indisguise_org

While trawling about looking for ideas on writing, I came across an interesting blog (albeit seemingly dead, and with a default WordPress theme): Reviews in Haiku. Each post is a review of something, written in haiku-form.

I’ve never been much of a haiku person, but it was a challenge I wanted to try out for myself. A link he had on the site pointed to Start Writing Haiku, which is a wonderful document filled with beautiful lines. I think I must discover this form of writing more.

That said, here is a review in haiku, for tomorrow’s review on BBC’s 2009 adaptation of Emma:

Unlikely actors–
Hot summer, lively-warm tones,
Scenes well-played: oh yes.

Stay tuned!

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

I’d like to share a very nifty, quick-to-whip-up piece of code I use for the book reviews I will be doing from here on out, in my Reader category: a short JavaScript snippet to hide spoilers (you can see it in action in my Mockingjay review). You see, I suck at making book reviews: I always inevitably talk about things that is best left to be discovered by a reader. So to help myself and anyone who might chance upon my reviews, a spoiler protection feature for my blog sounds just about right.

Why I didn’t go with the “More” tag route

WordPress has a feature that lets you force users to click through to the post’s dedicated page: essentially, hiding anything under the “More” tag when viewing in the blog index/posts list.

This works as a quick solution: but this didn’t really feel very “bright” to me. That’s an extra click and page load, and it means that I can’t have multiple spoilery sections in a single post. I don’t exactly know why I will need multiple separate spoilery sections, but far be it from me to set limitations on my writing style!

My solution

I went and used JavaScript to hide spoilers in the page. I did so for a couple reasons:

1. Users won’t need to wait before seeing the hidden content: one click to surface it, and it’s there already.
2. There is minimal break in the experience and tone of the entry.
3. I could have as many spoilery sections in my entry, but the entry will still read as expected: you could just skip the spoilery sections easily.
4. Users get the same experience whether they’re reading the entry on its own page or on the blog index page: spoilers will still be marked.
5. Presentational text (show/hide spoilers) is not included in the content of the post.

The implementation

My library of choice is YUI3, but the same should also be relatively easy to do in other libraries, or even just plain JavaScript.

The script basically retrieves any and all tags with a class name of “spoiler” and hides everything inside that by lowering the opacity to 10%. This way, the user has a tantalizing, indistinct view of just how much they’re missing out by not reading the book/watching the movie! ;)

The script also adds its own text to the entry via JavaScript, saying that there are spoilers ahead and they can click on the text to toggle visibility. It’s not an actual link, but I wanted to style it slightly like a link–but you really have full freedom as to how you’d like the spoiler toggle warning to look like.

(As always, the best place to put the code below would be at the end of your page.)

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/3.2.0/build/yui/yui-min.js"></script>
<script language="javascript">
YUI().use( "anim", function(Y){
    Y.all('.spoiler').each(function(o, i){
        var id = 'spoiler-' + i;
        var spoilerToggle = '<div id="spoiler-toggle-'+i+'" class="spoiler-toggle">Warning! Spoilers ahead! Click here to toggle spoiler visibility.</div>';
        Y.on( 'click', function(e){
            var opacityValue = ( o.getStyle('opacity') >= 0.9 ) ? 0.1 : 1;
            var anim = new Y.Anim({
                node: o,
                duration: 0.25,
                to : { opacity: opacityValue }
            });
            anim.run();
        }, '#spoiler-toggle-'+i );
        o.insert( spoilerToggle, o );
        o.setStyle('margin','20px').setStyle('opacity','0.1').setStyle('padding','10px');
    });
});
</script>

Without any HTML tags with the class “spoiler”, the script will not run unnecessarily, so you’re pretty free to use it for any page or post type.

To add styles specific to the spoiler toggle, you can use:

.spoiler-toggle { /* style for whole warning */ }
.spoiler-toggle span { /* style for toggle "link" */ }

Customizing the code

You can use the above code for almost any other similar purpose. You can change the element it hides by changing “.spoiler” at this line:

Y.all('.spoiler').each(function(o, i){

making sure that what you put in is a valid CSS selector (i.e., #some-id .some-class element or similar). It will then apply fading in/out to the whole element.

You can also well as change the wording of your toggle, or completely change it out to a different element (an image, or what-have-you) by changing the HTML at:

var spoilerToggle = '<div id="spoiler-toggle-'+i+'" class="spoiler-toggle">Warning! Spoilers ahead! Click here to toggle spoiler visibility.</div>';

making sure that you leave the outermost div with its ID intact.

Hope it’s useful, or helps you think of other ways to improve your site. Website improvement never needs to be a full-blown affair: a couple low-hanging fruit, small details here and there, makes the work worthwhile. ♥

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

I love fruit shakes, fruit juices, and other such drinks. It’s one thing I miss the most in the Philippines: the proliferation of fruit drink stands. You can’t walk 10 minutes in a mall without bumping into one of these things when you’re there!

Sadly, this is not true in Singapore. Oh, there are plenty fruit stands in the food courts and hawker centers, but it’s just not home.

And so, my blender is seeing a lot of action. Last weekend I bought bananas, apples, oranges, lemons and strawberries, mostly to snack on and cut up for dessert. However, what I’m using them for the most now is for making fruit juices and shakes! I have at least one a day for the moment.

It’s crazy easy to make myself a nice, worthy drink, and cleanup of the blender is pretty easy. I usually put in two different kinds of fruits, a cup or two of water or milk, and some honey. Sometimes I add in some ice cubes.

And after, I rinse off the blender body to remove most of the visible fruit/food particles and slush, then I put in about a cup or two of water, a bit of liquid soap, and blend the mixture. Since I don’t usually put sticky stuff in my drinks, this is usually enough for cleanup. Then I can use the diluted, frothy mixture to do the rest of my dish washing! :D

Here are two of my favorite drinks:

1. Banana-tomato shake

   This was a bit of an “accident”. I was making a grilled egg mayo sandwich and I wanted tomatoes in it. But obviously, one whole tomato is too much for one sandwich, so instead of popping the tomato back in the fridge, I tossed the remaining half into the blender with a banana. A cup of milk (I use low-fat pasteurized milk), about a teaspoon of honey (I never really measure, my honey container has this twisty top), and then I blend them all together.

   The result is a creamy banana shake that is not too banana-ey. There is no strong tomato taste, but you occasionally encounter bits and there is a slight tartness to the drink, an edge that wouldn’t have been there with just the mushy banana. It also looks pretty good! Creamy beige with a touch of pink and spots of red.

2. Apple-orange juice

   Perfect as a pick-me-up for the mornings. I squeeze the juice out of an orange and put that into the blender. As for the apple (I use a Fuji apple), I sometimes leave the skin on, when I don’t have as much time to peel it–it makes the juice look pretty nice, what with small specks of red. I just cut it into smaller pieces and take the core out. They all go into the blender.

   Then a cup of water, a teaspoon of honey, and I blend away. I haven’t tried using milk, as I think the citrus and milk together just won’t suit my stomach. It’s perfect as a healthy breakfast drink though, very bright and perky.
   

I’m doing some more experimentation with a couple other fruits, although I admit I sometimes wonder if I’m crazy to try some combinations out. :x

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

A recent article on WoW.com caught my eye: would you list [World of Warcraft] experience on your resume? Previous musings on the subject and the recent hullabaloo on RealID have pushed some introspection on the subject in my head, and the article reminded me of it.

Silmarien after learning she got the job

Playing in a social capacity in World of Warcraft entails talking to people, managing people, and organizing people. Oh, you can play without ever talking to other people, but a good number of people also employ quite a number of interesting skills while in-game:

1. The ability to manage people’s expectations–and, well, people–in a raid group
2. The ability to analyze a fight to pick out what went wrong and how to improve on execution
3. The ability to successfully mediate between people regarding all kinds of issues
4. The ability to “sell” a guild’s reputation and “brand”

Those are only a few of the things that people pick up as they progress into the game. You have people developing and practicing everything from leadership skills, marketing and brand management, team buildup, analysis, financial acumen…you name it, somewhere in the world (…of Warcraft) a player will probably be enhancing his skills on a certain work-related (or work-enhancing) skill.

The ongoing stigma

In a lot of industries and communities, being a gamer has a lot of negative connotations: this is one of the reasons why there was strong resistance to Blizzard’s initial RealID designs that required you to reveal your real full name on forum posts.

WoW players are seen as losers and no-lifers; people who sit in front of the computer and eat chips scattered all over the keyboard; people who scream, swear and throw tantrums at every little thing (link NSFW due to language); people who stay up all night and show up half-asleep and zombied out at work. With a lot of people, it won’t matter if you look very dapper in a coat and tie, that you graduated top of your class: you just get crossed out because you’re a wildcard. “Ha ha, he plays WoW, must be a loser.” *toss*

And that’s a shame. Oh, there must be “losers” in WoW, there are plenty of those in my humble reckoning. But there are losers everywhere. Some guy might play tennis but he parties all night and subsequently always shows up half-asleep and zombied out. Some guy might be your average joe, but he sits on the couch five hours a night and fifteen hours on weekends and eat chips all day. You don’t scoop out the crud by ignoring WoW players: you just might be passing up on someone who applies himself really well to the job.

Not all hope is lost

I remember this one time (no, not at band camp) when a colleague and I had to interview a couple people for an opening at our company. We went through the short stack of resumes as we went along, and came across this one resume which boldly announced “World of Warcraft Guild Master” in his extra-curricular activities, along with guild size, responsibilities taken, and improvements done (like, “raised guild recruitment levels up 15%”, how cool is that?).

My friend and I both play WoW and, of course, mentioned it in the interview. Cue ten-minute animated discussion about his guild and how being a guild master was like (and possibly, uh, other things too).

You know what? We were able to shortlist only two from over a dozen resumes given to us. He was part of that short list. He was conversant, alert, he knew his languages, and his experience was solid. We could see he didn’t take himself too seriously, that he knew how to work hard and stick to his guns while not turning into a monster in the process.

So, would I?

I’ve already mentioned World of Warcraft in my resume, but honestly have not thought of expanding that to include actual activities within WoW: space is at a premium and I already have it relatively full. Maybe if I ever am foolish enough to start my own guild and stubborn enough to stick with it ;)

Its inclusion was a very deliberate action on my part, however: I don’t want to be in a company that would look down on me because I choose to kill Internet dragons with friends.

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

I’ve always been more of a paper person than anything else; I like the feel of a book in my hands, flipping the pages, discovering the story one page at a time. I’ve tried e-books and podcasts, but neither have become a habit, and they are sometimes downright a pain to go through.

A couple of months ago, however, I went and tried an audiobook of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It was slow going at the start, but by the third night, I was lying in bed in the wee hours of the morning, tired beyond belief, and still listening to the damn audiobook. I had to admit, if I was reading a book, I’d have succumbed to sleep a couple of hours before as I would probably have started seeing double by then.

I’ve tried a couple more audiobooks since then: an abridged version of His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, Sabriel and Lirael by Garth Nix (I had to buy it–Tim Curry was narrating!), The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. Right now, I’m listening to The Great Hunt, also by Jordan, because I finished the first while recuperating in the Philippines and couldn’t find the second book there.

I also found that I was “in the moment” more often than when I was reading: it was easier to be swayed by the emotions in the book than usual. Admittedly, this owes a great deal to the talent of the narrator, but I think it’s also caused in part because of the different kind of concentration that I need to do to listen to an audiobook. Certainly, reading a book warrants your full attention: it’s not like watching TV where you can listen in on the background and only spare a couple glances at the screen, but still understand what’s going on. But this is a different kind of attention, one that I’m not used to, so much that it feels like a higher level of concentration, and thus, a higher level of involvement.

An audiobook convert?

Well, not quite. The availability of audiobooks doesn’t replace having the actual book for me. I still buy the books–I read Catching Fire and Mockingjay as books. I still read faster than I listen.

But audiobooks now have a place in my reading life: I’ve decided that audiobooks are good for first-time reading, usually allotted to the first book in a series I was interested in (such as The Hunger Games, His Majesty’s Dragon, and The Eye of the World).

My approach to it is likely tied to the fact that I get an audiobook a month from my subscription at Audible, so it “feels” like I have a free book a month that I can be a little more adventurous. Certainly, the audiobook doesn’t really take up bookshelf space, which is at a premium. *pets bookshelf*

Are you an audiobook fan?

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

Writing processes have always intrigued me. I love reading what methods and processes various writers have when they work, if they write by hand or direct to computer, or if they hire someone to type it all, or if they record themselves and transcribe. To be sure, I’ve wanted to try many different writing work flows, but none has stuck yet–aside from what I’ve been doing when I was younger, as a writer and an editor of the school newspaper.

My writing work flow

I write on my computer, and then I print it out, double-spaced, a page per sheet. And then I take a red pen. And I massacre it with editorial marks.

What this does for me is a sense of accomplishment, at almost every stage of the writing process. When I’m done with my story, when I’m ready to clean up that first draft, a thick printout serves as my “congratulations for making it this far!” It’s closure. It’s a tangible output, something I can hold, hug, and kiss in the darkness of my room where no one will think I am odd. It’s the end. I HAVE DONE IT!

And the red markings? Oh boy. We are always our harshest critic, and seeing the page marked up with corrections, notes, and various curly stuff–it’s also a sense of accomplishment. At the end of the editing, to see the once-immaculate pile of sheets wrinkled, slightly off-kilter, and filled with squiggly lines–it is glorious. I know I did my job.

Then I go through another round, but this time there’s not a lot to go through. Things that I missed, stuff that I thought would sound better, but they don’t. Close friends might also take a peek at this stage, but it’s seldom. I’ve rarely needed to go through a third pass-through, but then the dozen stories-to-be-turned-to-novels in my hard drive were never printed out, and short stories (the bulk of my published writing) generally don’t need such an involved process.

Other interesting processes

As mentioned, I’ve always been intrigued with how other writers do it. Going through a “writing reboot” as I am, now would be the best time to sit down and familiarize myself with a new way of doing things.

I’ve heard of a couple interesting ones:

1. Recording oneself, then transcribing it manually or with some tool or service;
2. Writing everything by longhand, and then typing it out manually or by scanning it in and getting it converted;
3. Writing everything on different pieces on note cards, easy to switch scenes around;
4. Using a specific software with its own work flow.

Do you know of any interesting work flows, or do you have a particular one which works for you?

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

I lead a relatively “visible” online life. I tweet and I blog, and I’ve been active in various communities and places ever since I’ve been online. I know a good number of people online, consider one of my best friends someone I met online, and a lot more people know of me through the Internet though I might not know them.

But Foursquare (and other location-sharing services) has never been an option for me. I realize you can limit visibility of your updates, but why will I want the world to know exactly where I am? I can understand the glamor of it if I travel–hey, I’m in Paris, and now I’m in Rome, booyah!–but I lead a rather normal, boring life. I wake up in the morning and get to work, and after work I either go home or pass by a place or two before retiring. Occasionally things are exciting: I have a dinner party to go to, or a trip for business or vacation.

But do I really want someone to have the ability to walk up to me and say “Hi! You’re angelamaria, I know you through the so-and-so website! I saw you were here on Foursquare and thought I’d say hi!”

Antisocial? Maybe, but I think it comes with the realization I have a lot less privacy than I thought I had.

There is no such thing as privacy online

I know the very idea of leading a vibrant online life seems to say the opposite: there is no such thing as privacy. Once it’s on the Internet, it’s there forever. And having been here for a long time, I’ve become a lot more protective of my anonymity.

“But I thought you said you liked online visibility!”

I know, I’m in a bit of a pickle, aren’t I? It’s just another juggling game. These services online–a lot of them are free, of no monetary cost to use, but you do give them something in exchange for using their services: your privacy. Sometimes the trade is fair, and sometimes it’s not enough. It’s up to each individual to find out where that fine line is.

A friend recently said that it seems that as we get older, we get a little more conservative with sharing. That’s completely true for me:

1. 2000 – 2003 (thereabouts) – I had an online journal hosted on my website, maintained by hand. No permissions “system”. There were sometimes “hidden” links.
2. 2001 – Livejournal created.
3. 2002 – 2009 – Livejournal generally public, with friends-locked entries. As the years went on, I had more and more friends locked entries, and made heavier use of group filters.
4. 2009 – present – Livejournal completely locked to public and contains only friends-only entries.

As I got older, privacy online has become more and more of an issue. People knowing what you had for breakfast is harmless for me, but people I don’t know knowing where to go find me to harass me is another matter.

And that’s why you’ll never find me in Foursquare ;)

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

I moved to my own place early last August, and have been spending a fair amount of time in the kitchen. I've never been much of a cook, but I'm pleased at the chance to experiment and learn at my own pace, with fun and without pressure.

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.

I moved to my own place early last August, and have been spending a fair amount of time in the kitchen. I've never been much of a cook, but I'm pleased at the chance to experiment and learn at my own pace, with fun and without pressure.

Originally published at Whimsical.Nu. You can comment here or there.