Four Island

I quite clearly have a problem. I call myself a programmer, but really, when was the last time that I programmed? My project management system tells me that the last commit on The TGS Website, my current project, was on March 16th. The most recent thing that I've released was probably Layout 7 back in August. Therefore, I'm a fail.

What do I blame my current programming laziness on? My extreme obsession with archiving. I'm sure that's a mental disorder or at least a byproduct of my obsessive-compulsive disorder because it's really unhealthy. My music library has the have the exact date I started listening to a song and it has to have the exact number of times I listened to it. When I chat with someone, I must be able to access some form of log. And when I started the revival of the TGS website project, I started to track the time I program.

I have an extremely tight procedure when it comes to programming: write a ticket, start the timer, implement the feature, commit the code, close the ticket and log the time. This is very unhealthy as it puts me off from coding because I feel that it's too much work to fix a simple bug or implement a simple feature. While I know that source control and issue tracking are very good practices, I am very strict with my implementation of them and the addition of time tracking is too much.

Therefore, I need to come up with a new strategy. I think the best thing to do would be to eradicate the time tracking part of the process. While that doesn't resolve everything, it would get me back to where I was before, and didn't I manage to release Layout 7 for Four Island last year? I think that if I try to maintain a healthier programming strategy, this laziness streak would end. I sure hope so, anyway.

If anyone has any suggestions for a healthier programming procedure, I'd be very happy to hear about it. Leave a comment! :P And new commits should start appearing in the TGS Website repository before long if this decision works :).

YAY I LIKE PILLOWCASE. Anyway, yay! I guess it was worth the wait, eh?

AWWW YEAHHHHHH - 10 vote(s)! No, I mean no, I mean no, I mean no, I mean no - 0 vote(s)! Maybe? - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

Okay, I know, I failed. I ultimately failed with my True Falsities revival. I posted once, and then ate a brick. Sorry. I really don't know how I can try to revive TF if I can't even post on it. So, first off, I failed my goal. No neutrality, I just flat-out failed it. Second, I'm reconsidering freezing True Falsities. We could either freeze it and leave it as it is, or keep it unfrozen in case anyone randomly decides to post on it. I doubt people would post on it anymore, but it's not my choice (well, it sort of is), it's the voters' choice. Sort of. :P

Through the popularity of my current comic (Pillowcase!), it's sometimes difficult to remember that I once had a different comic: Kirby's Fan Mail. Yeah, remember that? That was a.... weird little comic, wasn't it? Yes, anyway, I recently had it brought back to my attention when I was looking through my Google Analytics. I saw a referral to Four Island from something called badwebcomics.wikidot.com, and I though, "Hm, what could that be?" So I went to the page in question and found.... a review of Kirby's Fan Mail explaining how it fails and how I'm mentally challenged! YAY! :P

Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. The article actually was about how stupid the comic was and I seriously find it VERY amusing. Read it here, plez. 'Tis awesome. Like how he points out that I can't draw or that I think word salads are comedic gold.

However true or funny the article may be, however, there are some points I would like to make in my defense:

• First of all, the author of the article spelled my last name incorrectly. It's Insigna, not Insignia.
• One of the author's favorite things to make fun of was a comic of mine called Shimi's Warning, which he described as incredibly stupid because it was just a picture with a link to an off-site comic. There are several reasons that I had to do this. First off, Shimi's Warning was done in Flash, which, due to a technical limitation of the comic hosting software, could not be hosted directly on the site. Second, the only thing you can post in the comic area on that site is comics. You cannot just post text. Yes, I probably should've provided a text version of the URL so people could just copy/paste it, which I eventually did. However, the comic itself has since gone down which is really not quite a shame because it was pretty bad.

And.... that's really all I can think of right now. It's not too easy to defend KFM :P. In fact, here are some things that I think the article lacks:

• Blatant copyright thievery - After writing a comic involving a cookbook, I posted a comic from the original Kirby manga because it had to do with the previous comic. Yeah.
• My total non-coolness - Yeah, four years ago, I didn't know what "emo" meant. So I probably embarrassed myself.
• The whole "world trip" debacle - For a few comics, I talked about having Kirby go on a trip to other people's comics and do stuff. Instead, I stopped posting comics for two months and simply had him write a letter of apology when I got back. Wow, my failness never fails to fail!
• Same with the "awesome" 50th Comic Party.
• Homophobia.
• There is clearly no food in this one, yet he claims he is eating it.
• The punch line of this one is the fact that the sender of the letter didn't leave a name. Ha-ha.
• I'm not going to pretend to know what I was on while writing this one.
• My total disregard for an update schedule. For a time, I would post like 10 comics a day, and then I wouldn't post for like a month. Then, I stopped doing the comic in 2007, only to pick it up for a month in 2009. I'm surprised people actually still read it.

Clearly, I could go on for much longer, but I don't feel like it. Instead, I'll let you, the reader, either read the article I linked to above or search through Kirby's Fan Mail for more of my failness. Oh yes, and check out my recently revived comic, Pillowcase! Thank you and good night! :P

Oh-ho-ho! It seems like Pillowcase is pop-u-lar! Perhaps it's because it's the only one of the listed projects that didn't die a horrible death. Yes.

True Falsities - 2 vote(s)! Pillowcase - 5 vote(s)! Endlenge - 1 vote(s)! FourFiction - 1 vote(s)!

So, yes. It may seem like I've failed my most honored annual goal, posting at least once a week other than the weekly poll post. Well, I had three posts planned for last week and they all fell through, probably due to my zombie-like state. Seriously, when I order something online, I go insane until it arrives. I was going to write about the 2 year anniversary of The Fourm, my awesome April Fools Day joke (I'm so awesome, right? THREE ISLAND!) and a hilarious review I read the other day.

Anyway, I found a loophole in the goal: I never specifically said that I couldn't post twice in one day. So, later today, I will post another post and it will count, yay! Don't worry, I've already written the post, so it's not going to fall through. And I'm not going to try to pull this one again; I still feel like it's cheating a bit and I really dislike posting twice in one day, so from now on, I'm going to try my hardest to post earlier in the week. Cheese.

EDIT: ....wow. WOW. Lol, I think I may have had a lesion. No, I didn't fail my annual goal at all. Somehow, I forgot that I posted about Pillowcase Season 3 earlier this week. So I pretty much just freaked out about nothing. Lol. I'll post today's other post tomorrow instead. :P

GUESS WHAT. No, I didn't set myself on fire again. I'VE RELEASED PILLOWCASE SEASON 3. YES. IT HAS STARTED.

Enough with the screaming. Okay, so after 5 months of work and procrastination on my part, I've finally finished the first 65 comics of Pillowcase Season 3! parties You may be wondering why I said "first," well, it's quite obvious: I'm quite free to add on to the season while it's going on, and so are you! If anyone wants to contribute to Pillowcase, send in a guest comic! :P

Anyway, I'm very, VERY happy that I've finally revived Pillowcase. And don't worry, people. I worked very hard on this season. It's not going to be a bust like Season 2 was. :P

Lol, MLIAA received a fairly good response on this POTW.... until you factor in the fact that most of those positive votes were probably me. Then the lack of posts on MLIAA makes more sense.

Soooo average! - 6 vote(s)! Too cool. - 0 vote(s)! Too boring. - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

I really should be prohibited from voting more than once on things. Lol, anyway, happy Spring Break to most people out there! Today is Saturday March 27th and I'm very happy! EARTH HOUR!!!! I hope everyone participates in Earth Hour (my favorite eco-friendly event EVAR) and yay! :D Also, I hope everyone's excited about Pillowcase! :P

Okay. A few days ago, I was discussing True Falsities' sad downfall, which was probably due to the extremely large network latency associated with it. I stated that I would just keep it that way until FourComment came around because no one uses True Falsities anyway, but I've now decided that that's not good enough.

I miss True Falsities.

It was a fun website. Many Four Island memes were started as an article on True Falsities and we cannot forget that it was True Falsities that spawned my favorite website project, Pillowcase :P. True Falsities died because I didn't want to let go of my commenting system, which was because I had forgotten one simple fact about True Falsities: I am not the only one that posts stories. Other people post stories! It doesn't matter that no one comments (if no one comments, don't fear the anonymous commenting!) because people are contributing via posts!

True Falsities was fun, so I'm going to find a way to revive it. So, as a first step, I disabled IntenseDebate so that people would actually visit the site again. But how would I encourage people to post again? That's where The Great TF Initiative comes in. Within the next 11 days, I'm going to write a total of 5 new True Falsity stories. They may be horrible. I certainly hope that they won't be :P. Anyway, I will write these stories and then, during the week of April 5th to April 9th, I will post one story a day. A week of True Falsities! Maybe that'll get people posting again!

Now I know what you're all (read: me, me and only me) thinking: "BUT WAIT STARLA YOU ALREADY FAIELEDEDADE YOUR ANNUAL GOAL!!!!!!" Because apparently, you're insane. Yes, I have failed my annual goal of posting on True Falsities twice a month because I only posted once in January and I didn't post at all during February or March. Well, if I post 5 times because of this, I will have made up all of the missed posts for January, February and March. Technically, this isn't allowed in the goal, but we'll make a special exception for this situation because of True Falsities' [near?] death. If True Falsities comes back to life and I continue to post twice a month, then it'll be great. :P

EDIT: I'm just realizing now that this is very similar to a post I wrote last year. Well, let's hope it works this time. :P

Some of you may remember last year when I asked people what to do in the way of a commenting system because the main reason people said that they didn't comment on my blog was anonymity. While I didn't really find a satisfactory solution for my website (other than partial integration with The Fourm), I tried installing IntenseDebate for most of my hosted sites/project sites, including True Falsities, Color Pencils and Bubble Blog. It worked out pretty nicely. IntenseDebate looked pretty and all comments were associated with a central IntenseDebate account that could be used on other IntenseDebate-supporting sites.

There was one problem, however.

INTENSEDEBATE IS FREAKISHLY SLOW.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about True Falsities and why it suffered the death that it did and I recalled the fact that it took a very, very long time to load. I took a look using Chrome's Developer Tools and I saw that it it had a network latency of 5 seconds. 5 seconds! And that's me.... accessing a website.... within my own house. 5 seconds. I can only imagine how long it must take for viewers overseas.

Clearly, something had to be done. I looked around at my other IntenseDebate sites and saw that Color Pencils and Bubble Blog were also loading hideously slowly (which may also have been the reason that those two sites died). I disabled IntenseDebate on True Falsities, and, what do you know? It started zipping along happily. But that wasn't acceptable--I wouldn't receive any comments without some sort of centralized commenting system.

So I did some looking around and found Disqus. It looked pretty neat. So I downloaded it and set it up on True Falsities. Oh, wait, did I saw that it was easy? No? Oh, well, good, because it wasn't. Because of some monstrous limitations placed on my server that are out of my control (and yet completely fixable by certain people that will simply not oblige), my server couldn't access the Disqus website. Apparently IntenseDebate did all of its processing on the client side.

So I then spent the next 2 hours finding a proxy and configuring the Disqus plugin to use it instead of straight Internet access. And it finally worked. But.... it was hideous.

I don't know why, but Disqus simply didn't want to work. I had a difficult time exporting my comments from IntenseDebate to Disqus, the actual comment forms looked bad and wouldn't even appear most of the time and everybody instantly became anonymous. Also, every single comment looked horrible because Disqus completely discarded any formatting information the IntenseDebate provided. I tore out my hair at this point. I was actually hyperventilating.

Clearly, Disqus was no good. So I looked around for another solution and found something called Echo. It looked pretty awesome. Wait, check that, IT COSTS MONEY. No way José.

So, at this time, nothing can be done. True Falsities, Color Pencils and Bubble Blog are stuck with immense latency and there's really no chance that anybody will go on those sites now because of it. Which is very sad. Because I like those sites and they are never posted on. I really didn't want to settle with this, so I did something thinking and came up with a thought. :P

As some of you may know, the specification for Four Island 3.0 includes a complete rewrite of the travesty that is the Four Island commenting system. I figured, hey, if this new commenting system comes out nicely, I may detach it from Four Island and let it be its own commenting system like IntenseDebate that people can download and use. Probably called FourComment. :P

I think this is a good idea. Because I want integration with social networks. Because I want ratings and notifications. Because I want my webpage to load.... quickly. FourComment should be very professional and I hope that I go through with this because the current state of commenting systems on Four Island is.... bleh. A big integrated thing with cool features and a professional look would make me very happy. :P And with that, another large project is added to the Four Island 3.0 specification. :P

Hmmph. It seems that everyone has disagreed with me. I would like to mention something: when there is an OTHER option, the implication is to comment and explain which RP you would like to see revived! Don't just leave me hanging! Unless, of course, you all meant indifferent, which makes me feel pleh.

Fourm RP - 1 vote(s)! Waiting Room Mk II - 3 vote(s)! Wish Fulfillment - 1 vote(s)! Other/Indifferent - 6 vote(s)!

Lol, I'm trying my hardest to revive RPs but it doesn't seem to be working! I've posted on Fourm RP and double-posted on Waiting Room Mk II but they're going nowhere! I think Wish Fulfillment is totally deadzorz, though. Maybe that shouldn't have been an option. Anyway, comment! I would like to know what you like! :P

I now have definitive proof that I have no life.

You know that site My Life Is Average? To put it bluntly, nothing that goes on there is average. It's all "I jumped out of a third-story window and survived!" and "I handed a piece of dog poop to my teacher and got an A!" It used to be funny, but now it's all lies. Most of the posts are so crazy that they can't possibly be real and I don't understand how they made it on to My Life Is Average.

So, I created "My Life Is Actually Average", a place where boring and usual things happen. This is a place where stuff that is ACTUALLY average occurs! It's so boring, it's actually sort of funny! :P To show how obsessed I've been with this website (that I thought of like 4 days ago), let's see how many posts have already been posted: 129. Lol. A few were submitted by other people, but most of them were from me.

Yes, you heard that correctly, YOU CAN SUBMIT STORIES YAY. :P They don't necessarily have to be true (the "actually" in MLIAA implies stories that are intrinsically boring, not true), in fact, most of my posts are modified versions of posts on My Life Is Average. But you're free to write true posts because they're much more likely to be average! :P

Anyway, I'm weird. It's true. But, go on My Life Is Actually Average! Post your boring stories! It'll be fun! Lol. :P