Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I thought I’d spend the holiday writing, but instead I made my own color picker. It’s a table of all 4096 web-smart colors, but don’t go there. The page is half a megabyte, so it’s a bit of a slow download and will also run up my bandwidth quota. I’ve already hit 20MB today just testing it. The page looks like this:

The arrangement leaves much to be desired, but a better one will have to wait for another holiday weekend. When you click on one of the colors, you get a popup in that color, with the hex color value in black and white text. The cell size can be adjusted from 8 to 16 pixels.

To see what it’s like without a long download, try the little version (popup or full page), which gives those 27 colors out of the 4096 total which are closest to the web-safe color #6699cc.

If you like it, you can download the whole thing, unzip it and open it locally in a browser: color.tar.gz (32kb). The main page is the one with 4096 in the title. If you’re sneaky enough, you can even find the real page on-site and play with it at freeshell’s expense.

I should mention that none of the color pages have been tested on IE, only Mozilla and Chimera. Click at your own risk.

Here’s Jintian’s 40 fannish facts meme, by way of Lori, Seema and Sara. I was too lazy to do it myself, so they helped. My corrections are in brackets.

1. (Seema) Fic must have weddings in it.
2. (Seema & Lori) I don’t need a biology lesson [about] slots and tabs.
3. (Lori) Everyone who sent feedback on story X, send me a copy, cause I never saw it!
4. (Seema) I write my fic on a Mac! You should too!
5. (Lori) You haven’t lived until you get jossed.
6. (Lori) I think Lori’s a world-class author who should be writing publishable fiction and sending it to agents.
7. (Seema) I wrote an amazing fic called ‘The Museum.’ In general, I win lots of awards [just like Seema].
8. (Seema) I started a mailing list when I should have been writing fic.
9. (Lori) Everyone should read Seema’s fic, so cruise over to her website.
10. (Sara) My filk makes Sara laugh far too much.
11. (Seema) I’m insufficiently reluctant. Go me!
12. (Lori) Colony is vastly underrated by all and sundry. Probably because it’s not read often enough [or wasn’t edited enough].
13. (Lori) My filk should win awards. Lori said so.
14. (Seema) Yellow rocks my cabash.
15. (Seema) I don’t do memes over 5 items so I conscripted my minions, Seema, Sara and Lori, to write this list for me.
16. (Lori) Picard/Janeway is one of my favorite pairings, if I liked pairing fic.
17. (Seema) I think there are aliens voting in fanfic contests. It’s the only explanation for the results.
18. (Lori) Fandom is like high school [only worse].
19. (Seema) I don’t find Icheb attractive.
20. (Seema) There is a Janeway/Picard fandom but there is no such thing as a [Doc]/Seven fandom.
21. (Lori) C/7 is the one true pairing, because it’s canon. Get Over It.
22. (Sara) Canon is queen here at Jemima’s Trek.
23. (Lori) Bitter Old Fan Queens rule.
24. (Seema) I like Seven. I [don’t] own a couple of catsuits just like hers.
25. (Seema) My fanfic is a gift.
26. (Lori) Badfic. Fandom’s car accident. Can’t quit rubbernecking.
27. (Seema) I’m scared of Seema.
28. (Seema) I got conscripted into the Blog Wars through no fault of mine. I was an innocent bystander, and bang! I got attacked by William James.
29. (Seema) Stylesheets rule.
30. (Lori) The few, the proud, the filkers….
31. (Seema) I love TOS. Really.
32. (Seema) I prefer my friends to be coherent and to have a minimal ability to spell and use punctuation properly.
33. (Lori) When you’re museless and wandering, start a fan list without a fandom, and anything can happen.
34. (Seema & Lori) Just say no to your fic taxes. No New Fic Taxes!
35. (Seema) I’m a BNF but I refuse to admit it.
36. (Lori) Ask not what ASC can do for you, but what you can be insufficiently reluctant to do for ASC!
37. (Seema) Just say no to LJ.
38. (Seema) Just say no to Virtual Seasons.
39. (Lori) Feedback. The final frontier…to seek out readers, to elicit their reactions… to have my story noticed where none have noticed before! (cue music)
40. (Lori) I’m writing a babyfic. Everyone is pregnant. Everyone who can be, anyway — I won’t stoop to mpreg, thankyouverymuch.

I couldn’t find an easy way to add palettes to the Mac OS X color picker, so I looked for on-line color pickers to help me design a seventh stylesheet for the blog. Here’s a nice page of on-line color picker reviews from the web-graphics.com color blog. I also took a look at Google Directory’s list of color pickers.

Here’s a 5-k winning blogger with the world’s simplest on-line color picker. He also has a bookmarklet for identifying the colors used in a website. Rather than steal someone else’s color scheme, you can check out these color scheming links.

A while back, Mac Edition called for more web colors and the web-smart palette was born at more Crayons, which also has a cool color weblog, through which I found a snarky essay on what I’ve always thought of as Eighties colors.

I’ve been looking around for a 2D version of more Crayons’ 3D color cube, similar to the nice color layouts of the 216 web-safe colors at Visibone, but so far, no dice. I haven’t found anything based on the 4096 colors but more Crayons’ own color slider and slices of their color cube. I’d like something I can run off-line, but they have no downloadable utilities and I don’t feel like pagesucking the entire site. So I think I’ll make my own 2D color palette. Later.

I’ve changed the style switching links to gifs, as seen in Talk to Oneself, who replied to my recent ping saying Mozilla had been fixed. Unfortunately, the babelfish translation didn’t throw any further light on the entry. (I shudder to think what babelfish will do to that sentence alone.)

Anyway, try out the images, keeping a couple of things in mind:
 
The LCARS styles work properly only in Mozilla-based browsers.

The page must be reloaded when switching to or from Technicolor because of the extra javascript.

This weekend is your last chance to sign up for Boskone 40 at the cheap rate. This Boston con runs from February 14-16, 2003, and is the ultimate geeky way to spend Valentine’s day.

The annoying part is how they go on referring to it as a free service. I get a lot of free services, and not a single one of them comes with invoices due. They’ll get $9.95 for what everyone else gives away free when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. This means I’ll go back to using Crosswinds as my mirror, since it’s back up, more or less, and I did finally get all my Voyager fic up there tonight before I heard this bad news.

The email has been resized to fit your screen. Emphasis on free added, though the capitalization is original. If you don’t see it, click “more.”

(more…)

Title: Where is the Fic?
Author: Jemima
Series: VOY
Summary: A filk on the eternal question of Voyager fandom.

Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?

Where is the fic
You said you’d write for me, it would be J/C -
Will it ever be?
Where is the fic?

You told me J/P was disgusting, and you would never try to find
Those tired, misplaced lizard babies - they should be left behind!

Where is the fic
You said you’d write for me, it would be J/C -
Have you gone P/T?
Where is the fic?

If you’re still suffering through Enterprise, I wish that you would let it go.
Don’t leave me hanging on a cliffhanger -
Come back and fix my show!

Oh how I wish I’d never read you;
I guess it must have been the plot.
I got sucked in to such a weird AU,
The one you left to rot!

Where is the fic
You said would be J/C for eternity?
Have you gone C/P?
Where is the fic?

Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
Where is the fic?
[repeat ad nauseum]

The news from this pretty Mac rumor site is that new iMacs with the swingy arms [insert arm swinging motion here] are coming out soon, perhaps as early as next week. They’ll look the same, but pack more of a processor punch. Prices are rumored to be going down as well.

This means I’ll have to put off my mac shopping for a few weeks yet.

Birthday of the day: Happy Birthday to Seema!

This week on MBTI Theater: the T/F Preference. T/F stands for Thinking/Feeling, the Judgment preference. The previous preferences, E/I and S/N, are pretty black-and-white, at least once they’re explained. T/F, on the other hand, covers more territory than just thinking or feeling. Thinking and feeling bear no direct relation to judgment, as far as I can tell, so using the descriptions of T and F types I’ve come up with an empirical categorization of the T/F preference.

First of all, the T/F distinction is used to distinguish people who are interested in things (the impersonal) from those who prefer human relationships (the personal). In speech, we find a distinction between direct honesty and a more social tact. You might have thought those were E/I things, but they’re here in T/F.

In the matter of opinion, the T is the classic freethinker, generating both criticism of the status quo and solutions to social problems. The F, on the other hand, tends give more consideration to the opinions of others than to her own, leading to social conformity. When it comes to expressing opinions, the T goes about it logically, following the argument from premises to conclusion. The F tends to argue by accretion, circling around the topic and heaping more information onto it at random.

So the T/F distinction is as much about sociability as logic. The biggest effect on fandom, I would say, is the personality divide between people who are concerned about the story as a thing to be judged by impersonal literary values, and those more concerned about the audience than the internal logic of a story. The baton of badfic has been passed from the S’s to the F’s. Tune in next time to see whether the J’s or the P’s can recover it from the F’s.

Weird link of the day: Before there were Borg, there were…Daleks

Seema claims to be too selfish to give a gift. On more than one occasion, I’ve embroidered something just because I liked the design and I enjoy stitching. Once a project is done, though, it’s more likely to be given away than to stay with me - otherwise my apartment would be very fru-fru. With fic, of course, you get to give it away and keep it, too.

Since Liz is mocking me, I’ll leave off the serious stuff. Here are some quizzes:

Which of the Pride & Prejudice Sisters are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

free enneagram test

My full results were: 6 2 4 5 7 3 1 1 7.