When my partner and I sit down to play Final Fantasy RPGs together (one person driving, one person navigating or commenting), sometimes about when one of us gets bored/fed-up, the other one will be quite interested and eager to play. So the controller gets handed over and the driver/navigator roles switch. And sometimes, when the new driver gets bored, the navigator will be keen to drive once again.

Occasionally, like tonight, this role swapping will go back and forth several times, causing video game sessions hours longer than they would otherwise naturally be if only one person was (sensibly) playing until they were bored and then stopping.

It's not like FFn is particularly riveting, it's just kind of got that scratch-an-itchiness about it that suggests that just a couple minutes more might be nice. And then it's an hour past your bedtime.

It's okay, we're adults, we can stop any time. 

Last night I fell asleep dreaming of pixels. Two of them. Two pixels. Well, one, and then two. Actually, last night I fell asleep thinking I should get up and work on the fucking pixels because the work I was doing on sleep wasn't going very well either.

But then it was morning. Which was good.

Chrome, you see, had two pixels, Safari had zero, and Firefox had one. (Which is hilarious in a way because Safari and Chrome are almost the same browser.) CSS is supposed to make these problems not happen. But of course they do. Because designers need steady jobs, just like everyone else. (You're telling me that isn't someone's rationale?!) 

And what kind of struck me about CSS is that it's like a lot of things. You can be angry and harsh and define every fucking thing about every margin and div and font size and whatever and force it to be exactly what you want. Or you can be chill and zen and take the "yeah as long as it looks good, it doesn't have to be exactly the same on every browser" route.

Which as an attitude is in the long run much healthier for your soul. 

So what happens is when you finally decide that being angry about everything not being perfect just isn't going ever going to work and you strip out all the crap and start from scratch is just about when you find the zen-like magic incantation that not only gives you exactly what you were fighting for in the first place, but makes all of the browsers render it exactly the same way. (For the record, that would be putting the fixed font-size on the enclosing UL rather than the LI items within it.)

So that was my little bop on the nose from the Buddha for today.

(*CSS is cascading style sheets, a kind of computer language used to describe how a web page should look, as opposed to specifying what the content words & images should be.)

This sounds like a fine thing, a little drop of social media without trying to sip from the firehose.  I love my friends but I don't have the time to sift through their forwarded funny pictures and weird news stories.  

So, the Kickstarter for my game Avalon Lords officially ended today, about $105k short of our goal.  But on the glass is 1/3 full side of things, friends and strangers pledged $45k to my cause.  And the Steam greenlight campaign is up to 10k "yes I would buy this game" votes!  It's hard not feeling down because the Kickstarter failed, but I will just look at funny pictures and read weird news stories until I jolly back up.

BTW, hello!  I'm the lead game designer and COO for a little game development studio, in addition to doing web development and IT management for an employee benefits company and doting on partners, pets and friends.  When I have any free minutes I derive a great deal of satisfaction wrecking guys in multiplayer strategy games.  

Boots, 1-year old ginger tom-kitten

I think there's a tendency among readers of books to underestimate the value of a good editor. I know for many years I had no idea that books even needed to be edited. And then for a while being reviled at the thought that someone might dare to touch my words. 

But now I realize the value of having someone review your work and saying, "hey, that thing you're obviously in love with, it's okay to be in love with it, but no one else is really going to care that much, so cut it short, okay?" or "what the hell that doesn't make any sense?" or "TOOT TOOT hello I am the QE2 and I am going TOOT TOOT through your plot holes."

I'd like to think that as one's experience as an artistic creator progresses, one is able to look at one's own work with more objectivity and to easily accept the input of others. But then I'd also like to think that creating art should be about making what I want, not what anyone else wants, so fuck objectivity. Which put together have that great push/pull dynamic of any great chaotic system.

In conclusion, yay art and yay collaborators.

I'm reading FB posts and chatting with teacher friends all of whom have bid (or are about to bid) a fond farewell to a brief summer. Yesterday, I saw approximately half-a-gazillion "First day of school" pics, and I'm sure next week's feed will feature the other half-a-gazillion pics. Interesting how many districts return pre-Labor vs. post-Labor Day...

This is my first year in 14 years where I'm not standing in front of a classroom every day. Feels weird. Freeing, a bit, but also mildly nerve-wracking. I'm only teaching one night class at Cedar Crest College each semester this year, and striking out as a freelance writer. Fortunately, I've a good, long 5-month contract that starts the end of September, but oy - what to do until then... or after?!

I've hooked up with a resume-writing company. The pay's not bad when the workload's decent - they're still "easing me in," and I'm hoping to get hit with more orders soon. 

Yesterday, a good friend told me that her husband - a jewelry designer by trade-turned-construction-worker - was just offered a position designing a line of 25+ engagement rings for the Astor diamond clan. Epic. Another friend started her dream job as director of multimedia/ content at Whole Foods. A former student landed a great position at an elementary school a few months after moving to Arizona.

Hearing these great stories gives me hope that, as I continue my search for writing gigs, I'll find one (or several) that brings me joy, intellectual challenge, financial stability, and satisfaction knowing it's something I can do - and do well!

I love most of what PKD has written, but  a few things stick out. Once I discovered Confessions of a Crap Artist I always felt it was my favorite.  His only "mainstream fiction", but still written in his style; I felt it was like a pocketknife. The ideas I discovered in it were everyday useful, and changed my life in a small but important way.

But I just restarted rereading the Valis trilogy: Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Now I remember that compared to that little pocketknife of pratical wisdom it's a thermonuclear chainsaw capable of opening The Universe up and showing its guts.

As you might expect, they both get my highest recommendation.

Mine was on sale.

I always make fun of my husband for putting on a movie he's already seen 500 times.  It usually involves hunting for Russians in an adrenaline filled submarine, or some catastrophic weather event. I rarely repeatedly watch a movie if I can still remember the plot.  The exception to that is two John Hughes movies.  16 Candles and Pretty in Pink.  Ridiculous.  I know. 

What is it about Molly Ringwald that made her such an appealing adolescent "every woman"?  She didn't fit the 80s blond bombshell mold, the characters she played were always vulnerable but principled, and at the end of the story she always got the boy and he was a better man for it.

I was realizing that when my students see Molly Ringwald it may well be the equivalent of seeing "Gidget" when I was a kid.  What?  That middle aged lady was a teen surfer dreamgirl?  What?

This got me thinking about the 80s and the pop culture I consumed in the 80s. I can remember how important the word "individuality" was to me then.  Self expression was a crucial concept to 16 year old me, who had little else to really concern myself with. Looking back, I realize that I had a limited context within which to understand the idea of being an individual.  To me it was rebellious. It was punk rock. I had no idea how well it fit in with what it means to be an American and that long history that can easily take people down the path to libertarianism.  Punk rock.  That transition point where Anarchy and Libertarianism still coincide.

Back to John Hughes.  His movies were always set in mansions and on "the other side of the tracks".  Class was upfront and center in most of his romantic storylines. It was the barrier to true love in place of the grudges of feuding lineages. The feuds were between the popular kids and the outcasts- the kids with money whose parents appeared to be chronically out of town versus the kids whose dad was Harry Dean Stanton. And the subtheme of "being yourself" was always part of that plot line (and everybody was white too). His movies may have also paved the way for series like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, which I also consumed hungrily and with a sense of identification. Some of the resonances I see are an uncertainty about what will happen in the future, unrequited adolescent desire that seems like it will end the world, parents that don't understand, and life in the shark tank of high school.  Class issues creep in to the extent that teenagers ever really have an awareness of class at all beyond "my family doesn't have the same things that their family has".

Given the way the 2000s have gone, I'm surprised there isn't a revival of the working-class, oppressed teen, struggling against conformity theme in pop culture. I don't feel like I'm seeing it.  I wonder why that is. It strikes me that the 18-21+ year olds that I teach have a vastly different perspective on the world. The ones I interact with as a professor tend to be "joiners", but the ones that identify with me most tend to be the "change the world joiners" who participate in creating on campus recycling campaigns and who want to go on to study public health.  They are much more realistic about the world than I was at that age, but also frequently much more privileged in terms of what they feel entitled to.  They seem less alienated in the middle class way that I felt alienated as a kid.

I don't really know how all of this fits together, but I guess my question is- Is there contemporary pop culture that's as teen-angsty as those 80s movies?  The Perks of Being a Wallflower might come close. In 2014 what drives teen angst and what are contemporary teenagers rebelling against?

As you've noticed by now, One Post Wonder got a major facelift today. Sean Puckett has done a sweet job, removing clutter and improving the user experience while respecting and enhancing the best of what was already there. I'm stoked to have a collaborator who grasps where I'm trying to go.

A few changes may take a moment to get used to. There is only one button to change your userpic now; it's on the "Me" page, where people had the most luck finding it. And the buttons to move text blocks, video blocks, and photo blocks appear only when necessary. The buttons to add new blocks appear only at the end of the article– but you can then use the arrows to rearrange the blocks. We both feel this is a good compromise to make things less confusing overall.

With a second contributor joining the project, now is a good time to review the core values of OPW:

No more than one post per day! That's the point. This rule may be bent but not broken. For instance we may introduce "indulgences" which recharge slowly, but you won't be able to post twice times a day, every day. Not even for money.

No big-brother filtering. The "one post per day" rule allows you to filter posts yourself. If you're not riveted, just don't click the arrow to keep reading.

This is a business, but you can opt not to be the product. We may profit from its operation, so long as we are able to focus on the best interests of our users as well as the bottom line. We will eventually explore operating OPW as a "B corporation" to help lock this core value in place. We may display advertising, but you will have the option of paying a membership fee to see no ads.

You own your posts. You grant us a license to show them to people by posting them here. Duh.

Thanks again for believing in what we're doing. More improvements are coming down the pike.