Thought Box

You all likely know that I will be getting married in March..  That means you should click the image below and learn a little more about the wedding and my wonderful fiancée!   You’ll find a blog, photo galleries, and information on travel and most anything else you’d wanna know.

Allow me to introduce you to the world of LARPing:

For the uninitiated, LARPing is Live Action Role-Playing.  Think Dungeons and Dragons, but in real life. 

My first interaction with the LARP community occurred when I attended a gaming convention in Milwaukee at the innocent age of sixteen…  After a fairly epic win in the Nuclear RISK tournament (it’s a variant of the standard RISK game you either love or hate – and I’m leaning towards hate right now..), I headed for a restaurant outside the convention center for lunch and was almost immediately surrounded by a bunch of idiots dressed like vampires – covered in fake blood and tattered clothing.  My naive and immediate response was, “Meh, cosplay idiots are getting in my way…”   I then went back to whatever conversation I was having (possibly about the creepy, hyper-realistic statue of a security guard inside the convention center) only to be shocked back to attention by some feminine screaming coming from behind me.  The vampires weren’t just dressed like idiots, they were attacking someone!

The real peculiarity came when I noticed that they were talking to the person they were attacking…  Almost giving instructions..  Kind of like you imagine pro-wrestlers tell each other, “Ok, now I want you to body slam me, and I’m going to kick-out when you try to cover me”.  I immediately sensed that the woman wasn’t in danger (probably tipped off by the Victorian age attire and super nerdy glasses), but my Creep-o-Meter was off the charts!  One of my buddies quickly explained what was going on (note: it is ALWAYS good to have one of those friends who knows something about everything weird and nerdy – they are some of the most useful people to have around) so we wouldn’t freak out too much, and we went on our way.  Creeped out.

Oh, and the best possible thing happened after that!  About a block away was another convention center… with a Christian something something Convention going on…  And the LARPing was happening between that convention center and all the hotels.  FTW

My experience aside, apparently this LARP stuff is becoming more and more popular; or perhaps it has always been a niche activity?  We rarely think Civil War re-enactments are the weirdest thing ever, but those are essentially LARPs, right?  I mean, Bulgaria had a national LARPing event in 2008, so maybe that validates it a little?

LARPing has, at the very least, reached the level of popularity that they’re making a movie about it: enter Unicorn City FTW!  (DISCLAIMER: yes, I know the producer of the movie… yes, that is a DigiCert t-shirt in the first shot and it’s sponsored by them…  but I do really think it looks like a funny movie!) Here’s a snippet from the press release:

UNICORN CITY is the story of gamers who move to the mountains to live out their fantasy lives. It is a loose adaptation of Don Quixote set in modern times and features Live Action Role Playing (LARP) culture in a light but tender hearted romantic comedy.

Check out the trailer:

It may not be for everyone (definitely not me), but come on - we can all learn something awesome from LARPing, right?  In mean, this young man has learned something useful – the “Magic Missile” spell!

I tried a new WordPress theme a few months ago and there were aspects of it I really liked, though I needed to dig deep and fix some php code…  Well, those who know me well know how wonderful of a programmer I can be (meaning I’m terrible), so I never really got the gumption to do something about it…  As a last straw, Aaronius commented on my last post that the comment fields were busted and didn’t give direction on what you were supposed to put in each field..  Welp, that’s all the patience I had for a theme that needed some major rework.

To remedy the situation, I searched far and wide for another theme that I could implement w/o a ton of work.  I finally found the current one (goes by the name of Scarlett?) and liked it enough to spend a couple hours tweaking and edited php at a level I feel comfortable with.  So, for you RSS folks who aren’t actually at the site, here’s a peak at what we’re looking at off to the left…

One of the major annoyances I’ve come across in the last year w/ a lot of the WordPress themes I find available is that they often include a bunch of junk code in the footer that allows the designer to link to some trashy websites and increase their SEO by hijacking my footer.  I’m all for giving credit to the designer or website I’m pulling the theme from, but I’m not about to let some doofus link to porn or some other inappropriate stuff using my outward facing journal of sorts.  I did a quick search and found some help here.  Essentially, this guy suggests putting some finder comments in your Main Index Template, refreshing your page in another tab/window, and then copying the code between the finder comments to paste into your footer.php file.

The process is fairly simple, but with a more complex theme like mine I couldn’t simply copy/paste the code from the page source like the link suggests..  Since I have a custom footer w/ an about me, Twitter feed, and Flickr feed I had to adjust the code I found in the page source w/ a php injection and then modify the remainder from there.  Not really a huge deal, but it took my feeble php skills a little while to remember how exactly to do a php injection properly.  Ick!

I’ve also done some simple stuff like getting the logo changed to the name of my blog, updating the top menu bar, getting the sexy flash tag cloud built out and modified, and setting images for the moving carousel of posts at the top.  I don’t know how much more tweaking I will do, but I feel fairly comfortable with it now.  Hopefully this is a little nicer and everyone approves..  Functionality is more important than appearance, however, so let me know if you see something!