I've been finagling around with fiddly stuff on my art/design website, trying to make it prettier as well as more functional. As it was pretty much the first site I tried building with php, it was chock full of obfuscated logic and gobbly-gook and having to snout around entirely too much to find what I'm looking for in order to make quick edits. So I cleaned it up and made the structure more intuitive and the php more legible. And I added a gallery, yay! Need to explore more possibilities with Joomla, as it is making me like javascript more. The gallery randomly freaks out on me in Google Chrome, which is rather unfortunate, but as Chrome also randomly freaks out on me, I'm not too concerned. I've got a small collection of different CSS styles, and I tried to make them look not as tacky as they used to be. It's a weird line I feel like I'm trying to walk: I want to have this range of different CSS styles that a user can switch back and forth between, to see my design ability. Thing is, I don't want to make the styles *too* different from each other, as I don't want insane server requestage to happen. So I'm just keeping many things in neutral or b/w, to keep from having too much clashing occur. I also rescanned in a few things, and scanned in a few new things. New art, yay!

Anyhow, feel free to check out my updates at varoper.com!

I finished the series, finally. It was addictive to the end. In some ways satisfying, in other ways rather frustrating. I wrote a rambling review of it on Goodreads, should anyone care.

I will include a brief snippet here, something that in scanning over reviews of the books I just hadn't seen touched on at all.

"One thing about the books that I do appreciate is this: In many fantastical pieces of fiction, there's a central character who ends up being the savior (Harry Potter, Frodo/LotR, Neo/Matrix, Rand/Wheel of Time, etc etc). That character is usually "different" in some way or another that ends up saving everything, and that character is consistently male. It was a breath of fresh air to read something where the character with the awesome powers who saves the day is actually female."