CaptainSpam @captainspam@social.exclaimindustries.net

Oh, all right, I'll pin a useful toot:

Some amount of this account will refer to my comic, The Dementia of Magic, at https://dementiaofmagic.net. Others may refer to nothing really at all.

Once again I find myself adding in way too many details to background elements where a good amount of it will be hidden by foreground elements, and then more of it will be hidden by Gaussian blur.

I'll need at least two of these coming up. You'll see which.

"As usual today on Jeopardy, we've come across a substantial amount of money through means our lawyers have assured us we are not required to disclose, and we desperately need to dispose of it through a trivia game show for reasons we are also not required to disclose. And this round's categories are..."

New copies of the books have arrived. Looking good so far. I think just some minor adjustments to the covers and maybe lightening up some of the full-page stuff in Chapter Three (Lulu's prints seem a bit darker), and this oughta work.

Got it. Turns out jQuery's .html() method doesn't quite work the way I expected when multiple elements are involved. Should be fixed now.

Woah. Something with my widget isn't agreeing with that last toot.

There we go. The second edition PDF of Chapter Three is now up. It's *mostly* US Letter sized, but I took a lot more liberty in changing page sizes for bigger comics, given it's digital and all. Here's a link!

(this is a ~100MB download, by the by; be forewarned)

https://dementiaofmagic.net/book/pdfs/DoMChapter3eBookWebLetter.pdf

I've also got a physical copy of Chapter Three en route just to see how it looks. Hopefully that works out.

The books arrived yesterday. Looks like I don't need the super-expensive premium color processing (it looks like it was designed for photo books, as it gives everything a glossy sheen), and Lulu's stuff is of otherwise comparable quality to KDP. So that's good news, at least.

Though I might need to do some minor re-layouts for the new margins. More to come.

Test copies of the US Letter version of Chapter Two of the DoM are en route. Hopefully Lulu's not-super-premium color processing is good enough, because holy cow the price shoots up a LOT the moment you turn on the premium option.

Of course, if not-premium's good enough but premium's noticeably and appreciably *better*, maybe I'll keep a few copies of that around just to be fancy schmansy.

I like the phrase "English is a flawed language". It implies the existence of some immaculate, flawless language that isn't at all pretentious.

I just started poking around with making a US Letter version of Chapter Three of the DoM. That one might take a bit more work than Chapter Two. Turns out that, since I was going digital-first for all the sketches and, more importantly, page-size full-bleed images, the originals are much tighter to those original 8"x10½" sizes, so I'll need to manually edit most of them to look right.

So that'll be a project.

The second edition (US-Letter-sized) PDF version of The Dementia of Magic Chapter Two is now up for download! Still researching options for the physical version, and I'll get Chapter Three going eventually.

(linking to the Books page so you don't get a surprise ~100MB download; look down the page for the "Or, download a PDF!" link for Chapter Two)

https://dementiaofmagic.net/books/

There's only one 'S' in Daylight Saving Time, dagnabbit!

DAGNABBIT, I SAY!

Huh. Turns out it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be to re-layout the first DoM book to 8½"x11" (US Letter) instead of 8"x10½" (US Government Letter?). So, I've got a layout that might work for print-on-demand shops that don't take custom book sizes.

I also went over the commentary to rework some of it, so there's also that. It's technically a second edition now, so I'll replace the PDF version on the website soon enough. More on a new physical book edition later.

There we go. I think I've got just about everything I want in the widget for now. Now I know how to abuse embedded SVGs to use as icons, too. So that's cool.

https://github.com/CaptainSpam/mastowidget

Next, here's a poll for testing the widget. I think the API is pretty clear on this, but some usable data couldn't hurt.

And awesome, a deleted post doesn't even show up in the API. That makes that part easier.

I think the only other major things are handling polls and maybe displaying a count of boosts/replies/favorites, when applicable. I'm definitely not going to try to handle interacting with a poll from the widget, as that would entail some login shenanigans I'm not really prepared to deal with at the moment. Still, usefulness abounds!

Oh, hey, I wonder how the API treats custom server emoji...

Widget development is coming along nicely. I'm lucky that my current public timeline has a few good examples of special-case posts for me to test stuff out (boosts, replies, image attachments, etc).

Though, if you see me start to make weird posts with specific flags set (content warnings/sensitive, spoiler tags, etc) for seemingly no reason at all, well, now you know why.

The first draft of the newly-renamed mastowidget is now live on the DoM website. It works, per se, in that images show up when posted, but there's still a bunch of other neat stuff I can add in.

Also, the layout may change significantly. I've got better ideas, ideas that DON'T involve using CSS float and overly-fixed-size boxes. More on that when it happens.