Flashes of Panic

I was getting tired of the blue Gravatar icon coming up for the many of my commenters who never signed up with them. So I installed MonsterID, and made a few little hacks to my local copy of the Gravatar plugin so that if you don’t have a Gravatar, you’ll be assigned a monster.

To expand a little bit, MonsterID randomly constructs a monster from a set of eyes, arms, legs, bodies, and colors. However, the “random” generation has a seed value, and if you give the same seed, you get the same monster. Just like Gravatar, I’m using a hash of the email address provided with the comment, but instead of using it as the database key, I use it as the seed for MonsterID. This means that if you provide the same email address, you get the same monster, and odds are microscopically small that anyone else will get an identical one. (If you don’t leave an email address, it will be truly random, possibly even across multiple views of the same comment.)

I’m still tinkering with the sizes a bit, but for now, enjoy the wonders of whimsical combinatorics.

Now Playing: So Much Water from End Of Amnesia by M. Ward

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