Any Old Actress

//Site Specs

This is a personal site. That's right, personal. That is "All About Me". It's an indulgence, a luxury. It holds my weblog and peripheral details about my person, and serves as a sort of hub for all my web activities (unlimited access to BrookeOnline - er, something). This is version 5.5 of Any Old Actress, the first to utilise valid transitional XHTML, and the first to rely on CSS entirely for aesthetic elements. Designed in IE version 5.5, road tested in Mozilla Firebird 0.7, and coded by hand in MSNotepad, it should work on all platforms. My weblog is powered by Movable Type (version 3.15), and enhanced with the Smarty Pants Plugin, the QuickCode Plugin, Jay Allen's Blacklist Plugin, Conversation Killer, Brad Choate's Macro Plugin, and the all new No-Follow Plugin. Archives are sorted with the help of the ArchiveAnyway and DateHeaders plugins. Graphics were created and edited in PSP version 6.01 (unregistered shareware), and exploit various typefaces. The style switcher uses PHP as set forth in the A List Apart article by Chris Clark. AOA is currently viewable in 3 different styles, as follows:

• Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman - The default style is the entire reason I even have a personal site. I've used variations of this theme in something like 5 different incarnations of the site - blue-scale, technicolour, frames, chromeless pop-ups, you name it. This particular treatment of the "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" poster appeared the third version of AOA, and has been iron-on transferred to one of my t-shirts. Read more about this version in my inspiration section, below.
• Watch Her Disappear -
• Your Stupid Minds! -

The navigation is ridiculously simple. There to your right, are 4 sections of links. The first are your style-switching options. The second contains links to the main weblog (script), this page of site specs (studio), a link to the page about me (starlet), my favourite sites (exit: stage right) and more. Next is a guide to the web projects I own or run. And the featured circles section is just a smattering of the web projects I've joined - find the rest here. "Up to No Good" (to your left on the main page) consists of... what I've been up to re: last blog entry; recent reads, current favourite songs etc.

//Emotibombs

You might have noticed my weblog has tiny smiley bombs scattered throughout. This was accomplished by way of Brad Choate's Macro Plugin for Movable Type, and The Girlie Matters' tutorial for using said macro with the MTInclude tag. Once I installed the plugin and modified my Movable Type templates I discovered that none of the existing emoticon sets suited me. So, I set about adapting a particularly cartoony set of Ikonboard emoticons, to the more managable 15 x 15 pixel size utilised by most PHPBB forums. By then though, the little yellow smiley guys seemed boring, and at Laura M's suggestion, I converted them to tiny smiley bombs.

I figure other people are dissatisfied with the selection of emoticons out there, so I'm throwing these out there for public usage. Links crediting me ( http://villainess.net/actress ) with their creation are very much appreciated. You can preview the entire set of bombs in my web log, or download the entire set in a zip file. I also offer my MT macros for this set in a .txt file (this may need altered to reflect your directory structure), and the original set of yellow emoticons in a zip file. Please, do not alter or edit the emotibombs or emoticons. Rather, contact me for additional expressions since I am so totally open to suggestions.

//Inspiration

I've kinda got a superpower complex. But that's jumping ahead of things. This site exists solely because during my "Oooh, Rasputina" phase, I ended up wandering the Cult Classics section of Hollywood Video. Since I'm a web junkie, when I saw the "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" cover, my first thought was "Hey, that'd make a great layout! Dynamic, unique, and just a little skanky!" Any Old Actress is my favourite track on Rasputina's Thanks for the Ether album (yes, much better than Transylvanian Concubines) - and the imagery of larger-than-life silver-screen idols who can do no wrong and their fundamental humanity...

"They saw her break through barriers 40 feet high. It was the finest moment in a long life... It's one of those things you should not try at home. What's meant by intentional falls can never be known. Any old actress worth her salt ought to know. The higher you are you want to see what's below."

It's the perfect complement to the visual imagery of the "...50 Foot Woman". It's so perfect, that I have to wonder if b-movies are a guilty pleasure of the Rasputina gals. If I hadn't stumbled across the 50 Foot Woman visuals, I doubt I ever would have created a personal site. I'm an egotist sure, but for the most part I lack the desire to talk about myself when no one's listening. Along those lines, I appreciate the way the title, a cinematic front, allows me a small measure of self-denigration. I don't have to take myself too seriously, opting instead for a setting of drama and histrionics.

So, why do I love this imagery enough to use it for my personal site (5 times over)? That's where the superpower complex comes into play. See, I view the world in terms of GoodGuys and BadGuys (although, the most interesting characters are those BadGuys who decide to do Good things). This theme pervades nearly all fiction, and most actual interaction - endlessly fascinating. I've pretty much outgrown the "I've got superpowers! Where's my cape?" phase of this perspective, but I still identify with um... superheroes. And villains. And b-movie monsters. I prefer the world in absolutes. Heroes are everything humanity aspires to be, we love them (or resent them) for the possibilities they represent. Villains are everything we wish we weren't, and we either love them for their honest depiction or hate them for tempting us. Some villains (the anti-heroes) are caught in that grey area where most of us (and Nancy Archer, the 50 foot woman) dwell - torn between elevated ideal and base instinct. I figure that I dwell somewhere in that grey zone, hence the exaggerated tragic figure.