So, apparently Microsoft China has decided to blatantly rip off Plurk in their newest MSN offering. Generally, I’m pretty cool with M$ despite the hate on all fronts, but … this really isn’t a case of HATERS GON’ HATE.

Hell, I’d have probably never even noticed (considering Plurk is by far a much more prevalent microblogging service in Asia, where we get Twitter) except that I’ve been using Plurk for almost a year, and my timeline exploded with the news.

Boo.

On a more festive note, game is horrifically addictive.

Finally got around to doing some updating — I had about a million and a half rp icons sitting around rotting on the hard drive, and decided it was about time to update shounen-terrorist.net. So that’s taken care of!

I’ve recently switched computers; gone is the trusty Vaio, replaced by an eMachine (DON’T JUDGE ME) that I promptly upgraded the crap out of. Hueg power supply, gratuitous amounts of memory, an extra hard drive, a much-upgraded graphics card … dude, I’ve wanted to work on desktops forever, and it’s every bit as much fun (and frustration) as I’d imagined.

Oh god, I am a massive nerd. D:

Likewise with the upgrades, my copy of Windows 7 came in. It’s a little different, but I’m really loving it … except for the part where I have to restart my network card every time I restart my computer before I can connect to the internet, sob. There’s always something, right? Right.

In other words: I cannot wait for Christmas to be over. Retail during the holidays is hell on earth, no lie.

So I finally got around with tweaking a lot of the stuff Dreamhost gives us that we never look at — good times, and hey, gmail-based email. I thought that was awesome since I’ve never been a big fan of squirrel mail, so I switched.

Having a separate branch for docs/calendar/sites/email is kind of awesome. Even though I’ll probably never use them more than once or twice (well, beyond email), it pleases me, so hey. Honestly, I’m kind of having a lot of fun getting back into the swing of things; I need to start thinking about redoing some other layouts across the collective, most notably karaoke-soul.net — and maybe Spindizzy (though I blame most of that on just finishing troublechecking my part for TFL.org tonight.)

Also added iBegin’s Lifestream plugin, which is that obnoxious thing in the sidebar there that integrates plurk/twitter/flickr/pretty much any social network site you can think of into yet another place no one cares about. Except me, because it’s a good way to Feel Important About Oneself. (Or, alas, a half-assed way to prove that yes, I do exist online more than once or twice a year. orz)

And that’s that, honestly.

Except for the fact that for some reason, I’ve been really craving some old-fashioned Dir en grey. Which has been assaulting my playlist for the last few hours. It’s kinda glorious, really — I feel about eight years younger AND INEXPLICABLY ANGRYYY, hee.

Finally,  finally, after two years of dicking around, I’ve finally set aside everything else and finished the long-overdue theme update for electricangels.net. And here it is!

Lots of firsts for me, but I won’t get into them here. I’m mostly pleased with it, and that’s what matters.

Recently returned from a trip back home to Montana as well (pictures available at flickr). It was good to see the family again, and doubly pleasing to finally have actual conversations with my step-father, something neither of us seem to have been any good at previously. A benefit of growing up, right?

I’m twenty-six in four days. Birthdays haven’t really felt like birthdays in a long time — or, at least, not as we remembered them to be when we were children. Still, there’s a tiny voice in my head complaining that I’m getting older, and what is there to show for it?

I can’t say I’m unhappy. Maybe, maybe, that’s what really matters.

Okay, so.  Obviously, I’ve neglected to update wordpress in a while; thus, it seems the new install did some sort of strange things to the layout.  Rather than trying to go through all that and fix, I’m just going to use it as motivation to make another layout.

…why did it eat my tags, I wonder?  Hmm.

I’ve been quiet lately, mostly because I’m moving to Arizona early next month, and haven’t had time to do much of anything besides pack and work as much as possible. D: This, however, is relatively unimportant, save for that whole leaving the state thing. (It’s a lot easier to plan and execute life-altering moves when one only has two boxes of earthly possessions. An entire apartment is another thing, and it seems like we can’t get rid of this stuff fast enough.)

The neat thing of the day is the fact that my SO has finally set aside his technical stuntedness in the interest of finding something that would allow him to connect to our (soon-to-be) old co-workers, and family and whatnot. The solution, of course, is a Wordpress site, since he very much dislikes myspace and the rampant faggotry that carries on there (and who doesn’t?).

So. flashpointsmile.com is his new home, and I’m rather excited for this. He’s already talking about learning how to design his own themes and whatnot, and god knows it never just stops there. (Why yes. I do dream about nerdy things like coding together, thanksforasking.)

I guess this also constitutes a new hostee! post, so hooray there.

The best thing, though: thanks to emulators and homebrew, and Saint Andrew (the patron saint of handheld gaming system modification), I can finally, finally play FFVII and Xenogears on a handheld, something I’ve wanted to do forever.

A super-exciting week, indeed.

This was, quite possibly, the most frustrating project I’ve decided on in a while.   Wordpress has a ridiculously complicated css file, that had me totally confused for most of the design, and I dunno … green’s not exactly my color.   Whatever.   Anyway.

As for big updates around the network, not a whole lot happening beyond the struggles with a few different content management systems.   I moved my fiction from this domain to its new domain, which is probably a little silly considering that I don’t really do a whole lot of it, and installed eFiction over there.   Check it out at karaoke-soul.net.   Feel free to leave some reviews or challenges; that’s most of why I ended up using the script in the first place.   Currently, I’m working on a few different fiction projects, all of which are interesting but rather mentally consuming, and at least two of them are really making me feel the sting of not being as great at my favorite hobby as I wished I was.   We’ll see how things turn out, though, oh yes.

Mister World should be getting something of an update, soon — I’m currently wrangling with a layout database script that refuses to cooperate, and it seems to have been discontinued, so I’m eyeing some alternatives.   Technology is so full of headaches for me, hee.

Anyway, I figured that since EA was up for a new layout anyway, that I’d get another chance to work on it. EA is actually a little bit easier to manage, since I don’t have any other scripts to mess with, and it’s really little more than a gateway to the rest of the network, so it wouldn’t get overwhelming. So. Yes, as of now, EA is wordpress-powered, and it should be quite the learning experience if anything.

And because I could, I added a plug-in for avatars. I like little pictures. :3