Ever considered buying a graphics tablet? Well there's a great deal on one today over at Woot.

It's only $33. Seriously, that's uber-cheap if you ever wanted to test one out. It's probably crap, but at least it's better than using that mouse of yours.

Act quickly, and it coult be yours. And I do mean quickly, as Woot deals only last a single day.

This would make me want to scream.

Linked from this page.

Instead of working on fun stuff like 2007 awards nominees layout or our internal admin page overhaul, I got to spend the morning fixing the Awards section in the Portal front page. Specifically the Turd of the Week award.

The CSS isn't that complicated. But it's definitely made more challenging when you consider it's a heavily viewed portion of the site, located in an area on the page where it affects the position of the pods around it, and that it needs to be tested in Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE7, and IE6 (where the bug was more than just a visual thing, it actually pushed boxes around making the page harder to navigate). So not a hard thing to implement, but something I had to recheck a dozen times before making the decision to push a new stylesheet live. The good news is that my fix didn't require anyone else, I didn't have to bother any of the programmers to change any of their code; something I could just tell Tom about after I fixed it.

Then there are the larger questions. Do we delete the user who so delighted in making the site look ugly for a time? ("Nah, not *that* big of a deal"); Do we ditch Turd of the Week altogether since it's just a headache anyway ("No Tom, let's not be hasty"); Do I quietly delete the review of the user who claims the ugliness brings a tear of joy to his eye? (Nope, that would be an abuse of power).

I could have simply deleted the entry, which would only be a short-term fix. Instead, it wasted around an hour of my time, something I hate to admit to the little bastards that revel in that sort of thing -- little attention whores love to know when they get a reaction.

But I share all of this for two reasons:

First, to say that these stupid little exploits are only temporary. Our fixes are permanent. In their own way they would even be a fun challenge if it didn't mean diverting our attention from launching new features.

Second, a warning to people who defend these lame movies by marking scathing reviews as "abusive". If I see a review calling these submissions out for what they are I tend to clear them of any wrongdoing. So anyone jumping on the bandwagon and flagging comments that are accurate in pointing the finger at spam groups, they're going to get a surprise in the form of a garbage whistle.

So keep playing your little pranks. The rest of us will just keep besting you.

I guess this could probably get filed under "99% useless for a site like Newgrounds", but it was something that was bothering me: NG finally has a print style.

There aren't a lot of people who come to Newgrounds to print things out -- maybe a Penicorn thread here, or a userpage post there -- but when they did it was butt ugly. The entire first printed page was nothing but header login boxes and useless links.

Now, however, we have a new style sheet that hides the useless junk like buttons and footer links, converts everything to black and white, and puts the breadcrumb trail back to what it should be instead of a bulleted list. Again, not exactly rocket science but definitely something that had been bugging me a bit.

For a *really* good time, print out a BBS thread. It's the only thing I could imagine myself printing in the future, so I gave it a little more attention than the rest of the site.

The only limitation to the css is where I didn't label giant sections of stuff properly from the get-go, like the stats column in the userpages. There's not a really good way for that to be deactivated while printing without bugging the programmers here, but if there's anything else that could use better styles for printing, note it in the comments.

Bluehippo kindly offered to make me a custom signature, and finally finished it today.

Here it is, in all its cryptic glory!

Soooo.... In celebration of Tankmen .5's release, we've released yet another shirt design in the NG.Store.

It's kinda blowing our load for surprise items when the new store launches, but there were just too many shots of people smoking in the latest installment of the Tankmen series that I couldn't pass up the synergistic opportunity. (How's that for corporate-speak?!)

It also means that Lisa's news post about finally making the cut has been rendered obsolete, but little does everyone know that it's actually her modeling the Smoking shirt design as well. Funny how we all thought it was Stamper's chest at first... Maybe she oughta rethink that goal of dropping weight all the way down to 99 pounds now that people think she looks like a boy. :)

So it hasn't actually snowed more than half an inch yet ('round these parts, anyway), but we're finally ditching the Winter header theme. I guess people accociated it more with Christmas, which is fine since I was a little sick of it anyway. So down it comes.

The challenge is to make it more simple to update the header in the future. It's not difficult as-is, technically speaking, but processes could always be improved upon. I found that when every time I made a change to the site's main CSS file (ngsite.css), I had to make changes to the backed-up version of the file too, the one without the fancy holiday theme additions. It wouldn't have been a big deal -- and still wasn't that big of a deal anyway, technically speaking -- if it was for only a day or two, but using a swapped-out style sheet for an entire month was a bit of a hassle considering the amount of tweaks and edits I'd been doing.

So, I've been messing around with swappable themes, the kind where all we have to do is toss in an additional style sheet that would overwrite the necessary header styles and call new images altogether. This instead of combing through a dozen different styles spread across the existing code. Not only would it make it simpler for me -- having all the styles in one handy place and not requiring me to edit multiple sheets for each change -- but it would be simpler for Jim and Ross too since there wouldn't be any timing issues. The art could be moved into a special holiday directory and the new style sheet could be added to the queue first, and then the script to activate the changes could be run at a later time. All around a simpler method.

The question remains whether there will be a noticeable glitch where the images are swapped out. For example, a user's browser loads the default header styles (which also call the new images) then load all the other styles in that first sheet. Will the browser display those images first, then swap them out for the updated styles a microsecond later? Or will it wait to see what the ultimate result is before rendering anything at all. I'm guessing it's the latter, but we won't know for sure until we test it out.

The reason I bring all this up now is because I've got the Peni-pals.com site set up to use a different skin for each section, and it's working out surprisingly well. I'm excited to use the technique elsewhere. It's a lot of extra code and a little bit of a headache but does help to keep things organized better.

Finally, a salute to our fallen header:

So, my youngest sister posted a few weeks ago and I linked to her post about how much she loves the Newgrounds staff page. It was met with a lots of "Tits or GTFO, Bob's sister" and other such delights.

Well, my oldest younger sister has made her first post finally, after successfully purchasing her first Penicorn doll. It seems that my request that she change her user image was honored, even though it's not what I had in mind. At least it seems like she knows how to give the people what they want right off the bat.

Anyway, go over there and show her some NG love if you have a chance.

(My favorite part is the simple algebra equation she uses for her subject heading, even though I don't totally get it.)

Looks like we've got our first happy customer.

We sent out his package the morning after we announced the penicorn plush dolls were on sale, and his order apparently arrived about four days later. We were sort of wondering what people would think once they got their hands on these toys. Would they feel "quality" enough? Will people be happy with the size, the weight, the color, the dab of hot glue on the tip...? Looks like they are. :D

We're also glad to be getting orders for these crazy things. There was some doubt over whether people would embrace the concept or find it too creepy. I mean, *WE* think they're cute, but we're relieved to find out that other people think they're cute as well. I'm still too embarrassed to show my parents what we've created but I've been showing them to all my friends. Tim and I are even planning on buying a few ourselves to hand out to our friends who have recently had kids, and Stamper brought three down to give to his dad (who I think named them Huey, Duey and Louie).

It'll be sad to take them down on 12/13 but right now it's a lot of work to hand address all these envelopes. Here I am, working on HTML and CSS, and I have to pop up every few hours or so and click through Paypal's painfully slow site to pull up addresses one at a time. (Believe me, I've tried the multi-shipping options, and they suck ass.) The new store will make this all go so much faster. Hopefully they'll be back up in time for Valentine's day, along with the new Peni-pals.com site.

Edit: And this guy.

My Dad has finally accomplished one of his dreams, and that is to be the best Settlers of Catan player in the world. He's played over 900 games at the time of this writing, and at an hour per game, that's a huge time investment.

I mean, he's always been good. And obsessed.

When I first introduced my dad to the original Settlers of Catan board game a few years ago (having been introduced to the game myself by Ross, incidentally), he was immediately fascinated by it. He went out and bought all the expansion sets -- none of which he likes as much as the original version -- and demanded to play it every time we had a game night. Regardless of how many people we have to accommodate at a gaming get-together, be it two or 12, the first question out of his mouth was always the same: "Are we playing Settlers?"

Most of my friends and I invariably tired of the game mostly because there are so many other great board games out there; too many to be pigeon holed into playing the same one over and over again. Another reason was that because it was the only game my dad liked to play, he was becoming impossible to beat. Those of us who were smart enough not to trade with him would get frustrated at people who would fall for his salesmanship. After a while I vowed never to play with him again unless it was some different variation of the game that he hadn't completely figured out yet, and even then only when I absolutely couldn't convince him to try something else in my collection.

Fast forward three years to the pre-release of Catan for Xbox Live Arcade. We played it on the XBLA developer network here in the office (a perk from The Behemoth side of the operations) and knew immediately it was right up my dad's alley. I mean, here we were playing it every chance we got, taking turns against the different A.I.s and critiquing each other's strategies. The game was so well implemented and fun to play that it was obvious it would be an immediate addiction for my dad, whose would stay up to the wee hours of the night playing Civilization on his PC.

So I borrowed Tim's expertise for a weekend and we drove down my parent's place in Maryland. First, we went on a whirlwind shopping spree where we purchased a 46" Sony TV, a new Xbox 360, wireless network card, wireless controller, and an XBLA gold membership. Then we went about completely rearranging the living room to optimize it for the new set-up and getting my dad familiarized with the whole online gameplay experience.

Within one week he was absolutely hooked.

After a month he was still staying up to 3 a.m. on a regular basis to squeeze out every minute of gameplay he could.

Now, almost seven months after its debut, my dad has finally made it to where I knew his passion for Settlers of Catan and addictive personality could take him: Number One in the world.

Congratulations, dad. You've earned it.