All Of Us

Can we blame Gary Thuerk for the state of spam in the world today? No. Should we praise him as an email visionary? Well, Alan Moore gets awards, so who can say.

This post is funny, because as Tim's words trail off in that last panel, I can see the next panel as clear as day: mask donned, his plan decided, Tim's head snaps up, he looks at Dick, Damien, and Alfred and says, “Okay, guys, let's go steal a Batman.”

With that in mind, I realize I would buy a comic where Tim and Damien bicker across Europe as they chased art thieves.

Apparently this came out in November. I may have to track this series down.

I mean, does Bruce wear the duster and goggles when he gets his platinum blond girlfriends to call him “Deedee”?

“Oh, yeah I, I had a kidney stone once… Incredibly painful… Same kinda thing I'm told, so yeah I hear you. Actually my cat and I had one at the same time and we were not fun to be around, I'll tell you that much. He got his because he was eating too much dry cat food and I got mine because I wasn't drinking enough liquids, so that's why you see me hydrating all the time; because I have no desire to experience that kind of pain again.” – Rodney McKay, “Search and Rescue”

The man is a fucking prophet.

Kidney stones, even the little ones you can't see, are no fun. No fun. Nada. None. No! Just don't.

After the last two days, you will never see me without a Gatorade or water bottle.

I have learned my lesson!

DISREGARD WOMEN

ACQUIRE TRAPS AND PIZZAS

- /co/mrade commenting on the new Scooby Doo

What I do with my free time and too many TRIO Blocks.

I'm happy with Triomondo's size and that at no point in building him did I have to start from scratch because I pushed too hard trying to attach a limb. I'm also happy that I was able to use the hinges from the Seige Tower battering ram to give him a couple of extra points of articulation. (The last big guy like this I built just had rigid arms pointing forward.) However, I'm not happy that he looks so svelte. If I'd been thinking, I'd have made his arms stand a bit further out from the body.

Ah well, live and learn. I'll keep Triomondo around for a few days, study him a bit, then break him down down for something else.

Possible spoilers for an upcoming issue of Fantastic Four:

I'm a DC

I'm a Marvel.

If that doesn't sum up the deep shit DC's swimming in these days, nothing will.

Comi-Con International is going on right now. It’s the geek/creative Xanadu, and news has cast me in a playful set.

(Poetry is not my forté, forgive me.)

Hank Pym, I apologize. I apologize for the “chocolate cock” jokes. I apologize for all the crap I've said over the last year or so about you.

This isn't an excuse, but this is the reason: it's not easy being an Iron Man fan. On one hand you're fighting an up-hill battle against the Reed Richards, T'Challa, Doctor Doom, and, yes, Hank Pym fans to promote your guy as a scientific genius. Then on the other hand, you're making excuses about why your super-genius technology hero with a multinational corporate infrastructure isn't using his tool set to really help the world. It put a chip on my shoulder, and when Mighty Avengers came out, I reacted badly.

I reacted very badly, very immaturely, very a lot of things.

So, I'm sorry. I'm not going to rush out and start reading New Avengers, but I won't be making any more cracks about your past. We all have out histories, and frankly, you're isn't as bad as some.

I had a long list of things to get done today, web programming was not on that list.
Guess what actually got done?

I’ve talked about converting documents for e-readers before (see: Blinding e-Leaves with Clover) and have been noodling with a more generalized conversion model. (That was a mistake, my original project used clean .txt files, I rapidly came to realize that converting messy HTML text is a separate problem altogether.)

After backing off the generalized attempt, I rebuilt the code as a single-source application (keeping the basic structure so I can generalize it later) targeting Livejournal.

Livejournal is an 11 year old blogging site, currently owned by the Russain mafia. Its userbase skews female, and it’s the locus of a lot of fiction writing.

It’s also a nightmare, code-wise. The Livejournal API is no use for getting raw outputs of anyone’s posts but yours– so everything is screenscraping. Even then, Livejournal allows users to insert arbitrary code in their entries… its default text-editor generates HTML 2.0 content, but an entry can be almost any format… XHTML, Wordpress’s internal markup standards, embedded with Javascript etc etc etc.

So why start with Livejournal? The other site candidate I was considering allows users to import from Microsoft Word. That’s even worse!

Anyway, so a lot of custom skimming and tag-stripping later (and two separate HTML cleaner classes!) I have a working Alpha-version application; Clover ePub Livejournal binder v0.1 -- ALPHA.
http://clover.covertutopia.com/

So if you have an e-reader… by all means try it out and tell me how it works!

UPDATE: Apparently the new demo entries I linked the application to by default… break it. *sigh* Stupid LJ… why do you need skins, themes and formats? They’re 3 different ways of doing the exact same thing!
UPDATE #2: That’s fixed, it should be much more robust now.
UPDATE #3: Grr… have altered filters to leave a bit more garbage on top (entry tags) in the name of breaking less often.