In CSS, url() is defined as part of the lexicon, not the grammar. If you write

  .x { background-image: url(  "foo/bar"  ) }

everything from the u up to the close parenthesis is ONE TOKEN. As far as I can tell, the only effect this has on anything is to make it more difficult to implement a CSS parser.

I couldn't leave well enough alone: I had to redo the books meme with the categories I wanted. Behind the cut, since I don't want to spam everyone's friends pages with nearly the same content twice. However, for additional incentive to read it, there are explanatory anecdotes in there now!

06:41 pm - well, if queenpam did it, I'd better.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

I want to add quite a bit more information to — which books I mean to read/finish reading, which books I wish I could un-read, which books I would recommend to everyone, which I would recommend only to people with compatible tastes. But that would be work.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose*
Don Quixote
Moby Dick*
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum*
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince*
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*

Is there any portable way to read [as in the system call] from a file directly into a C++ standard string? One would like to do something like

  str.reserve(filesize);
  got = ::read(fd, str.data(), str.capacity());
  str.enlarge_to_cover(got);

(error handling and loop until EOF omitted for clarity) but I can't actually find a method that does enlarge_to_cover(). Also, data() returns a read-only pointer.

... why am I still awake?

My sister Dara has a theory, which I reproduce here in full:

I have a theory, which probably derives from Harold Bloom, that we are directed in the course of our work as theater artists in the English-speaking world by the first Shakespeare play we ever saw. (If it was Bloom’s theory, it would expand to include all people, theater artists or otherwise.)

I tested this theory on two of my Convergence colleagues. Sure enough, we all had different answers - Robert had seen HAMLET first, which is remarkable. (I’ve never seen a live production of HAMLET.) Tony saw ROMEO & JULIET.

The very first Shakespeare I saw was MIDSUMMER, at the Theatricum outdoors. I remember these things from it:

- Puck swinging in on a rope from an enormous oak tree. The element of surprise. The feeling that the stage was alive with actors, that anyone might jump out of any crevice. That the ground, the hills, the walls were exploding with language.

- “But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so.”

- the lovers running through the twisted paths of a Topanga Canyon hill.

- the fairies saying “And I. ” “And I.” “And I.” (A chorus?)

- Bottom’s mask of a donkey’s head.

- The Mechanicals. “O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall.”

- laughing so hard that my face hurt.

- “If we shadows have offended” - the fantastic power embodied in that one actor, who was carrying all the threads of the play lightly in his mouth.

- Rhyme.

MIDSUMMER is about magic and love and language games, and I think I could even argue that it’s a landscape of imitation - between people and semihuman god-things, people and animals. Imitation being, of course, the founding principle of the improvised chorus. And it’s set in Athens, too. Which takes me back to the Greeks.

So I can derive all of my influences from it. I think I derive the other half from the film of “The Little Mermaid,” especially the fish-choruses.

Let us (er, me) know what the first Shakespeare you ever saw was. What do you remember of it? Do you think it shaped the direction of your work, or relationship to literature, or theater? If so, how? If not, Harold wants to talk to you.

Basic flavor elements:

• magic is wild; somewhat unpredictable, from the heart as well as the head
• The High Elves were Not Nice. I'm thinking more like Pratchett's depiction than e.g. Michael Moorcock's. Also, they're all dead.
• from Earthdawn: putting back together a very broken world
• keep the horror subtle, though (rugose, squamous ascii art! ha.)
• references to high fantasy kept small - mob monsters ok, plot monsters not
• take plot monsters from where? perhaps mythology?
• references to real world should not be exclusively European
• e.g. Chinese dragons, not European (also, dragons are much too badass to fight)
• steampunk technology is fun and could add interest
• high technology doesn't fit, though

Fun stuff:

• Ursula Vernon wombats and weird fruit
• Secrets of the Gnomes gnomes
• Nomadic carpet makers? Flying!
• Non-Euclidean overworld map
• ...gets more Euclidean as the plot advances?
• Jelaza Kazone-type sapient trees
• At least one type of magic done with bells.

Don't drink the water
You find on desert planets
It will make you God.

— Katie