Back in black.

Today I reverted to a "simple" template, because the so-called "dynamic" thingies are way too slow to render on a shoddy connection. Also some of the content didn't work properly, and I can't be arsed to decipher the CSS and html templates that rule blogspot page layout.

On the downside, that means the blog is no longer mobile-browser aware and will serve you the same page regardless, but I've tried to mitigate that somehow.

The page layout is set for 1400 pix width, which on any proper computer display this side of the millennium should fit comfortably, but in case you're reading this from a tablet or phablet you should be good as long as you can fit 800 pix or thereabouts.

Tested on a TF101 10.1" tablet (1280*800 if memory serves), it takes only a small zoom out to cram the whole thing to screen width, and the fonts are still large enough to read just fine in landscape mode.

In portrait mode,  you need no further zoom out to read the main content column, which is designed for a nominal 900 pix width, but reads smoothly enough shrunk into 800 pix width. You'll lose the sidebars however, while clean vertical scrolling becomes sort of a minigame — that's my gift, to you.

And yeah, it's light-on-dark again, because I dig trog mode, and because not all devices offer a convenient way to swap between night and day modes.
  

When looking for a segue image, do not google "chocolate shower" — just sayin'…

Unrelated, in the crossing wires department, the following mashup happened in my shower* earlier today :

— Adam Curtis : People embrace ultra-conservative views such as theocracy not (just) because they're dog-crazy, but because they've lost faith in the ability of politicians to change the world for the better, on account of political power inevitably leading to corruption.

— Bill Maher : The craziest reactionary ultra-conservative really are a tiny minority, only one so vocal that clueless politicians (whose pulsometers got calibrated forever back in the era of one-way mass-media) can't correct for the distortion and then buy into the fiction the loudmouths really make the core of their constituency.

Extrapolate.

*[I meant : 'in my head', while in the shower, wherein neither Maher nor Curtis are particularly welcome to partake in person.]

Unique browsing experience.

…that's what the blurb says, at least.

Yeah, it's all black on white now, as opposed to the opposite: I'm toying with the new Dynamic Views templates on blogger, which are neat, if still kinda gimped by the lack of a 2-sidebars option and easily selectable trog-mode switch (or at least a light-on-dark scheme that doesn't require CSS voodoo).
Also some gadgets don't show in this template, but for the price I pay, it's hard to argue…

So, expect it to change again in the near future, I can't promise anything except it will remain free of blink, bling, longhand fonts and adverts if I can help it.
In the meantime, you can play with the corny display modes, just under the masthead.

***

Don't trust the candyman…

Not all wishes come true, and in the world of electronic hobby publishing less than in most places, but still… the Other Blog is finally on, and there's a slew of articles coming up for that one.

As for AcDpad, I'm still waiting on the long overdue upgrade to run more than one instance of self concurrently so I have time to write here too, but I'm not losing hope entirely on plan B, which is merely me becoming fantastically smarter and more efficient at time management.

Don't hold your breath though, or don't sue me if you do.

Fall update.

It has been a while…

And the drought is not over yet, I'm afraid: although there are quite a few notes piling up in my hard drive, I still am not the blogger for real, having sort of a block on pushing half-baked content in the open.

Namely, I've been goofing around with articles for the other blog, and reading like crazy, once again faced with the limitation of running a single instance on a linear 1 s/s time.

That said, I do sleep, and even dream. Thanks to one of the daily reads (I suspect), I woke up today with the vivid (albeit quickly vanishing) impression of a "perfect moment" kind of evening.

There was duck on the menu, but that's not key: I had the unrealistic privilege of sitting at the same table as Glenn Gould, Neal Stephenson and Will Wright, while Scott Adams was stuck in the elevator with Ayn Rand, to everyone else's relief (unfortunately, Charles Stross had missed his plane).

Unrelated, but the first episode of The Shield season 7 is out…

PS: Yeah, flight schedules are an insurmontable obstacle in my dreams, when death isn't, go figure…

I didn't take the week off.

...I swear.
For some reason, 6 days flew by since last post, and I have no idea where they went.
Subjective time flow here is really weird, and/or I can't seem to get the hang of it.

I've massed notes on design and world building, but I can't bring myself to post half-cocked rants, for some reason (believe that, previous entries aren't a fifth as bad the brain drool as they could have been without copy-editing) ...maybe I'm not blogger material after all.

Anyway, I'll play tease, be it only to guilt-trip myself into finishing those articles.

Coming Soon™ on this screen:

• Monica VS Phoebe: the dirt.
• MovieOS — Part II: The Bad.
• The other blog: because I can't post daily on one, why not make it worse ?
• Game making and the meaning of life: of the great why ? that keeps us awake at night.
  

Until then, I recommend this Gama article about MMO*s and addiction (yeah, it's about as original a topic as RMT and Virtual Property debates, but it still got me thinking).

ttyl.

Pentimento-free area.

Since I started populating this blog in earnest, about a week ago, I've improved the template and blog on the fly, cosmetics-wise.

A side effect is I've been looking back at already published posts more than once, and occasionally edited released content beyond mere spell checking and copy-proofing, which is probably a good thing on average, but it got me thinking about the abstraction layer of the blog template.

If I had a hard time writing here, up until I tweaked this blog template to an approximation of my taste, what does it say about reading it ?

I realize I'm using this platform as a poor man's (tiddly)wiki, because I'm lazy, and I can't help but try and emulate the organic nature of tiddler-based writing on a support that is meant as a fire-and-forget journaling platform.

Thus, I overdo on production value, revising the past as I go, which wouldn't be so much of a lie if it wasn't for the fact blogspot is conveniently (?) devoid of versioning and history.
A few months/years from now, will I be updating old entries to account for new developments ?
What of interface and cosmetic tweaks, could context change be enough to affect the meaning of old content ?

Does it matter ? In any way ?
Guess that's what the Brainfart label is for.

Does that count as a post ?

I couldn't say, really: although I'm vaguely aware electrons aren't among endangered species, the whole stream-of-(un)consciousness trip is something I usually keep for special circumstances — quality rambling time, solo under a hot shower, preferably barely awake, or drunk, or both.

I'm probably not the best judge of what's appropriate when it comes to blogging... let's go for a second opinion on the intarweb.
...and a third.

During my poking around, I stumble on this, which I will probably be wasting some hours on over the next couple days.

Still, the hive mind isn't helping much, and I feel stuck for about as long as it takes to fix a coffee, until I realize I'm sitting at ground zero of the blogosphere, or pretty close, and I oughta take a look around.

So I hit the "Next Blog" button in the navBar a couple times.

• Christensen Family (English)
  
• My Planet ... (Spanish)
  
• Momentos OURO (Spanish)
  
• Tenablog (Spanish)
  
• Cheyenne Autumn Huber (English — cheaters disabled the navbar, I had to spin the wheel manually)
• Football (English)
  
• Liliana (Spanish)
  
• Running the Beards (English)
  
• DE ANTRO EN ANTRO .COM (Spanish)
  
• Blog do Mario Mello (Portugese — Brasil)

At last, I learn something about the blog-geist: at 11 PM GMT on a saturday night, half of the most recently updated blogs here are spanish speaking.

Moving on.

Apparently a header can't be taken seriously these days if it doesn't sprawl halfway down a 17" screen...

I've been fiddling around with the 'pad layout, in order to make it a tad less awkward, and finally took advantage of a nice 3-column template from SuckMyLolly.com, thanks to it being released by Sharnee under a CC Attrib License.

As you can see from the demo blog, this is a very nice layout, but it's sort of a waste at resolutions larger than 1024*x, since the main central column is static in width (a common issue with most blogger templates I've seen so far), so I quick'n'dirtied my way around that, switched the theme to trog mode, and finally got rid of the classic photo banner that forces you to scroll just to get a good view of the last post and sidebars.

Speaking of screen real estate... the tiny composing window of Blogger is annoying as hell, so I guess I will have to find a third party-editing tool, since the (otherwise peachy) Resizeable Textarea FF add-on doesn't work on Blogger's WYSIWYG editor.
Any clues/hints welcome about that.

Anyhow, not only is the 'pad much less of an eye sore than a couple hours back, but I believe I also crossed all the required boxes on the checklist of a typical blog entry:

• Blogging about blogging: check
• Linking to other blogs: check
• Ranting about my frustration/struggle with the medium: check
• Pointing to a few authoritative/semi-useful resources: check
• Not getting anything done while I muse about stuff to do: check

Hey, this thing is easy as pie — and I guess it counts as a Post™, after all...

Periodicity...

OK, one entry every three months probably doesn't exactly fit the bill of online journaling, unless one lives on geological clock.
In my defense, I'm not really happy with the medium, and would rather use some tiddlywiki-like sort of platform, if I could find the time to tweak it to my taste for blogging.

Meanwhile, I've been stockpiling articles drafts on the laptop, waiting for some quiet time to sort notes out into something akin to legible content.
That time, I believe, may be about now.

Thanks to a recent relocation to an otherwise pleasant but internet challenged locale, I've spent the past 10 days sieging the local great firewall of censorship, and generally just trying to get on the damn intarweb.

Now that things are more or less sorted, I'm slowly making my peace with the notion that I'm just about stuck in a 20th century-flavored asynchronous online paradigm, where mail and semi-static content rule.

After I found myself firing up IRC as a substitute for MSN/Gtalk (because it's easier to catch up on group chat logs when one drops unexpectedly on IRC), Blogging suddendly started to make sense, in a @well mailing list way.

So... stay tuned, something may yet happen before another three months.

Oops.

This place is the armchair designer drawing board.

It is not an artsy (of the eye-gouging school) book of prophecies, nor the feverish questing for absolute truth of a nerd groping at pseudoscience to reassure himself making games is grownup stuff after all, nor a lot of other things...

It is the semi-honest, barely edited, account of a journey through a world of thoughts, written in perfectly broken English.

This journey, and the relation thereof, have no clear beginning nor end, little periodicity or schedule, and only a vague notion of direction, in that everything that happens and is told herein relates more or less to the weird, sticky, mildly sick and wildly confused art and craft of building game worlds.

As to why you, or anyone should or would want to read that, I have no definite, much less convincing, answer. It is intended as a personal notepad, for reference mostly, meant to get half-gelified ideas out of my system before they clog a pipe, or something.
...which is not to say it couldn't be your thing, maybe you'll enjoy parts of the reading, maybe it will click for you like it clicked for me at the time I wrote it.

Possibly you'll identify, find some echo of who you are, were, or may turn into, but there's no lesson here, no deep truth or all-encompassing theory of the world, nor of the self of the gamey world creator: only what you get when a freewheeling mind jolts down stuff so he can move on to a different ramble.

Because of all of the above, there will be a lot more first-person voice than is usual on pseudo-technical/academic/theory e-writing, for I speak unto thee, reader, from nay higher place than this non-ancient, unimpressive armchair, and do so only in my own name, wary that I am to find myself — or you — in bad company.

If you're new here, this is a recommended read.