Kinda moody, adding content...

Today, I woke at six in the morning and immediately set about digging into the visuals of two programming different projects. For one of them I'm doing a natural feel, roses, pink cloth, and dark woods, and I had the frustration of acheiving the engraved effect I wanted with the title page, but then not being able to reproduce that effect later. I did discover the layer, transform, offset effect along with the "heal" effect in the Gimp, allowing me to make a reasonable tiling effect so the sidebar can stretch as long as it wants, but the cuts on the top and bottom were flawed and you can see it. I'm feeling perfectionist.

I also discovered Django's evolution module. It was very useful in doing data migrations when I updated my database, but migrations are still sucky in Django compared to Rails. Which is a pity because I like Django a lot more; it's too bad there's too much to know, and the mindset of a Django developer isn't quite blossoming in my head quite yet. I'm too old-school, WebObjects. All this hand-holding ORM stuff is new to me.

Been kinda down otherwise. No energy. Played a round or two of Sorry! with Kouryou-chan. I cooked a cassolet this evening with fresh beans that everyone else thought weren't softened enough, even though they soaked for eight hours. Took care of my laundry. That kind of day.

Thank you, Jonathan Carroll

So this writer guy, Jonathan Carroll, he comes into my bathtub while I'm holding Outside the Dog Museum and he grabs me by the throat and he says to me, "There are these things called adjectives and metaphors and there's this whole tradition of telling an entire story in a paragraph to leave the reader wanting more stories and not just more plot, and now you're going to go out there and you're going to write a story where your characters are conscious beings who give a damn about where they are and where they're going and every paragraph is going to be about something and not just some vaguely quirky setup with science-fiction furniture just to get two bodies into a position you can mechanically describe as sex, okay?"

Yes, sir. Right away, sir.