Four Island

Okay, these appear to be becoming regular, lol :P. Anyway, today's topic is on ABUSED-AS-A-CHILD COMMAS. No, seriously, I mean COMMAS THAT ARE USED INCORRECTLY OR NOT AT ALL. Some examples:

Notice that when the orb in motion comes in contact with a stationary orb, it reduces the counter on the stationary orb by 1. Once an orb's counter reaches 0 it explodes and is removed from play, and you receive 1 point for doing so. This is the only way to earn points.

Jay Is Games

Read that bolded part out loud. Seriously. Is there no pause after the zero? Replace the number with a word and it'll become clearer. "Once an orb's counter reaches zero it explodes." There should be a pause in there because "Once an orb's counter reaches zero" is like the cause and "it explodes" is the result. "Once an orb's counter reaches zero, it explodes." Aw, how lovely. Here's an example of the opposite:

Every widget is derived from GtkWidget. This means, changes to the properties of GtkWidget will effect all widgets. Furthermore many other widgets have "parent widgets". For example properties of GtkButton will also be applied to GtkCheckButton unless it is explicitly stated otherwise.

Gnome Live!

That pause between "this means" and "changes to the properties of GtkWidget will effect all widgets" is ENTIRELY UNNECESSARY!!!! OH MY GOD! brain explosion I'm very sorry, I'm just VERY easily annoyed by what I consider poor English, which may also be considered perfectly normal English by those who aren't insane. Who? Oh, and by the way, it's "affect", not "effect". Pwned.

HEY KIDS, IT'S ME AGAIN!!!! I'm feeling very English-angsty and I have that urge to throw stuff again, so it's time for another RANDOM ENGLISH RANT! Today's topic is LONELY ADVERBS. THOSE LONELY, MISUNDERSTOOD ADVERBS. (Why do I keep misspelling lonely as lovely? Well, adverbs are quite awesome. So they're LOVELY YET LONELY ADVERBS. We can work that into the script. It's okay, subconscious, I'm on your side.)

Nothing gets my "I THINK I'M GOING TO LAUNCH NUCLEAR WAR ON A FIVE YEAR OLD" up like "I didn't do that good on that quiz." NO, YOU DIDN'T DO "GOOD" ON THAT ENGLISH GRAMMAR QUIZ, JOHNNY. YOU FAILED IT. YOU WILL NOW BE DEPORTED TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN.

Grammar lesson, kids. An ADVERB is a descriptive word, usually ending in a telltale "ly", that modifies verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. An ADJECTIVE, like "good", is a descriptive word used to modify nouns and pronouns. Now, let's look at that statement above again, shall we?

"I didn't do (verb) that good (adjective) on that quiz." What is modifying what? If you're an idiot, you may say that "good" is modifying "quiz", in which case the sentence would translate to "I didn't do that good quiz." Are you copulating with that quiz or talking to it? No, good tries to modify "do", or more specifically, how you did on that quiz. But adjectives can't modify verbs, can they?

NO THEY CAN'T.

Here comes my best friend, "well". Why? Because Samara Morgan lives there. No, really, because it's an adverb! Adverbs are lovely. (My subconscious is happy.) It's actually rather sad. Adverbs are far more important (in my opinion) than adjectives, yet they're often shifted off to the side when it comes to parts of speech. Adjectives get their names in headlines (FAT MAN FALLS OFF STEEP CLIFF ONTO IMPORTANT BUSINESSMAN) while adverbs have to be content with living in obituaries (Melinda Jones died peacefully in her sleep, though a chainsaw-wielding madman was just about to sneakily sneak into her room and murderously cut her head off.) Adverbs are great. Just embrace them.

Anyway, using adverbs, that sentence turns into "I didn't do that well on that quiz." HORRAY. I AM VERY HAPPY THAT YOU DIDN'T DO WELL ON THAT TEST BECAUSE IT IS FAR BETTER THAN NOT DOING GOOD ON THAT TEST. Seriously, you could use that as a double entendre because "good" can be used as a noun too, sometimes. "Johnny did good on his test? How, did he recycle it or something?" Loffle. (AHH THUNDER)

This is one of my most commonly heard transgressions in the English language. PEOPLE, HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO ADD AN "LY" TO THE END OF YOUR WORDS? "I ran so fast the other day!" Okay, all of my examples so far have been irregular, but you get the point.

Oh god, I'm going to end up as an English teacher. And some kid is going to come in and complain that he did bad on his Math test and I'll throw a textbook at him. And I may possibly have to go to court for it, but if any of that happens, it'll happen on Four Island, which I am the sovereign leader of and have already created a law that allows abuse on the grounds of incorrect grammar. Except if I accidentally does it. That then does count not at all.

Though I sort of just lost all of my English teacher cred by starting a sentence with a conjunction. Oh well.

Hey, look everybody! It's time for a Random English Rant! This is a segment in which I see something happen OVER AND OVER AGAIN, and then go a bit insane. THERE I GO AGAIN! ... ... ... ... AGAIN!!!!

Anyway, today's topic is on the fact that....

PREFORM. IS NOT. A WORD.

Well, it is, but it doesn't mean what you think.

Preform is commonly used by people who don't know better as a synonym of perform. In fact, it's probably a typo, but the users of said typo often don't know that it's incorrect. Le gaspez! I myself used to be frequently guilty of this horrible transgression. :P

To perform something is to bring something about. To preform something is to, as it sounds like, form something beforehand. I have never, ever, ever, ever, EVER heard the word "preform" used normally in context. :P So, don't use it! I PERFORMED THE ACT OF MURDERING EVERYONE WHO SAYS PREFORM. I PREFORMED A SWORD SO THAT I WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO DO THE MURDERING WITH WHEN IT CAME TO THAT.

Sound easy? It is. Or it isn't. That really depends on your IQ. :P

Okay, I probably sound really rude now, so I'm going to leave before I get lynched. And remember, kids! Performing a play is good (as long as you get good reviews), but preforming a play (before you can get those silly copyright use approvals) can get you chased down Main Street by a torch-wielding mob! And we all know which one of those is better for the colon, don't we?

The dissolving of Randomlog seems to have resulted in quite a bit of fallout. We continue, today, with another explanation-y post. One day, on Randomlog, an Uncategorized post was published entitled "Get Along Little Moose" accompanied by an extremely strange audio clip. I'll reproduce that here. :P

Click to listen to Get Along Little Moose

It's hilariously weird. For those of you that couldn't really understand it, here are the lyrics:

Get get get along Get get get along Get get get along little moose {x4}

Get along little moose You move way too stupidly We have to get to Mamatown in the north of Idaho! We have 4 head of nose To move way out West But you're moving too slow You are such a pervert!

Get Along Little Moose

What on earth is it? Is it a preview of The Gates Of Sleep's new song? Um, no. It's actually (once again) the result of a combination of MadLibs and my insanity. The other day, I was video-chatting with my cousin and we were doing MadLibs. No, we weren't Pink Panthering, we were putting in randomly insane words in each field. One MadLib I did was called "Westward Ho!" It was.... odd, to say the least, even disregarding my MadLibbial additions to it. It was about two insane children who thought they were cowgirls and were singing songs and stuff. (No, I'm exaggerating, seriously! :P)

The song they sang ended up as "Get along little moose, you move way too stupidly...". In a bout of insanity (where HAVEN'T we heard that before?), I opened Audacity, put the song though a Text-To-Speech program, added some background music, played around a bit with the vocals and.... there we are! Aren't I weird? :P

Okay, by now you've seen the title and are prepared to run for your life. DON'T WORRY. I'm not going to inundate you with Pink Panthers! Well, sort of. Maybe.

First, I wanted to sort of explain what on earth I was on during Randomlog. The idea started on or about Thursday, two weeks ago. I was poking around gmail.com for some reason and decided to create a new email address: one that people could send completely random stuff to that I would be inspired by to write or produce something. I probably filched that idea from Homestar Runner, but whatever. :P Anyway, I decided I would make a blog for the stuff I created via that method.

Later, I was poking around some old parts of The Fourm and discovered this old fossil. A story generated in a MadLib-like way. I mentioned in that post that I had also created a similar story using Pink Panther in every field. I don't know why I did that. It was weird. Anyway, I was suddenly inspired to create a new blog where every post was a Pink Panther'd MadLib story. I see now that that is enough to send someone insane. Oh well. :P

Anyway, I was setting up the Pink Panther blog at one point (K2 loves me like a kitten!) and suddenly realized that I could combine the two ideas! So I renamed the blog to Randomlog and made Visitor Content, the random email inspiration thing, the main part of the site. Sort of. As of Saturday, when this post was written, which also happens to be 7 days since the email address was first revealed, I have received no email at that address. Quite. :P

Anyway, as you know, Randomlog is no more. However, I do not like throwing stuff out. When I decided to post Caption'd images every week after the poll results, I didn't start posting images with the first one that hadn't been seen, I posted all of the previously revealed images (all four of them) AND posted a new image.

Where am I going with this? I think you know. The Pink Panther Collection! YAY! I moved all of the Pink Panthers from Randomlog, published or not, to a single page and put them up on Four Island Other. Read them! Please? :P Some of them are actually a bit funny because of the inappropriate parts of speech and the self-referencing, though the repetition does sort of get to you. Anyway, there we go. Twenty-three MadLibs full of Pink Panther. Yes, I know, I'm very odd. Deal with it. :P

Yes, the public has spoken. I have gone quite insane. Look see:

Randomlog. Awesome idea or Starla's gone insane again? OMG THIS IS SO AWESOMELY RANDOM I LUV RANDOM YAY INSANE LOL YAY - 2 vote(s)! whut. You're already insane. You're more than that! Do something! - 5 vote(s)! What's Randomlog? - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

So, Randomlog has been dissolved. I know, I think I went temporarily insane last week. However, I have a replacement life for it. Don't think it's legacy is dead! Because... something!

I have been trying for A VERA LONG TIME to get it through my THICK head that THIS IS MY PERSONAL WEBSITE. OMG. I CAN POST. WHAT I WANT. ON IT. AAAH. I've keep telling myself that I can post freely here, and yet, it never happens. However, I think that is going to finally change. Now that Randomlog has been dissolved, I need another place to pour that random creativity into. Where should that be? Right here, right? No, I won't be posting Pink Panthers here because I know they are heavily despised. No, come back! :P

Now, Randomlog, as seen above and from the results of this week's poll that have already come it, was not a very popular place. I blame Pink Panther. :P However, I really liked both the Caption'd thing and the My Life Is Happy segment (which I never actually explained), so what I've decided is that I'll post a Caption'd along with every week's poll results and I'll just post My Life Is Happy pieces, as well as other randomly fun stuff, directly to my blog. Won't this be fun?

Because four Caption'd images have already been exhibited, I won't be cheap and spend four weeks showing images that have already been seen. I'll post those four images today PLUS a new one, and every week from now, I'll post one. Doesn't that sound great? prays

What I Like About... Starch

Gleefully Descrated

What I Like About... Tina

Robes

And here's the new one!

Tina's Creation

Yay! Anyway, my final topic in this extremely long poll post is that I really didn't like what I did last week with combining a poll post with a real post. It just produces too many problems. Therefore, while last week will not count as breaking my annual goal, I will no longer be posting ONLY on Saturday. I have to post at least one more time during that week.

Really, I think my problem with poll posts is that, because I don't post other things that frequently, there's so many of them. With this (hopeful) new posting regime, this shouldn't be a problem anymore. Yay! Let's see how it works out. :)

I've often wondered about what I should blog about on my blog. Stuff, right? I asked about it in a poll a few weeks ago. Programming stuff won, but is that really all yo you people care about? Last year, I did a few randomish posts such as Cakefile and A Short Tribute To Doctor Who and they were received well. Random stuff is fun and hopefully you'll be seeing more of it on this blog.

However, note that when I say random stuff, I do not mean like My Weird Social Commentary. I'm trying to pretend that never happened. It actually only happened because I was in this same situation--it was late at night, I was tired and I need a post so I wouldn't fail my annual goal. This is why I like posting earlier in the week, so even if I don't post again later, I'm safe.

Also, I wanted to mention that I've been thinking about it and, really, this is my personal blog. I can write whatever I want to on it. If you haven't noticed, all I ever write about is programming or a project I'm "working" on. I could write about some insane book I'm reading or the most fantabulous singer evar. In fact, you know what would be cool? I buy an album once a month because I like collecting things and CDs are just freaking awesome. So, what I could do is, after purchasing my monthly album, listen to it for about a week and then write a review of it.

That would actually be a really cool thing to do. I actually just came up with that while writing the previous paragraph. Writing does stuff for you :). Anyway, I think I'll be writing more often on my blog because I realized that I don't have to restrict myself to formalish stuff. I mean, look at Drifty's blog, or Pyro's blog. Now, I'm logging off so I can get some sleep. Bye. :P

I now have definitive proof that I have no life.

You know that site My Life Is Average? To put it bluntly, nothing that goes on there is average. It's all "I jumped out of a third-story window and survived!" and "I handed a piece of dog poop to my teacher and got an A!" It used to be funny, but now it's all lies. Most of the posts are so crazy that they can't possibly be real and I don't understand how they made it on to My Life Is Average.

So, I created "My Life Is Actually Average", a place where boring and usual things happen. This is a place where stuff that is ACTUALLY average occurs! It's so boring, it's actually sort of funny! :P To show how obsessed I've been with this website (that I thought of like 4 days ago), let's see how many posts have already been posted: 129. Lol. A few were submitted by other people, but most of them were from me.

Yes, you heard that correctly, YOU CAN SUBMIT STORIES YAY. :P They don't necessarily have to be true (the "actually" in MLIAA implies stories that are intrinsically boring, not true), in fact, most of my posts are modified versions of posts on My Life Is Average. But you're free to write true posts because they're much more likely to be average! :P

Anyway, I'm weird. It's true. But, go on My Life Is Actually Average! Post your boring stories! It'll be fun! Lol. :P

Do you ever get that feeling that it's 11 o'clock and you haven't written much all day and you're feeling kind of tired? And then do you realize that it's a Friday, you haven't written much all week and you're 39 minutes away from destroying a month's worth of posting effort? Yes, this has happened to me quite often, most notably during last year's Kirby Week (I invite you to look at the time that post was posted :P).

Anyway, it's happening right now and the little Spongebobs in my head are running around and screaming "WE THREW OUT HER NAME!!!!!" Lol, no, but I'm sitting in bed, overheating slightly (the computer is on my lap) and trying to write something, anything (well, not anything, because my blog has standards (lol, sentences like that make me think of My Weird Social Commentary and the aforementioned Kirby Week post and I shudder)), to prevent myself from failing my annual goal. Yes, I am taking my annual goals very seriously this year. I have only failed one so far and that was the "post 2 True Falsity stories a month" goal, and that's even possibly excusable because I'm thinking of possibly discontinuing and archiving True Falsities. If, by the end of the year, True Falsities is not longer active, I can't really say I failed the goal, so I'll just say NEUTRAL.

Wow, is it getting hot in here? No, that's just the laptop. One of the great features of my new laptop is that it doesn't overheat. Well, obviously, it's new. But my old laptop overheated on a regular basis. In fact, now that I am using a different computer for general use, I decided to use my spare (and slightly broken) computer for other purposes, and chose to use it as a development computer. And then I discovered that running WEBrick caused the computer to overheat. So, I do my Ruby on Rails programming on my general use computer now.

Speaking of Ruby on Rails, I have some news! A few weeks ago, when I announced that my top-priority project was Xidet, a lot of people were annoyed. Okay, one person was annoyed. Lol, maybe a few people, if you count the voices in my head. Anyway, the consensus was that The TGS Website was more important and has been promised for longer. While it is true that the idea to restart Xidet just suddenly popped into my head one lazy Thursday, the original Xidet announcement was posted in March of '08 while TGS was not started until April of '08 (not to mention the The TGS Website, which was not conceived until MUCH later).

However, while Xidet quickly died out (it wasn't official until January of '09, though), The TGS Website had much more promise and my first attempt at it in '08 seemed like it might be going somewhere. Plus, TGS is (surprisingly, considering the slow reaction time of some of our members....) an active project which should have a website to support it. So, I've rearranged my project queue. The TGS Website is Number #1, while Xidet has falled to Number #2. And yes, I have been doing some workingness on it. Check out my awesome codingz at the TGS Website project site! Lol, that wasn't vain at all.

Ah! That reminds me! I would like to inform everyone of a momentous occasion that most people forgot about! Yesterday, February 18th 2010, was the first anniversary of Pillowcase! One year ago yesterday, I sat down on my bed and wrote Bluemonkey's Saga, went insane and later made it into a real comic! Obviously, I am insane, but Pillowcase is yay! I am excited about how well it was received last year and am pleased to leak the rumor that it may possibly be starting up again very soon! Stay tuned for more information!

Wow, would you look at that! My lonely ramblement/massive digression has landed me a post! A weirdly random one, but an actual post! You know, I do think I'll post this. Especially as I now only have 16 minutes. And rest assured, I will, from now on, make every attempt to release my weekly post early in the week so as to prevent this procrastination problem from happening again. Thank you all, and good night!

I'm a bit insane. Yes, I know you all knew that. Anyway, as I make my rounds across the Internet, I find random stuff that I just have to rant about for no reason to people that wouldn't count as extant in a court of law. So, I thought I'd post a big batch of short rants here. It's my weird social commentary!

When I get bored, I occasionally go to some random old date and read all the Daily WTF post preceding it. :P Some five years ago, The Daily WTF posted the following in one of their "fail collection posts":

Are ya WTF-ed out yet? Let's hope not, otherwise you'd miss out on Duane Homick's discovery of the strftime documentation ...

%S is replaced by the second as a decimal number [00,61].

The Daily WTF

I could scream quite a few things right here, but I think the best way to describe what's wrong with this is a sentence found later in the referenced document:

The range of values for %S is [00,61] rather than [00,59] to allow for the occasional leap second and even more infrequent double leap second.

strftime documentation

Yeah, right back at'cha.

Another time I was rather bored, I randomly went to http://bored.com. It was a real site. :P I actually found a really fun game called Red Remover, but that's off the point. I found something that made me laugh and I had to post it here:

Okay, I know what you're thinking: "Starla, don't make fun of advertisements. It's just not worth it." I know, I know, it fails in many ways. But what really got me is how this advertisement, which stages an IM conversation from some person offering me a gift if I click a big button entitled GIFT (which I would've noticed on an IM program :P), is totally platform-specific. See how different the calculator I opened up looks from the Windows XP-style advert?

And don't even go there with the calculator. I'm running Ubuntu Linux.

Anyway, so, um, perhaps I am a bit obsessed with Lady GaGa. Lol, anyway, I had heard a rumor claiming that the video for her song Telephone was to be released yesterday. Sadly, it was not, but while I was frantically searching Google, YouTube and Twitter, I found this hilarious typo of the day:

Okay! That was random.... and fun! Perhaps I'll post more of these short posts at other random times. Or perhaps I can stop writing cop-outs and actually do some blogging. :P