Swatches

2010-03-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

Trying to choose a good background for this blog. I first tried the popular background that you see to your left, but found that spread over the entire screen, it produced a lot of eyestrain, and spotlighted every speck of dirt on the screen.

The cleanest image left me with the dirtiest look, so I tried a dirtier image, because dust does love monitors.

That's a lot of dirt, I thought. A little too much, I found, and not just because the image was larger. That much color and speckling was distracting.

Maybe something a little grayer? I tried the next, and found that the system was now fighting me, noting with very mild amusement that the graphic had been called "rough paper".

I guess so - I had to go into "edit html" to move it to where I wanted it to be, and again to get this text to its right instead of above it. This file was messing me up.

The page seemed to have a love hate thing going with it, though - it looked nice, but the text was a little lost in the texture. Setting the text to all bold, I ended up with a look that I didn't find completely satisfactory, but better, and not a clone of other pages that I had done. It needs work - all bold might weary the eyes in a long post - but this will do, for now.

It's late and I want to eat.

Perhaps you meant to go somewhere else?

2010-03-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

There was a Chicago focused blog that previously made reference to the Green Tortoise in its name. This is not that blog.

But if you did mean to be here, then perhaps I ought to tell you what this blog is: it's a team blog in search of a team that might or might not arrive, but I'm hoping that it will. There's a gross disconnect between the experience of the Green Tortoise as I've seen it portrayed online and as I experienced it on the ground, and when I keep running into slick, glossy layouts on supposedly amateur created fan sites, and "spontaneously written" reviews that are stylistically indistinguishable from professionally written ad copy implausibly often, I'm not surprised at the discrepancy between image and reality. While I certainly had a rougher time on that trip a few years back than did most of those I was traveling with, the fact of the matter was that I got to hear about a lot of unhappiness from a lot of the other campers. I look at the way in which others have tried to bury my own account of my own experiences, and I wonder how many other people just gave up on trying to be heard.

I decided that I'd like to do something about that, and now have the pagerank to give that a try. This blog is a place where you can maybe (subject to my approval) come to tell your story of Green Tortoise experiences that weren't all sweetness and butterflies, the kind of stories the Reptile isn't going to agree to let you post on their site. It's a place for telling the other side of the story, as experienced by those of us who made the mistake of traveling with the Green Tortoise without taking a few hits of acid, first. If you'd like to be on the team, drop by my site update group and introduce yourself, telling me a little about your story and indicating your desire to work on this blog. Please keep in mind that I'm trying to keep this place down to a low PG rating: no profanity and no adult material, and definitely no bigotry or hate-mongering. Pretend that you're writing a travel report for a newspaper and ask yourself what would or would not be appropriate, and let that be your guide.

If there is enough interest in this blog, eventually I'll put it on the Dissatisfied Customers of the Green Tortoise Ring. If not, I'll find some other good use for it. Some of my family members collect reptiles; maybe it'll be about that. I don't know. We'll see.

That Stupid Green Tortoise Blog

Swatches

Perhaps you meant to go somewhere else?