the link to the Wikipedia entry on ‘Lokean’ doesn’t exist. Being a psychology student, I made the assumption Lokean refers to the ideas of the philosopher of John Locke, but I could be wrong.

You are. And, damn. Teach me to pick the most obscure reconstructionist heathen religion to not believe in; I guess the page got deleted for (non-)notability. Now I have to find a new reference source…

How do you keep up with all these communities and chat programs!?!

I have a very short attention span.

So. Yeah. That was a lot better than I was expecting, to be honest, and I’ve got my shortlist of things I need to clean up. So thanks to Nellie for taking the time to spot the things the contempt of familiarity keeps hidden from me.

FenPress got the start of a layout yesterday,¹ and I think it’s evident that while ten years or so of practice has helped me in the layout department, I still struggle when it comes to logo design. Oh well. Not to mention I now need to re-write a bunch of WP’s code which I told myself I wouldn’t, but… it’s just layout stuff, so… that’s okay, right?

Right.

I’ve been thinking about my whole user profiles problem, and the real issue with it finally hit me somewhere on Friday night. The difference between WordPress and LiveJournal is that, in the latter, the relationship between users and journals is 1:1. You are your journal. WordPress is different. A user can have zero to n journals, while a journal can have 1 to n users. This impacts on the friending system, since how are you going to apply it across multiple users and multiple journals? See, I was thinking you have two levels of basic friending. A one-way relationship makes you a “Fan” of a user or a journal, while a two-way relationship is a Friend. Initially, posts will be able to have separate user levels for Everyone, Registered (anyone with an FP account), Fans and Friends. (Friends are, by definition, also Fans.) But my problem here is which Fans and Friends am I referring to? Fans and Friends of the user, or Fans and Friends of the journal?

At the moment I’m leaning towards the journal, just because it makes more logical sense. But then what’s the point of being able to friend users?

It also means I’m going to have to make a profile page equivalent for individual journals.

Hrm…

Last thing (and, wow, I haven’t done one of these multi-topic posts in a while). So Mat and I went to see The Incredible Hulk on Friday night. I’m still not really sure what to think about it. I love Norton as an actor and so forth, and the film wasn’t bad like Hulk was (mostly because it allowed Hulk to be heroic instead of just tortured, which is always nice in a superhero story), but…

I dunno. Maybe I’m just spoilt after seeing Iron Man, because this film certainly didn’t tap into the same chemistry that one did. And that’s no-one’s fault, exactly. Because RDJ’s Stark made Iron Man and while Norton does his best with Banner the character himself just… well, just isn’t as fun. I think one of the reasons we all love Iron Man so much is simple wish fulfilment; we all want to be Tony, rich and brilliant and witty and slowly digging ourself out of apathy and into heroism (with superpowers pew pew). But no matter how much we empathise with Banner, we don’t want to be him, and I think that puts up a bit of a wall between the film and the audience.

And this is a problem, because — like Iron Man — TIH suffers from having a kind of a crap villain. I said to Mat as we left the theatre that there are essentially two types of superhero films; the ones where the hero fights a villain who is his opposite and the ones where the hero fights a villain who is pretty much exactly like him, but evil(-er). I’m not sure which one I prefer. On the one hand you’ve got films like Iron Man, TIH and Batman Begins, all of which had Big Bads that were, well, pretty lame. The drama in the films came from the journey rather than the destination, and you have to empathise with the hero (which is why Iron Man worked for me, TIH and BB not so much). And on the super-extreme other hand you’ve got Superman Returns whose villain was, well, so much more fun than its hero that you were kinda maybe rooting for him to win. Just a little bit. And, okay, Supes saves the day like you know he will and he’s earned his victory… but you kinda wish he didn’t. Maybe. Because Evil is Cool. Even though it shouldn’t be. You know.²

… where was I again? Oh yeah; The Incredible Hulk, okay-but-not-great due to lack of interesting characters.

… man, work distracted me with stocktake and now I’ve got no idea where I was going with this.

1. Purple, cream, charcoal and green. Oh Dee… ^
2. This, incidentally, has always been my problem with Superman full stop. He tends to be either a Christ-like nice guy (and thus extremely boring), or a total self-righteous dick (leading to a Luthor Paradox)… occasionally both within the same episode/issue! It bothers me that all his best writing seems to be in fanfic… ^