01/05/08 by Garvar at 11:21pm EST

I hate teenagers.

This is a very judgmental and crude statement, so I'll explain a little more on what I mean, and why I mean it. But before I begin, I'll attempt to disambiguate what I mean by "teenagers". I'm talking about your American-Pie-clich� angsty, simple-minded, hollow-headed bandwagon-hopping preppy highschool students. Cellphones, exposed boxers/thongs (despite it being winter and minus degrees celcius...not that I can say that with any merit as I'm wearing shorts like I always do) wigger chains, the very embodiment of our future's damnation. With that picture in mind, I'll begin:

I've just gotten home after a wonderful night on the town of Burlington (where I've just moved for work) with a friend of mine from Guelph, since she lives natively in Burlington and therefore knows it well. The evening proved to be quite entertaining by its own merit, but I also got to see something my hometown lacks. Something that both pains and disgusts the eyes.

Clusters of teenagers. Droves and droves of messy-haired, preppy, chain-wearing, belt-notwearing, cellphone-toting, prophanity-slinging, prepubescent-screeching, acne-farming, GED-achieving teenagers. After a game of Glow-In-The-Dark miniput, Lo and I decided to drive around aimlessly, because she quite likes to...drive around aimlessly. I showed her where I work, she showed me a few historical places of varying importance to her life, places of general interest, and was on the way to showing me a house with particularly impressive christmas lights when it hit us.

A clusterfuck of about 20 or 30 teenagers, all moving in a single pack along the sidewalk. There was enough space for me to just shrug and ignore it, until they were followed by a couple more teenagers, followed by another space, and then another mass of flesh and garments. We turned the corner and it was like wandering into a bee-keeper's hive. Over one hundred teenagers trudging along the sidewalks with their tails between their legs.

Why? We quickly found out why. Even though it was only 10pm, the cops had already discovered and broken up a house party of epic proportions. I've seen a number of American Pie and other teen movies, but had never seen an actual party of that magnitude, but the one before me put Hollywood's to shame. There were easily more than 150 highschool students crawling along the sidewalks of this subdivision we found ourselves in, shouting at one another in both fear of mommy finding out what they'd been up to, and intoxication. Lo and I both started to laugh at how pitiful and shameful the sight was, and it took me an unpleasant amount of resistance to refrain from cracking some dirtbag skulls. How loud and inconsiderate would they have had to have been to have their party broken up by 10 pm? Was there even enough time to tap the keg? The whole lot of them looked like brain-dead bandwagon-following machines, and each face disgusted me at first sight. I'm glad I wasn't such a mindless waste of flesh and bone when I was highschool, but to be honest I wasn't much better. I wasn't a stain on society by any means, but I'm pretty sure if I ever met my teenager self, I'd kick my ass. And I'd be thankful for it.

So after the cops broke up this party, this some-odd-hundred-large social infestation dispersed, looking for a way to kill time before phoning mommy for a ride home. If you weren't an arrogant, inconsiderate, intellectual stain, you wouldn't be in this situation, but now the cops are going to tell your parents what you were up to and you're not going to be allowed to go to that Linkin Park concert you were looking forward to. You'll think your parents are the worst parents ever for being so horrible and unfair to you, your angst and emo levels will skyrocket, and gawd-awful mainstream media profits will increase proportionately and we'll have even more Shit Radio. Thanks a ton.

So Lo and I continued to drive around, seeing a few more sights (one street south of where I live is lined with giant, nice-looking houses). We passed a Tim Hortons along the way. It wasn't a pretty sight - like a rotting carcass festering with maggots. We continued on our way, started talking about doughnuts, and before long Lo wanted to go to Tim Hortons. I thought I could go for a Hot Chocolate, so in the name of lulz we decided to brave the elements of the most disappointing age group known to man.

Those poor, poor minimum-wage employees. I really did feel kind of bad for the girl working there. For starters, the moment we got out of the car, all we could smell was cigarette smoke from the teeny-boppers. In case this sounds normal, we were in the parking lot. Outside. In what we would expect to be fresh air. The nearest teenager was a good 30 feet away, but the entire plaza smelled like cigarettes thanks to them.

Inside the Tim Hortons wasn't any better. The smell was a lot less unpleasant, but the commotion was more than enough to accomodate for that. Nearly every seat and every table was occupied by mildly intoxicated teenagers, hollering to one another like a pack of banshees in order to be heard over the rest of their banshee-hollering peers. I saw two elderly gentlemen looking around with confused, fearful looks on their faces like Armageddon was suddenly upon us. Before the party it was likely they were just having a quiet chat, reminiscing with one another about fond times.

Needless to say, it was extremely loud and frantic in there. The line was backed well to the door, but if that wasn't enough, the intoxication of the patrons added to the chaos. When I was about to order my drink an overtly drunk 15-or-so-year old leaned forward onto the glass by the clerk and said something, but I hadn't the scholars to translate it for me. She held up her brown paper bag which held a doughnut, said something else, and the bag slipped from her hands. In a foolish haze she stumbled around and attempted to procure her order. Being given the opportunity, the clerk turned to me a second time in order to conduct some more coherent and less stressful business. I was rather tempted to hop the counter and take over for her. If I were in her shoes I would likely have told everyone below the age of 18 and above a BAC of 0 to fuck off.

And yet, Lauren and I couldn't help but laugh the whole time.

The Tim Hortons wasn't the only establishment being zerg rushed by hordes of annoyance, either, but from what we could tell it was hit the worst at the time we were there. Disappointing that these some-odd-hundred individuals couldn't be doing something more constructive - or at least less destructive - activities with their time. I understand that because this party was broken up, many firms were treated to a large boost in revenue, but I don't think turning the consumerism wheel is valid tradeoff for tolerating a scourge of indecent people. If anything, it would be promoting it.

All in all, though, it was an eventful and entertaining night. Disappointing when I think about all those GED students, but at the time, I had a good laugh. So, in closing:

Fuck all those empty-headed, shallow, trend-treading, arrogant, angsty, rude, vulgar, indecent douchebags.

>:L

01/05/08 by Garvar at 4:42pm EST

More optimizations done to the code. Making a news post is even easier/cleaner now, and I re-rendered the post background image files to provide uniform, consistent results.

Also, it is now possible to directly link to a specific post, however, you need to both know the post id and the url. I just need to now make a macro (because, well, to hell with HTML. I've had a taste of PHP and I'm not going back!) for each post to link it.

On the other hand, I think straight html might actually be easier. Ah, I guess I'll go ahead and link up the PIDs.

01/04/08 by Garvar at 9:28pm EST

Another 0.5 hours and the n= value has error checking so people who are sneaky douchebags can no longer easily fuck with the news.php page (if you set n=a or any other letter between this post and the last one, it resulted in an infinite loop).

Now it is time to eat.

01/04/08 by Garvar at 9:06pm EST

2.25 gruelling hours and we're in business, baby!

For those of you wondering why the home page has shrunk so considerably, or worse yet, what happened to all the memories of news posts past, don't worry: they're all still here.

At the bottom of the homepage now is a link to a forum-style "news thread" that lists all old posts, 10 to a page.

You currently can't link to specific posts yet. That will come later, as it is awfully easy to implement now, but I'm hungry. Very hungry.

01/04/08 by Garvar at 6:50pm EST

Hey, Happy New Years, folks.

I'm implementing a new PHP script which should both automate post-archiving and allow users to link to specific news posts that they consider memorable and heartwarming (so, any and all of them).

If anything goes screwy, it's only temporary.

12/04/07 by Garvar at 1:11am EST

There, I've done it.

Though completely transparent to you, the viewer, I've recoded all the pages in php to make the navbar a one-block piece of code. If I need to change the navbar at all, I only have to edit one page, instead of the entire website (hi twinkfish). This is actually the original reason I wanted to do the website in PHP in the first place, but looking at the comic page as it is now, it proved useful to take into account some of PHP's other assets.

I figured that, while I have a bit of time, I'll tackle the navbar. Took twice as long as expected, but a good 50% of the time spent on this was me trying to figure out how to perform external method calls.

Turns out I was putting php code in an html file, so all I really had to do was rename the remaining .html extensions into .php, revise the Arwing class (yeah, I named my class Arwing, so what? The function is called checkGDiffusor() and if something's wrong with it, I know exactly what to do.) and bam it just worked as expected.

12/04/07 by Garvar at 12:28am EST

What the hell.

I knew Starfox was good for some laughs, but take a look at this promo video for it.

The things people got away with, back then.

12/02/07 by Garvar at 2:20pm EST

Well, good news.

Decided last night to go back to BRW's roots and hit up the local Pizza Hut with Pete for some serious dinner-eating and comic-writing. There's something special about just the two of us going to that place, because we accomplished a lot in the way of BRW's remaining plot. We now have the entire "basic idea" written out, and now just have the individual comics left to plan out.

We shall see this to the end.

Also, I've been giving some thought into how I'm going to restructure the index page. Now that I know a bit more PHP as well as MySQL and database queries, I can reimplement the navbar as well as rewriting the news page to automatically index old posts. The former is pretty unnecessary, but will take me about 20 minutes to implement. The latter, on the other hand, is a much more necessary feature which will be much more difficult to implement. But I'll see what I can do, because this page is getting long.

11/26/07 by Garvar at 2:55pm EST

A quick update. Site-related, not comic-related.

It has come to my attention that the transparent pngs used in the news post background cause (potentially significant) performance drops, particularly when scrolling. This has gone unnoticed until now simply because I don't experience the lag on my own PC and have never been to BRW on my laptop. So, rather than keep my pretty newspost background and assume the best for everyone, I've assumed the worst for everyone and adjusted the background to be marginally less pretty in order to have (hopefully) consistant performance.

11/24/07 by Garvar at 7:15pm EST

Hey folks...Don't know if you caught the message posted on the Overlord site but things should be getting back on track pretty soon. And when I say pretty soon, I mean, we've actually made efforts to get some writing done, and comics should start appearing again in January.

Maybe I'll post some lulz on this page in the meantime, when they come about.