Friday, February 10, 2006
The day I realized that my father was evil
That sounds a little melodramatic, but I don't know of any better way to put it; he IS evil, a person for whom the focus of his life is to do harm, and I've known it since I was a little kid.
I didn't see much of my father for the first few years of my life, as he was over in Vietnam; as a Navy man, he was of course on a boat, not in the jungle, but he nevertheless considers himself the equal of those vets who were actually in danger, and speaks of those who couldn't re-integrate into society upon their return with contempt, calling them cry-babies and liars who are too lazy to work and so playacting at being mentally ill... aren't people who served in the same war supposed to feel camaraderie? My father never did find it necessary to feel normal emotions about anyone, sigh. Anyways:
Given where we lived when the event of this post occurred, I'd have been 4 or 5. There was a tiny Italian restaurant that we went to regularly, and every time we got close enough to be able to see it, my father'd say the exact same thing; "Look how small it is; it looks like it's just a kitchen, not a whole restaurant." About the 20th time we went there, when he started off with "Look how small it is," I piped up from the back seat with "It looks like it's just a kitchen, not a whole restaurant"; imagine my utter astonishment when he barked "No it doesn't!!" Once the shock faded enough for me to regain the power of speech:
Me: But... but... that's what YOU always say!!
Him: No it's not!!
Me: Yes it is!!
Him: NO IT'S NOT!!
Mother: You know perfectly well that you always say that; where do you THINK she got that line from?
Him: I'VE NEVER SAID THAT!!
Mother: Yes you have, many times.
Him: NO I HAVE NOT!!
Mother: You certainly have, and stop your bellowing, we're in a CAR.
They went another half dozen rounds in that vein, but I wasn't really listening anymore; I was wrestling with the horrifying realization that my father was LYING, not in a joking or kidding way, but screaming like a maniac to try to force his claim down my and my mother's throats. He wasn't lying the way kids do, to avoid punishment or persuade others to grant favors, in fact I couldn't see anything he stood to gain, or any reason at all for what he was doing; he had just, on a whim, decided to toss a belligerent denial at me, and was so determined to make it stick that he was arguing fiercely with my mother and ruining everyone's dinner before we even got into the restaurant. He'd shown himself to be the sort of person who would attack anyone at any time, with no reason and no warning.
Evil, in other words.
I'd never even guessed that adults lied before that very moment; why would they NEED to, when they had all the power? To a small child, adults are godlike figures, and, although they could be arbitrary and cruel, in the way of most gods, the assumption is that adults have moral rightness on their side; I knew that lying was absolutely WRONG, I'd been told that countless times as all children are (the gray area of white lies and such was years away from being explained to me), so if my father lied that meant that HE had done wrong, that, by the only logic I had at my disposal, he was BAD. The more he ranted and raved in contradiction of my mother's unwavering insistence that he HAD been saying that, the worse he appeared in my eyes; even the most troublesome child didn't scream denials at an adult over and over, and that he WAS doing that was putting him into some new zone below anything I'd ever contemplated human beings existing in.
I couldn't tie my own shoelaces yet, but I'd already done a deadly accurate analysis of him, one that it would take many, many years for even the adults who knew him best to catch onto. Knowing his true nature, I had to live under his absolute control for another 20 years; how I ever managed to create a good life for myself after that is a source of constant amazement to me.
Like all evil people, my father didn't just let his true self show ONCE; he did so over and over, not just in general but in that specific way... there were plenty of other times that he viciously denied something objectively inarguable that I'd said. My mother eventually caught on, after about a DECADE (she's no genius), and would say, "Quit contradicting her just for the sake of being contradictory," and he'd argue that he wasn't, launching into full-volume diatribes replete with foul language to try to intimidate her into ceasing the debate (which didn't do him much good, I've gotta give her that). When he couldn't find something suitable in what little I said to him to pull this stunt on, he'd throw out something outrageous, like "There's no cream in cream cheese, they call it that because it spreads like cream" (I only WISH I was making that one up, it's a real-life example), and when I refuted his nonsense he'd be off and running; sadly, it wasn't until he was long gone that I learned that when someone's spoiling for a fight like that the way to thwart them is to ignore them if possible, and, if not, to brush them off with "Whatever," which gives them nothing to argue with.
Looking back, I can take comfort from one thing; from the time I was about 10, I was able to out-argue him... oh, he still "won" because he could tell me to shut up or leave the room, and that's how every such battle ended, but he KNEW he'd been out-argued, and it must have galled him no end that I was smarter and had a quicker mind. I gained something from all that fighting, too; I can out-argue or out-debate ANYONE, because I learned at an early age to instantly review all aspects of an issue and have a lineup of points ready to be tossed out before I begin, while most people don't even have ONE point thoroughly thought out before they start spouting off. I'm guessing that's behind my essay-writing style as well; I had to be sure and check everything from every angle so that my father couldn't blindside me with a question I hadn't prepared an answer for, and to follow ever possible idea out to 10 decimal places to be sure I didn't come out with something wrong that he could pounce on... doesn't that sound like how I blog a topic to death?
There's one unanswered question; no, not "why did he act like that?", because evil people just do what comes naturally to them, the way rabid dogs do... why didn't I quickly revert to the idea of "the parent is in the right" as a normal child would do upon witnessing something that shook their belief in their parent's virtue? A normal kid can see their parents do nearly anything, and be the victim of varieties of abuse too hideous to describe, and STILL believe that their parents are "good," that their actions are proper, and that anything they themselves suffer must be because of their own badness to which the parents are validly responding... why didn't *I* react that way? I honestly don't know; I'm infinitely grateful for it, though.
After writing that last line, the urge hit me to do a search for my father on Google; he has a very unusual last name, so it wouldn't be like with most names, where you find 100 different people, but there was no reason to expect there to be any info online on a random old man. My "urges" are still on target, though, because I found him; he's a professor at a small college now, and has a slew of articles in his area of expertise available at dozens of places online... he's been a busy beaver, apparently. It amuses me that the man who retired from the Navy at 45, claiming he'd never work again, and was instead going to be a real estate wheeler-dealer and investment wizard (both of which he failed at, but not before wiping out a big chunk of my parents' life savings) is working so hard at 70; too bad he didn't use some of that industriousness when he left the Navy, instead of dedicating himself to making my life, and to a lesser extent my mother's life, a living hell. I guess his 2nd wife wouldn't let him sit around doing nothing, or, more likely, the 1/2 of his retirement pay that he gets (my mother gets the other half) plus whatever $ she had wasn't enough for them to live off of, and he had no choice; in either case, at an age when he SHOULD have been able to be retired and living comfortably, through his own poor judgment and stubborn stupidity he's stuck working hard instead of being on permanent golf holiday with a pension and investments to add to his Naval income.
Karma.
:-)
I didn't see much of my father for the first few years of my life, as he was over in Vietnam; as a Navy man, he was of course on a boat, not in the jungle, but he nevertheless considers himself the equal of those vets who were actually in danger, and speaks of those who couldn't re-integrate into society upon their return with contempt, calling them cry-babies and liars who are too lazy to work and so playacting at being mentally ill... aren't people who served in the same war supposed to feel camaraderie? My father never did find it necessary to feel normal emotions about anyone, sigh. Anyways:
Given where we lived when the event of this post occurred, I'd have been 4 or 5. There was a tiny Italian restaurant that we went to regularly, and every time we got close enough to be able to see it, my father'd say the exact same thing; "Look how small it is; it looks like it's just a kitchen, not a whole restaurant." About the 20th time we went there, when he started off with "Look how small it is," I piped up from the back seat with "It looks like it's just a kitchen, not a whole restaurant"; imagine my utter astonishment when he barked "No it doesn't!!" Once the shock faded enough for me to regain the power of speech:
Me: But... but... that's what YOU always say!!
Him: No it's not!!
Me: Yes it is!!
Him: NO IT'S NOT!!
Mother: You know perfectly well that you always say that; where do you THINK she got that line from?
Him: I'VE NEVER SAID THAT!!
Mother: Yes you have, many times.
Him: NO I HAVE NOT!!
Mother: You certainly have, and stop your bellowing, we're in a CAR.
They went another half dozen rounds in that vein, but I wasn't really listening anymore; I was wrestling with the horrifying realization that my father was LYING, not in a joking or kidding way, but screaming like a maniac to try to force his claim down my and my mother's throats. He wasn't lying the way kids do, to avoid punishment or persuade others to grant favors, in fact I couldn't see anything he stood to gain, or any reason at all for what he was doing; he had just, on a whim, decided to toss a belligerent denial at me, and was so determined to make it stick that he was arguing fiercely with my mother and ruining everyone's dinner before we even got into the restaurant. He'd shown himself to be the sort of person who would attack anyone at any time, with no reason and no warning.
Evil, in other words.
I'd never even guessed that adults lied before that very moment; why would they NEED to, when they had all the power? To a small child, adults are godlike figures, and, although they could be arbitrary and cruel, in the way of most gods, the assumption is that adults have moral rightness on their side; I knew that lying was absolutely WRONG, I'd been told that countless times as all children are (the gray area of white lies and such was years away from being explained to me), so if my father lied that meant that HE had done wrong, that, by the only logic I had at my disposal, he was BAD. The more he ranted and raved in contradiction of my mother's unwavering insistence that he HAD been saying that, the worse he appeared in my eyes; even the most troublesome child didn't scream denials at an adult over and over, and that he WAS doing that was putting him into some new zone below anything I'd ever contemplated human beings existing in.
I couldn't tie my own shoelaces yet, but I'd already done a deadly accurate analysis of him, one that it would take many, many years for even the adults who knew him best to catch onto. Knowing his true nature, I had to live under his absolute control for another 20 years; how I ever managed to create a good life for myself after that is a source of constant amazement to me.
Like all evil people, my father didn't just let his true self show ONCE; he did so over and over, not just in general but in that specific way... there were plenty of other times that he viciously denied something objectively inarguable that I'd said. My mother eventually caught on, after about a DECADE (she's no genius), and would say, "Quit contradicting her just for the sake of being contradictory," and he'd argue that he wasn't, launching into full-volume diatribes replete with foul language to try to intimidate her into ceasing the debate (which didn't do him much good, I've gotta give her that). When he couldn't find something suitable in what little I said to him to pull this stunt on, he'd throw out something outrageous, like "There's no cream in cream cheese, they call it that because it spreads like cream" (I only WISH I was making that one up, it's a real-life example), and when I refuted his nonsense he'd be off and running; sadly, it wasn't until he was long gone that I learned that when someone's spoiling for a fight like that the way to thwart them is to ignore them if possible, and, if not, to brush them off with "Whatever," which gives them nothing to argue with.
Looking back, I can take comfort from one thing; from the time I was about 10, I was able to out-argue him... oh, he still "won" because he could tell me to shut up or leave the room, and that's how every such battle ended, but he KNEW he'd been out-argued, and it must have galled him no end that I was smarter and had a quicker mind. I gained something from all that fighting, too; I can out-argue or out-debate ANYONE, because I learned at an early age to instantly review all aspects of an issue and have a lineup of points ready to be tossed out before I begin, while most people don't even have ONE point thoroughly thought out before they start spouting off. I'm guessing that's behind my essay-writing style as well; I had to be sure and check everything from every angle so that my father couldn't blindside me with a question I hadn't prepared an answer for, and to follow ever possible idea out to 10 decimal places to be sure I didn't come out with something wrong that he could pounce on... doesn't that sound like how I blog a topic to death?
There's one unanswered question; no, not "why did he act like that?", because evil people just do what comes naturally to them, the way rabid dogs do... why didn't I quickly revert to the idea of "the parent is in the right" as a normal child would do upon witnessing something that shook their belief in their parent's virtue? A normal kid can see their parents do nearly anything, and be the victim of varieties of abuse too hideous to describe, and STILL believe that their parents are "good," that their actions are proper, and that anything they themselves suffer must be because of their own badness to which the parents are validly responding... why didn't *I* react that way? I honestly don't know; I'm infinitely grateful for it, though.
After writing that last line, the urge hit me to do a search for my father on Google; he has a very unusual last name, so it wouldn't be like with most names, where you find 100 different people, but there was no reason to expect there to be any info online on a random old man. My "urges" are still on target, though, because I found him; he's a professor at a small college now, and has a slew of articles in his area of expertise available at dozens of places online... he's been a busy beaver, apparently. It amuses me that the man who retired from the Navy at 45, claiming he'd never work again, and was instead going to be a real estate wheeler-dealer and investment wizard (both of which he failed at, but not before wiping out a big chunk of my parents' life savings) is working so hard at 70; too bad he didn't use some of that industriousness when he left the Navy, instead of dedicating himself to making my life, and to a lesser extent my mother's life, a living hell. I guess his 2nd wife wouldn't let him sit around doing nothing, or, more likely, the 1/2 of his retirement pay that he gets (my mother gets the other half) plus whatever $ she had wasn't enough for them to live off of, and he had no choice; in either case, at an age when he SHOULD have been able to be retired and living comfortably, through his own poor judgment and stubborn stupidity he's stuck working hard instead of being on permanent golf holiday with a pension and investments to add to his Naval income.
Karma.
:-)
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
The spiritual desert... and a ray of hope
It's been dismayingly long since I've had a spiritual breakthrough; these things don't keep to a schedule, of course, but STILL. A close friend with whom I have a 20-year history of being able to call her whenever she thinks of calling ME commented recently that I'd missed one of my "prompts," which is totally unlike me... can I have burned my perceptive circuits out by pushing too hard?
I did have a brush with karma last week, though, which has made be cautiously optimistic. You might recall the huge epiphany I posted about on 2-20-06 about how we end up favoring the non-virtuous over the virtuous; you might also recall my having said at various times in the past that when you make a major decision or realize something major and are correct in what you realized or decided it apparently releases a big burst of positive energy that brings something positive back to you... something not only big but odd enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck, and that happens FAST, usually within 24 hours. In this case, it only took 12 hours:
The 1st time I checked my eBay account the day after the epiphany, there were 2 new messages. The 1st one was from a seller giving me a 2nd-chance offer at an item I'd been outbid on; that's nothing shocking, but it'd been NINE days since the auction, so it was a little weird. I instantly decided to NOT accept the offer, although I still wanted the item; declining was an instinctive reaction based on nothing I could point to, and that was a little weirder. The 2nd message was from someone whose member name I recognized; I've never had any contact with her, but she shares one of my collection passions, and we've bid against each other many times. At a loss as to why she'd ever contact ME, I opened the message to find the following:
"Hi. Noticed you bid on this ***** too. I found another seller who has them for sale. Even though we may bid against each other, I was excited to find this auction & thought you might be interested too. The item # is: **********."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! Why would she have remembered NINE days later that I'd bid against her in an auction we both lost? Why would she have CARED, given that I'm not only a total stranger but a rival as well? Whatever possessed her to take time out of her life to contact me and do me this favor? (It was a BIG favor, too, because I was able to get the item for less than a 1/3 of what the original seller sent me the 2nd chance offer for.) How is it POSSIBLE that both she and the seller just happened to think of ME over a week after the auction we were all involved in? Just as eerie; what made me not take the seller's offer when I was perfectly willing to buy that item at that price... can you imagine if I'd used the 2nd chance offer and then discovered when I opened the next message that I could have gotten it wildly cheaper? When a freaky synchronicity, not to mention a psychic episode, happens right on top of a major epiphany, there's only one explanation; karma.
As exciting as that was, there's nothing new about it; I'm thrilled with both my wildly enhanced understanding of human nature and my new collectible, but I'm getting desperate to make some spiritual progress... October was the last month that I really produced anything substantial, which is GRIM. I got unspeakably exhausted by the end of last year, and then the holiday season added its own problems, and... I fell out of the groove, focusing instead on how I'd get enough sleep to keep functioning. Since I started blogging on alternate days, I've caught up alot on both sleep and getting things done, but have been too distracted by trying to do all my projects at once, cleaning endlessly for all the company that's been here, and my mother's announcement of her breast cancer, to have ANY really deep thoughts (aside from the one epiphany), much less any spiritual ones. The last time I said that in a post was 9-28-05... and the following month was a good one, so hopefully I'll get a similar boost this time.
To end this post on a positive note, here's a marital moment my husband and I had a couple of days ago; in shuffling things around in my closet, I discovered a shirt that's too small for me to wear anymore... I tried it on to be sure, and, although it's stretchy, it's just too skimpy for me now, especially since my boobs have gotten bigger (it's genetic for women in my family to gain a cup size in their late 30's/early 40's, I did NOT get a boob job). I wandered down the hall to the kitchen, where my husband was, to express my dismay at having to give up a really cute shirt, and his response was to get all bug-eyed and start panting; mind you, I was in sweatpants, and the shirt has long sleeves, so there was no skin showing... the only different thing about my appearance from the way he sees me every day was the snugness of the shirt. I made some exasperated comment about his behavior, and he, apparently thinking I was implying that he was faking, lifted his shirt away from his groin area to reveal that he was... er, NOT faking his excitement. When I called him a filthy creature for having such a ridiculous over-reaction, he pointed out that for a couple our age, who've been together for as long as we have, to have the man still so enamored of his wife that he's THAT stimulated by something so trivial is pretty impressive. He's right, of course; oh, he's still a pig, lol, but he's right. I wonder if eHarmony.com could've predicted THAT? ;-)
I did have a brush with karma last week, though, which has made be cautiously optimistic. You might recall the huge epiphany I posted about on 2-20-06 about how we end up favoring the non-virtuous over the virtuous; you might also recall my having said at various times in the past that when you make a major decision or realize something major and are correct in what you realized or decided it apparently releases a big burst of positive energy that brings something positive back to you... something not only big but odd enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck, and that happens FAST, usually within 24 hours. In this case, it only took 12 hours:
The 1st time I checked my eBay account the day after the epiphany, there were 2 new messages. The 1st one was from a seller giving me a 2nd-chance offer at an item I'd been outbid on; that's nothing shocking, but it'd been NINE days since the auction, so it was a little weird. I instantly decided to NOT accept the offer, although I still wanted the item; declining was an instinctive reaction based on nothing I could point to, and that was a little weirder. The 2nd message was from someone whose member name I recognized; I've never had any contact with her, but she shares one of my collection passions, and we've bid against each other many times. At a loss as to why she'd ever contact ME, I opened the message to find the following:
"Hi. Noticed you bid on this ***** too. I found another seller who has them for sale. Even though we may bid against each other, I was excited to find this auction & thought you might be interested too. The item # is: **********."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!! Why would she have remembered NINE days later that I'd bid against her in an auction we both lost? Why would she have CARED, given that I'm not only a total stranger but a rival as well? Whatever possessed her to take time out of her life to contact me and do me this favor? (It was a BIG favor, too, because I was able to get the item for less than a 1/3 of what the original seller sent me the 2nd chance offer for.) How is it POSSIBLE that both she and the seller just happened to think of ME over a week after the auction we were all involved in? Just as eerie; what made me not take the seller's offer when I was perfectly willing to buy that item at that price... can you imagine if I'd used the 2nd chance offer and then discovered when I opened the next message that I could have gotten it wildly cheaper? When a freaky synchronicity, not to mention a psychic episode, happens right on top of a major epiphany, there's only one explanation; karma.
As exciting as that was, there's nothing new about it; I'm thrilled with both my wildly enhanced understanding of human nature and my new collectible, but I'm getting desperate to make some spiritual progress... October was the last month that I really produced anything substantial, which is GRIM. I got unspeakably exhausted by the end of last year, and then the holiday season added its own problems, and... I fell out of the groove, focusing instead on how I'd get enough sleep to keep functioning. Since I started blogging on alternate days, I've caught up alot on both sleep and getting things done, but have been too distracted by trying to do all my projects at once, cleaning endlessly for all the company that's been here, and my mother's announcement of her breast cancer, to have ANY really deep thoughts (aside from the one epiphany), much less any spiritual ones. The last time I said that in a post was 9-28-05... and the following month was a good one, so hopefully I'll get a similar boost this time.
To end this post on a positive note, here's a marital moment my husband and I had a couple of days ago; in shuffling things around in my closet, I discovered a shirt that's too small for me to wear anymore... I tried it on to be sure, and, although it's stretchy, it's just too skimpy for me now, especially since my boobs have gotten bigger (it's genetic for women in my family to gain a cup size in their late 30's/early 40's, I did NOT get a boob job). I wandered down the hall to the kitchen, where my husband was, to express my dismay at having to give up a really cute shirt, and his response was to get all bug-eyed and start panting; mind you, I was in sweatpants, and the shirt has long sleeves, so there was no skin showing... the only different thing about my appearance from the way he sees me every day was the snugness of the shirt. I made some exasperated comment about his behavior, and he, apparently thinking I was implying that he was faking, lifted his shirt away from his groin area to reveal that he was... er, NOT faking his excitement. When I called him a filthy creature for having such a ridiculous over-reaction, he pointed out that for a couple our age, who've been together for as long as we have, to have the man still so enamored of his wife that he's THAT stimulated by something so trivial is pretty impressive. He's right, of course; oh, he's still a pig, lol, but he's right. I wonder if eHarmony.com could've predicted THAT? ;-)
Monday, February 06, 2006
The 2nd cutest sidebar doodad EVER
Karma Kitty is still the cutest, but if you're observant you've noticed something at the top of my sidebar that comes close; his name is Neko, and you may have seen him before, as there's an all-white version of him in several popular animated gifs... he's not a gif, though, he's a dazzling example of DHTML (the "D" stands for "dynamic"). Click on him, and then move your cursor away; he'll follow it in any direction, OVER anything on the screen. When you pause, he'll stop by your cursor, at which point he might: scratch his ear with his hind leg, scratch an imaginary wall to the left or right, scratch in front of himself, or, VERY rarely, scratch behind himself. He'll do 0, 1 or 2 of these things, at random, and take a random amount of time in between them and in doing them collectively... after which he yawns, lays down and goes to sleep, with z's floating over him and his little sides moving in and out as he "breathes." When you move the cursor again, he shows a "startled" reaction (his tail goes up and he gets that halo of tiny lines around his head, plus he sits up if he was laying down) and runs after it. Occasionally, though, he'll run for the bottom left corner of the screen, and do his little routine down there; if you move the cursor some more, usually he'll run back at it, but not always... very catlike. Moving the cursor over onto your menu or scroll bar will also make him run for the corner; when you return to the regular screen area, he'll come back. If he's in his "home spot" and you reduce the size of the screen, he won't move along with the rest of the sidebar, but will soon reappear at the edge of the screen as he runs back to his area; if you re-widen the screen, he'll be left behind again, but will quickly return to his spot. To make him go to his area and settle down there when he's running around, just click on him; if you can time a click on him as he's running back, he'll return to cursor chasing.
Have you tried him out yet? Go ahead-I'll wait. :-)
Isn't he FUN? When I 1st saw him, I thought he was an animated gif that the blogger whose site I was on had somehow managed to put in the upper left of his page, overlapping the Blogger logo; I pulled up the source code and looked for the gif, so that I could get what I assumed was code to put stuff in that corner, but I couldn't find it. It was LATE, and I needed to get ready for bed, so I asked my husband (who wasn't doing anything in particular) to search the code for whatever page it was calling that had the gif on it, and thus the command(s) I wanted; with his usual sniveling and ill grace, he complied... and then tried to pretend he didn't know HOW, so I had to tell Mr. High Tech to do a search for "http" in the source code and check each URL he found.
When I came back from washing up, he had a surprise for me; the kitty wasn't a gif, it was a script doing something slick with DHTML... and then he showed me how it worked, and with a shriek of delight I jumped in and started madly playing with all the versions available at the home page for the Neko game
http://www.webneko.net/
Then, I did something VERY hard; I ignored my rampant desire to try installing him, bookmarked the page and went to bed... and if you're a long-time reader, you know how passionately I love my blog doodads, so you should be duly impressed. I went right to work on it as soon as I got up, of course; my 1st step was to just stick the code in with no attempts to customize it, to see if it'd work with my template... I was relieved to see that it did. Then, I put the code in the sidebar part of the template, rather than after the body tag as the website said to, to see if it would still work; it did, but unfortunately Neko still came out at the upper left corner of the page rather than in the sidebar. I took the h1 references out of the code, thinking it was this that might be making it go up there; no change in Neko, but a link to the website appeared in the sidebar. I tried to put him in an iframe; I got a rectangle of gibberish. Out of ideas, I emailed the programmer who'd created the game; he replied promptly, and told me that he had Neko on the right-hand side of this site
http://procrastinators.org
and that if I could adapt the code he had there for my sidebar I was welcome to use it... but that it wasn't something I could just copy and paste. My husband, who knows some programming, looked at the code and said that it seemed like it was feeding info to the script, because (as I'd already verified) the variables being used didn't appear elsewhere in the source code; this was good, because it meant that I didn't have to try to define the variables in my template, which could cause possible conflicts with other stuff. He also told me, and this was the pivotal point, that the #'s in the code were coordinates counted down from the top of the screen and in from the right, so I should be able to plug my own #'s in and get the kitty down in the sidebar (rather than in the corner); I copied the extra bit of code, stuck it in, put in my best guess for how many pixels down and in I needed to go to get Neko right on top of my sidebar, republished, refreshed, and... PERFECT!! :-)
Flushed with victory, I added a line of code to give usage instructions, so people wouldn't make the mistake *I* did of thinking it was a gif rather than a game; THAT came out perfect the 1st time too, scarily enough... I won't get used to it, of course, but it was nice. After that, all I had to do was little tweaks; I altered the wording to make it shorter, then played with the coordinates until Neko was centered over the instructions and as close as possible to being right on top of them so that people would grasp that they were "his"... and then I was done.
In case he uses the URL I sent him and visits my blog; thanks to ace programmer Greg Bell, both for creating this adorable version of Neko and for writing back to me on a Sunday and being friendly and helpful... you ROCK!!
I hope you all enjoy playing with Neko; be sure and play with Karma Kitty too, so we don't have a cat fight. ;-)
Have you tried him out yet? Go ahead-I'll wait. :-)
Isn't he FUN? When I 1st saw him, I thought he was an animated gif that the blogger whose site I was on had somehow managed to put in the upper left of his page, overlapping the Blogger logo; I pulled up the source code and looked for the gif, so that I could get what I assumed was code to put stuff in that corner, but I couldn't find it. It was LATE, and I needed to get ready for bed, so I asked my husband (who wasn't doing anything in particular) to search the code for whatever page it was calling that had the gif on it, and thus the command(s) I wanted; with his usual sniveling and ill grace, he complied... and then tried to pretend he didn't know HOW, so I had to tell Mr. High Tech to do a search for "http" in the source code and check each URL he found.
When I came back from washing up, he had a surprise for me; the kitty wasn't a gif, it was a script doing something slick with DHTML... and then he showed me how it worked, and with a shriek of delight I jumped in and started madly playing with all the versions available at the home page for the Neko game
http://www.webneko.net/
Then, I did something VERY hard; I ignored my rampant desire to try installing him, bookmarked the page and went to bed... and if you're a long-time reader, you know how passionately I love my blog doodads, so you should be duly impressed. I went right to work on it as soon as I got up, of course; my 1st step was to just stick the code in with no attempts to customize it, to see if it'd work with my template... I was relieved to see that it did. Then, I put the code in the sidebar part of the template, rather than after the body tag as the website said to, to see if it would still work; it did, but unfortunately Neko still came out at the upper left corner of the page rather than in the sidebar. I took the h1 references out of the code, thinking it was this that might be making it go up there; no change in Neko, but a link to the website appeared in the sidebar. I tried to put him in an iframe; I got a rectangle of gibberish. Out of ideas, I emailed the programmer who'd created the game; he replied promptly, and told me that he had Neko on the right-hand side of this site
http://procrastinators.org
and that if I could adapt the code he had there for my sidebar I was welcome to use it... but that it wasn't something I could just copy and paste. My husband, who knows some programming, looked at the code and said that it seemed like it was feeding info to the script, because (as I'd already verified) the variables being used didn't appear elsewhere in the source code; this was good, because it meant that I didn't have to try to define the variables in my template, which could cause possible conflicts with other stuff. He also told me, and this was the pivotal point, that the #'s in the code were coordinates counted down from the top of the screen and in from the right, so I should be able to plug my own #'s in and get the kitty down in the sidebar (rather than in the corner); I copied the extra bit of code, stuck it in, put in my best guess for how many pixels down and in I needed to go to get Neko right on top of my sidebar, republished, refreshed, and... PERFECT!! :-)
Flushed with victory, I added a line of code to give usage instructions, so people wouldn't make the mistake *I* did of thinking it was a gif rather than a game; THAT came out perfect the 1st time too, scarily enough... I won't get used to it, of course, but it was nice. After that, all I had to do was little tweaks; I altered the wording to make it shorter, then played with the coordinates until Neko was centered over the instructions and as close as possible to being right on top of them so that people would grasp that they were "his"... and then I was done.
In case he uses the URL I sent him and visits my blog; thanks to ace programmer Greg Bell, both for creating this adorable version of Neko and for writing back to me on a Sunday and being friendly and helpful... you ROCK!!
I hope you all enjoy playing with Neko; be sure and play with Karma Kitty too, so we don't have a cat fight. ;-)
