Girl Meets Geekdom

Yes, I?’ve been absent for a month. I took winter break as an opportunity to pursue some random projects which I will post as I finish up. For my first post-hiatus post, I was going to write something totally relevant about the game industry or computer graphics or something, but I figured I’d scrap all that and, in honor of my new “off-topic” section, write about something completely and utterly random: body wash and loofahs.

After a conversation with my roommate’s semi-boyfriend today, it has been brought to my attention that guys are more “soap” people and tend not to go for the body wash-loofah combination. For those enlightened male individuals out there who have figured out the inferiority of bar soap, I applaud you. As for the rest of you, read on.

Forget the gentle moisturizing components of bodywash that attract the female audiences. Body wash is just more practical than bar soap. It comes conveniently bottled so its contents don’t contact the shower water, and you can bring it with you to the gym, or pour it into a smaller container for travel purposes. But most importantly it saves time. I mean, think about what you have to do to clean yourself with bar soap. First you apply the soap, which is slipping around in your hand, over the part of your body that you are cleaning. Then you have to put the soap down to work up the lather, and you have to pick up the soap again to clean another part of your body. Very often, the soap will be slippery and fall to the bottom of the shower and you have to pick it up. Of course every time you do this, the soap is getting smaller from sitting in the water. It’s completely wasteful! You can never use ALL of a bar soap. With body wash, you pour just a little into a loofah and very shortly after the loofah contacts your skin, you get a lather. Plus the lather does not go away until you are ready to rinse you loofah. Think of the efficiency. Bar soap is like washing dishes with detergent and no sponge! Why would you still use bar soap? It’s ridiculously inefficient!

As for the concern that it’s girly, pretty much every brand of bar soap has a bodywash equivalent. And sure, while you can buy very fancy scented body wash, the normal body wash that sit next to the bar soap on store shelves smell like soap. And if you still think that something as efficient as bodywash is girly, maybe it just goes to prove that women are smarter.

Anyway, I promise, next post will be on video games or something.

Today I got all excited about Gravatars and downloaded a fancy plugin from the WP Plugins DB and proceeded to activate my plugin hoping to soon see pretty little pictures next to the comments in my posts. To my dismay, this did not happen. It was not some magical plug in as I had hoped. I had to go to the downloader’s site to insert a massive if statement in the foreach loop of my comment block.

So, I figured, fine, I’m not afraid of code. So I inserted it, edited my stylesheet and even created a little icon for those “gravatarless” individuals. To my dismay, this resulted in everyone being “gravatarless.” Needless to say, I was frustrated. In order to install this fancy plugin, I had to drop in a gravatar folder containing default images as well as a rather large .php file. I opened it up to find that there was actually a lot of code in there and automatically assumed that it’s probably not something I could dissect in a few hours. So I proceeded to the Gravatar website to figure out if they had any solutions.

What I found there was shocking. So this thing that apparently required a plug in consisting of a folder and a .php file with a LOT of functions is really something that can be done in as many lines of code as I had to add to my comments.php file. Even LESS if I wanted the gravatars to always link back to the gravatar website. No plugins required.

So for those of you who use WordPress and are too lazy to install the plugin here’s the simplest form of the code:


<img src=" http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=
  <?php echo md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default); ?>” alt=”" />


That code displays just the image. Of course I use a much more complicated code to generate the links and default image:


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) :
$default=””;
if (” != get_comment_author_url()) {
   echo “<a href=’$comment->comment_author_url’
title=’Visit $comment->comment_author’>”;
} else {
   echo “<a href=’http://www.gravatar.com’
title=’Create your own gravatar at gravatar.com!’>”;
}
echo “<img src=’”;
if (” == $comment->comment_type) {
  echo “http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=”
  .md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default);
} elseif ( (’trackback’ == $comment->comment_type) ||
  (’pingback’ == $comment->comment_type) ) {
  echo gravatar($comment->comment_author_url);
}
echo “‘ alt=” class=’gravatar’ width=’80′ height=’80′ /></a>”; ?>


Just enter in the full path of your default image where it says $default = “” and replace the


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) ?>


Anyway…I figured if you can accomplish it in the same amount of code in your .php file, why the hell do you need a plugin with a lot of functions to do it for you?

I’ve been reading the blogs of various screenwriters lately, primarily John August, and David Anaxagoras and it’s becoming really clear why they’re just so plain interesting to read: they have a voice. Maybe it’s just them, but there’s something about witty geekish humor that just draws me in. I swear I can hear their voices when I read. (Not that I really hear their voices or even that I have the faintest idea what they sound like, but their character comes through) No matter what they write, it turns out funny and generally fun to read…even if it doesn’t sound like a fun topic at all. Don’t believe me? Try reading John August’s post on BunnySlipperz.

So why are they so good at this witty humor with a voice thing? One theory: every once in a while they have a very short sentence. Seriously.

Sometimes, it’s its own paragraph.

This makes me wish I had a voice in my writing, and was altogether a lot more interesting to read. People have told me that on AIM I sound the way I talk — they can hear my voice in the words I type. I took that as a great compliment. Somehow, that translates rather poorly to blogging. Why? Well, I’m not exactly the most eloquent of people in real life…maybe that’s why I sound unique on AIM. I have a rather suspicious vocabulary, populated with random sounds (erm, durrrr, ugh, pfffft), Canadian spelling (colour), and blatant misuse of words from foreign languages (ano). Somehow, that just doesn’t work in sentence form.

In my latest insomnious binge, I switched the management system of my entire website from Drupal to WordPress. I was impressed with Drupal early on…but it was too heavy. Too many features, too difficult to customize. It was too much to learn and I just didn’t feel like I had control of it. There were chunks of code that did who knows what but I was afraid to delete it. So I gave WordPress a test run, and was impressed. It was light, simple, and it was something I felt like I could not only easily customize, but I felt pretty comfortable working with it technically….maybe even write a module.

After trying it out extensively on one of my subdomains, I made the big switch. It was smooth. It so smooth I actually felt confident enough to dump my entire Drupal database. Then I came to the startling realization that Gallery2 and WordPress integrate horribly. The access point is this wp-gallery2.php files which drives everything. They don’t support URL rewrites and I had to install two extra modules just to stop getting error messages. When it finally displayed something, it makes my sidebar go crazy. I fixed it with a rather hacky solution. Then comes the motherload of the troubles, I get an error if I have to click any of the links. This is beyond me. I’m baffled. So baffled, I think I’m going to sleep.

This morning, I finished my first feature length screenplay. It was 102 pages long. I printed it out, hole punched it, placed brads in the top, bottom (but not middle) holes, and turned it in.

It was satisfying. So satisfying I almost want to change the font of this website to 12pt courier. Almost.

In having finished my first one, I already want to start my next. I know I should be revising the one I just wrote or something, but in all likelihood, that screenplay would never be made into a film so forget the follow through.

My screenplay is called Written on Water. It’s loosely based on the life of Eileen Chang. Very loosely. If it ever got made into a film, fans of Eileen Chang would be screaming injustice.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I began writing. It was a hard first project. I should’ve done something I knew more about. Let it be a project for developing my voice as a writer rather than telling the story.

Like all art, one has to start with technique, then find their identity and define their content. I skipped right to the content. But who cares, really? I have a 102 page screenplay and it was damn satisfying.