Design

One of the reasons I'm on Blogger rather than Wordpress is that I love the back end. It's high-contrast and the writing area for posts is big and there are fewer buttons.

I like simple. I like clean. For this blog, I don't need the advanced design and media that come with Wordpress, because all I'm doing is blogging. Wordpress is where I work, Blogger is where I play.

I didn't leave everything completely default, though. I have pages - all there visible at the top - because I do things and you can give me money for them. In my sidebar I have a short bio and a pic because it tells you who you are reading, and a list of links to find me on those other sites that I regularly use, and a place to subscribe by email or publicly recommend my blog. I have my archives, neatly in drop-downs, so that you can navigate. I have a cloud of tags, to give you another way to navigate and also because it amuses me greatly that the tag 'Seneca Crane's beard' has more than one post attached to it.

I have a blogroll of other sites to check out, because some of my friends and family also have internet presences and that's neat. I also have the World Community Grid square there, because that's a neat project that more people should be involved in.

Most of the blog is black and white, because that's easy to read, and I like easy to read and simple. The background is yellow because I wanted some colour, and yellow is cheerful. I also picked yellow because I looked up some stuff on colour-blindness and it looks reasonably similar no matter what kind of colour-blindness one has. That was a thought, because my dad is colour-blind and I'm ridiculously sentimental.

Sometimes design is about more than just branding, or other factors, like wanting it no-fuss, will inform branding and design decisions. For me, it was important that these decisions be made deliberately, because I didn't want to put something together only to change it later when I thought of something better.

Labyrinthine

I had, until tonight, never watched Labyrinth. I've read things about it, seen meta discussions of it, and been subjected to pictures of David Bowie's hair from it, but I had not seen the thing itself.

Since it's rather ridiculously late at night, I figured I may as well liveblog it. And by 'liveblog' I mean 'write it up and the queue it for like three weeks from now in case I am lacking in bloggable ideas.'

Seven minutes in, and Sarah is really ridiculously melodramatic. She makes me cringe. Liked the transition in the garden with setting jarring stuff, though.

The goblins are amazingly adorable.

David Bowie's eyebrows are amazing, and I think it's Sarah's voice that I hate.

The Labyrinth itself is really, really neat.

Something I love about the visual medium more than the written one is clothes. Specifically, David Bowie's coat. But also Seneca Crane's beard. Reading about gaudy things and internalizing 'okay, yes, ridiculous and blingy and wasteful' and seeing absurd and fabulous are different things.

It's like the problem of translating Lord of the Rings to film: long passages of the books are encompassed in a single long shot of New Zealand. As a corollary to that, an accurate description of David Bowie's coat would most likely be boring and overdone and ruin the pacing of the story. The coat may be as awesome as the eyebrows.

I had been worried, momentarily, that at the end she would be required in proper bildungsroman fashion to leave childish things like goblins behind at the end of her journey. The dance party is excellent. I am glad she left David Bowie's creepy love/possession thing behind, though.

Dance Magic is possibly my new favourite song.

The Hunger Games

So, I just saw The Hunger Games tonight, but I'm delaying this post because, well, there are spoilers, and I don't want to ruin it for anyone who wants to see it in theatres still.