Thursday, November 09, 2006

The world weighs on my shoulders but what am I to do?

I don't love warped, but I don't hate it, which is more than I can say for a few blogs I've reviewed on here. It was wicked hard to get to, though. For some reason, I couldn't access it through yahoo when it was e-mailed to me. I think Gary, who apparently designed his own template, has some weird blocking setting, so I had to access it backwards, through arcofdescent.com, which can best be summed up as: "Bushitler. No War for Oil. Bush Lied People Died." Meh.

Thank all that is sacred, what I was asked to review today WASN'T the political blog. Because seriously, a little bit of that shit goes a long ways with me.

Anyway, on to warped.

Template-wise, I don't have too much to complain about. In spite of repeatedly searching, I don't know why Gary has this stripper motif going on. It doesn't seem to fit his "68 things about him" or his general posting trends, so eh, I don't see the relevance. However, it's clean, white, and isn't too busy, so that makes it an improvement over some. However, there is a problem with it. The main text column has something janky going on with the width or borders, because in IE it cuts off about 4-5 letters from the end of each line, making interpreting some of his posts a bit like code-breaking.

I'm sure some wanker will say, "Well beyotch, you should be using firefox, so quit yer bitching." And while that's true, and I do use firefox on my home computer, I can't use it at work, so IE will have to do for this review. And, further, the majority of the world is STILL using IE, so pretensious firefox geeks can bite me. If it looks like crap in IE, it's still crap, regardless of how pretty it looks in some other geek internet platform. So, Gary, fix your column width or border or padding or margin or whatever it is that's bolloxing up your blog in IE.

I don't know why this blog needs all those stupid little blog promotion buttons tagging onto the sidebar. I personally think those things are STUPID, but every person who submits their blog here seems to love them so w.t.f.e. If people want to clutter up their nice clean templates with useless shit, so be it. At least he doesn't have ads.

And I do love the design statement at the bottom of the template. It's funny.

Contentwise, it's not great, it's not bad. Gary has glimmerings of a decent sense of humor but they are often unfulfilled. However, they do show promise. I personally believe his sense of humor is being suffocated by his overwhelming political negativity and and he may be suffering from PESTS. I'd encourage abandoning the political blog because it's boringly earnest and lame, and there are ten million blogs just like it out there polluting the blogosphere from both sides of the political spectrum, all hand-wringing and sky is falling and hell in a handbasket on a fast train, and I avoid that shit like the plague because I think both the far left and the far right are full of crap. But that's just me, and my inherent cynicism allows me to avoid falling into the trap of thinking the world is nearing its cataclysmic end every 2 years due to the control of one party or another.

They've been saying this shit since Reagan in '84, which I remember well, and it has yet to occur. So, anyway.

A few final things. Gary likes 80's music (yay, Gary). Gary likes teh boobies (you're so in luck here, Gary). Gary loves his wife (awww, schwweet). Gary quotes Ferris Bueller (rock on, Gary). Gary isn't half bad.

I give him for making me search backwards for his blog through the morass of his political b.s.

But, I give him for his clean template and not too crappy content.

2 comments:

  1. I do love the eight track font he uses. LOVE IT! One of my favorite offered at dafont.com.

    I dig the stripper motif, as well but I agree it's not very fitting of him...or so it kind of seems.

    Content's pretty good for a blog. Can't deny that.

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  2. Thank you very much for the review. Extremely well thought out and descriptive.

    The stripper motif, hmmm. Yeah, it probably not *me*. Truthfully, I don't know why I chose to go with that. I guess I wanted something a little different from my previous designs, which were (believe it or not) even more bland and vanilla than what's up there now. Obviously, I'm no designer, but I wanted my own look, not one created by someone else.

    Sorry you had issues getting to the site, love. I put in htaccess blocks a few weeks ago after finding out that a co-worker found my site through a search. I, uh...went a little nuts with that shit. Maybe I should ease up a bit on the blocks.

    As for the main page, we've all but abandoned posting on it (one post in the last 3 months). I agree that it's the same stuff you can find on a zillion other blogs, maybe that's why I haven't bothered doing much of anything with it lately. I do appreciate the frank assessment of it. It's funny, the wife and I have had the main site up for almost 5 years and we STILL have no idea what we're going to do with it.

    Gotta agree on the eight track font, kitty. That font fucking rocks my socks.

    About the wonky template issues in IE...what version of IE are you using? I'm using IE 6 and it looks fine to me. Hopefully you're using IE 7 or something, then I can get to work on fixing it.

    Once again, thanks for the review.

    P.S. Yep, I dig the 80's. That was my time in the sun.

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Grow a pair.