TIGT

Hi! The TOC links in your excellent article “When Responsive Images Get Ugly” on CodePen (can’t post links here) don’t work, they have no anchor parts.

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:37:44 -0500

CodePen’s blog posts got deprecated a while ago, and they’ve been rotting ever since. They used to have comments (some of which were really worthwhile on that article), if you can believe it

ADD-Like Behaviors in Average People vs. People with ADD

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 03:57:31 -0400

Behavior	Average person	Person with ADD*
Loses keys (they’re gone)	Once a year, at most	4 or 5 times a year
Forgets important appointments	2 to 3 times a year	At least monthly
Blurts out remarks that distress others	Once a month at most	At least weekly
Constantly moving about; can’t sit still	Not a problem	If person with ADD is hyperactive, a problem much of the time
Periods of attentiveness	An hour or two	A few minutes or, if very interested in task, 3–4 hours
Can think of creative ideas	Several a week	Constantly has ideas; it’s sorting them out that’s the problem
Late for work or other appointment	Rarely	Frequently
Agrees to do 3 things in same timeframe	Rarely	Frequently. Tries to do them all. Sometimes succeeds!
Loses important papers like checks	Rarely	Up to once a month

* Person with ADD who has not developed accomodations to solve problems and/or is not taking ADD medications.

I can’t memorize things.

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 05:58:46 -0500

I don’t mean that metaphorically. When diagnosing my ADHD, I scored 30^th percentile recalling unrelated sentences. The bad 30%. Drunk people do better.

I’ve successfully memorized a mere handful of things, and I can sum them all up right here:

My birthdate (but not how many years old I am)
My address for ≈20 years, and my current one
4 phone numbers, 2 of which are nigh-identical
My dad’s, brother’s, and sister’s birthdays

I know theirs because I think of my sibling’s birthdays as relative to mine, and dad’s is a day away from a holiday.

I still can’t remember mom’s. I know. I remember the month, and when it approaches, I look it up.

In my first relationship, I forced myself to retain our anniversary and her birthday. Because if I didn’t, that information would no longer be relevant, if you get my drift. It was really hard. Strong emotions are my one lifehack for this, but they need to be industrial-strength.

And I’m pretty sure I remembered the anniversary only because it was October 3^rd, and I had just seen Mean Girls.

So how do you remember anything then

Immersion helps. I can’t remember anyone’s name until I’ve heard them called ten times by others.

When that won’t work, there’s only one thing I can do: understand it. If I learn how new information relates to a system as a whole, I’m good to go.

That’s why I blow hard at names, addresses, and dates — most of the time, they’re arbitrary.

This also means I learn differently. I understand for most folks, memorization is the easiest solution. But for me, I have to dive in and really grok what even the arbitrary bits are. A lot of coding terms are literal jokes (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor and GNU’s Not Unix, for example), but learning those stories makes them stick.

As a result, when learning something big, I have an extended, frustrating period of incompetentence and hopelessness, then suddenly it all clicks and it’s second nature. This has its ups and downs. Pro: second-nature knowledge is a powerful asset. Con: but sometimes it’s knowledge about, oh, some real-life examples:

Minecraft engine quirks
Obsolete HTML elements and attributes
Weird animal facts
Homestar Runner

Golbat’s Colosseum animations are a beautiful thing to behold.

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 09:50:54 -0500

Golbat’s Colosseum animations are a beautiful thing to behold.

Down the Rabbit Hole of Huge Power

Sun, 02 Oct 2016 09:00:21 -0400

Huge Power is a notoriously busted Pokémon Ability — it doubles the entire Attack Stat, which is a stratospheric power boost. Diggersby and Azumarill go up ≥3 tiers by having it.

It doesn’t make much sense, though. I initially wrote it off as something given to Azumarill to make it unterrible (and then Azumarill kept getting buffed). But there is a next-level pun and story behind Huge Power.

Dajare is a Japanese wordplay tradition kind of like a pun and homophone rolled together. And it is everywhere; Japan, as it turns out, is infested with dad jokes.

And boy is this ever a dad joke.

Huge Power’s Japanese name is strictly translated as “Muscleman”. That’s all Bulbapedia explains, because Bulbapedia and nuance are mutually exclusive. But if you paste the characters into a more sophisticated translator, you get two results:

力持ち (ちからも) — Noun

muscleman; strong man

力餅 (ちからもち) — Noun

fortifying mochi; mochi that improves one’s strength

mochi received from one’s parents after giving birth

mochi given to a toddler on its first birthday

It’s one of them Dajares. But what does mochi have to do with anything?

We speak of “the man in the moon” in the West, but Japanese mythology considers the patterns on the moon’s visible face to instead be a rabbit making rice cake — that is, mochi.

And who gets Huge Power?

Azumarill, the Aqua Rabbit Pokémon; Diggersby, a bunny with big beefy arms for ears; and Mega Mawile, which looks rabbitish with the second giant alligator mouth coming out of the back of its head.

I told you this pun was next-level.

Cat.

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 22:49:43 -0400

Cat.

Old Minecraft ideas, from way back when—I’m thinking 2011....

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 17:12:46 -0500

Old Minecraft ideas, from way back when—I’m thinking 2011. I used to be more into it more than was healthy; it’s what I did when dropping out of UMaine, to think about something other than how useless I was.

Originally they were just pencil and marker, so I inked them on a whim.

You can probably see this predates bats, golems, villagers/Testificates, and even Endermen, hence my take on the concepts.

The goblin villagers were based off of an old, old post from the original Minecraft development blog, which neither Tumblr nor Google can find, sadly. The yeti, worm, and shark were just some one-off ideas for monsters within various kinds of terrain; the yeti lived only around snow, the worm could “dig” (phase) through dirt blocks, and you can probably imagine where the shark showed up.

The two I like the most are the Smoker and the golems. The Smoker was supposed to be an equally-annoying relative of Creepers, where it would seek out and devour wooden blocks. The golems how I envisioned what ended up being Iron Golems—I vastly prefer these!

Photo

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 22:59:24 -0500

On Patreon

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 22:20:01 -0400

I’ve heard a few complaints about Patreon, where people say it looks like a shill/cashgrab/desperate ploy. Worse than having ads, even.

I suspect that’s a psychological issue. Maybe it does seem worse to some people. But as someone who messes around with web development, my humble opinion is that NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY BE WORSE THAN ADS.

Ads track you as hard as they can in barely-legal (or worse) ways. Block cookies? Have an ad-blocker? Doesn’t matter. There’s a million different ways of spying on you. Notice Apple’s is built into the operating system.
Ads load who knows what, whenever they feel like it. Ever been to Wikia? It will make your browser cry with piles of Flash, GIFs, and poorly-coded JavaScript, hammering your computer trying to figure out who you are and what you’d like to buy. All of which, by definition, is not what readers go to a site for.
The only people ads make money for are really big sites (and the ad brokers, but you knew that). So for the little people who would even bother with a Patreon, ads wouldn’t help anyway. And if you use an ad-blocker to mitigate the first two issues, then the creators make even less money.

TL;DR: ads invade privacy, make websites slower and crashier, and then don’t even work on top of all that.

So if the alternative is small creators linking to their Patreon in text, or even with, god forbid, one whole image, GOOD.

Goblin sketch. The effort to blend into society via pants was...

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 22:10:00 -0400

Goblin sketch.

The effort to blend into society via pants was mostly successful, but it never stopped being awkward.

Matching avatars for you and your friends (From left to right:...

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 00:08:00 -0400

Matching avatars for you and your friends

(From left to right: keepay, elementnumber46, tigts, drainagemage, kissmyasuka)

Photo

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:57:00 -0400

And this is possibly the oldest Work In Progress I own, and...

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:48:00 -0500

And this is possibly the oldest Work In Progress I own, and therefore the one least likely to ever be finished. It’s supposed to be a fusion of an underwater scene and, uh, fruits and vegetables. That’s a banana squash whale, a carroctopus, a brain coral pineapple, a watermelon clam, two strawberryfish, a corn lobster, a starfruitfish, a school of grapes, and some jellytaters. Also some raspberries placed to look like polyps or coral or summat. Prismacolor markers applied inexpertly over a pencil sketch, with pencil then coming on top to add shadows and texture.

I found some old art files of mine, which means I can update...

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:38:00 -0500

I found some old art files of mine, which means I can update this with the full photoset version of this piece. Literal years old, so while I’ll appreciate any feedback (Especially regarding fixing its levels), just know it may not be implemented for a while.

HINT: Squint.

I read up until the final translated chapter of Goodnight,...

Sun, 26 Jan 2014 19:57:00 -0500

I read up until the final translated chapter of Goodnight, Punpun a week or so ago. I liked it so much I felt obligated to do a fanart.

Not gonna lie, I dislike this result. I abjectly hated it when I had just finished, so I guess things are getting better. Still, in order to make great drawings you have to get rid of the 10,000 bad ones first, right?

Jason Poland recently out-niced me, so I had to fire back with...

Sun, 22 Dec 2013 22:38:00 -0500

Jason Poland recently out-niced me, so I had to fire back with this fanart. Take that!

This is the protagonist of a short comic, to practice comic...

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 20:12:00 -0500

This is the protagonist of a short comic, to practice comic storytelling and various other things before I start Mortropolis. Ideally I make all the really bad mistakes with this one to get them out of the way.

I’m shooting for 20 pages as a soft goal, but ultimately the story will dictate how long it is.

My only sticking point is, she needs a name. Any suggestions?

This is my entry for the Major Bueno Party!! Of course, this is...

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 17:56:00 -0500

This is my entry for the Major Bueno Party!! Of course, this is the original size, my actual submission looks more like this.

If having a 200x150 .png bounce around in a flash game sounds like a fun time, you should totally enter too!

pokémon creeper

Wed, 02 Oct 2013 13:52:00 -0400

pokémon creeper

librarian sphinx

Wed, 02 Oct 2013 13:46:37 -0400

librarian sphinx