Four Island

Oh my god, I have to share this.

This is a tangential story, but not one with a particularly happy ending.

Yesterday, while I was bored, I spent a whole bunch of time reading quotes from the XKCD Quotes Database. I came across a quote that linked to TV Tropes. I was doomed before the page even finished loading.

For those who don't know, TV Tropes is like Wikipedia multiplied by a hundred million. It's about devices and conventions that authors can and will use in their works, many of which have become clichéd and a list of them and the works themselves. This site is infamous for it's ability to keep you trapped within it's walls all day. I went from LaserGuidedAmnesia to FairlyOddParents to LotusEaterMachine, sidetracked temporarily to 1408 (scared myself a bit reading about that), back to Oubliette, to HighOctaneNightmareFuel, to NightmareFuel and finally to FridgeHorror. While I opened many tabs off of FridgeHorror, I never got to read them. Sitting inconspicuously in the middle of the page was the link that brought would inevitably be my downfall. As TV Tropes would call SchmuckBait:

"Animal Crossing is made of this trope. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see here, but don't expect to sleep at all for a few days. No, really."

I DIDN'T LISTEN.

The link led to a story called "The Terrible Secret Of Animal Crossing". And let me tell you, it is quite scary. The fridge horror can be quite amusing the first few times (I love how Tom Nook says "Everyone who works here wears a uniform!" AND THERE ARE NO OTHER WORKERS :P). Don't get me wrong, it's unbelievably awesome story, but it's most likely the same awesome as The Ring or The Number 23. It's like creepypasta with Animal Crossing. I don't know what creepypasta is, but I wanted to say it because it sounded funny. Now excuse me while I get my DS and empty my inventory of gyroids. has a heart attack when she inadvertently digs up a gyroid GET IT OFF OF ME- shot

It was a bit exciting, too, as my favorite Animal Crossing character Tangy appeared in the story a few times. She appears in my (not as insane, but still pretty weird) Animal Crossing story "Obsession" and is the first character I ever met in my copy of the game. We quickly became best friends :P. Also, our birthdays are on the same day, WHICH IS AWESOME. :P

Anyway, I invite you to read it. The Terrible Secret Of Animal Crossing. Read it. I can't say that it's more insane than House Of Leaves (which I also love!), but seriously, be smart and read it during the day. I didn't. And look what's happened to me? :P

Finally, if there's one thing that I've taken away from this experience (and you'll understand when you read the story):

I am *NEVER** going to summer camp again.*

Through the popularity of my current comic (Pillowcase!), it's sometimes difficult to remember that I once had a different comic: Kirby's Fan Mail. Yeah, remember that? That was a.... weird little comic, wasn't it? Yes, anyway, I recently had it brought back to my attention when I was looking through my Google Analytics. I saw a referral to Four Island from something called badwebcomics.wikidot.com, and I though, "Hm, what could that be?" So I went to the page in question and found.... a review of Kirby's Fan Mail explaining how it fails and how I'm mentally challenged! YAY! :P

Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. The article actually was about how stupid the comic was and I seriously find it VERY amusing. Read it here, plez. 'Tis awesome. Like how he points out that I can't draw or that I think word salads are comedic gold.

However true or funny the article may be, however, there are some points I would like to make in my defense:

• First of all, the author of the article spelled my last name incorrectly. It's Insigna, not Insignia.
• One of the author's favorite things to make fun of was a comic of mine called Shimi's Warning, which he described as incredibly stupid because it was just a picture with a link to an off-site comic. There are several reasons that I had to do this. First off, Shimi's Warning was done in Flash, which, due to a technical limitation of the comic hosting software, could not be hosted directly on the site. Second, the only thing you can post in the comic area on that site is comics. You cannot just post text. Yes, I probably should've provided a text version of the URL so people could just copy/paste it, which I eventually did. However, the comic itself has since gone down which is really not quite a shame because it was pretty bad.

And.... that's really all I can think of right now. It's not too easy to defend KFM :P. In fact, here are some things that I think the article lacks:

• Blatant copyright thievery - After writing a comic involving a cookbook, I posted a comic from the original Kirby manga because it had to do with the previous comic. Yeah.
• My total non-coolness - Yeah, four years ago, I didn't know what "emo" meant. So I probably embarrassed myself.
• The whole "world trip" debacle - For a few comics, I talked about having Kirby go on a trip to other people's comics and do stuff. Instead, I stopped posting comics for two months and simply had him write a letter of apology when I got back. Wow, my failness never fails to fail!
• Same with the "awesome" 50th Comic Party.
• Homophobia.
• There is clearly no food in this one, yet he claims he is eating it.
• The punch line of this one is the fact that the sender of the letter didn't leave a name. Ha-ha.
• I'm not going to pretend to know what I was on while writing this one.
• My total disregard for an update schedule. For a time, I would post like 10 comics a day, and then I wouldn't post for like a month. Then, I stopped doing the comic in 2007, only to pick it up for a month in 2009. I'm surprised people actually still read it.

Clearly, I could go on for much longer, but I don't feel like it. Instead, I'll let you, the reader, either read the article I linked to above or search through Kirby's Fan Mail for more of my failness. Oh yes, and check out my recently revived comic, Pillowcase! Thank you and good night! :P

Oh dear. A few days ago I read on Daily Blog Tips that due to Google acquiring FeedBurner that all feeds should be moved to Google's servers. The problem with that is that Google set a deadline. Feburary 28th. Worst part is, any feeds not transferred before said date will 404.

It's pretty easy to transfer your feeds. There's a link at the top of the FeedBurner member pages entitled "Move my feed now" or something similar, which lets you sign into a Google account to move the feeds to. Then it transfers the feed, which may take a very long time depending on the length of said feed. Then, you're done. You won't be able to sign in to feedburner.com anymore, but feedburner.google.com works. You'll also be advised to change your feeds.feedburner.com links to feeds2.feedburner.com, but if you don't, they'll redirect.

I think Google's mistake, though, is setting unmoved feeds to 404 after the deadline date. For instance, if I didn't read Daily Blog Tips, I would not have known about this. At all. I'm so detached, I didn't even know FeedBurner had been acquired! Imagine the problems. I probably wouldn't know a thing until June when someone complains that the RSS feed has stopped working.

So, you peoples who use FeedBurner, make sure that you transfer your feed to Google's server!

Ok, I admit it. I'm a little too obsessed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Don't think so? Then explain why I made a wiki about it.

I made The Sabrina FanWiki as a collaborative resource for Sabrina and her fans. It will contain episode guides, quotes, pictures, characters and more. If you are a Sabrina fan, you're allowed to add content. If you're not a Sabrina fan, you can but I really don't see why you'd be contributing anyway.

I plan to write episode guides for episodes on a weekend daily basis. However, there are a few episodes that I have a problem with (for instance, low voices in at least two of them) and that I'd prefer someone else wrote the guides for. For more information, see the Community Portal.

Oh yes, and just a shout-out to someone in mah Math class who will probably never read this: "Melissa Joan Hart is not a terrible actress!"

Anyway, I hope you enjoy The Sabrina FanWiki and feel free to contribute!

I like programming. I especially like C++, Java and PHP. However, I decided that I want to learn another language.

Perhaps inspired by the PMS I use, Redmine, I have decided to learn Ruby. It's actually not that bad. It's pretty interesting, simple and easy to use. For instance, unlike many languages, Ruby doesn't require classes or main functions to display its "Hello World" program. This is it in its entirety:

puts "Hello World!"

A great way to learn is the "Try Ruby!" interactive prompt available from tryruby.hobix.com that teaches you Ruby from your browser. It's a lot of fun, it's fun and I'm repeating myself.

Another fun aspect of Ruby is the Ruby on Rails framework, which was the base of the popular PHP framework CakePHP. Rails makes it much more easy and fun to write Ruby web applications. I plan to write a certain upcoming website in Rails, too.

One thing that does annoy me about Ruby, though, is that its command-separation character is, like BASIC and all derivatives, the newline. I fine semicolon separated languages so much better. I just do. :)

puts "So, do you like Ruby?"
likeRuby = true
puts "YAY!" if likeRuby

No, this isn't about The Fourm. It's about the new website I'm hosting! Everyone, say hello to Pyro's new blog, Randomness! YAAAY!

Everyone, make sure you go check out her new blog because it's like, yay. :)

NOTE: She's using Wordpress 2.7, which, as I guessed, must be pretty good because it's been downloaded quite a few times. :)

Ok. So, I found about Automattic's new commenting system thing, IntenseDebate from CSS-Tricks. The features list made it sound really good, so I tried installing it, and I also got Drifty and Timbo94 to install it on their blogs too.

Well.... it's interesting. I mean, it does have it's good features, which are great, like reputation and threading and generally looking nice. But there is a problem.

It's so slooooooow! I mean, it loads quickly enough, but when I sit down to type in a comment, I'm way ahead of it and the letters are appearing the box one.... by.... one.... very.... slowly and I'm just sitting there, waiting for everything to appear so I can figure out what spelling mistakes I made.

So.... I guess IntenseDebate is pretty good. However, I'd like to argue about it with someone, so we can do that here. :) I've uninstalled IntenseDebate for the time being because I can't really have it perfectly yet until I hack the Wordpress plugin, so we're back to Four Island comments for now!

Or, even better, we can deblatog about it!

Recently, I (GAH) read an article on CrunchBang called Closest Booky Wook. I like Memes, so I'm going to help propagate this one, as well as sending a Pingback. Why do I like Pingbacks so much?

Anyway, as per the instructions, here are the rules, repeated:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I tried this instantly, with strange results. First of all, the first book I found didn't even have 56 pages. The second book I found didn't have any words on page 56. I finally found a book that fit the critera, and here's the quote:

Comprised of a basic Cross stitch with each of the four legs tacked down by a short stitch.

Encyclopedia of Needlework by Donna Kooler

....kay. I just posted the encyclopedia description of a "Rice" needlepoint stitch on Four Island. Strange.

I am OBSESSED with TiddlyWiki. Well, one TiddlyWiki in particular :)

TiddlyWiki is a wiki package that works without a server. It's completely HTML and JavaScript, self-contained in one file and is handy to carry around on a memory stick. It's so useful, like a lot.

It's easy to set up, fun to carry around (and keep away from other people :) and stuffs. It's by default a little strange, as if you click on a link, the page shows up in the middle column along with the other ones you've opened, but there's a plugin called SinglePageModePlugin (warning, that site is VERY slow) that allows you to have only one page open at a time. It's really useful.

TiddlyWiki is also themeable. Since I use mine for my diary, I decided to go with Kubrick (the default Wordpress theme). There's a link to a site with lots of themes on it at the TiddlyWiki site.

If you want to use your TiddlyWiki as a diary/journal as well, I also suggest the CalendarPlugin (same site, same slowness). Put it in your sidebar, and then the day numbers will link to the journal entries (if you use TiddlyWiki's built-in "new journal" thing)

Anyways, TiddlyWiki is the best and you should use it. Yay.

24 Ways is an interesting.... thing edgeofmyseat.com does every year, during the 24 days before Christmas. It's a nice way to enjoy the waiting period with fun, interesting articles on web design. The best thing, I think, about 24 Ways is that all of the articles are about great, interesting things and are long. Yes, fun, long articles. Yay.

I don't know, I'M TRYING HERE! GAH, of all the reviews I write on Four Island, I really need to find more adjectives to use....

Anyways.... I'm failing at this review. GAH. I better just wrap it up then:

24 Ways is a great blog about web design that is fun. Yes. Go there. Now.

And if the Four Island posting thing works out correctly, this post'll have been posted on the first day of 24 Ways 2008.