My current hotmail account is one that I've had since September 20, 2007. I wouldn't know this date had hotmail not saved my account creation date. In fact, I wouldn't even remember the year. I had a different hotmail account before this one... but it was one that I had made when I was around 8 or 9 and of course had an embarrassingly stupid name. Ugh, fine, I will say it. It was called cherry_angel91@hotmail.com. Yep. Angel. I went there. Cherry is the name of my dog and 91 is obviously my birth year. I'd just like to take a moment and say that the angel part was wholly my sister's idea since she thought it was cool and had "angel" in her e-mail address back then too. So... Ha.
By the way, I refuse to call it Windows Live Mail or even Windows Live Hotmail. It will always just be hotmail. Same goes for Windows Live Messenger. No. It is MSN. I often wonder why it is that I do not move on to gmail. A huge number of people have done so. I even heard someone say on campus that hotmail is the past and that everyone has gmail now. *Raises hand* Hello? I use hotmail! But why?
Why not? What exactly does GMail have to offer me that hotmail doesn't? More space? Don't need it. I'm not a person who embraces change and so I stick to my hotmail. Perhaps if I ever feel compelled to change my e-mail address in the future I will move to something but for now I will be sticking with hotmail for a very long time. To be completely honest, I don't really use e-mail much other than to e-mail myself information or some files so I can access them at a different computer and to get YouTube notifications. I'm on MSN 90% of the time that I am on the computer. But here's the kicker, I stay invisible and I do not talk to anyone on MSN. I only log into MSN because it gives me a notification alert when I get an e-mail.
The real reason for why I stick around my hotmail and the real reason for why I felt compelled to write about my hotmail today is simply record and data keeping. I just spent the last hour finishing organizing my inbox. I say "finishing" because several hours prior I spent about an hour and a half doing the same. There is a total of 7, 056 e-mails in my hotmail account right now. In a couple minutes 3, 146 of those e-mails are going to be permanently deleted. The remaining 3, 910 e-mails are there to stay. They have now been sorted into different folders and for the first time in over two years my inbox = 0. Before sorting and deleting there was around 6, 500 e-mails in just the inbox. I didn't get the exact number. The rest were old old e-mails that had already been organized into folders.
Big shocker, 2, 970 of those e-mails are from YouTube: e-mail notifications I get when someone comments on a video, comments on my channel, subscribes to my channel, replies to my comment on a video, when I get content matched on a video, etc. Admittedly, as big a number as 2, 970 is, it's not as much as some more famous YouTubers might get... but dang. It's still a damn lot.
But the other e-mails? There's SO much of my life in there: flight booking confirmations, car rental confirmations, e-mails from old friends, old school work that I sent back and forth from home to school, completely random links that I sent to myself to save for god knows what reason (it was pretty fun to copy and paste the links and discover what it was), receipt of past purchases, beta invitations, validation e-mails to forums or websites that I completely forgot I ever went to and frankly still have no idea why I was there in the past, records of old group projects that I worked on and our conversations, important e-mails from the university, equally important e-mails for RESP, old correspondence between me and my parents the first time I left home for university.... the list continues on and on. It was certainly quite a journey to sift through all that.
...and THAT is the reason I'm sticking with my hotmail. Memories. What can I say? I'm a mush. I love keeping records of the past and revisiting them at a later date. To have this incredible database of events in my life just stored there is quite amazing and wonderful.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Density
Isn't density amazing? I always have a roll of plastic wrap in my dorm room. It's not for covering food though. Plastic wrap is amazingly useful when you're packing and want to make sure shit stays where they're supposed to. For instance, a plastic wrapped book will not get its pages crumpled and damaged in the traveling process; a bottle of toner won't open and spill if tightly wrapped in plastic wrap. As I live ~3000 km from home this plastic wrap is a necessity for me when packing. Who the hell knows that my poor belongings go through when it's being shipped or when it's being thrown around in my suitcase as it travels with me by air. But that's not the point of this post. What was the point again? Right, density. A roll of plastic wrap is very dense... and consequently very hard. It's so amazing though how something as thin and flimsy as plastic wrap can become so hard when rolled up densely. It's like the whole spider's web vs iron thing. Amazing.
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
The Quest for the Perfect Amount of Gas!
Carbonated drinks. Why do we have carbonated drinks? I understand that it makes the soda taste erm... fresher? more refreshing? whatever. But honestly, I feel like they carbonate it a bit too much. After a drink from a bottle of soda I find my mouth to be in slight pain almost and as I swallow it the sensation is most unpleasant as it fizzes down my gullet. After said gulp, I feel a strange sensation in my belly up to my throat. At this point I have to do some weird inner gut maneuvers in order to free the gas bubble that has formed inside: which of course has to come out as a burp. I apologize if this post has been so far slightly disgusting and the fact that I am a female probably adds to that sense of "wtf?" while reading this. I know. But it's true!
So one solution to this is to hold the soda in your mouth a bit longer so that the gas has time to escape before ingestion. However, this approach, while not as unpleasant as assisting yourself into a burp, is arguably more unhealthy than just swallowing the darn thing. The acidity and the sweetness of the soda is sure to cause some damage to your teeth every time you hold soda in your mouth for a prolonged period of time. If you were daft enough to not realize this and are in habit of doing this then I suggest you stop. It'll help your dental bills in the future.
Option two is to leave the bottle opened for a while. But this is annoying as I do not wish to wait to drink the soda I just bought. Option three is the best option that I can find thus far... First, safely open the bottle to release pent up gas. Drink one or two sips (suck it up and burp). Close the bottle firmly then shake the bottle slightly until you feel the bottle start to build pressure. Carefully open the bottle to allow gas to escape. Safest way to to open only until you get a little hiss of gas escaping. If you see the soda start to bubble up towards the top, immediately close, wait for the soda to calm the fuck down then continue. Once all the gas has been released, taste test the soda to determine whether it is to your liking. If not, repeat above steps. If you bought a can, then well you're fucked and have to use option two.
While option three works to reduce the carbonation I find that it somehow diminishes the taste a bit. The soda I like best is when I simply leave it out for a couple minutes to allow the gas to escape naturally. Unfortunately, I'm not sure exactly how long I should leave it out and in any case, as I've stated before, I do not wish to or have the time to wait for my drink to slightly flatten. I understand the extreme carbonation of 2 L bottles as they are kept longer and therefore need the carbonation to last longer.. but the 591 mL bottles? Why do you people insist on liking such extreme carbonation? It only gives you gas! I just wish I could find a delicious soda which is carbonated to perfection to preserve both taste, freshness, and pleasant drinking experience. Is that so much to ask?
Fun fact: In Canada (where I live), soda is more often referred to as pop. Eg. "Pop machine", "you shouldn't drink so much pop", "can you get me a pop?" I know, to Americans it must sound weird. I used to call it pop all the time and in fact thought that calling it soda was strange sounding. But as I grew up I grew out of drinking pop and in consequence I had no frequent occasions to refer to the carbonated drink. I only recently started drinking soda again when I visited America several times (I know, what a coincidence!) and drank a lot of rum and coke during my visits. From then on I started using the word soda more but the word pop still holds its place in my vocabulary. I tend to use soda for writing or more formal speech while using pop as a colloquial slang... which is actually what the word is. Canadians do not use the word pop in formal writing.
So one solution to this is to hold the soda in your mouth a bit longer so that the gas has time to escape before ingestion. However, this approach, while not as unpleasant as assisting yourself into a burp, is arguably more unhealthy than just swallowing the darn thing. The acidity and the sweetness of the soda is sure to cause some damage to your teeth every time you hold soda in your mouth for a prolonged period of time. If you were daft enough to not realize this and are in habit of doing this then I suggest you stop. It'll help your dental bills in the future.
Option two is to leave the bottle opened for a while. But this is annoying as I do not wish to wait to drink the soda I just bought. Option three is the best option that I can find thus far... First, safely open the bottle to release pent up gas. Drink one or two sips (suck it up and burp). Close the bottle firmly then shake the bottle slightly until you feel the bottle start to build pressure. Carefully open the bottle to allow gas to escape. Safest way to to open only until you get a little hiss of gas escaping. If you see the soda start to bubble up towards the top, immediately close, wait for the soda to calm the fuck down then continue. Once all the gas has been released, taste test the soda to determine whether it is to your liking. If not, repeat above steps. If you bought a can, then well you're fucked and have to use option two.
While option three works to reduce the carbonation I find that it somehow diminishes the taste a bit. The soda I like best is when I simply leave it out for a couple minutes to allow the gas to escape naturally. Unfortunately, I'm not sure exactly how long I should leave it out and in any case, as I've stated before, I do not wish to or have the time to wait for my drink to slightly flatten. I understand the extreme carbonation of 2 L bottles as they are kept longer and therefore need the carbonation to last longer.. but the 591 mL bottles? Why do you people insist on liking such extreme carbonation? It only gives you gas! I just wish I could find a delicious soda which is carbonated to perfection to preserve both taste, freshness, and pleasant drinking experience. Is that so much to ask?
Fun fact: In Canada (where I live), soda is more often referred to as pop. Eg. "Pop machine", "you shouldn't drink so much pop", "can you get me a pop?" I know, to Americans it must sound weird. I used to call it pop all the time and in fact thought that calling it soda was strange sounding. But as I grew up I grew out of drinking pop and in consequence I had no frequent occasions to refer to the carbonated drink. I only recently started drinking soda again when I visited America several times (I know, what a coincidence!) and drank a lot of rum and coke during my visits. From then on I started using the word soda more but the word pop still holds its place in my vocabulary. I tend to use soda for writing or more formal speech while using pop as a colloquial slang... which is actually what the word is. Canadians do not use the word pop in formal writing.
Sunday, 13 November 2011
I love it when your misfortune is my happiness.
Hello. Today my blog title sounds like a completely stereotypical emo kid's status message on facebook. But I must admit that it holds a certain ring of truth for me. You see, half of me is an utterly selfish person and has absolutely no regards for you or your suffering. If the end result entails me gaining and you losing, why, I could not be happier. I've recently had an experience in which that is exactly what happened but I probably won't ever tell anyone the details for sake of saving face. I'll give you a hint; it has something to do with this blog post. But probably not in the way you are thinking. You may have remarked upon the fact that I only attributed this characteristic to half of myself. So one must now ask the question of what the characteristic of the other half is. Let me make an analogy to make things clear. You see there's this family of three: a mom, dad, and a daughter. The mother and father are not getting along at all. So what do couples do when they are not getting along with each other? Have sex. With other people. At least the dad was in this situation. With the daughter. The mother knew but only felt horrible inside. She never did anything. The other half of me is that mother. That half just kind of sits there with all the worries but never does anything. In case you're wondering the analogy is referring to a movie called "The Quiet".
Is this blog post confusing? I hope it was.
Is this blog post confusing? I hope it was.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Cracking Your Brain
You know when you have a weird tense feeling in your shoulders/neck... and it's not exactly pain but it's uncomfortable? Then when you crack your neck it feels so much better? Well that's kind of what I'm feeling with my brain. Yeah. I wish I could crack my brain. It feels uncomfortable and I wish there was a way to relieve the discomfort like cracking your neck does.
I researched a bit into cracking your neck a while ago. It's one of my many habits; granted, I don't do it because of real habit but rather because it relieves the discomfort in my neck. Apparently cracking your neck is bad to do because the more you crack it, the more it increases the discomfort in the long run. It creates a cycle in which you crack to relieve but cause more discomfort so you have to crack again, and again, and again. Unfortunately, I happen to be one of those people in that vicious cycle. After reading that I tried to stop but honestly the discomfort gets too much to resist having that relief sometimes. The reason for the cycle has something to do with the big muscles getting relaxed and causing other muscles to have to shoulder the burden or what not. I kind of forget the specifics of it but that's the general idea.
Cracking your back however doesn't seem to have any proven negative effects. Of course if it is done wrong and with too much force it could injure you. If you couldn't guess, I crack my back a lot too. Another set of cracking I do is my knuckles and fingers. This one's quite the popular one as a lot of people believe it is bad to crack your knuckles. The belief is that it will hasten the onset of arthritis. Research so far hasn't proven this theory yet. One doctor even has a habit of only cracking the knuckles on one hand. Neither hand has shown any sign of having more or less negative effects than the other. It has been shown, however, that cracking your knuckles can decrease the strength of your grip. When I read that I was like zomg because I've noticed for couple years now how much of a pussy grip I have (cracking my fingers go back a long ways too).
One that I didn't research or come across is cracking your wrists. I'm not talking swiveling your wrists and having it make little clickity clack sounds. I mean pushing my hand down so it makes about an 80 degree angle with my arm. I don't get the wrist cracks as often as the other ones but I do get them more often than I would like.
I have way too many cracking shit in my body. Jeez.
I researched a bit into cracking your neck a while ago. It's one of my many habits; granted, I don't do it because of real habit but rather because it relieves the discomfort in my neck. Apparently cracking your neck is bad to do because the more you crack it, the more it increases the discomfort in the long run. It creates a cycle in which you crack to relieve but cause more discomfort so you have to crack again, and again, and again. Unfortunately, I happen to be one of those people in that vicious cycle. After reading that I tried to stop but honestly the discomfort gets too much to resist having that relief sometimes. The reason for the cycle has something to do with the big muscles getting relaxed and causing other muscles to have to shoulder the burden or what not. I kind of forget the specifics of it but that's the general idea.
Cracking your back however doesn't seem to have any proven negative effects. Of course if it is done wrong and with too much force it could injure you. If you couldn't guess, I crack my back a lot too. Another set of cracking I do is my knuckles and fingers. This one's quite the popular one as a lot of people believe it is bad to crack your knuckles. The belief is that it will hasten the onset of arthritis. Research so far hasn't proven this theory yet. One doctor even has a habit of only cracking the knuckles on one hand. Neither hand has shown any sign of having more or less negative effects than the other. It has been shown, however, that cracking your knuckles can decrease the strength of your grip. When I read that I was like zomg because I've noticed for couple years now how much of a pussy grip I have (cracking my fingers go back a long ways too).
One that I didn't research or come across is cracking your wrists. I'm not talking swiveling your wrists and having it make little clickity clack sounds. I mean pushing my hand down so it makes about an 80 degree angle with my arm. I don't get the wrist cracks as often as the other ones but I do get them more often than I would like.
I have way too many cracking shit in my body. Jeez.
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Half Way to Insanity
I feel like I'm half-way to insanity. Not because half of me is insane or going insane but because I am insane. I am also sane. It's a tug-of-war with myself. Won't anyone join me?
Monday, 3 October 2011
The Stage Hand
It is unfortunate that I am constantly banging my head up against a natural human characteristic. The tendency of people to not appreciate things that they don't necessarily see. Perfect example are stage hands and staff at plays. There is a LOT of work that goes into creating the set, manipulating the set, timing said manipulations, timing lighting, timing music, assisting the actors/actresses off stage with hair/makeup and costume.. etc etc. Without them the play wouldn't be what it is but we don't normally pause to think of them. It's because we don't actually see them doing the actions as well as because we take things for granted. All the results of a stage hand's job are things that we expect as the norm and therefore think nothing of. However, if they're not there or done badly we will remark upon it.I feel like an abused stage hand these days. A lot of it has to do with things that occurred on the Toegoff forums which I manage.
First was the whole drama incident where I felt rather insulted that people could complain about my efforts to make the community a safe, friendly place. If you honestly don't know then someone got banned for being continually disrespectful and making personal attacks on people on the forums. It was a bit of an express ban since he made it clear to me that warnings have no effect on him whatsoever. Anyways, the issue is that people started saying the admins banned whoever the heck we wanted if we didn't like them; saying that we're too strict with the rules and that we're restricting their freedom.
This really insulted me because when setting up the forums and the rules and guidelines for them I seriously took into consideration the fact that the rules may interfere with the forum experience. I made the rules in a way in which we could still enforce a friendly environment but not have people feel like we're breathing down their necks. Even in enforcing these rules we were so lenient that warnings were hardly ever given. That doesn't mean that there was no moderating going on though. Our moderating crew and I spend a lot of time just going through the forums. But no one sees that. Even if someone gets a warning, no one but the recipient sees that either. No one witnessed the amount of thought I put into making the rules or all the messages I sent to members regarding little ways in which they were toeing over the rules. In fact, there have been many many cases where if I was strict I should have given them a warning, instead I just wrote them a message about it. But no one really knows the number of these that go out except me.
Second is something a bit more specific as well as largely general. The Toegoff forums recently made the change from invisionfree to zetaboards. To do this I had to get a new layout since invision codes do not work on zeta. After everything was done, one guy says that he would like a different theme to be available for use since the one on there right now makes his eyes bleed. It's not really the insult to the layout that bothered me. Tons of other people have told me they like it so I don't really care that much about one dick's opinion on it. But rather how completely dickish that request was. First of all the layout took a lot of work from me. In their minds all I did was find a layout and paste the codes in. That's not what happened at all. I'll be completely anal and go through every single thing that went into making that layout what it is at this moment.
Of course the very first step is to find a layout. I am not a coder and have no knowledge of CSS at all; therefore, making my own layout is out of the question. This first step is actually one of the hardest. It's pretty dang hard to find a layout that looks good, as well as functions well, as well as matching your individual need. I spent literally over 2 hours picking a layout. When picking a layout I need to put aside my own personal tastes and consider the theme's appropriateness for the forum and its audience. I went through so many layout threads it's crazy. And then I found one that had a really cool feature of a menu at the top which has the options slide slightly when you mouse over it which I thought was a cool effect. I really liked this menu because it let you put a LOT of links at the top (up to 12) and I really wanted to have something like that. Unfortunately, while the actual layout was very well done and pretty to my eyes, it was... too pretty. It was kind of girl-ish and that's definitely not what fits the Toegoff forums. So I found another layout and with my complete zero knowledge of CSS put in that menu I liked at the top of this new layout. That process sounds so easy in a nice little sentence but trust me it was a lot more. I had to figure out where the coding (html) went in the headers. Then I had to go into CSS and find its corresponding coding (which is no easy feat when you have no knowledge of CSS at all) and put that in the new layout CSS. Unfortunately again, I wasn't pleased with the results. This entire project got scrapped.
After some more searching I finally found one that was clean, simple, yet still "styled". The process of finding this layout and then finding where the coding for it was is a story in itself. One thing that I didn't like about it though was that it had a designated box for the advertisements on the board. As someone who uses adblock plus and doesn't see the advertisement, the white blankness in the middle of the board just felt absurd to me. So I asked Toegoff to take a look at the CSS coding for me to see if he could take out the box. He succeeded but it changed the board's white cells to black. He then asked bobtherocket (another moderator) to take a look at the CSS (since bob is a website designer) and even he couldn't figure out a way to get rid of the box and maintain the same colors at the same time. He probably could have done it but we decided it would be too annoying and wasn't really worth it. So that's two other people's time poured into this layout that no one will ever know (well now you do since you read this but let's be honest here, who's still reading this crap?). And of course changing button graphics on those forums are fucking tedious as hell. The thing is I had to do this twice because I originally did all the fiddling around on a different private forum to make sure everything was ready. So I copied and pasted a ton of links from the layout code source to the private forum, then I had to later copy and paste again from the private forum to the actual forum. You'll probably think "what's the big deal? It's just copy and pasting." Yes, but it's a LOT of copy and pasting. My fingers were literally sore after all the copy and pasting. It's mindless, tedious work.
So now I got my layout. Now I had to configure the board to match it. First of the matter was that the layout came with a banner which just said the theme's name on it. Obviously I wasn't about to use that. So I had to go into the CSS, find the URL of the background of the banner and multiply it about 12 times in photoshop just to have a backdrop for the new banner. Then I got to actually working on the banner. Looking at my list of fonts I had nothing very good. So I had to go online and browse a ton of shit fonts to find a couple that may or may not work. Installed all of them, then finally back to photoshop. Try out a dozen of these new fonts and found one that would serve well. Then I went through a lot of different effects such as metallic gradient in the font and a boarder around the word that has an inner and outer glow. Fiddled around with it for a while. Then finally settled on font, metallic gradient, bevel, settings to make it look metallic. Finally done. Up it goes to photobucket.
Next are the pips. The user rank indicators. I had no idea what to use for pips but looking around the new layout I found that the topic markers were little orb things that could serve as pips. So I open it up in photoshop but unfortunately there was no way to separate it from its background cleanly so I decided to make my own from scratch. Black dot, bigger white dot behind it with bevel, smaller white dot on top of it which is then blurred, put an even smaller white dot on top of the smaller white dot and blur this too. And there you go, you have an orb with a beveled white border. Save for web as gif, upload it on photobucket, put its link in the coding and now I have pips. But unfortunately invision's pip system was a bit messed up so in turn my old pips were messed up. I had to go in and edit every single tier and change it to use forum's default pip and set how many of the pips. Another tedious task. Then comes the issue of admins and mods who have 7 pips currently. Admins red, mods blue. Photoshop time again. Except this time with those colours respectively and instead of one orb I have to stretch it to 7 in the actual one pip. This goes up onto zeta as a badge and then I have to go into group settings for admins and mods and set each badge accordingly. There was the additional thing of making a hearts badge for pwnies but I won't bitch about that because it's a personal joke I played on him a long time ago.
Then came the menu links. This layout displayed them nice and large at the top (which is part of the reason the other menu code that I liked wasn't used). I wanted to add some personal links on that bar. So off I go into google and zetaboard forums to find coding for that. I find one and successfully put in a link to Toegoff's YouTube channel. Later on I decide that I want to add his Livestream link too. I add it and it completely messed things up. Adding the new link made the bar stretch too long and therefore it went to a second line. Needless to say, looked horrible. So then I had to go and find a code that lets me completely take control of that menu so I could take some stuff out. Had to go and get the links for the standard links like Search and Members: put those in minus the FAQ and Portal buttons which were useless then put the new ones in and finally everything looks good.
Even in that I left out some annoying shit I had to go through. I left them out because it was just a matter of stupid circumstance or mistakes on my part. I also left out all the new settings that I had to set after the conversion. But yeah, no one knows all that. No one even thinks about it. To them it's just "oh she just copied and pasted some shit into a box."
(Oh and the old doHTML tag was taken out which was how we were embedding videos. So I had to google how to do that in zetaboards. Then I had to go into the admin CP and enable that function. Then I had to write up a tutorial on how to do it for the forum ((and trust me, some people need tutorials that assume they're really stupid)). Not that big a deal but again, something that's taken for granted. Like honestly, I have things I'd rather do than write up a tutorial on how to embed youtube videos but I know that I should to let everyone know of the change and so that new users can be pointed towards the thread instead of having someone explain it to them every time. It's part of my responsibilities as a forum admin and I do it.)
And now finally back to the one guy and his one comment. See why his comment is dickish? Just because the layout isn't appealing to you, you want me to go through all that again? And you have the audacity to request this with an insult attached? Yes, like I'm going to waste my time pleasing your ocular senses. In any case, it wouldn't exactly work out right as the admin and moderator badges are just that... badges. Not pips. Therefore, they will not change with the theme change and will look very strange on a different layout. This comment had one good thing I guess though; it made me realize just how invisible my work on that forum is.
Another case on the forums where I felt a bit like a stage hand was a year ago for the community league of legends tourney. Sure, everyone said thank you to me for setting it up, etc etc. But no one but me knows exactly what a grueling task that damn thing was. Try organizing 36 mostly random people from the internet and getting them to be on at a specific time on a specific date. Not easy. I basically had to keep track of every single person and what times they said they can or can't be on. Once someone suggested a time I would have to make sure the other 3 all confirmed agreement to it. Not only that but things were made more confusing by the fact that people's forum names weren't their LoL names. By the end I had literally memorized who was who with a different name and everyone's partners for each round. And the biggest pain in the ass of all were the people who just didn't show up to set times or would come on the forum once in a blue moon to say "no, I can't that day." Then not check back for another forever. In total, I sent 53 individualized e-mails for the setting up of this tourney. Mind, those are just e-mails, not posts I made on topics or conversations I had on LoL PvP.net chat or on skype. I say individualized because... they were. What does that mean? It means it did NOT involve much copy and pasting but actual personal input from me to match that specific person's interests. I sent a variety of messages: asking them to please come on the forums and post their schedule, telling them that a date and time has been suggested and for them to confirm it, warnings for lack of participation, disqualification by lack of participation alerts, telling people on the stand-by list that they got in and had to respond soon or lose the spot and here was the thread and this was their partner... etc. But most of them were me telling people of the new suggested time and asking them to come and confirm it. But really no one knew how much time went into checking all this information for that person and then e-mailing them about it. If someone received one from me they'd probably not think much of it other than about the pertinent information at hand. They wouldn't think, "wow how many of these does she send out?" Yes, I got a pat on the back for this tourney but at the same time I don't think anyone really understands how much shit went into it. You have no idea how mind boggling it is to have 8 people discussing their available times in one thread while keeping in mind which 4 are together as well as the connection between forum name and LoL name and keeping track of who has or hasn't confirmed to what time. Then realize that there's 4 of these going on at the same time. As the organizer I literally spent forever organizing all those in my mind as well as on Notepad and making sure everyone has confirmed availability on the set date. It's not really something you can understand unless you try it. Especially with a group of people who don't really have a motivation to keep responding to you.
And that is the conclusion of my bitching about people not realizing how much work I do. I probably sound like such a bitch in this post but honestly I don't give two shits. This is my blog on which I vent shit. If I can't be a bitch on my own blog then that's when I know it's time to shoot myself. And see, now that all this has been recorded on this blog, that much more of these thoughts and feelings has left me. Isn't that just so wonderful about blogs?
First was the whole drama incident where I felt rather insulted that people could complain about my efforts to make the community a safe, friendly place. If you honestly don't know then someone got banned for being continually disrespectful and making personal attacks on people on the forums. It was a bit of an express ban since he made it clear to me that warnings have no effect on him whatsoever. Anyways, the issue is that people started saying the admins banned whoever the heck we wanted if we didn't like them; saying that we're too strict with the rules and that we're restricting their freedom.
This really insulted me because when setting up the forums and the rules and guidelines for them I seriously took into consideration the fact that the rules may interfere with the forum experience. I made the rules in a way in which we could still enforce a friendly environment but not have people feel like we're breathing down their necks. Even in enforcing these rules we were so lenient that warnings were hardly ever given. That doesn't mean that there was no moderating going on though. Our moderating crew and I spend a lot of time just going through the forums. But no one sees that. Even if someone gets a warning, no one but the recipient sees that either. No one witnessed the amount of thought I put into making the rules or all the messages I sent to members regarding little ways in which they were toeing over the rules. In fact, there have been many many cases where if I was strict I should have given them a warning, instead I just wrote them a message about it. But no one really knows the number of these that go out except me.
Second is something a bit more specific as well as largely general. The Toegoff forums recently made the change from invisionfree to zetaboards. To do this I had to get a new layout since invision codes do not work on zeta. After everything was done, one guy says that he would like a different theme to be available for use since the one on there right now makes his eyes bleed. It's not really the insult to the layout that bothered me. Tons of other people have told me they like it so I don't really care that much about one dick's opinion on it. But rather how completely dickish that request was. First of all the layout took a lot of work from me. In their minds all I did was find a layout and paste the codes in. That's not what happened at all. I'll be completely anal and go through every single thing that went into making that layout what it is at this moment.
Of course the very first step is to find a layout. I am not a coder and have no knowledge of CSS at all; therefore, making my own layout is out of the question. This first step is actually one of the hardest. It's pretty dang hard to find a layout that looks good, as well as functions well, as well as matching your individual need. I spent literally over 2 hours picking a layout. When picking a layout I need to put aside my own personal tastes and consider the theme's appropriateness for the forum and its audience. I went through so many layout threads it's crazy. And then I found one that had a really cool feature of a menu at the top which has the options slide slightly when you mouse over it which I thought was a cool effect. I really liked this menu because it let you put a LOT of links at the top (up to 12) and I really wanted to have something like that. Unfortunately, while the actual layout was very well done and pretty to my eyes, it was... too pretty. It was kind of girl-ish and that's definitely not what fits the Toegoff forums. So I found another layout and with my complete zero knowledge of CSS put in that menu I liked at the top of this new layout. That process sounds so easy in a nice little sentence but trust me it was a lot more. I had to figure out where the coding (html) went in the headers. Then I had to go into CSS and find its corresponding coding (which is no easy feat when you have no knowledge of CSS at all) and put that in the new layout CSS. Unfortunately again, I wasn't pleased with the results. This entire project got scrapped.
After some more searching I finally found one that was clean, simple, yet still "styled". The process of finding this layout and then finding where the coding for it was is a story in itself. One thing that I didn't like about it though was that it had a designated box for the advertisements on the board. As someone who uses adblock plus and doesn't see the advertisement, the white blankness in the middle of the board just felt absurd to me. So I asked Toegoff to take a look at the CSS coding for me to see if he could take out the box. He succeeded but it changed the board's white cells to black. He then asked bobtherocket (another moderator) to take a look at the CSS (since bob is a website designer) and even he couldn't figure out a way to get rid of the box and maintain the same colors at the same time. He probably could have done it but we decided it would be too annoying and wasn't really worth it. So that's two other people's time poured into this layout that no one will ever know (well now you do since you read this but let's be honest here, who's still reading this crap?). And of course changing button graphics on those forums are fucking tedious as hell. The thing is I had to do this twice because I originally did all the fiddling around on a different private forum to make sure everything was ready. So I copied and pasted a ton of links from the layout code source to the private forum, then I had to later copy and paste again from the private forum to the actual forum. You'll probably think "what's the big deal? It's just copy and pasting." Yes, but it's a LOT of copy and pasting. My fingers were literally sore after all the copy and pasting. It's mindless, tedious work.
So now I got my layout. Now I had to configure the board to match it. First of the matter was that the layout came with a banner which just said the theme's name on it. Obviously I wasn't about to use that. So I had to go into the CSS, find the URL of the background of the banner and multiply it about 12 times in photoshop just to have a backdrop for the new banner. Then I got to actually working on the banner. Looking at my list of fonts I had nothing very good. So I had to go online and browse a ton of shit fonts to find a couple that may or may not work. Installed all of them, then finally back to photoshop. Try out a dozen of these new fonts and found one that would serve well. Then I went through a lot of different effects such as metallic gradient in the font and a boarder around the word that has an inner and outer glow. Fiddled around with it for a while. Then finally settled on font, metallic gradient, bevel, settings to make it look metallic. Finally done. Up it goes to photobucket.
Next are the pips. The user rank indicators. I had no idea what to use for pips but looking around the new layout I found that the topic markers were little orb things that could serve as pips. So I open it up in photoshop but unfortunately there was no way to separate it from its background cleanly so I decided to make my own from scratch. Black dot, bigger white dot behind it with bevel, smaller white dot on top of it which is then blurred, put an even smaller white dot on top of the smaller white dot and blur this too. And there you go, you have an orb with a beveled white border. Save for web as gif, upload it on photobucket, put its link in the coding and now I have pips. But unfortunately invision's pip system was a bit messed up so in turn my old pips were messed up. I had to go in and edit every single tier and change it to use forum's default pip and set how many of the pips. Another tedious task. Then comes the issue of admins and mods who have 7 pips currently. Admins red, mods blue. Photoshop time again. Except this time with those colours respectively and instead of one orb I have to stretch it to 7 in the actual one pip. This goes up onto zeta as a badge and then I have to go into group settings for admins and mods and set each badge accordingly. There was the additional thing of making a hearts badge for pwnies but I won't bitch about that because it's a personal joke I played on him a long time ago.
Then came the menu links. This layout displayed them nice and large at the top (which is part of the reason the other menu code that I liked wasn't used). I wanted to add some personal links on that bar. So off I go into google and zetaboard forums to find coding for that. I find one and successfully put in a link to Toegoff's YouTube channel. Later on I decide that I want to add his Livestream link too. I add it and it completely messed things up. Adding the new link made the bar stretch too long and therefore it went to a second line. Needless to say, looked horrible. So then I had to go and find a code that lets me completely take control of that menu so I could take some stuff out. Had to go and get the links for the standard links like Search and Members: put those in minus the FAQ and Portal buttons which were useless then put the new ones in and finally everything looks good.
Even in that I left out some annoying shit I had to go through. I left them out because it was just a matter of stupid circumstance or mistakes on my part. I also left out all the new settings that I had to set after the conversion. But yeah, no one knows all that. No one even thinks about it. To them it's just "oh she just copied and pasted some shit into a box."
(Oh and the old doHTML tag was taken out which was how we were embedding videos. So I had to google how to do that in zetaboards. Then I had to go into the admin CP and enable that function. Then I had to write up a tutorial on how to do it for the forum ((and trust me, some people need tutorials that assume they're really stupid)). Not that big a deal but again, something that's taken for granted. Like honestly, I have things I'd rather do than write up a tutorial on how to embed youtube videos but I know that I should to let everyone know of the change and so that new users can be pointed towards the thread instead of having someone explain it to them every time. It's part of my responsibilities as a forum admin and I do it.)
And now finally back to the one guy and his one comment. See why his comment is dickish? Just because the layout isn't appealing to you, you want me to go through all that again? And you have the audacity to request this with an insult attached? Yes, like I'm going to waste my time pleasing your ocular senses. In any case, it wouldn't exactly work out right as the admin and moderator badges are just that... badges. Not pips. Therefore, they will not change with the theme change and will look very strange on a different layout. This comment had one good thing I guess though; it made me realize just how invisible my work on that forum is.
Another case on the forums where I felt a bit like a stage hand was a year ago for the community league of legends tourney. Sure, everyone said thank you to me for setting it up, etc etc. But no one but me knows exactly what a grueling task that damn thing was. Try organizing 36 mostly random people from the internet and getting them to be on at a specific time on a specific date. Not easy. I basically had to keep track of every single person and what times they said they can or can't be on. Once someone suggested a time I would have to make sure the other 3 all confirmed agreement to it. Not only that but things were made more confusing by the fact that people's forum names weren't their LoL names. By the end I had literally memorized who was who with a different name and everyone's partners for each round. And the biggest pain in the ass of all were the people who just didn't show up to set times or would come on the forum once in a blue moon to say "no, I can't that day." Then not check back for another forever. In total, I sent 53 individualized e-mails for the setting up of this tourney. Mind, those are just e-mails, not posts I made on topics or conversations I had on LoL PvP.net chat or on skype. I say individualized because... they were. What does that mean? It means it did NOT involve much copy and pasting but actual personal input from me to match that specific person's interests. I sent a variety of messages: asking them to please come on the forums and post their schedule, telling them that a date and time has been suggested and for them to confirm it, warnings for lack of participation, disqualification by lack of participation alerts, telling people on the stand-by list that they got in and had to respond soon or lose the spot and here was the thread and this was their partner... etc. But most of them were me telling people of the new suggested time and asking them to come and confirm it. But really no one knew how much time went into checking all this information for that person and then e-mailing them about it. If someone received one from me they'd probably not think much of it other than about the pertinent information at hand. They wouldn't think, "wow how many of these does she send out?" Yes, I got a pat on the back for this tourney but at the same time I don't think anyone really understands how much shit went into it. You have no idea how mind boggling it is to have 8 people discussing their available times in one thread while keeping in mind which 4 are together as well as the connection between forum name and LoL name and keeping track of who has or hasn't confirmed to what time. Then realize that there's 4 of these going on at the same time. As the organizer I literally spent forever organizing all those in my mind as well as on Notepad and making sure everyone has confirmed availability on the set date. It's not really something you can understand unless you try it. Especially with a group of people who don't really have a motivation to keep responding to you.
And that is the conclusion of my bitching about people not realizing how much work I do. I probably sound like such a bitch in this post but honestly I don't give two shits. This is my blog on which I vent shit. If I can't be a bitch on my own blog then that's when I know it's time to shoot myself. And see, now that all this has been recorded on this blog, that much more of these thoughts and feelings has left me. Isn't that just so wonderful about blogs?
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