Professor: Okay, time to begin. Last time we talked about Diversity Removal Jurisfunction. Who can tell me what that is?

[Gunners wave their hands in the air wildly]

Professor: You, Girl Sitting In The Front Row. What is Diversity Removal Jurisfucntion?

[Gunners lean forward in their seats, eager for Girl Sitting In The Front Row to answer incorrectly]

Professor: We just talked about it yesterday.

Girl Sitting In The Front Row: Is it when the court gets to decide if they get to remove people from diversity functions?

Professor: Good. Imagine that you work at an office building, and on the top floor they have a water cooler and we want to know whether you can get up to the water cooler. And it turns out that you can get up there in a few different ways, like Diversity Removal Jurisfunction. Some people want to get up there, because they have free bagels on Tuesdays. To get up there, you can climb the Diversity Removal Jurisfunction mountain, but a lot of obstacles are in the way. First you see the barbed wire, and then the vampire with the laser sword, and then the Three Trials of Ancient Mystery. And you have to get past all of them to get to the top.

[Gunners sigh dejectedly as they reluctantly lower their hands. Entire Class furiously transcribes everything that Professor says at 95 wpm]

I am a firm believer in the therapeutic power of anonymously published open letters, and I noticed that it has been over a year since anything was posted here, so here goes. For background, let me point out that I am a first year law student under no delusions that this is anything but passive-aggressive venting.

Dear Gunners,

Keep your hands down in class. Nobody cares that you want to change the hypothetical to come to some crazy conclusion. The professor even pointed out that if you change the hypothetical without constraints it will lead to whatever result you want. I should sue you for damages based on the amount of my time you waste. You are not super intelligent and interesting. You are tools.

Dear Professors,

You guys are pretty cool, but please stop indulging the gunners. You know who they are, you know that all you have to do is not call on them. I was about to applaud today when you told one of them that you knew there was a question but you were moving on anyway.

Dear Hank Williams Jr.,

Why, yes, I am ready for some FOOOOOTBAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLL

If you are reading this, then I am successfully able to upload random crap to this page. Fear.

I am writing this from the all new, all exciting posting interface I just finished (okay, fine, mostly finished). Basically, the upshot is this: although it looks the same, the front page is actually pulling all of its posts out of a database and assembling them. This is a departure from the old, bad way of me hardcoding every post by hand as I wrote it. I got that stuff all finished on...umm, Saturday, I think.

So, to go along with that, naturally it follows that I needed to create a way to actually put the stuff into the database. And that is what I have (mostly) finished writing today: a simple little form with a bit of script to take form input and throw it into the database.

As it is, there are still a few issues to work out:

• I suspect that line breaks are not going to be preserved, so I will have to figure out how to parse the text and automatically add them in. FIXED
• Apostrophes fuck up the script. Egads!
• Something is wrong with allowing comments.
• As other pages are added to the site, I need to make it easy to post on those other pages.
• I will probably need to throw an edit function in there at some point too.

But as it is now, at least I have this done. If nothing else it will be very useful reference when I do the Muse & Stone database and its interface (which I really need to wrap up super soon! >.<).

I'm somewhere around halfway done with adding functionality to allow users and the attendant ability to log in. You can see the first stirrings of this over on the menu at the right. In fact, my testing tells me that the link, and the login screen behind it, actually work. So please feel free to go do that: it ought to add a slight bit of personalization to the pages (for the two minutes that the cookie lasts). Your password doesn't matter: I have yet to make the script actually talk to the database with the user information, so it's just accepting every login right now.

What, you might ask, is the point of all this? Well, with users comes the ability to add a lot of potential functionality. Already in the pipeline is the ability for me to write these via a form, shove them in a database, and just get them out with PHP--this will be much freaking better than doing it in raw HTML as I am doing right now. Attendant to that is the ability to let other people write shit too. Aperture (ne Rogue) is the guinea pig for this.

What other plans might be made? I really don't know. If I start feeling ambitious, it's possible I could write messageboards. Or maybe a game or something. Do you have any ideas? E-mail me. Do you think I should let you register as a user? E-mail me. Or, you know, talk to me some other way.

Anyhow, like the last post claims, progress is being made daily. Woop woop.

Holy shit!

The old, interesting placeholder page has been replaced by this new placeholder page. But it's slightly less placeholder-y AND makes use of what I expect to be the final (or mostly-final) design for the whole site (whereas it used to just be the design of the blog). Unfortunately, this design renders it much more difficult than its worth to create the functionality of the CYOA placeholder stuff. So that's discontinued.

Anyhow, the long and boring procession toward a full site launch continues relatively unabated. CAN YOU FEEL THE EXCITEMENT?