Archive for June, 2008
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Last week, I was pretty sure I’d missed the pride parade this year, so I didn’t even look up the date until today. And, of course! the parade was Saturday morning. Gaaaaaah. So much for me.
Some day, I’ll get my act together, I swear. In the meantime, I’ll live vicariously through pictures of the Seattle and Anchorage parades. *Siiiiigh*
One: my garden, in vibrant, true-to-life color! (opens in a new window)
and Two: [EDIT: oh, never mind.]
I really can’t come up with anything more than this:
“Have you ever wanted to see a website made out of nothing but FAIL? Now you can! Princess Gowns, in the UK, has the worst professional website I’ve seen, ever. From the small “gold”- and grey-on-black text to the poorly-resized pictures at the top (after you pick a category, any category) to the also badly-resized weeeee teeny thumbnails of each dress, it’s nothing but FAIL all the way down. Wow.”
(not to mention your retinas…), try the LJ community of ugly_crap. Lots and lots of WTFfery, pretty funny commentary, and more hideous clothes than you can shake a stick at. (Also good for a shudder/laugh: bad_hair, bad_makeup, and badeyebrows.
You’re welcome.
So I was poking around on Etsy, looking to see what kind of dreadfalls/dread falls I could find. I found some decent-looking stuff, and some not-so-great stuff.
And then I found Style And Flair. Now, I have no idea if their falls are good-looking or not, because the pictures they have up are so incredibly underexposed and badly lit that it’s nearly impossible to tell what color the falls are, let alone see how they sit on one’s head.
Hell, when I took pictures of my paintings, I had to put down my blank foamcore for a background, then stand on a stepstool and lean waaaay over so I could get a decent shot of them. I had lots of light (both natural and artificial), and I still used the flash to fill in. Fortunately for me, none of the cats wanted to help.
Shadows Return will be released on June 24, according to the email that Amazon sent me. As happy as I am to see another Alec-and-Seregil adventure, I have to say… Alec gets kidnapped again? Argh.
Now, if only Lorna Freeman would write another Borderlands book…
Wheeeee. I’ve been having entirely too much fun with the Creature Creator, at least after I finally got it to install (long story short: compatability= WinXP SP2; run in admin mode.)
If you want to see what kind of strange things I’ve made, you can see them here. Some of them I don’t even like, but they were too odd to cancel entirely, so.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to get other people’s critters into my copy of SCC…
Yesterday, it was but a budding phrase, a momentary amusement.
Today? Pictures, .mp3s, and possibly even a video: I Am Aware Of All Internet Traditions has blossomed into a cottage industry. Some of them are sheer delights, others are simply great.
I’m going to give you a piece of advice. Free. Yes, I know, you get what you pay for, but trust me on this — it’s worth _my_ weight in gold. Or worth my weight in sheets of standard 8.5 x 11 paper printed, single-spaced, in 8-point font with the time, date, and ‘ten thousand units sold!’. On both sides.
What is this gem? It is simply this:
DO NOT EVER STATE OR IMPLY THAT SOMETHING IS OPTIONAL IF IT IS NOT.
That’s it. I like playing games, that’s why I spend entirely too much time and money on them. I do not, however, enjoy playing guessing games when it comes to installing them. For example, not-so-coincedentally: Spore’s Creature Creator. If you decline to install the “new EA Downloader”, SCC is installed on your machine… But you can’t play it. (Or at least I couldn’t; I looked in all the logical spots for the .exe file and surprise! nowhere to be found.) The text on the dialogue box that pops up asks, very clearly, “would you like to install? If you don’t, some patches and features won’t be downloaded.”
I can choose to say no and nothing untoward will happen, right? That’s what it implies. Am I stupid? These ‘features’ are not elaborated upon, but I’d guess that they weren’t required for install, otherwise they’d come packed in the file I downloaded, right? I mean, outside of large MMORPG games, that’s how it usually works.
So. If you want to keep your customers happy and have them share their delight with the world, don’t give them a choice if there’s no actual choice involved.
Some love,
Me
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