Bee

Taken on the way home from one of several appointments yesterday. Nothing interesting, unfortunately. So, a flower picture it is. And a bee. Because BEES.

It’s been a while since I posted a flower picture, so here y’go. This was taken on a hillside above the Oregon coast.

I’ve been reading a lot of Shit People Say to Women Directors, a tumblr blog on the deep and endemic sexism in the US film and television industry. It consists of things said to women trying to work in the industry, as is implied by the label on the tin, and it’s pretty often pretty brutal.

And we all know how bad the sexism is in gaming, and more specifically, the computer gaming industry, which makes me think there ought to be another blog called Shit People Say To Women In Gaming. This anonymous post at The Trenches could be the first entry.

In mid-2011 I applied for a localization testing position in Birmingham, UK. I have 2 years of translation experience and plenty of good references, so I knew my chances were good (I want to be part of the industry and I don’t care which end I get in). I sent in my CV and received an email back on the same day with a date and time for a phone interview. I was through the roof, you have no idea how long I had been trying to get into the industry. …

Interviewer: Look, madam, I will be frank with you, I don’t actually believe you want this job.
Me: (very stunned) No?
Interviewer: No, I don’t believe your interest in the gaming industry is genuine as a woman.

Go read the whole thing, it actually manages to get worse. And keep in mind: this is a testing position, one of the relative refuges for women in software, in recent years. Imagine the odds of getting a callback for a woman in dev.

eta: And this can be the second post.

I kind of want to get a custom-made license plate frame. I’ve never bothered with anything like this before, but then again, I’ve never named a car before either. I’m kind of thinking of something like this:

RAPTOR 312 LIGHT

“CF BSG75” is Colonial Fleet Battlestar Group 75, which is, of course, Galactica. (I’m not sure yet of how to do the spacing, either. CFBSG 75? CF BSG 75? If you have an opinion I’d like it.)

I generally don’t like my fandom references to be super-obvious. I like them to be the sorts of things that are in-universe and to be things that people who don’t care won’t notice. Like, I always wanted to build an Angelic Layer control helmet, and just carry it around at cons, like every AL player does at events in-universe. Nobody would get it, but it would be awesome.

This isn’t that good, but it fits the aesthetic.

(I’m also thinking of getting this, trimming off the COLONIAL and FLEET words, and putting it inside the driver’s side front side miniport window. This trimming should work as long as I’m careful, particularly since it’s a vinyl transfer sticker.)

eta: also, see my comment below. That kind of doing it wrong just … nnngngnggghgh. Really visceral NO reaction. I don’t even know why.

I added previous post/next post links at the bottom of each post in desktop view. Mobile phone view already had them, up top – but I thought they looked better at bottom in desktop.

Regardless, I had to write new code to do it. It’s pretty trivial code, but let me know if it breaks?

Oh, I also fixed <i>/<em>/<b> html markup in comments. Those work again if you’re commenting locally. I’ll have to re-fix it every time they update my comment management plugin – unless they accept the code change I just submitted – but at least it’s back and I saved diffs so it’ll be easy. Let me know if that gets weird also.

Thanks!

I did a bunch more site maintenance over the weekend, particularly on mobile. This involved combining the candy button row with the menu row and making both look better (imo), and adding some silly animation on the social buttons because I could, and stuff like that.

Let me know if things are broken; there was a lot of under-the-hood work here, and if I bodged something together wrong, well, I’ll fix it if I can. But see the known issues below.

Regardless, have some before and after pictures, and a couple of animated gifs if you want to see a direct comparison: front page view, blog post view.

But the mobile experience in particular is what’s really different. It’s changed so much that I’ve turned it back on for most mobile browsers, having previously disabled it for everything except the most primitive mobile web viewers.

Basically, before, it just had all sorts of problems. Leaving aside the colours being all wrong, there was pretty much no way out of this view or to the rest of the site. It just wasn’t built for use in a mixed-software environment, and the navigation system was fiercely primitive.

Plus, it didn’t do any correct things with images, so any but the smallest pictures were truncated, and so on. You pretty much had the latest posts and… that’s it.

There was, in theory, a way to exit to desktop view, but it didn’t work and I didn’t know why. The best I could do was wodge in a link back to the main site, as best I could, but it was pretty well hidden.

Now, post-update, if mobile users come to the site’s front page, they still get the desktop view. That’s because reasons; it’ll stay that way until the next big site rebuild. But once mobile users hit the blog, they’ll enter the mobile mini-site. And here’s what they see.

The secret is, almost all of my mobile hits go straight to the blog, so for them, it is the front page. So triggering better mobile behaviour based on that seems okay.

The first thing you might’ve noticed is hey look, it’s a bloody navigation bar. Holy hell, who could’ve thought that up? Fun, right? It’s sticky, too, so it shows up on all the mobile pages. But even better – all those top links to go mobile views of pages, including the front page.

It sounds trivial, but this was actually more work than it should’ve been, since this mobile theme had no provisions for this at all. So I wrote it in.

Now, there’s cheating going on here. The mobile front page is a completely separate page. That means I have to maintain two front pages, which blows. Same for the shows page. But since the mobile version of the front page will be pretty static, I’m … acceptably okay with that. Stuff changes on the desktop version all the time, but those changes are automated – newest blog post preview and Twitter feed excerpt, right? If you’re seeing this page, you’ve already been to the blog, so the latest-post excerpt is uninteresting, and there’s a social media bar with links if you’re into Twitter. It’ll do.

And hey, check it, blogpost images shrink to fit now. Welcome to 2008! Or, arguably, 1997. Whatever.

Down at the bottom of the mobile pages you’ll find navigation links back to the desktop version of the site. The blog and music players will stay mobile versions, but the rest – this is how to get to the desktop view where possible.

There are more places to go in this bottom menu; since it’s the desktop menu, I can put on all the primary pages and you’ll get a… somewhat consistent experience? As less inconsistent as I can manage? Something like that.

I’m sure this is a bit confusing, but it’s my best compromise and I’m hoping it works out.

Here’s the blog page top all knitted together, and the same for the front page. And desktop view, blog page, before and after, since I’ve already uploaded them.

Anyway, that’s what I did this weekend. There are problems. The biggest is that I can’t tell the difference between Android tablets and Android phones, so right now, Android tablets are getting phone view, when I’d rather be serving them desktop. A lot of people are surprisingly okay with that, apparently? Anna tells me the devs at Big Fish Games have to do it on a per-device basis, and I don’t have that kind of granularity.

The second is that it should be possible to disable mobile view entirely on any device. I mentioned above that it never seemed to work. Now I at least know why it doesn’t work (cache conflicts), and also know that I can’t fix it. (And that there have been unanswered support requests for this sitting out there for months. I guess they can’t fix it either.) Sorry, best I can do. Stick to the desktop navigation menu and you’ll mostly get desktop.

Other than that, let me know if you see problems, and let me know what does and doesn’t work for you. From what I’m hearing, almost everyone prefers a phone-specific view on phones. I hope that’s true.

I’ve been doing a bunch of work to make my formerly-terrible phone view for my blog into something that’s better on a phone.

What do you think, sirs? Additions include navigation to other parts of the site (finally), a mobile contact form that works, easier access to the mobile music page, throwing mobile users of video over to my youtube page, things like that.

And two questions:

1. As a phone user, do you want to see this view instead of the desktop view? I think at this point (since it’s not just locked into the pale-blue-on-pale-blue madness which was Carrington Mobile and also lets you visit the rest of the site) it’s kind of reasonable so suggest that.

2. If you’re a tablet user, do you still get the desktop site? I want that. Tablets can handle desktop view. Phones, though – yeah, not as much.

Anyway, what do you think?

…but when I do, it’s on prod.

You may have noticed things flipping around a bit on the band site today? I’m doing some small cleanups and upgrades and stuff. The home page has been particularly hilarious. I should’ve done screencaps.

Anyway, the non-blog and non-bandcamp sections are pretty much done, except for a new banner graphic I haven’t made yet – check it out if you like. Mostly it’s menu and headers and social media button updates and improvements.

I just need to port all that to the blog and to Bandcamp. YAY INCOMPATIBLE CODEBASES! Welcome to Doin’ It Wrong in 2015; I’m your host; the Acme rep will be here any time now; watch out for falling pianos.

Now – let’s get dangerous.

Is this just some sort of weirdness on my browser, or is Google actually saying this?

Excuse You

Because I’m pretty sure everyone with a Pacific Ocean coast might have something to say about that. Particularly but by no means exclusively China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Viet Nam.

Front of Battle, 1 August 1945, Pacific Theatre

Also Hiroshima.

And Nagasaki.

Sorry for the radio silence the last few days – I’ve just been swamped with offline stuff. Nothing interesting, I’m afraid. But hi, all you new visitors from Tumblr! I see the John Barrowman/Gatekeeping and Recourse post is making another around. You can click on the gadget on the left to play our music, or pick individual tracks on Bandcamp. Good to see you!

Oh, what’s going on… I fixed that bad amp, finally. Well, mostly – it won’t run with battery anymore, that board is just fried and I don’t feel like rebuilding a new one from scratch. But the rest works.

We’ve given our new car a name – Raptor 312. We’ve never named a car before, but a couple of weeks ago bought a silver Fit. Mostly we wanted more cargo space and a hatchback again, but as soon as we got it home, we went “y’know, this thing looks like some sort of shuttlecraft.” Then we decided that it had to be a Raptor – Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii’s Raptor, in particular. Because Cylons.

Anyway, that’s all we have time for right now. Plans are afoot, schemes are ascheme, no rest for the wicked, all that.

eta: …wow, hi, aqua-aureum followers. There are certainly a lot of you! I will take the opportunity to confirm aqua-aureum’s suspicions that I would not have tolerated a (known) white supremacist in our midst, and add that pleasantly, the question never even came up. Go us, I suppose.

Anyway, I hope you’ll give some of my band’s music a listen. We have some free-download tracks too. And welcome!