Watching Clannad makes me wish I wasn’t such an ass in high school. For me, that’s where the fantasy in Clannad lies, not the cute girls. I really don’t have this urge to protect or rape the girls of Clannad as the prevailing Pavlovian “tastes great!” vs. “less filling!” response mechanism regarding moe goes on twitter. One appealing wish in the show is how rewarding it can be to help somebody, that the person will accept the help. They might make you weed their entire lawn first, but they’ll take the help you offer. The girls in the show just make it easier to believe that some dude would go through all that trouble. There’s just no way I’d buy it if Tomoya took it upon himself to break his back clearing the weeds from around Kotomi’s house if Kotomi was a dude on the basketball team. In real life, helping people is a bit more complicated, requiring something of a spine, will power, determination, taking more than a thought to count.

Back in high school, I really didn’t go out of my way to help anyone, which I regret to some degree and Clannad feeds off of that wistful regret. The wish being fulfilled? That I’m not a selfish individual that only cares about himself. Of course that’s just a fantasy. I don’t have the amount of concern about my friends that these characters have. Sure, when stuff was going down I’d feel for my friends or if they were moving I’d help, but like I don’t think I’d weed and re-sod their lawns for them just to cheer them up. I guess that’s part of what appeals to me about Clannad is it makes me feel like I would actually be that thoughtful about someone else’s problems.

That’s not why I watched Clannad. It’s funny and I like sappy feel good stories where the “good” things in life matter. It’s years and years of watching Little House on the Prairie after school as a little kid tainting my sensibilities.

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On Wednesday my blog was hacked. It wasn’t a big deal, more of an annoyance, but it could have been worse (or it is in fact much worse and I just don’t know it yet). To get back online I deleted and then re-uploaded my WordPress files via ftp. It was faster than trying to hunt down which files may have been altered. After that I took a look at the MySQL database to see if there were any extra tables and checked to see if any users were added to the users table. All clear, but also used the WordPress Exploit Scanner to take a look and was clear too. Hopefully, that’s the end of the hack.

I’ve been good about keeping my WordPress installation up to date, which is important in keeping your site safe. With WordPress 2.8 there’s really no excuse not to since it’s a one button push operation. Just a minute ago I updated. It took thirty seconds to upgrade to 2.8.1. Unfortunately, I was lazy with changing passwords every so often and had grown lax with scanning my PC for malicious ware — as an uneducated guess, this is how I got hacked. Full deep scans have since been done. Thanks to Gargron for reminding me over Twitter to change the database password as well as the ftp and blog admin passwords.

If anyone knows what else I should do, please let me know.

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The content section of the front page does away with a lot of the meta data. Just a picture and the title. Hopefully, it works out.

The theme was made with the Hybrid theme framework. It took a little time to get used to working with a framework because it does things a little differently. Like instead of deleting a call to an element in the template files, you add code to a function file to ignore an element. At first it was weird doing it that way, but when I realized I might have to do it on three or more page templates, it works out being better, especially since I can see myself toggling things on/off.

So here’s Dark Canti. My first theme.

Anyway, it’s Memorial Day, a holiday, but I’m not going to a barbecue or the beach. I’m off to work.

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Instead of making new content, I decided to rearrange old content. Spring inspires a change. The last two themes I had used paper texture and grunge style, so decided to go with no texture and minimal decoration. Load time should be a lot better, if my host server is running well.

When I first saw this theme it reminded me a little of Eureka Seven, mainly because of the bold use of arial, but now that I’ve done an awful job of cluttering it up, it looks less so.

This theme looks messed up in IE6. Then again, almost every theme hates IE6. Anyway, to the 6% who still use IE6, sorry about the mess.

Edit: Reverted back to Sketch’d.

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Instead of packing for Otakon and getting a good night sleep so that I don’t crash too early, I decided to install a new theme for HappySoda. Of course, it’s never a one button press operation. It’s 2AM. I started at 10pm. Still not done, the links and archive pages need some code to work how they did on my previous theme, so for now those are down. Search page is a mess too.

One of the widgets I wanted to install in the previous theme, but didn’t have the room since there wasn’t a footer, was Community Cloud. Basically, if you comment here the plug-in puts your online name and site for people to click. It’s sorted to appear randomly. Even if it winds up being useless, it at least does provide some linkage until I get the blogroll page straightened out. Check it out in the footer.

I swear blog maintenance itself is an obsession sometimes. I meant to shoot Ringo before leaving. Oh well.

Anyway, I’m probably going to skip taking a lot of pictures or doing any reporting down at Otakon, even if I am setup with Twitter. There’s so many people doing reportage that it doesn’t feel special to do it, so I’ll spare myself the hassle. Instead, I’ll see how fast I can spend the bag of loose change I cashed in for $213.52 this morning. Something tells me I need a Lucky Star coaster set.

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MAX Magazine

MAX Magazine from Mexico continues to put one of the figures I reviewed in their magazine. Here are some of past and upcoming images of the pages.

HappySoda with 9rules

I’m kind of surprised that 9rules accepted this blog, whose biggest feature is pictures of 24cm tall women made of polyvinyl chloride. Seems the site earned a reaction from the 9rules crew when reviewing it. I was listening to that site review stream cast and had no idea they were talking about HappySoda. I wish I had stream window up instead of minimized, seeing Tyme’s (one of the 9rulers) reaction to the page loading up would have been priceless or make me want to bury my head.^^;

Actually quite a few anime blogs were accepted by 9rules. Seaslugteam has the first list and the link above also shows that Drastic and Cruel Angel Thesis made it as well.

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There’s still a list of stuff I have to do to get this new theme up to what I want, such as what to do with the Tag Cloud, put it on a separate page, stick in the archive, or sidebar it? Hell, the default Tag Cloud widget doesn’t show up right. I want to try and figure it out, even if that’s not the way I’m going to go.

The first five or six months that I had tags on my blog, hardly anyone clicked on tags, but once they became a standard part of WordPress, I think bloggers that didn’t use them began to understand the benefit of tags and started using them as a way to dig through a site. I am allergic to sidebars that stretch on to infinity tough, so I wonder if I can get away with removing category links from the sidebar. The “Figure Review” category link gets a lot of action.

Still undecided is the RSS feeds to your sites. Based on my outgoing stats, I don’t think they drove much traffic to anyone. Most outgoing actions were prompted by links in comments than the RSS feeds. I am aware of their value for search engines though, so I think I’ll put them on their own page. The benefit there is being able to display the feed to more of you…might go the SimplePie route for that, but I can smell that will be a hassle for the PHP challenged.

Anyway, what do you think about this theme?

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• WordPress 2.1.3 to 2.3.1
• Theme: Tarski 1.3 to Tarski 2.0.4
• Flickr Photo Gallery 0.91 to 0.93.2
• Imported Ultimate Tag Warrior tags into the native WordPress tag system

The only thing that doesn’t work right anymore is the Comvatar plug-in. I’m pretty sure that’s because of the upgrade to Tarski rather than the upgrade of WordPress as the Comvatars still show up everywhere they’re supposed to except for in the actual comments themselves. I did a quick switch to some Sandbox themes and the Comvatars show up in the comment, so it’s a Tarski thing. I’m reluctant to leave Tarski behind as it is an extremely well supported theme. I’ve customized my Tarksi theme a bit and even jumping 8 or 9 releases, most of my customizations have remained intact, save for the tag cloud which should be fixed with available plugins and the problem with the comvatars.

Or I could just take this opportunity to start with a new theme.

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