Let us begin
My original idea of printing out the pages of my old site to pdf’s didn’t work. The html didn’t translate very well. It wanted to break pages in bad places, for example. I had a workaround, but…look, it just didn’t work, okay?
I think the thing to do is dump the whole site into an area on this site. For now, I’ll link to individual articles. Later, I’ll fix the functionality the connects them.
Simply put, the “home” links don’t work yet. Let me know if anything else goes wrong.
Don’t worry. Just click.
I actually owned the lab coat in the graphic. You can’t tell, because weasels don’t have shoulders, but it was a proper mad scientist’s coat. Probably Fifties? It was a heavy, heavy cotton with little steel buttons that marched across the shoulder and down the side. And it fit! I loved that thing.
Our first experiment offers the cat raw meat and cooked meat to see which one she prefers. The answer surprised me.
Hell yes that’s clickbait. And do please click the graphic with the Zippo lighter. It’s a scrap of javascript and I was very proud of myself.
May 3, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 6
Science!
The first section of my old site was called Doktor Auntie Weasel’s Laboratory and it was essays on science. This was the header graphic (but in color. I think this one was animated.)
The machine is based on a snapshot of real object I owned. It was an early model Relax-A-Cizor, an item that was banned so hard in 1970, they were ordered to be collected and destroyed. You couldn’t even legally sell one used.
It’s a terrifying device – you attach probes to your body and it electrically stimulates your muscles for you. The electrodes were fabric pads that you wetted before use. Yes, I tried it. If they dried out or you placed them wrong, it hurt like a bastard.
If you placed them right, your muscles jerked like that decapitated frog from High School science class. Please tell me you had that class.
I paid $10 for it at a junk shop in Pawtucket and it was pristine. It had all its bits, including the instruction manual. I was awed by it and I’m not sure how I got rid of it in the end. It might be upstairs.
I’ll pick an item from this section for tomorrow.
May 2, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 7
Before I had a blog
Before I had a blog, I had a website. It was a series of medium-form essays on a bunch of different subjects arranged in topical…piles? I had a ball with the graphics and the coding. The writing was, as writing always is, a pain in the tail.
There were, like, twenty different front page graphics and you’d get a random one each time (two pictured above). When you moused over one thing, something on the other side of the page would light up. It was all stupid fun, but it pleased me. I crack me up.
It ran from 2003 to 2006, so the graphics were small and/or low resolution – we were all painfully conscious of download times in the Oughties (I still instinctively am). But, on the whole, it held up pretty well.
One day, somehow, domain scalpers stole the address. I’m still not sure how that happened. I must have missed a renewal notice or three.
And that was the end of that.
To be honest, I was relieved. It was ass-ache and I was then right at the beginning of my trans-Atlantic relocation. I was whelmed. I was too ignorant to be overwhelmed yet.
Zo! I thought it would be fun to reprint some the old stuff, probably as links to pdf files so the formatting holds. None of it has been archived anywhere, as far as I know. Long-time readers will recall that my birthday is in early May and I bug out for the first week or so of the month.
Have some vintage weasel and consider me bugged.
May 1, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 2