make-believe.org

Notes on the wonderworm

• Wiggles is now an official CSS Zen Garden design. As a matter of fact, it's number 99. Wow. Congratulations to Dave on racking up a century.
• I defy anyone to come up with a more ridiculous name for a design. Yes, it does make me cringe a bit too. It really was the name of the character though. Unbeknownst even to himself, Wiggles would transform from your average anthropomorphic worm into a "wonderworm" whenever he uttered the magic word "OMYGOSH!". And he would be restored to his workaday self if he suffered a blow to the head. Or so I gathered—I only read one chapter, because it was pretty excruciating.
• CSS guru Eric Meyer has gone on record saying "Wiggles rocks my world." And having said it, there's no way he can take it back now, even if he ever reads this. But seriously, this has chronically inflated my ego. Maybe I'll make a t-shirt out of it.
• I had to compress the jpegs to the point of asphyxiation to get the design under my arbitrary limit of 500kb. So image quality ain't quite what I would have liked. But hey, it's supposed to be a golden age comic book.
• Speaking of which, here's the original source whence the images were derived: the Golden Age Library of comic books that have entered the public domain.
• The design is MOSe enabled. This means it looks better in virtually anything other than Internet Explorer. Don't look at me; ask Microsoft. (There's also a slight bug in the design list, where I forgot to take into account the possibility of lengthy design titles. Like, for instance, "Wiggles the Wonderworm". Way to shoot myself in the foot, eh?)
• As with Miracle Cure, I owe some inspiration to Shaun Inman's This is Cereal, which remains my favourite.
• I used Comic Sans MS in a Zen Garden!! (Cue evil laughter...)

Joseph | 15 Apr 2004