Jesse's Posts

Twenty years ago today I was a 14-year-old kid on a 33.6k dial-up modem punching names of things I liked into a site that purported to give out free ad-supported domain names. Eventually I hit on one that was available. Thus, Oasisband.net was born.

What started as just a random collection of junk I was interested in grew into a major creative outlet for many of us. We argued and illustrated and sang our hearts out. We were a community in the truest sense, and in a way I have not experienced in life since.

I am beyond grateful for the happiness and joy Oasisband brought me, and for setting me on a path to learn the skills I still use in my career today.

Happy 20th Anniversary to us!

I wish us all the best!

Holy cow, two news posts in one day!

I was poking around some old data, and found a number of posts that were never ported back in the previous rewrite of 2008. This includes a fair number of game reviews, as well as the entire "Others" section.

They've only been missing from the site since 2008!

It took just over 10 years(!) to get out the door, but a full rewrite of Oasisband.net in a maintainable modern MVC framework is now live - you are looking at it.

In reality there have been a lot of false starts at a rewrite. This time I figured instead of having a moving target of improvements, I would be better off just getting a visually identical version out the door ASAP and then fix from there.

If I've done my job correctly it should be hard to even notice anything is different.

I'm skeptical anyone other than myself is still interested in Oasisband, I've been looking for an outlet for some things I'd like to write that would not fit on my professional blog.

Coming soon:

• Comics
  I have a couple comics hanging out that have never been posted. I'll get those up ASAP
  These are in fact now up.
• Layout Cleanup
  A lot of things with the current design really irk me. Namely text alignment being all over the place.
• Responsive Design
  I get emails from Google all the time about how Oasisband.net sucks on mobile, so I intend to fix that as best I can.
• Better Author Pages
  It's only been 14 years since I promised them.
• Obloglog
  I did not reimplement obloglog. If you'd like to post something, email me.

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I'm in a way better place to actually implement fixes now that I'm not working around a rats nest.

Believe it or not I still somewhat "maintain" the code of Oasisband.net after all these years. It actually takes a little bit of work here and there to keep it running.

Last night I moved it over to a new web server, and in the process upgraded it to sweet sweet Let's Encrypt powered SSL - taking Oasisband.net boldly into the new millennium.

You can probably notice the wonderful new 'https://' appended to the URLs.

Another major piece of what helped Oasisband.net thrive in its heyday is sadly going away tomorrow. AOL Instant Messenger is shutting down forever.

We used it to communicate; it drove the word-of-mouth spread around the high school. We would never have reached the heights we did without it.

It was the literal backbone of "Oasisband.net" as a community.

Heck, our AIM usernames are still listed on our profiles on the "About Us" pages.

If not for AIM, we never would have found Joel, who provided us with free hosting for almost ten years. Who later provoked me to pursue programming and my career no less!

We all have a lot to thank AOL Instant Messenger for.

On top of everything else, our dear friend and writer Meka T. Slorne, who passed away some years back, at this very moment still shows as online thanks to never having been signed out by his "dumb-phone". I still connect to AIM, and seeing him in my buddy list every day has stood as a solemn reminder.

Today is truly a time for reflection. I'm sad to see it go.

Geocities is shutting down today. I am more than a little disheartened, and will miss Geocities. For all the mocking and scorn Geocities receives, and don't get me wrong, much of it rightly so, what it did do is encourage me, and I'm willing to bet multitudes of other children, to learn HTML. My first couple sites were hosted there, and hell, for a good piece of Oasisband.net's heyday it was hosted there. I cannot humbly thank them enough. It was by this I learned the skill by which now I make my living. As Geocities slips into the night with an almost inaudible wimper, I feel such gratitude and respect.

Rest in Peace, Geocities. You will live forever in my heart, and forever haunt the Wayback Machine.

Kinamand (Meaning Chinaman in English) was a beautiful and interesting film.

The main character, Keld, is a plumber who is more or less stuck in a rut. When his wife of many years leaves him for another man, unable or unwilling to cook for himself, he begins to eat at a Chinese restaurant near his house every day.  This begins a friendship between Keld and the owner, Feng.  When a pipe breaks in the kitchen, Keld offers to take a look.  Seeing that the kitchens plumbing is not up to code, Keld offers to replace it in exchange for free meals.

When Keld finishes the plumbing job, Feng very happy with Kelds work asks Keld to marry his sister Ling, so she may stay in Denmark with her family, in exchange for 25,000 Danish Kroner (Roughly USD$4,000) Keld contemplates the offer momentarily and then declines.  Keld is then shown at a divorce settlement where he is asked to pay his ex-wife 50,000 DKK.  Keld, unable to pay the amount returns to Feng and tells him he will accept if he would be willing to double the offer.  Feng accepts.

Ling and Keld, after a meeting with immigration officials, hold an extravagant wedding. Keld, a seemingly apathetic, slightly brutish man, is pulled into a remarkable world of subtlety and tradition while living with Ling, growing to appreciate it, and falling in love with Ling in the process.

The movie was quite understated, which I strongly appreciate. It was visually beautiful, whereas Europe was shown with kind of a grey dreary pall, the Chinese figures in the movie, as well as the brief moments in China itself were quite bright and colorful, which helped illustrate the stark differences in cultures the movie was attempting to convey.

Kelds character was very relatable, trying to find meaning to life while rolling with the punches. The juxtaposition of the portly, inelegant Keld to the petite, beautiful Ling was quite striking and in fact made for a wonderfully odd coupling.

I highly recommend this film to anyone who can appreciate subtlety, it being one of my favorites of recent years. As I understand it one of the only places to find this movie in America currently is by Netflix, where it can be streamed or received via physical disc, and this would be my recommendation

As the title implies, Oasisband 3.5 is in the works. I know you and I know what you are thinking: “But Jesse, Oasisband 3 was never fully completed”. And you're right, but the work I invested in Oasisband set me up with a decent framework to base other sites off. The problem was it lacked sophistication. It was written awkward and weird, inheriting mistakes from someone learning PHP and MySQL while creating it.

During work on other sites the framework has matured and blossomed into something wonderful. Fully encapsulated modules, much simplified image management, clean up of stacks. I plan to open source this framework at some point in the future, the preemptive name being “phrame” with the note that this is just a codename until something more suitable is found.

Also, as a side note I intend to use this framework on my other site as well, PHPStandards.net which is a work in progress.

I’ve mentioned several times before watching a movie strictly for atmosphere. If any move I’ve ever seen has been worth watching for Atmosphere, its Last Life in the Universe. By Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, the director of 6ixtynin9 (Ruang Talok 69), it’s a truly whimsical, slow yet perfectly paced film.

The film revolves around a suicidal, obsessively clean Japanese man working as a librarian in Thailand. Through a set of slightly winding circumstances he finds him self

...tbc

I don't like to use Oasisband just to post things, but this is worth a listen