Ree’s musings

Okay, what is going on when I try to embed a video in Tabulas? It's driving me bananas!

Embedding works in Tabulas and crossposts to LJ, but both posts have invalid code that tries to "close" tags that are already self-closing. Editing the LJ crosspost repairs these errors. Editing the Tabulas post gets these errors back immediately upon reposting -- the invalid code cannot be deleted. It respawns.

I thought it might be a rogue Firefox plugin, even though that doesn't explain why LJ works fine (once the Tabulas-altered code is fixed), but the same thing happens in Opera. Whatever is happening, it's happening on the Tabulas server, not in my browser. It appears intended to correct improper HTML. That's fine, nifty even. It also breaks valid XHTML. That is not fine.

I tried encasing the "close" tags in an HTML comment, hoping that the correction system would see what it wanted to see and leave the uncommented code portion alone. No dice. The same faulty "close" behaviour occurs with an HTML comment, even though that doesn't make any sense. </!--> is not markup, HTML or XHTML. It's just invalid. And annoying. And now it's trying to "fix" my encoded HTML, when I want it encoded so it's visible in the browser! What on Earth is going on here?!

Does anyone have any ideas on how to get around this? I refuse to forgo valid code just to embed, but surely there's a way to have both!

Looks like Blogarithm will stop providing update notifications for sites that do not provide an RSS feed. My entire use for Blogarithm was tracking sites that couldn't be arsed to provide a feed, so now I'm looking for alternatives.

I have previously asked LJ Genie for suggestions and gotten nothing workable, just services that only use RSS feeds. FeedBlitz and the site it bought, Bloglet, will not work because they track only feeds, just like Blogarithm's new owner (rssfwd) does. ComicAlert works for some webcomics, but ComicAlert only sends updates for comics with enough subscribers and most of mine are too niche.

Any ideas? It doesn't have to be a remotely hosted service -- I'm fine with installing a script on my webspace to accomplish this, but I don't know where to look for one.

Strange happenings tonight. Arak came over and he showed me some bits of video games. He's trying to whet my appetite for the 3D Legend of Zelda games even though that is totally heretical to Reeish thinking. Also, it is working. OMG so pretty.

I wanted to show him exactly what happened when one of my games locked up on me, so I fired it up. I always get wrapped up in the story so the glitchy end to my explorations makes me feel slightly ill. I walked up to the buggy spot, taking my time to delay the inevitable, and told him to watch.

And that's when I saw an animatic I had never seen before. O.o?

I don't know what changed. I had already done everything I could to clean the game media and my console, and none of it worked when I tried to play shortly afterward. But today I saw that animatic and managed to get all the way to a save point. Yes! I told Arak he must have an aura of Cure Light Wounds for video games.

Before Arak left, he tried turning his Game Boy on. It had frozen on him earlier and he wanted to see if it would work correctly now.

"Well," I impishly reminded him, "it was in the same room as my game. Maybe it was affected too."

It was. We parted, happy with our lot.

When my brother Squirt got home after work, I giddily informed him of the events in his absence.

He laughed... and said, "Think that would work on Super Metroid?" He had two copies that both had graphics glitches -- statues reskinned with missile tiles and so on.

A quick search of the room turned up a copy that had been well within range of the perceived game cure. Squirt told me to pop it in and try it.

I started a new file. And played well past Kraid, at least 20% of the way through the game. The glitches were completely gone.

I'm thinking Arak should set up shop at an upcoming convention: "Heal your vintage video games with our fantastic aura! 100% success rate (as of Dec. 21, 2007) - rates negotiable - all game types welcome to try - no refunds."

In the meantime, I can continue my game! And play a file on Squirt's Super Metroid too! Awesome! (That's probably enough caffeine for the morning though. Heh.)

I'm a big ol' post-Christmas softie. Case in point: I am currently a melty puddle of mushy "d'aww" because Christmas Day I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol with my family and it was awesome, and just now I saw a small photo of Michael Caine in another role entirely but still d'awww.

At least it's an appropriate time of year for it.

I'm to do a list of the things I got for Christmas, yes? Tradition. For starters I got lots of hugs. I got a day opening presents with my family, and before that I got another day looking up childhood games with my cousin. (Spirograph is as awesome as ever and eventually I will remember not to bear down on the pen on a wooden table. Eek.) Then more hugs.

Oh, I got some material goods, but lots and lots of warm squishy hugs are better (though I will concede to a paroxysm of glee upon opening my new Indiana Jones boxed set). Hugs! Hugs! More hugs!

D'aww.