made some headway with the bubble scheme
- learned to install compass extensions (ad hoc) to use string length function, but it doesn't do me much good since the string i want the length of is in the html and not the css
- threw in some random jquery i found on the web (will need to revisit/replace) to count characters
- made some sexy sass math to dynamically size the bubbles

the issue now is that they don't stack very pretty, so i'm going to go back to experimenting with flex-box til i understand it.. just don't want to lose this moment while things are working