Saturday, November 16th 2002

I've been very pleased with how narrow my site looked on high resolution computers. That is now fixed.

Overall, I think the (slightly) new look adds a lot to the site. As you can see, I now have a couple new mini-sections on the left below the navigation. I've added a quote, which I will update every so often, and five "of the Month" thingies (woah, watch out for that techie jargon). All of those links on the left are worth serious looking in to if you are at all interested in their corresponding section.

• Saying that, I must also say that Spirited Away is a far better movie than you think. It sunk the Titanic for a very good reason.
• The Silmarillion was just plain amazing. Tolkien could have turned any 20 to 40 pages of that in to an epic on par with The Lord of the Rings on it's own.
• The musician Tweaker (a name which referes to the idea of tweaking music until it's just right over a long period of time) has created some fantastic music. The song Linoleum I can't help but sing along with whenever I hear it, and it's a general rule with me that I don't sing along with anything, because I'm an awful singer, and I don't like to hear me, but with this song I just can't help it. The song Microsize Boy I would sing along with if I knew all the words, but that's okay, because the voice distortion on that song is awesome. Oh, and both of those songs are extremely different. different.
• As for John Howe, he's just an incredible painter of Tolkien's works.
• Errant Story is the new webcomic from Michael Poe, the creator of Exploitation Now. Near the end of the story-line (Yes, it actually gained a story-line after a while. A cool one, too.) EN became a very cool story-driven strip, and it looks like that's how ES is going to start. Now, sure, I liked the old EN strips, but the last couple months of it I loved. Errant Story could be damn cool (in fact I already love it). Not to mention that during the period that Poe worked on Exploitation Now he's become an awesome artist.
   

Sunday, November 10th 2002

Well, it's been a while since I've posted any of my music, and whether or not today changes that is up to you. It's more of an experiment, really, but I know of at least one person who might be interested in it, so I figured, what the hell. It's an Ogg Vorbis file, but don't worry, Winamp should play it just fine. I think Winamp has had support for Ogg for quite some time now, so if your copy of Winamp can't play it, you'd better go download a new version. Check out my "song" here.

Also, I've finally gotten around to updating DpBrowser Start (the main updates being the additions to the Online Comics section, and the new J.R.R. Tolkien section). I'll be doing some more updating, and restructuring of it soon. I should also soon have an ad-free version available (damn, those pop-ups are annoying).

In the mean time, if you don't want to see pop-ups, check out Mozilla or Opera. To set Mozilla to ignore pop-ups, go to the Edit menu and click Preferences, double-click Advanced, click Scripts & Plugins, and uncheck Open unrequested windows. No more pop-ups. In Opera, go to the File menu and click Preferences, click Windows, and change Accept pop-up windows to Refuse pop-up windows. (note: some sites actually use pop-ups for functionality instead of ads, if you find a site or link that isn't working, it may be trying to open a pop-up window, so don't forget where these options are in case you need to change them back) Don't bother asking me how to do this in AOL or IE, because they don't have these options (but that's okay, since no one should be using those browsers anyways). Oh, and unfortunately Netscape can't do it, thanks to AOL restricting them from it (note: Mozilla and Netscape are for the most part the same browser aside from this option).
 

Saturday, November 09th 2002

I have updated the Tolkien information I posted Wednesday with information on the Valar, and some definitions at the bottom of a few words which were not explained (such as Quendi, which is the true name for the Elves).
 

Wednesday, November 06th 2002

I have put together some brief information on Tolkien's languages and elves. I will personally be using this as reference (although I know almost all of it by heart already) when conducting RPGs in a fantasy setting which I can twist to make more Tolkien-like. It is also a good way for those familiar with D&D-like fantasy to see where concepts like Dark-elves, High Elves, Wood-elves, etc. came from. So, I figured I might as well make it available to everyone. Check it out here. It was put together using primarily information from There and Back Again, which is a great Tolkien reference site (though still under construction).