Thysbelon.Logo of a Hummingbird moth.

The Origin Of Every Kirby Song on the Kirby or Touhou Song Title Quiz

Kirby and Reimu. Kirby is wearing Reimu's ribbon and holding her gohei. Reimu is holding the star rod.

Last week, I came across a quiz that asks the quizzee, "Is this song title from Kirby or Touhou?". I thought that I would do very well at the quiz, because of how many Kirby songs I know, but I only got 66%. Then I wondered, “Are all of these Kirby songs actually real?” To satisfy my curiosity, I tracked down the source of every song title myself. I made the mistake of doing this before checking to see if...

Android 5.0 Lollipop: the Best Emoji

Smiling face with smiling eyes emoji.

I've never been that big of a fan of most emoji. Apple popularized the the use of gradients in emoji, but I think it just looks so ugly 😕. Gradients look nice in a background, but the moment they're put into a character design they just look tacky. The reason I like flat colors so much is because they don't have any ugly gradients, they're easy to draw✏, and they're easy to read at small sizes 🙋.

Lots of emoji use...

Trouble with Spacing Objects Evenly in Illustrator

A hummingbird moth sitting in front of a computer and looking frustrated.

Today, I was working on the social media ads for RCP and I needed to space out the numbers in "1,500,000,000". I first clicked "create outlines" so I could move the individual digits around. I knew there had to be a tool to space them automatically, but I didn't know where it was or how to use it. Following a guide I found online titled "How to Evenly Space Objects in Illustrator", I selected my objects, then clicked "Horizontal Distribute Space" in the Align window.
Nothing happened. I tried again and again; Did I select the objects wrong? Eventually, on a whim, I decided to ungroup the objects. It worked perfectly. Illustrator has good tools, but it's frustrating when they're so unintuitive.

New Color Scheme

Illustration of a hummingbird moth wearing a beret and holding a palette and paintbrush.

I spent a lot of time this week reading the
web accessibility tutorials at MDN and trying to make my website more accessible. I changed the tags, categories, navbar, related posts, and archive to list elements, to make them better for screen readers. I also adjusted the color palette of my website to meet the WCAG AA accessibility guidelines. I'm happy I was able to come up with a color scheme that is both more accessible, and is prettier than the one I had before.

Kirby and the Lovely Colors

A monochromatic painted green banner that reads Downtown Grasslands. Inside the circle at the center is an illustration of a cityscape covered in greenery and surrounded by trees.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land released last friday, and it's a lot of fun so far. I love the flat color, monochromatic graphics that display during the level loading screens. I've spoken before about how I like flat colors. The definition of a "flat color" appears to be a color with no shading, texture, gradation, or halftones at all. The kind of colors I like fit the definition of flat color, but I'm okay with a bit of texture or...

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