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.

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.

Oh ho ho... it looks like I can now get actual public API data from Mastodon servers without needing authentication. I think it's high time I updated my webpage widget to allow for things like, say, fetching images and metadata along with the text of posts...

Anyone reading this on the DoM website, you may eventually start to see actual images show up without going to the actual Mastodon page, is what I'm saying.

So, discussions occurred in IRC late last night, and...

It's great that, after accounting for Fangamer t-shirts and merch sold in the LRR store, Desert Bus for Hope 2020's final tally was over $1M raised for charity. Yay!

Though, it has exposed an unfortunate display bug in my widget, in that I could swear I accounted for dollar amounts over $1M just in case, but it turns out I didn't. Hrm. Must investigate.

Over the holidays, online shops tend to let you know if your order should get to you by December 24th, for obvious reasons. This was even more important this past holiday season due to the pandemic and all affecting normal shipping times.

I bring this up now because I have learned some shops haven't updated their outgoing shipping confirmation email templates yet. At least I hope my order will arrive by December 24th of THIS year. The email has left me in some doubt.

Anybody have any experience with Lulu as a book printing place? I was once again looking into how feasible it would be to switch shops, so I poked around their site with the parameters of the two DoM books, and yikes that's significantly more expensive. Like, around 20-25% more per book.

It's not like anyone's buying the ones I have now, of course, but can anyone vouch for Lulu's quality over, say, KDP (formerly CreateSpace)? I feel like cranking up the price that much is a big ask.

Y'know... maybe I CAN find a way to make the shift banners have their canonical shapes in the Desert Bus wallpaper app...

(it took me a while before I gave up trying to figure out what the actual term in vexillology was for that part of a flag/banner)

Well, this was surprising. An old friend of mine who goes by the name Bluez showed up, appropriately out of the blue, and gave me some DoM fanart of Matt! The fact that is is in blue is coincidence. Take a look!

I'll be glad to be back to the office at some point. I do not much like working from home all the time.

It's here! It's up! There's actually a 2020 Dementia of Magic holiday wallpaper! It's in the Gallery! Check it out!

https://dementiaofmagic.net/beans/gallery.html

All right... just a bunch of lighting effects, shading, ground shadows, and other stuff to go. I am GOING to get this desktop wallpaper done before Christmas, at the very least.

If you come from a temperate climate like I do and need to draw a palm tree, you start to wonder how they sit in sand. Like, deciduous trees have surface-level roots and grass tufts and all other crazy stuff at their bases, so you feel you have to stop and study how this applies to palm trees in sand.

And so eventually you find examples and discover they're really just kinda plunked in the ground without really anything like that showing above the surface at all. Huh.