Minte's New Writeups

Blink and marquee tag (how-to)

2009-01-02T01:10:13Z

If you want to annoy someone with Internet Explorer but don't want to learn JavaScript in order to make something blink, you can do it with the marquee tag.

(You see, the < blink > tag doesn't work on IE! Some may see this as a drawback, but I see it as one of IE's redeeming features.)

All you need to do is set the marquee's speed modifier so high that the text just looks like it's blinking. Make sure that you make the width a set number, so that people with different screen resolutions don't see some crazy text that isn't what you saw during testing. (P.S. - make sure that your width is wide enough for all of the text to be read.)

< marquee width=600 loop=-1 > Sample Text < /marquee >

Oh, and make the loop infinite, why don't you.

After you've got the width set to your amount (I don't care what it is), set a really high scrollamount (speed) value (think in hundreds), and fiddle…

fangirl (how-to)

2009-01-02T00:44:21Z

Dealing with Fangirls
_{^{Or, stay away from that dead bat}}

1) There are fangirls, and there are "rabid" fangirls.
Some fangirls are normal people who just happen to really like a certain subject or genre. They live among us, and you would never know unless you got them in a deep conversation about their chosen topic.
However, there are fangirls that are completely rabid about their object of obsession. They will mention it at every opportunity, and even work it into a casual conversation about something completely different. They make it incredibly clear that they are obsessed and going to stay that way. These are actually a minority, but are so loud and obnoxious that they are what is always seen by the public. Oh, and they're proud of it, too. This is the stereotypical fangirl, and should be feared.
Learn to tell them apart.

2)…

thoughtcrime (idea)

2009-01-01T23:40:25Z

I often catch myself thinking something that I would never want anyone else to hear me say aloud, and immediately drowning that thought. Sometimes I play music in my head, sometimes I focus on a happy little tree. Whatever course of action I take, I avert my thoughts from their traitorous path and focus on something more "wholesome".

Imagine a typical teenage male, admiring another male's clothing -- he would probably avert his thoughts as well as his eyes. Anyone who is beginning to enjoy any peculiar fetish, such as furries or small children (or anything else society at large sees as perversion), will at first try to turn their thoughts away and focus on something else, anything else. A housewife considering killing her children in order to follow her husband's wishes will discard the thought instead of taking a knife upstairs.

Of course, I think that this behavior is…

Theodore Roosevelt (person)

2009-01-01T05:04:25Z

Theodore Roosevelt, the man after whom the Teddy Bear was named, was a serious badass.

He originally intended to make a speech on October 14, 1912 in Milwaukee when he was shot by a would-be assassin. The opening paragraph of his speech is as follows:

"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet - there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best."
_{^{From Wikisource, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_have_just_been_shot}}

He then proceeded to make a full-fledged, 3,700 word speech with a bullet lodged in his chest. He visited the hospital…

Zyzzyx (thing)

2008-12-29T03:01:55Z

"What? 'Zyzzyx'? What the hell could that possibly be?"

Well, my friend, "zyzzyx" is a type of sand wasp named for the sound it makes. Oh, onomatopoeia can be evil sometimes!

Wikipedia, aka, "The Fountain of Knowledge," informs me that "They were first studied in detail by H. Janvier (a.k.a. Claude-Joseph) in 1928," and a Google search leads me to believe that they're native to Chile. (The country, not the pepper - that would be terrifying!)

"Zyzzyx" is also a great word for hangman, crossword puzzles, and any other puzzle or word game in which you are inclined to be evil. It it imperative, therefore, that you learn this word - if not so that you can use it, so that you can defend against its use. Very few people expect the word to be half Z.

However, it is not a very good word for Scrabble, seeing as how it does contain three z's, one of the few English words to accomplish this.

Bell Ringer (person)

2008-12-06T01:40:25Z

Bell Ringer: One who rings a bell.

In history, a bell ringer was the town crier, mayor, or (really) anyone else who had a bell and wanted to ring it. But we mostly think of the town crier and such.

Mostly we see bell ringers around Christmas (Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Yuletide/etc.), ringing away outside department stores. Their main purpose is to collect money for a cause - for families who need Christmas money, for childrens' hospitals, and for anyone else who might need a spot of cash to get them through the winter.

The Salvation Army, for example, is often spotted ringing the bells in December. Their red color scheme (as well as the tintinnabulation of the bells) makes them easy to spot.

Some find it annoying (Edgar Allen Poe even wrote a poem about bells driving one mad), and others find it a good way to prove that they're generous. Then, of course, there are the people who really are generous, and those people make up the backbone of such donations.