Once upon a time, I lived in a small town. The wider world was a very big place that I had only heard stories about. Cities were things I saw on telvision and daydreamed about running off to, but thery weren’t real to me. The internet was in it’s infancy - almost mythical in it’s remove form the things I saw around me everyday. My local library subscribed to Wired, and I downed every issue as it came in, in spite of the fact that I didn’t even own a computer, much less a modem.

I’m still that 16 year old kid, sitting in a rural county library, dreaming of science fiction made real. At the same time, I’m 19, and surfing the web for real, thinking that I’d just found the biggest, most anacharic library in existance. I’m 21, and leaving my small town without a backward glance.

Chasing the dreams of my youth, I found myself distanced form the small things I once took for granted. There are no katydids or crickets singing outside my wondow. I can no longer smell the baking bread scent of parched grass seeds on the lawn. Cars pass my apartment at all hours of the day and night, and starlight cannot reach past the light pollution haze.

I miss the world I knew I decade ago. There was more wonder, and nature was just outside my door. I keep hold of that wonder, or I try. I look for nature working it’s way past the highways and under the rushing cars. I notice when I pass a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace, even if I’m doing 60; and someday I promise myself that I’ll live out in the boonies again, and be able to look up at a night sky and see every star.

The dreams of my childhood got me here, and the dreams of my (relative) maturity will bring me back to where I started.

And it’s an actual, gods honest, professionally made mini movie. How cool is that?

Underworld is coming out in September. Looks like a kick ass movie. It *also* looks a hell of a lot like it’s borrowing liberally from White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

Very cool.

Simon Wilson has a nifty idea (though he’s not the first) about combining scripting and color in CSS3 with an eye to having color arrays, instead of defining umpty-nine separate instances of three different colors. It’s a neat idea. It’s not going to happen. Backwards compatibility is the biggest and most logical reason. (There’s a great discussion of this and more going on in the comments)

All I can do is sigh wistfully. Being able to define a color scheme in a concise array would clear up my biggest headache when I get the urge to re-skin the site. Namely, tracking down each and every instance of a particular color. This sounds simple, and search/replace takes care of most of the work, but there always a few classes/colors I forget about. (There are a few that only show up on three or four pages in the whole site.)

For a while, my (far less sexy) solution consisted of a style sheet that contained nothing but the color declarations for every class and id. This eventually became too combersome, especially when I wanted to change color and layout at the same time, so the color only sheet was scrapped. (I do still keep separate files for text formatting and layout/positioning)

But, for all the cool stuff that won’t be making it’s way into the CSS3 spec, there’s going to be a lot more that does survive. (Well, I hope) I can’t wait to start playing with it.

If this is what the soon to be horde of aol provided weblogs is going to look like, there had better be some *damm* fine content, or I’m avoiding them just on general principal.

Of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with my impending flashback of what happened when aol let it’s members loose on usenet. Oh no.

I’m not sure what a point lower than the vapid dolts abusing the LJ staff would look like, but I think we’re about to find out.

Irregardless of what most everyone is saying, T3 didn’t do anything for me. The story didn’t really break new ground and felt like a cop out when held up against the first two ventures. Yes, the blowing up of shit was nice, and the obligatory showing-up-naked scenes were cute, but as for the story itself? I had it called after the first 15 miniutes, and I really don’t like being able to do that. It makes everything else just… boring. (Though the RoboCop shout out, in the form of the T-1’s, was cute.)

LXG, on the other hand, rocked my socks off. Everyone associated with the project might have had a lousy time making it, but I had a *lot* of fun watching it. Yes, they divereged from the book in several places, but the changes worked. Well, most of them. I would have liked to see Quatermain as the bitter, opium addicted sot we see in the beginning of the book. On the other hand, I *loved* Dorian Gray. (And if you’ve read the book, his fate shouldn’t be much of a suprise. He’s not a nice man. Not even a little bit.) Forget about the immortality thing, he wielded the power of the smirk and the snark better than anyone since Methos.

And Peta Wilson? Looks great as a brunette.

So I’m doing the lazy sunday napping thing yesterday, and I wake up to the sound of crunch. Never a good thing. So I sit bolt upright and look around, thinking maybe I’ve rolled over onto my glasses. No such luck. My cat has just chomped a nice sized piece out of the right lens. Crap.

Fast foward some ten minutes of Bill and myself checking the fuzzy monster’s mouth for lens shards, and cleaning up said pieces from the bed. Sheesh. This was not the way I wanted to get some excitement. But I will say, thank god for emergency backups. (I can see without my glasses, but it’s no longer a comfortable thing.) This afternoon I was at lenscrafters, ’cause while I can live with my backup frames, I much prefer my regular ones. (Well, they’re comfy.)

Been meaning to blog this link for the last few days - Marta has been posting some flat out amazing illustrations for OotP to her LJ. I’m wishing these had been in the actual *book*.

Juno501 has a user icon I think you will all get a kick out of.

I’m becoming more addicted to FeedDemon with every day that passes. I’m not opening ten tabs at a time in mozilla to check if different sites have been updated - I just run a check on my feeds. So much simpler and easier. And now that I’ve eliminated about 90% of the pre-loaded feeds, I’m not getting buried in stuff I don’t care about.

I am *so* buying a copy when it gets out of Beta.