I was reminded, thanks to this bit of gaming humor that someone emailed me this evening, that on the way home Sunday the in-train movie was Madagascar. I won’t bore you with a lengthy review (in short: not horrible, occasionally clever, decently animated, minus points for major plot obviousness, and the lemur dance party song is too catchy for its own good) but I had to tell you about the one bit that made me laugh out loud.

Yes, I get weird looks from people I travel with quite regularly. C’mon, this is me we’re talking about.

Anyway. At one point the lemurs are in a state of panic, and one random lemur holds up a black book on which is written, “To Serve Lemurs,” and he cries out, “It’s a cookbook!”

See, it’s funny because it’s a reference to one of the more subtly dark Twilight Zone episodes. I mean the original TZ, not the watered-down nonsense we’ve seen in recent years. Anyway. During this year’s 4th Of July festivities here at the house we caught a lot of TZ (SFC runs a marathon every year), and “To Serve Man” was one of the selections. If you haven’t seen it, well, if you’ve paid attention up to this point you can guess the twist in the story.

How did I get here from there? Look at entry #8…

I probably won’t leave it like this, but I’ve swapped out the random signature picker (that which provides the silly text just below the big site logo, up there) with a random slogan picker. At first I was going to use the Sloganizer, which is awfully cool all by itself, but their code refused to play nice with Monaural Jerk’s template-based system. This merely provided me with incentive. I took some time and learned how to make my own!

function gdSlogan() {
  $sloganfile = file('/PATH/TO/YOUR/slogans.txt');
  $sloganraw = $sloganfile[rand(0,count($sloganfile))];
  $slogantag = 'XYZ';
  $sloganname = 'YourName';
    $sl1 = '<span class="randquote">';
    $sl1 .= str_replace($slogantag, $sloganname, $sloganraw);
    $sl1 .= '</span>';
  return $sl1;
}

The “slogans.txt” file consists of a bunch of… er… slogans, with the characters XYZ where one’s name should go. I then have that string replaced with, in my case, “GreyDuck” but you could use anything else you like. (Note: I also have a “span” wrapper to make the text behave accordingly with my particular stylesheet.)

Why didn’t I just write the slogans file so that my nickname would already be in place? Don’t be silly! How would I learn these little tricks if I didn’t push myself just a little bit? Besides, this means that someone who’s equally-or-less skilled at PHP-fu can take that bit o’ code and, say, my slogans file and plug them into their own site, huh?

It’s a public service, I tell ya. I’m all about helping others.

It’s a scary thing, when a geek starts getting restless. He (or she) is prone to puttering around looking for something to tweak, install, experiment upon, or otherwise futz with.

Today, I got restless. One subtle result is a slightly-modified site banner. Less-subtle results may appear in the next week or so… if, by then, I’m still interested in the projects I started today. Such is the nature of the geek-dilettante.

Here’s a little hint for those of you who play City of Heroes and are excited about the prospect of equipping a new character with bow and arrow:

Please, do not name your character some variant of “Robin Hood.” Really. If you can’t summon forth the slightest bit of creativity, if all you can do is use a mangled rendition of, oh, the most famous bowslinger in all literature, then you need to get out of the game right now. Yes, right now.

Thank you.

This public service message brought to you by all of ten minutes on the Test server, puttering around Atlas Park with my TA/Archery Defender. Who is not, I’ll have you know, at all named anything like the aforementioned character. This is more than I can say for the half dozen clones I saw… Sheesh.