It's April 1st, and we all know what that means...

Freefall:




General Protection Fault:

   


Four oldies-but-goodies, including the spaghetti tree.

Five Ottawa-specific pranks from days gone by. And this year's was that the Rideau Canal Skateway was going one-way only during peak hours. (The giveaway was that the "one way" was opposite the direction of mass travel in the morning and afternoon.)

It seems stange that after 65 million years we can look back and now find that exact moment that the world changed.  Not just a line in the sand, but physical evidence from the KT-day.

There's something monumentally fascinating about being able to point at an ancient dead fish and link its death specifically and precisely to this one moment. 

We can even say exactly how it died. It was a spectacularly shitty death - being washed up by a tsunami, drowned in burning glass, then buried in gravel and wreckage for 66 million years.

So, I've cleared with Bob about the official thing that will need to happen with my account here on the forum, it's just a matter of telling him to pull the trigger once this post is up for a week.

I'll just put it out right away: I'm transgender. I've been dealing with the intensifying struggle of living two ways for a number of years now. For the past year, I've been on the therapy track to get myself ready, and this last week was my first week being completely full-time. Since I'm now being myself at work, it's time to start shifting over the active parts of my online life over to the correct identity.

After the week is up, I'll have Bob change my username over to "LynnInDenver", which is the name I've been using actively on newer accounts I've opened. People can just call me "Lynn". My pronouns are she/her/hers.

My ability to deal with life has gotten so much better as a result of doing this, that I can't even get it across in just a text posting, just that it is best for me, and I have no regrets.

In 9 easy steps.

Step 1: Open the private message, notice no attachment box
Step 2: Go to another tab, and click "create thread"
Step 3: Go to the bottom of this thread, and click upload attachment.
Step 4: After upload, click the button at the bottom marked "Insert into Post"
Step 5: Remember the attachment number pasted into the box above
Step 6: Click the "View my attachments" link.  Notice how your new file does not show up, nor does it count towards your quota.
Step 7: Copy the URL link of any file there.
Step 8: Go back to your private message, and click the image attach icon.
Step 9: Paste the URL, but change the number at the end to the number you remembered from Step 5.

Voila!  You have PMed an image.

You may not have noticed it, since the relevant parts of the page and posts are so tiny, but I've managed to finally move most folks' original registration dates from Yuku into their user records here.  

I say most because I've got just shy of 40 people here who I can't match up to a Yuku account; some of them are the FFML folks who joined us a few months ago, and one is a Fenspace newcomer, but I'm sure a lot of them -- particularly the ones who registered in August and September of 2017 -- are from Yuku, they just changed their handles and I never found out.  

I'll post that list a little later, after I've filtered out the FFML folks and other people I know joined us after the move, and if you recognize your old handle, please tell me!  In addition to your original registration date, there may still be messages and threads here belonging to your old name that I can move under your current one.

McSweeney's interviewed Lex Luthor, the Joker, Dr. Doom, and a few others.  General consensus:  Betsy is giving evil a bad name. 

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I'm a very forgiving person ... on Lord Vader's terms.  "Apology accepted, Captain."

While taking care of some board maintenance, I came across a bunch of posts made by an "RMH" a long, long time ago.  Would that happen to have been an earlier handle of yours?  If so, I can associate those posts with your current user account.

Thanks.

I had to hack the install script for the table plug-in I found because it was causing SQL errors when I tried to run it, and then I had to hand-insert the MyCode extensions to do it.  And the button on the new post page for the pop-up table generator, which I got working last night, isn't appearing now (and for some reason the bank of smilies have disappeared with it), and I don't know why.  But still, we have table support now, with the following caveats:

• Tables aren't rendered in the full editor.  You'll only see the square-bracket MyCode markup until you save the post.
  
• Markup codes are currently only recognized in uppercase.  When I get a chance, probably at lunch or maybe tonight, I'll clone them into lowercase versions so you can mix and match.
  
• There is almost no style control.  The table is always horizontally centered within the post.  Column headers are always going to be bold and centered.  Table cells contents are always regular and flush left.  The TABLE tag needs a width parameter (in % of screen width) or it will flood the post.
  

Been working on where Makoto's apartment is located.  I've got a candidate location but I want to check a couple more sources when I get home from work tonight.  From what few exterior views I've found, she lives in a corner apartment on the top floor of what seems to be a two- or three-story manshon of recent (as of 1992) construction, a bit on the high end (which is supported by its interior).  I've got a point on the Tokyo map I'm pretty confident I can say she's probably within a few blocks of.

I'll post a link to Google Streetview later tonight unless I find something that disagrees wildly with what I've come up with.

Has anyone else noticed that the WIP file size banner on the forum's main page has a 'last updated' date in there that's REALLY hard to see because it's in a shade of gray that almost entirely blends in with the green background?

Just checking.