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I was just thinking: does anyone remember a TV show about a family in medieval England? It was called Gray...something. Like Castle Grayskull only, not. The family was named Gray. Or Grey. And the daughter was named Eleanor and she was all cool and tomboyish. And there was a son named Cedric. I don't remember but I think there were other siblings. And the dad was a widower but he had a girlfriend. Anyway, that was a cool show. It was on around the same time as Young Indiana Jones and Briscoe County Jr. Those were the days.

I saw Connie and Carla. I'd heard somewhere that it wasn't very good so I was surprised to discover that it was actually quite good.

I'm hungry. I think I'll make pancakes.

ETA: oh, crap. I forgot it's Talk Like a Pirate Day. For some reason, I thought Monday was the 19th. I was going to put something on Pirate Monkeys Inc. about it. But I can't think of anything right now. Oh well.

Lookin at my web statistics, I see the main section is still more popular than the pirate section. I can understand that. I need to make something more entertaining for the pirate section. Because I spent a lot of time setting stuff up but I can understand people not being all that interested in playing the dice poker (and I'm keeping in mind the suggestion of having an animated opponent but I haven't gotten to doing it yet) or postcARRds. I have that LiveMotion for Dummies book that I haven't even opened yet. Maybe I'll get started with that today.

One weird thing I saw was the first page of the Sparklypoo comic was one of the top entry pages but it was also one of the top exit pages (but page 5 was ranked higher as an exit page). So a ton of people must be clicking on a link to it then leaving without reading all of it. Maybe they expect something different? I dunno.

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I'm bored. I'm on page 52 of LiveMotion for Dummies and we've just gotten to the part where it tells me how to include some text. The first 51 pages were all about how web animation is cool and how to draw basic shapes. I hate the pen tool. I cannot draw vector art. It is seriously counterintuitive, at least for me.

Also, it's occurred to me that I might want to include some sounds. I guess you can buy disks of sounds but I tried buying a clipart disk once and it sucked: to find anything, you had to browse through a list of thousands of images, about one-tenth of which were actually on the disks I bought; to get the other 90%, you had to subscribe online and pay more. Those bastards. You couldn't sort them either so you had no choice but to browse through the thumbnails of all the ones that weren't there. It didn't say anything about that on the box. But I'd installed it and that wasn't exactly a defect so I couldn't get my money back. I don't want to waste money on a similar thing with sounds. But I think it would really sound like crap if I tried to create my own sound effects.

I don't know what I'll do about music either. I got Piano for Dummies a while ago and the first half was all about how to sit properly on the piano bench and crap so I gave up. The For Dummies books don't all suck - I learned how to play the guitar using Guitar for Dummies. I assumed the piano one would be similar but it's not. I have a cheapo keyboard, you see, so I thought I could do a variety of stuff with that if I knew how to play it properly. Anyway, I can't play the guitar well enough to be able to use that. This is what happens when one's parents don't force one to take music lessons as a child. My dad plays the guitar and when I showed an interest a few years ago, he tried to teach me some songs. But it was really hard - he'd play some then stop and I'd try to play what he'd just played. That's not the way I learn. I can't just watch someone else do something and then sit there trying to copy them. I need something in writing. I need to be told which strings to play when. I actually paid for lessons but the teacher used exactly the same method, except at least my dad played it the same way every time. The teacher kept changing it slightly, without even really being aware that he was changing it. Both he and my dad sort of didn't know what specific notes they were playing and when I asked for that level of detail, they had to slow down and really concentrate. Like they were just playing without thinking about it and trying to think about it made it difficult for them to play. Weird. That's not how it works for me at all. I quit the lessons after not very long because it wasn't working.

I hate Sundays. This happens so often - I feel like I have to get something done because it's the last chance I'll have to get much of anything done till next Saturday but I often wind up spending most of the morning in bed then eat something junky for breakfast/lunch and spend the afternoon screwing around, reading a little, messing with my computer a little, not really getting anything done. Then I throw together something for dinner and go to sleep having wasted the whole day. Dammit.