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.

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.

Oh, hey, THAT'S why my Mastodon instance was getting bogus CSS. Apparently they changed it so all the assets and such get stuffed into the Docker image, not on the host filesystem (proxied in). Which makes a whole lot more sense, but does mean it breaks my setup made before that change.

At any rate, glad I fixed that. Now to look into this nifty new WebAuthn functionality...

All right. I have a plan to actually, seriously, for real have a holiday wallpaper for the comic this year. Yes, I know that means it's been ANOTHER four years since the last one. I swear that wasn't supposed to be the plan.

Um... what sort of USB hub did I just purchase, that it has Smart Charging, Human Sensing, TRUE POWER?

So, Desert Bus happened.

In fact, it happened to the tune of over $978k donated to charity over the course of 162 hours.

Belopaaaaaa!

As a reminder: Round-trip Desert Bus for Hope service from Tucson, AZ to Las Vegas, NV begins in approximately 40 minutes.

https://desertbus.org

As soon as it gets through review, the Desert Bus Widget will be the first Android app I've made that actually includes translations, thanks to the Desert Bus community! Yay! I'm at least partly sure I've got most of the weird edge cases accounted for.

Okay, THIS year I super need to make sure I have a holiday wallpaper ready to go. I swear it wasn't meant to be an every-four-years thing.

Today's fun adventure was getting another wisdom tooth extracted. Which means the rest of the day has been spent sucking on gauze pads waiting for my mouth to stop bleeding out.