I find it both depressing and supremely unsurprising that only 8% of people were able to correctly identify what a browser is, and that the remainder didn't know or confused it with a search engine. I know many people (mostly not from our generation(s)) that think the blue (e) icon is the internet, and that if you delete it the internet goes away. Not to mention the people that use "the Google".

These people are better off without computers

Haha, I've been blessed with the inability to find many of those types of people around me

There must be a lot of competent computer users in Texas then

I'm quite proud of that fact, although I'm not a Texan.

A major update. Just rewrote the whole entire design, lol. Check it out and tell me what you think. I've changed the design up a lot since the last updated, so I'm looking forward to some more critiques on the design

Here it is: http://swivelgames.com/templates/latest-111709/index.php

Approved. I like it.
Clean and crisp and light, and much nicer than the older darker theme.

Yummy.

Maybe I have no aesthetic sensibilities, but I'm having a very hard time seeing what changes you made since the last time I saw it...

Minor changes. Mostly just rewrote it.

I darkened the colors a bit, gave a lot of the text a bit more breathing room, changed the comments up a tad bit and the blog post layout (slightly), and did some other things as well. You'll notice other minor changes like the dashed border under each header in the right column.

Compare: http://swivelgames.com/templates/latest-111809/index.php
With: http://swivelgames.com/templates/latest-102409/index.php

http://swivelgames.com/templates/latest-102409/index.php

The second one (the one above) doesn't have the "home ... about me" text on the bar in IE...

10-24-09 is obsolete. Are you talking about the latest version of the design? If so what version of IE? IE7 uses (pretty much) the same rendering engine as IE6, so I'm not TOO worried about it atm...


EDIT:
Alright, in order for it render properly in IE7/IE6, I had to sacrifice valid HTML practice. I'm sure its possible but I haven't put much effort in to it. It's quite sad that it doesn't render properly in IE7/IE6, but in every other browser it renders fine. I'm just going to put a big fat "UPDATE IE" on it when I release it. I'm not going to sacrifice my source's validity just for the sake of the most retarded and annoying browser in the world. Also, I found that IE 8 is kinda retarded too and doesn't necessarily support conditional style sheets. It's weird. But IE 8 ignores HTML comments in style sheets all together, so I just put the code inside a comment. All the other browsers didn't change their appearance so it seems to have worked just fine.

Damn Internet Explorer.

EDIT 2:
Messed around with it a bit more and found that if I kept the previous source and just added
Code:
to the menu element, it would fix it for IE 6/7 and I used some conditional HTML comments to make sure it didn't affect any other browsers. woohoo. Fixed. Now go to hell IE...

Awesome! And I know the feeling from my many web design endeavors; IE is a giant pain in the neck to deal with.

Always has been, always will be. Although, IE 8 isn't such a pain. It's a lot easier to work with. It renders pages much like all the other modern browsers do, so it's not such a pain to work with.

The button in the top right should be 3 images, for Narrow, Medium, and Wide. Right now it gave me the illision I could drag it to resize as I felt necessary.

And everything being all... idk, pastel makes it kinda hard to read. But it's alright I guess, the excessive "//" on things like "//from my blog" makes the text hard to read, perhaps if you made those a different colour? Or a different size?

lol yeah, I'm going to fix that up a bit. I just kinda threw that up there last minute so I didn't really pay attention to detail or plan it out. Thanks for the observation though, lol. Much needed I got the complaint about the pastels on SitePoint as well and I tried dimming the colors, which helped, but I guess not enough. I'll see what I can do. The "deleted post" should be easily readable. It's just sorta... 'there'. lol. As for the forward-slashes, I can tweak them a bit and see what looks good. I can see how "from my blog" might be hard to read, though, as it's thing, but are you also referring to the sidebar headings?

Understand that this design is being written on an 1152x864 computer, so it's probably much easier to read on this computer then it is on the majority of newer computers out there (I'm sure).

Alrighty. Even darker colors:

Compare: http://swivelgames.com/templates/latest-111809/index.php
With: http://swivelgames.com/templates/latest-111909/index.php (new)

EDIT:
bah, double post :/

That's like one colour dood. Anyways, the darker border is better in my opinion.

lol you didn't actually compare them did you?

The differences are somewhat subtle in most areas, but heres what I've changed. I changed the majority of the colors. Almost every hex value I came across I darkened a bit and then previewed. lol

Oh yeah, I definitely like that better. I used to go with minimal color until I tried all the maroon for Cemetech 6 (this theme) and actually liked it a lot.