I did a little housekeeping on the Ayarane Project hub. (read: not LJ or Facebook versions)
All of my social networking stuff occupies the black bar header… thing rather than waaaay up top as text links. There is now a mail form and a permanent page about the details of Gourmet Ramen.

And… yeah. My brain is just kinda mush at the moment. I need to text my sister to wish her a happy birthday, for one thing.

Blah. BLAAAAH.

Perhaps some caffeine could jump-start things. Yoshi’s Imagination is mired in molasses today or SOMETHING.

Dear Internets, you know her from taking on the terrorists in Paragon City. Now she serves as Ayarane Project’s War Correspondent. Next on the parade of podcast personalities… Action Cat!

“Terrorists beware! Action Cat comes for YOU!”
Though her primary role is to report on the War on Terror, old habits die hard, and she still carries a (magically-concealed) assault rifle. You know, just in case.

Of course, she needs a cameraman, and who better to capture it all than Lakitu? He’s joined the HD age and traded in his old film camcorder for a high-definition DV model. And in a pinch, his cloud can expand to hold more passengers. Action Cat herself is packing a bluetooth earpiece… though despite what it looks like, the ear part of it is just for decoration, since they obviously haven’t made a version for catgirls yet. However, because the flapping became an issue with the sound recording, she decided to ditch the cape.

Action Cat makes a fairly disturbing discovery early into her assignment– those terrorists are, in fact, bulldogs! Rogue bulldogs pretending to be members of Al-Qaeda. Nobody suspects bulldogs, of course, because everyone is so entranced by their smooshed, vacant faces and such, but we at Ayarane Project know better.

Today just flew by really fast, as soon as I got here. I did more reading then drawing (and, if you’ve seen the twitter/twitpic feed on the AP hub, just looking out the window because it’s a really nice view from up here), but that’s okay. I’ma see if I can just do this every Tuesday.

One minor point of annoyance, though… I get that libraries and such would use filters. But why, WHY is Ayarane Project blocked and considered a Malicious Site? ;_; Even weirder is that this only affects the hub: the Ramen subdomain still works. WTF. This just means that I’ll have to, er, wait until I get home to reverse-tag any entries I make, blah. I wonder if there’s a way to petition Websense to get me unblocked, it’s just silly to tell my spaceship to GTFO. :( I have pictures of KITTIES, for smoo’s sake.

Anyway, time to pack up Dinah… once I get home, need to crack open Blastoise and put in his Blu-ray drive. About freaking time. :P

The great irony of Ayarane Project is that this hub and all its offshoots is one ginormous vanity show… this despite my fervent HATRED and utter aversion to being perceived as self-absorbed. I am not a secretive person (and I’m far too boring to have much that is even secret-worthy, the few things that ARE redacted and obfuscated are merely done so as a courtesy to others who would object) but at the same time I am not the type to actively shove every mundane detail of my life in others’ faces.

I suppose the existence of Ayarane Project would also constitute a happy medium– lay everything out, but don’t feel pressured to go parading it about. Of course, there’s the question of “what about potential employers?!” because, of course, it’s expected that in applying for work you’re bound to be Google’d and such. To them, I say “do your worst.” There are many, many reasons for this… among other things, the biggest would be that it spares me the incredibly uncomfortable burden of having to talk about myself LIVE. (Fellow social phobics, PLEASE tell me you understand what I mean.)

And, of course, I do not drink, smoke, use drugs or otherwise participate in things that are blatantly illegal or would make me look bad-silly. Hooray?

In all seriousness, though… one of the secondary purposes of this hub is to identify, itemize and archive the otherwise intangible aspects of me. This is both for your amusement (or lack thereof) and as part of an ongoing process of self-discovery/identification/blah blah blah. Years ago, most people would do something along these lines by stringing together a bunch of pages and calling it a “personal site.” (If you’ve followed Ayarane Project WAAAAAAY back since I first bought the domain, you would certainly recall my many attempts at those.) But in this NEWER era of blogs, Twitter, YouTube and the like, to get the same point across requires a distinctly… different form of execution.

Hence, we have this current form of Ayarane Project, a WordPress blog that pulls the bulk of its fodder from my LiveJournal (if only because I am too lazy to write the same thing for two separate spaces, and it’d be redundant anyway), but integrates the rest of my presence on the internets via the many widgets on the sidebar. I like widgets– I’m not the type to add them willy-nilly, but occasionally I’ll find one that would, you know, actually make sense to loot and deploy here.

This, of course, does not pooh-pooh or otherwise rule out the use of separate pages. (See that “about yoshi” link up there, for one. And, at the way bottom, you’ll find another that profiles my two machines Blastoise and Dinah.) There’s still quite a bit to identify and catalog… it’s a matter of figuring out how best to do it. And yes, I’ve actually entertained the thought of doing it as a wiki, if only for the whole “interconnected” thing.

Also: The YouTube channel’s not seen much action lately… I know I still need to finish the captures of the Phase battles from the first four .hack games, except I appear to have misplaced my GameBridge. o_O;;; I know I lent it to Bren a few months back but I also know she returned it… But, I’m not too worried since I’m considering getting this capture box since it can do HD and appears to be the only HD-capable capture device out there that isn’t HORRIBLY-obscenely-priced. Beyond finishing those captures, I’ve some penciled plots on nefarious things I could post but nothing coherent to elaborate on yet.

Anywho… other recent tweaks to the hub:
- The title is now a graphic, just because. For the curious, the handwritten font is “Tony Steidler-Dennison,” and I looted it off some blog several years ago. Based on the name, I would assume the font was constructed based off someone’s handwriting? (Presumably, this guy.) Googling shows that the font is no longer available for download anywhere else, and I love to use this font as a header, so this is one of those rare files I take EXTREMELY special care to back up whenever rebuilding my machines. The pixel font is another one that I looted from a free font repository long long ago… It doesn’t so much have a name but some alphanumeric code: “04b03,” if you feel like googling for it or others like it.
- New widgets: Randomly Yoshi-Factual displays a random detail about me, just for the hell of it. Then there is also The Eternal Poll, which is an ongoing query about how you like your Yoshi fix.

This is totally an exclusive for those viewing this from the main Ayarane Project hub. As in, this very server. Lucky you! Actually, it’s because it’s only relevant to this version of the blog and thus makes no sense to appear on the other variants.

I was SUPPOSED to go attempt sleep, um, 3 hours ago but decided on a whim to go diving through all the 150-ish posts that have been streaming here since the server change in late October of last year and add tags to all of them, since the stream widget thingy that pulls the posts off LJ won’t carry over tags and… yeah. Clearly Yoshi is very bored. From hereon I’ll try to go back and tag streamed posts (and fix the ones with YouTube/NBC video widgets since, again, the stream widget kinda forgets to import those) as soon as possible, just because it’s cleaner that way.

You’ll also see that in the byline there’s an “ITP” field (ITP being “in this post”) with the tags used. Also the Yoshi link should take you to the about page rather than another useless archive.

Why do I do this? Certainly can’t be because I’m stupidly amused by things like, oh, TAG CLOUDS and such?

What else… ah… I may replace the title text with something more graphical. But that I’ll do another time, when I am less sleepy.