Not From The Desk of Rory McCann…

This one’s really gonna be trivia about Admin (me), but one of you’s already noticed and asked me about it so I’m writing about it here.

Rather than repeat the whole thing again, here’s a screenshot from Instagram.

tl;dr version: If the TAG, the bit with the @ sign in front of it, says “urthboundmisfit” then it’s my personal Instagram. If it has my photo but NOT that tag, it’s not me. I’ve seen two accounts like that so far this evening. The other one had followed some of my other-purpose accounts (see below) and I saw the one with my name pop up as a suggestion when writing out my tag.

I have a few IGs for other uses and I need to double-check, but I don’t think my mug’s on any of them and if it is, it’s not at all recent. If you encounter something weird and are confused, feel free to DM me on IG. I’ll check it out.

FYI, Not Me But My Name is also following Rory. And also basically everyone else I was following, so they’re not singling him out. Hope they behave. Hope IG bans them before they stop behaving. Yes that means IG will ban my name. Nope, don’t care.

Okay. That’s your internet for today. Carry on.

So now it is spring.

I had a disappointing realization yesterday. I had had it in my head that The Book Group had begun in 2003. Oh no, my sweet summer child. It began in 2002!

Can you believe that show is old enough to drink in the USA this year?!!?!? Its final air date was two decades ago last month.

Sigh. I would have loved to do some sort of anniversary thing.

Well, at least I own the whole thing on DVD and a compatible player and I can watch it any damn time I want so HAH. 💙🤍💚

I hate Meta. Both Facebook and Instagram. We’ve been over this before, and of course I haven’t left either platform even though I came very close to it late last year (early this year? I dunno… it’s all a blur, man). One thing I hate about them is the way they mess up my newsfeeds. I can’t just get everything in chronological order, oh no. I have to get things in the order THEY think I ought to get them. Even if it’s something or someone I really want to see.

If you pay attention to a certain very tall Scotsman on Instagram, you know where this is going.

Yep. Rory posted again.

Fantastic photo (obviously not taken by him, doesn’t even look like it’d be a tripod-and-timer setup; mad compliments to whoever the photographer is, and likely it was Mrs. McCann), big man dwarfed by a far bigger waterfall. Opinions vary on where it’s located, and of course he’s not talking, but one commenter opined that it looked like something in Iceland, and I suspect they’re right. Hope they are, actually. We know how much he loves Iceland, and I hope he gets over there frequently.

I would also just about kill to see him and Thor Bjornsson (who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones for the character’s later-series appearances, and if you didn’t know that, catch up) clowning around on IG while he’s there. That would be awesome. Hopefully Thor won’t try to get Oor Rory into a gym, though. After Rory’s experience trying to cut for a shirtless scene in GOT which wound up not happening (the one where the Hound’s telling Arya the story of his burns), he’s pretty much sworn them off.

Anyway, because this is me and because Meta sucks and because my life’s been SO delightful the past couple of years, I didn’t see the post til two days later. Grump.

But hey. I’m glad he’s there at all. Still feelin’ smug ’cause I said a while back that if he got on social media it’d probably be IG. He’s a bit of a shutterbug.

(ISTFG I did not know he was on there until a couple months after he opened the account. And lots of times, I am wrong about stuff. But that just makes it more satisfying when I nail something between the eyes. BAZINGA.)

Oh! Speaking of Thor. He was here in Ohio again about a week ago! Goddamn it, every year I want to take my fat ass to The Arnold downtown, and every year I am BROKE when it comes around. I need to just make it a goal right now. You wouldn’t know it to look at me but I’m interested in health-nut stuff. My former stepmom used to bodybuild, so I’m not wholly unfamiliar with that whole scene. So, even if I’m still a fatass next year, and I probably will be the way things have gone, I’d like to go just to see if I run into him. He seems like a really fun guy. I can’t say I would be sorry to run into Ahhhhhnuld, either.

…..

I have this idea about how to format things here, using the blog function mostly instead of the pages, but I’m not 100% behind my own idea. Still mulling it over. It would be a lot of work that I just can’t do right now, but I was curious whether it wouldn’t look better as a kind of scrapbook format? I don’t know. I really don’t know, but I’m making note of it here in case I forget later and in case it turns out it would have been a great idea after all. I’m thinking about how most people look at websites now, and this theme is already mobile-friendly, but maybe the way I have arranged information could be mobile-friendlier. We’ll see.

Adding in more header images. You may find a new set peeking through now and again when you reload. We’re done with B&G.

Sometimes when I’m doing these, I have to trash one. Usually it is because I got Rory centered just fine but then the way the site displays is cutting off too much of his head or face. I mean, I can sit here and look at his below-the-neck too, but it’s just a bit weird not having his face in. What’s also weird is that that’s not how the images turn out when I edit them, and when I upload them they look fine in the behind-the-scenes too, but when you go to the actual front page they are occasionally fucked up. But I haven’t had too many of those be really bad. I’ve had several be shorter up top than they were supposed to be, but they still look okay, so I leave them in.

If you look at the site with a horizontal screen you may have noticed the side margins being solid-color. Sometimes you get that as an effect in photo-displaying software: for instance, whatever software Facebook uses. Not in this case. It’s part of the image file. When I uploaded these screenshots as header photos originally, I edited them to be 1200 x 2000 pixels because that’s the size the theme calls for in a header photo and it wasn’t too far off from the screenshot’s actual size. When I went back in to center Rory, I opened a particular header photo, selected all, cut the image completely out, and then pasted it into a separate 1200 x 1200 file as a new layer. The whole image is still there while the layers are separate, so you can just shift it around until Rory is in the middle and then flatten the whole image file, which “trims” the 1200 x 1200 bit. And from there, I pick a color, then go back to the 1200 x 2000 canvas and bucket it in. Then select-all and cut the 1200 x 1200 and put it over there too. Flatten. Save. Re-upload to blog header. Done.

It makes things look more cohesive. I know people are still going to look at the site with a horizontal screen now and again; I certainly do. And if they’re looking at the whole image, if it were just white, it’d be blinding and if it were black every time, it wouldn’t be as interesting. Using a color from the image makes it match its “frame” and it mixes things up a bit for variety that doesn’t clash.

Just one of those little design things. I don’t have formal training, not since high school, but I know what I like.

In the past I had made an effort to make the font and link colors match a certain color scheme. I don’t know how many of you remember that. After I introduced this theme, I sort of lost interest in that. (The most I did was go in and stop it transforming the font to uppercase in certain design elements. I hate that. How fucking hard is it to write something in all caps if that’s what you want to do?) But now I think we get plenty color from the header photos and so I don’t think I will be bothering with link colors again. Doesn’t really matter.

There’s this online course called WP Rockstar that’s supposed to help you get a start in making a living at WordPress. It’s pricey, if you’re my broke ass, but sometimes I think I ought to do that. It’s one thing I’ve consistently done over the last nearly thirty years. I got bored quickly with America Online’s native website editor in the mid-90s and started learning HTML myself. Eventually I got around to using Greymatter, the direct predecessor to WordPress (if you look up WP’s history they will tell you GM was one of their inspirations). That one was a lot easier to edit behind the scenes than WordPress is, and I soon had my very own site layout with my own logo and colors and everything. It was rad. Do kids still say “rad”? No? Good. Fuck off. That’s Gen X’s word. Nyah.

Unless you’re Glaswegian. Then it’s “Magic!”

Ever seen Rory say “Magic!” It’s adorable.

Anyway. So I look for free shit to teach me things. Codecademy looks promising. I’m not gonna write a Rory app or anything, but maybe at some point I could work out my own theme here. You never know.