wumpuses

Lady Island, when I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 7th grade, I did not ask myself, “Where do I begin to learn the difference between THACO and AC?” I asked myself, how much of my life will I devote to Dungeons & Dragons so that I may become the most excellent Dungeon Master who ever lived? To what stark end will I fling my immortal soul in pursuit of the everlasting game, that last bastion of fantasy to which we cling in the face of modern mundanity? Will I devote countless undergraduate hours to designing worlds with my role-playing kindred into the wee hours of the morning? Will I go to grad school to write my Masters thesis on the now-defunct Dragon Magazine and the powerful influence of role-playing games on the venerable print publishing industry?

WordPress can be within your grasp if you are willing to devote yourself to it fully, in the same way a fresh box of Twinkies beckons to you from a dark corner of your cupboard. Both have the potential to widen your midsection, unless of course you do a lot of cocaine, like I do.

If I were you, Lady Island, I would take it upon myself to have a specific goal in mind. Let’s say we were to create a unicorn website for your glittered-covered colleague, Cat. We would start by creating HTML templates that represent all possible layouts for her unicorn website, such as the landing page, where there are lots of unicorns grazing in a field of daisies, and the inner page, where we depict a single unicorn atop which sits a fair maiden. Then of course there are the other inner pages that are full of LOLcat spam and blinking banner ads. Once we had all of these HTML templates complete, we would be ready to transfer the markup to WordPress.

Of course, knowing HTML & CSS is only 1/2 of the magical, rainbow-colored journey that is constructing http://www.cats-unicorn-happiness.com. You also need to be familiar with basic PHP, which is what WordPress is primarily written in. You would go to WordPress.org—the website that hosts the open source WordPress software package, and download it. (WordPress.com—the commercial website that hosts blogs—is for losers.)

Using WAMP or a similar local development environment, you would set up WordPress on your computer (or if you don’t know what that means, just open a cheap hosting account and do it there). Then you can create a copy of the theme TwentyTen, (found in wp-content/themes/) or a similar theme you like which you can download from anywhere, and begin the arduous process of transferring the markup from your HTML templates to your theme.

Of course like most things in life, this is far more complicated than I’ve made it seem. However, WordPress.org’s “Codex” is an excellent guide for WordPress documentation. I personally prefer Googling anything and everything I don’t know. For example, just last weekend I learned exactly how many seconds it takes to suffocate someone to death with a turkey oven bag. 

Also, let’s not forget the three dashing young fellows upstairs who could help you every step of the way. 

What is the equal to treachery, that act so complete in its sincerity that the bard Dante, in his Romantic wisdom, consigned the greatest traitors in history—Judas Ischariot, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Gaius Cassius Longinus—to the lowest circle of Hell, beneath the frozen river Cocytus in the very maw of Satan to be chewed on for all eternity?

Why, my dear Andrew Rohman, it is that one act which the Elizabethans had reserved for God himself—succinctly, vindicta mihi—and for which the Hebrew gnosticists admired the awesome character of the Old Testament Demiurge, that leveler of worlds and indiscriminate planet flusher. It is that act for which a man is at last consumed by and at once made equal to his passions, and under the power of which he denies himself everything except his commitment to the administration of justice, and the settling of a score, and the execution of his enemy’s wrongs. It is that final utterance at the edge of language, where the uselessness of words is ultimately revealed as a nakedness and terribleness of indescribable despair. For there is nothing that so thoroughly transforms the whole being of a man into a force of intention than vengeance.

And there, fair Reverend, you will find the former judge and aggreived father Hieronomo, who at the end of The Spanish Tragedy, sits incarcerated by the authorities, after he has at last slain his enemies to avenge his son’s death.

KING

Fetch forth the tortures.
Traitor as thou art, I’ll make thee tell.

HIERONOMO

                 Indeed,
Thou may’st torment me, as his wretched son
Hath done in murdering my Horatio,
[But] despite all thy threats,
Pleased with their deaths, and eased with their revenge,
First take my tongue, and afterwards my heart.

[He bites out his tongue.]

Merry Christmas dear sir, and a Happy New Year. 

oh the places i’ve been

horror unchecked

(Source: caraobrien)

We are talking about betrayal, Andrew Rohman. Not deceit; not wickedness of a general kind, no, but unadulterated, calculated malice, the expert assassination of trust in the pursuit of personal gain. For in betrayal there is sincerity in its purest form, nothing less than premeditated evil, the perversion of loyalty and the cockroach of dispensation wriggling through an otherwise uncorrupt dish of just des(s)erts.

If you are a person with eyeballs who was not born in 1998, you have seen the epic space opera known as Star Wars. Astonishingly, this cannot be said of Perri Kinsman. Nevertheless, George Lucas, infamous ruiner of childhoods, directed the creation of the Star Wars prequels with maleficent glee, slaughtering Jedi via lowly stormtroopers, giving Sith Lords names like “Count Dooku,” defenestrating Samuel L. Jackson, and transforming Darth Vader into a weepy, fist-shaking Frankenstein clown. Our outrage is not the result of his incompetence, good honorable Reverend, no. Nor is it the result of his [REDACTED] turpitude. Our vitriol stems from George Lucas’ treachery because in his treachery there is sincerity, a deliberate shatting upon our loyalty to his vision of a “galaxy far, far away” so titanic, so insidious, that even a constipated Jabba the Hutt would be appalled.

Alas, Andrew Rohman, how we have endured such indignities in our travails. For the universe to permit sincerity only in betrayal is like a midi-chlorian virgin birth, or the possibility of Jar Jar Binks. What have we left but betrayal after betrayal as Hollywood remakes everything we held dear in our wee years, from Tron to Charlie & the Chocolate Factory?

So good of you to ask…

oh the places i’ve been