Categories
Dream Journal

Congressional Envelopes, Long & Gold

After learning some purported factoid about Congressional envelopes, I actually get my hands on one. It’s hugely overlong, with a vertical gold band and a tasteful border for the address. A surprising design feature:  if you hold it a certain way, the flap closes itself! I get my wife to try it; it’s tricky and it takes a while to get her to correctly press the pads of her thumb and forefinger over the gold corners. Why would they spend money to develop this technology? Who is this for?


I’m riding a personal cart on a single-track railway line that serves as public transit for a small rural community. It feels empty and follows a long highway along the convoluted recesses of the town. The trackway is obscured down the slope of a hill or levee, so you can’t even see it, and the routes seem to follow a river that’s out of sight. It’s a strange gray autumn day. I can’t recall why I’m riding the train, but I may be transporting garbage — a railway just for trash disposal.

Categories
Dream Journal

Kiss from a Girl who Found Me

An auto updating input window surrounded by a circle overlays the dream. Soon, if gets updated with info from Madeline Mladich.

I’m lying on the top back bunk of a row of communal bunks one day, reading Wikipedia while everyone else is out. A bald heavyset dude peeks in randomly, making an expression like like I might be in what he feels is an incorrect bunk. So I move down to the lone single level bed, then after he leaves, into a lower bunk next to it where I’m unlikely to be noticed. That’s where a girl finds me… a girl that seems to have specifically sought me out.

After a brief but very good conversation (where I somehow feel compelled to convey the importance of my contributions during the night, when I usually choose to work) she leans over the bed and gives me an absolutely glorious kiss. Our time available together, I realize, is far too short, and I get the idea to have her write down her info. The input window hovering over the dream updates — I feel like our relationship is solidified, saved in the computer memory sense. Madeline Mladich.

I show her some of my work, zooming around a simplified model of the city (still quite complex), overlaid onto the city itself. We’ve recently expanded, and I’m aesthetically placing more structures in the center of map, choosing as much as possible to stay away from downtown and the older well-established parts of the model.

Later on I’m walking up and down the narrow communal hall, knocking on white-painted doors looking for anyone who knows what the pink glitter paint I keep seeing on the doors means.


I’m in a part of the Ukraine. I explore a probably abandoned white building glinting in the weak spring sun. All the walls and ceilings are glass window-frames, like a greenhouse, but I get the impression this was light manufacturing of some kind. There’s a hobo-like character on roof helping me, and he spots a terminator robot outside for me to avoid. I can see it’s dark outline and the bright red blotch of it’s eye.

Categories
Glot-glot

Glot Theme #4 “Glot-o-matic” Unshelved

Rubik's Window

Well, hm. This is sort of embarrassing. Did any of you read that post I made back in November, about my upcoming website redesign? I was so excited. So eager. So naïve.

So… it’s been awhile since then. Most elements of my design were actually implemented; others were forgotten as life went on (as it tends to). So I’ve decided that good enough is good enough — as usual. I seem to be growing more practical and less apologetic in my old age. At least as far as apologizing for personal web designs done in my free time as a  hobby, skill-building exercise, and meditation on imperfectness.

Anyways. This is the New Stuff:

  • GLOT letters at the top are dynamic div areas (pure pixels!), style-able with CSS
  • author portrait with color-changing vertical stripes behind it
  • post titles used the 04_19 font; now they use Grixel Extended
  • tags attached to a post now have the same color and have a mini-tag next to them on hover
  • “about me” spiel is revealed on portrait hover
  • recent comments appear in the sidebar (in pixelated form)
  • Tumblr quotes, delicious links, Last.fm songs in the sidebar
  • my WeHeartIt images used as filler in the sidebar
  • number of comments shown in a comment bubble
  • posts outside of the default category (Wordglot) are now specially featured on the front page
  • Flickr photos show up below the main column on the front page
  • ditto for Twitter tweets, too
  • Creative Commons license and contact link shown prominently in the footer
  • post pages now have a more interesting mono-color scheme
  • possibility to set a featured image as background for a post
  • the “not found” page is really cool — try it!

And this is the Broken Stuff:

  • spacing is off in lots of places
  • colors can combine in near-unreadable contrast
  • the tags page… is bad
  • vigorous testing was not vigorous
  • I haven’t even checked it in Internet Explorer. Really. That’s how much fuck IE.
  • comments have no pictures and are a gray box
  • no, seriously — there’s not even a place to comment at all yet

Comment below and let me know what you think!

Categories
Glot-glot

Upcoming GLOT-o-MATIC

Religiously, I tune and tweak. I intuit and poke. A new Glot design is in the works. I drew this a week ago:

There’s nothing wrong with it yet. It’s still in that wonderful stage where nothing is broken, per se, just not gotten-to yet. But why do it in the first place?

Well, it’s exquisite process of brain-development and creative excercise and human development. I set out to learn things sometimes, then I learn them.  This time it was CSS3 and HTML5 and some Javascript. Hopefully, maybe, possibly, that pays off some day.

Very little is started, but one interesting thing I’m adding is more pictures. Below is an image from my WeHeartIt feed, which will automatically be displayed in the sidebar (just like this!) :

Nifty, huh? Back to work.

Categories
Glot-glot

Showing One’s Backend

I’m just trying to prove it’s a labor of love. For the record, no, it doesn’t make sense to do this custom CSS work when no one but me will ever work with it. Pleasure isn’t always sensible.

Considering the current financial climate, both personal and national, I feel forced to justify the frittering waste of several hours of time that is updating one’s admin screen. So here goes (prepare for long sentence): it’s an exercise of skill which not only keeps the mind sharp, provides a small bit of accomplishment, and is something to show off, but reasserts and reminds me every time I login of my personal sense of style, a style which is particularly energizing and, well, awesome. I like it. Do you?