20th October 2007

Happy Birthday to Nick…

It is Nick Hodgson’s 30th birthday!
See, about half an hour ago, he was 29. Now, a 14 year-old and a 29 year-old sounds bad enough already. But 14 and 30? Eeeew.
Ah, I still love him. I will marry him, then use him to seduce Ricky and commit bigamy. Of course, Nick wouldn’t be seducing Ricky. Nick would just be my means of getting to Ricky. Although maybe Nick seducing Ricky would work too. And then I jump in at the last minute and say “gtfo Nick!” And…
… this is turning into some strange form of slash/fan fiction. Like “you-think-it’s-going-to-be-slash-fiction-and-then-Tish-marries-Ricky” fiction. Hmm, OK, I’m going to spew out a load of keywords for Google now: kaiser chiefs slash fiction nick ricky tish cough teh lulz. (:
I put up a new layout. The other one was really really bugging me. You know when you look at something for too long and it starts looking ugly? It was like that. Except I can stare at Ricky and Nick forever and they are both still the most attractive specimens of the male gender that I know.
Maybe this layout will be a Ricky. Or a Nick.

23rd September 2007

Now available in fat free

Edit: I just had to document this little snippet of my stupidity, from an MSN conversation:

Tish 21:27 haha microsoft comes up as a spelling mistake on my mac
Tish 21:28:07 cause it spell checks everything you write
Tish 21:28:10 apple doesnt
Tish 21:28:15 well duh tish, apple is a word
Tish 21:28:22 -_-

I’ve gone on a pedantic optimisation spree - and I can gladly report that this front page alone weighs just 40kb. Yes, that’s right folks - a measly 40kb. I wish I could say the same for myself - I weigh about 60kg. I really need to go about trying to convert kilograms to kilobytes, don’t I? I should have a go at that, actually. I should even write a PHP script and put a converter up. The only problem being - I’m not a l33t PHP ninja

I’ve added a tag cloud to the footer, and I took away the buttons. They were piling on the pounds/bytes/whatever and they were kind of superfluous, really. I still need ideas on what else I’m going to add. Maybe a piratey cat quote rotation. Yarr me hearties, yo ho ho and a bottle of milk. That wasn’t funny, but whatever

Now, out of cyberspace and back into real life: I’ve decided I want to play drums properly. Of course, a drum kit costs about £250 - and I wont be able to practice in my own garage/house/room since it’s very noisy. I already play guitar and a sufficient amount of keyboard; I just really like making noise on drums. I have quite a good sense of rhythm, but as anyone who has ever tried to play drums will know, bringing a foot (or two) into something really throws it all off. I’m pretty sure I can get used to it, though. I prefer drums over guitar because I have very short, weak fingers, which means after more than two or three minutes of playing something that involves a lot of moving around, my hand becomes inundated in lactic acid - you know, the stuff that makes your legs feel like they’re burning in agony when you run for too long. I’m also quite clumsy with my fingers, so I always end up hitting the wrong notes or fretting the wrong string.

Next layout idea: cat on a drum kit (:

22nd September 2007

Dark - Take 2: yarr!

I had another go at the dark layout thing. And I think I finally pulled it off! *insert wild grin here*
I went for a piratey theme this time. No more rainbow and grey for me. I think I’ve run out of luck with that one. I’ve practically exhausted every possible idea that you can do for a rainbow and gray layout. I must now move on, into a world of darkness. And treasure. Lots of shiny treasure. Not to mention cats with bandanas and eyepatches.
I got bored in history (shockhorror!) and started drawing a cat on the back of one of my sheets, which later became pirate cat. I was in my room, staring at Jack Sparrow, who is positioned nicely on one of my walls, and all of a sudden, inspiration struck me. Pirate! Pirate layout! Piratey colours! Oooh!
It was from then on that I forgot about my ICT coursework and opened Photoshop CS3.
I haven’t even finished it yet, but I thought I’d post about it anyway. The other one was getting on my nerves. It got uglier every time I looked at it. I have an acute sense of perfectionism, which is really annoying. It leads to feelings of inadequacy, which leads to more perfectionism, which leads to never getting anything done, which leads to sleeping more (somehow).
So, yarr me hearties or narr walk the plank? And what on earth else should I put in my columned footer of ultimate piratey pwnfulness?

17th September 2007

Orange hair and burning test tubes.

On Saturday, I went to the Bullring. Y’know, the place in Birmingham, big shiny buildings, lots of tourists… etc. I walked around for a bit and went to the Oasis (punk/rock/emo/whatever type clothes place) and saw some orange hair dye. I said to my friend “I’ll look like Hayley Williams from Paramore if I dye my hair orange”. I was joking initially, and then she gave me the “I dare you” look. And lo, I dyed my hair orange.
It looks pretty cool.
Pictures? Yes, of course, you want pictures. Duh.

I look a bit like a box of tic-tacs with that orange hair and those green eyes.
I still find that amusing, even though I’ve told that to about fifty people who don’t find it funny at all (:
And in case you were wondering, my hair was blonde

We were breaking down long chain hydrocarbons (whatever that means) in chemistry today, and we were reacting paraffin with something. There was a crack in our boiling tube and the (highly flammable) gas we were making (by heating the mixture over a Bunsen burner flame) escaped. You can probably guess what happened next. Test tube on fire. I actually thought it was hilarious. We shouted to the teacher “MISS THE TEST TUBE’S ON FIRE” but she ignored us. Some teacher, eh? We blew the fire out (somehow) and about five minutes later she came up to us and said “did you say your test tube was on fire?” Reminds me of that episode of the IT crowd with the fire, and Moss sends an email to someone instead of calling 999.

I also got my SATs results back for English, Maths and Science. All level seven (the highest), with the exception of English Reading, which I got level six in. My overall English level was still seven, though.

I plan on changing the layout sometime. I have a design, but all my patterns, styles and shapes that I made for this layout (which I want to use) are cached in Photoshop CS3, which won’t load anymore because the trial has run out. Meh.

21st August 2007

Suddenly

I haven’t even been on this domain for a week, and all of a sudden I get seven comments on a post within a few days of posting it. Where are all you people coming from? Haha. I think it’s the layout. There must be a subliminal message in it somewhere. Saying “YOU MUST COMMENT”. The thing is, there’s nothing different about my referrers, but I’m getting a lot more hits. Hmm?

• 20 from tish.dubious.nu
• 12 from jemjabella.co.uk
• 3 from detraquer.com

I wonder…

16th August 2007

The Catmafia goes dark!

And after I’d convinced myself that what I had was good enough - I changed my mind and decided I would do something that I’ve never done before.
I made something dark.
Hence, the name of this theme is “dark”. I couldn’t think of anything better, honest. All my creativity had been sucked out of my brain in making the damn thing.
I got my inspiration from a colour palette I saw over at Colourlovers. I don’t have the link to the exact palette - but the colours were something like the pink, green and blue used at FamFamFam.
Well, I’m pretty pleased with it - although I think I need to tone down the colours a bit. It looks OK on my mac, but somehow everything is more saturated on my PC, and the green looks absolutely horrendous. Please give me any suggestions you have I’m also having trouble picking out a font that I like - since my mac’s resolution is a bit larger than my PC’s - anything that looks decent on my mac looks far to large on my PC. Maybe I’m just not used to my PC any more, hence I look at the font and think “God, that’s large, ugly and obnoxious.” So, yes. Suggestions please.
I was staring at the layout in Photoshop, and then I suddenly thought, “THE CAT MAFIA!? That is such a good name. I can’t believe I thought of that.” Yes, for me it often takes a while for the penny to drop. And sometimes, the penny floats back up again and then a while later, gravity will pull the penny back down. I often sit down in deep thought, and all of a sudden I’ll realise something: like “OH MY GOD MY NAME IS TISH! That suits me so well. Tish. Tishy Tish Tish. Tishhh.” Other people think I’m a bit mental, but my brain is so full of useless things that there is no room in it for basic facts, such as my name, in my… er… RAM. So occasionally something appears out of nowhere from my mental hard-drive and smacks me in the face.
Interesting analogy.
Back to what I was going to talk about until I got distracted by my own name - I wanted to ask you all: how did you come up with the name for your site? (if you have one, that is).
Personally, I was talking with a friend and we were making up random words by sticking other words together. Just for fun. We came up with several very idiotic things like “BottleMouse” and “NuclearChicken” but I, being cat obsessed, had to make up something to do with cats. So I shouted “CATMAFIA!” and started running around meowing with an invisible gun in my hand. And that is why my site is called The Catmafia.

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