hyenas, code, something from nothing

[nixy]

hyenas: I'm redoing my site and watching the Insim drama, but there's only so much PMBD social climate I can take. I am often reminded of a particular documentary about hyena packs - which are, one might note, decidedly matriarchal - that turned my opinion regarding these creatures from indifference to utter loathing. Ecosystems be damned - if we could be rid of hyenas, I'd be willing to make any necessary sacrifices (whether they be of the mindful recycling or bloodied altar variety). In other contexts, I am reasonably fond (in my distant, not-talking-to-anyone way) of quite a few PMBD regulars and I prefer to keep it that way. It takes a lot of the fun out of a community if you sort of hate most of the people in it. The closest I come to wanting to be part of a group is at GoS, but I do feel my square-pegness quite acutely from time to time. Not incidentally, I am very good at killing threads. LMK if you need any conversations ground to a halt. I will do it for free.

code: So, redoing: While I'm doing my site primarily because I am bored with the current look, I am also making certain that it's set up so that readability of the text is not dependent on the proper loading of a background image. From my experiences setting things up in the first place, I now know enough about CSS to know that 1) I still hate it, and 2) the first template I altered was coded by a crackhead. I am resistant to coding from 100% scratch (because that would be admitting an interest, however slight, in becoming proficient at CSS) so I poked at the guts of a couple of templates and found one that, so far, is proving tractable. My php skillz consist of comment-tagging anything I either don't want or don't understand to see what that does to the output, but you'd be surprised (or maybe not, if you do the same) at how effective this method turns out to be. Next time I redo things, I probably will do it from scratch, if only so the inevitable tangle of floats and clears that made sense to some stranger will be organized in a manner that I can comprehend without pain.

something from nothing: Technically, what I'm making is a new kind of nothing instead of an actual something, i.e., a new object mesh. I don't think my Secret Santa person is on LJ, or at least not hanging out in the corner where I am, but I'm going to err on the side of crypticness (cryptitude? crypticism?) just in case. My new toy won't need anything terribly fancy done to it so far as getting it into the game, but I will be taking an existing function and applying it to my object, and I will very likely be making a frantic post in the days prior to the SS deadline to beg for volunteers to test it out in their own games. This isn't that post, but be on the lookout sometime around the 20th :P