I’ve actually been feeling for a while now that it’s high time for a restart here, and for the past three or four weeks I’ve been thinking about ways to redesign the site. Up until a couple of hours ago I was thinking I’d spend this evening in Photoshop whipping up a new design proposal. But after actually opening up the site and looking at it, I’m thinking maybe I’ll stick with this for a while longer. I still think it looks pretty good, and I can think of a few different directions to take things in.

So, yeah. I’ll try to put an effort into making things happen here. Look forward to it, or don’t, as it pleases you.

Took about an hour in Photoshop. Man, I really should draw and paint more. It’s so much fun, and I really want to get better at it. Sucks that procrastinating is so easy.

I clearly haven’t mastered the trick of self-imposed deadlines with no consequences yet. But I shall, eventually. Just gotta keep trying. That’s probably the thing that does it – the lack of any consequence if (when) I fail to meet a deadline. But how to create a consequence that future me will not just ignore?

That’s the thing, really. How can present me ensure that future me turns out to be the future me that present me wants to become?

I’ll need think about it.

For now, I’m starting a new project. The working title is “Publish-a-cool-thing-every-once-in-a-while-when-I-feel-like-it”. I think it will be a success.

In addition, this weekend will likely be so epic that I likely won’t have the vim to post anything of substance here. This evening kicks off the weekend with a playtest of an RPG system that my friend Richelieu and I have been working with on and off (mostly off, to be honest) for the past, oh, four years, maybe. Super-exciting to finally get to try it out on some actual, live players.

That alone would have made it an awesome weekend, but to make it even more epic, get this: On Saturday, we will all huddle up close to Rickdorff’s 55″ TV and watch the extended blu-ray editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It will be glorious. Much rejoicing shall be done by all.

Then, on Sunday, just to round it all off and come to a nice close, we’ll watch the entire first season of Game of Thrones. And boom goes the dynamite.

A recipe for a great weekend if I ever saw one.

But it is a shame about that Make-Something-Cool-Everyday thing. I don’t want to give up already. Maybe I’ll dig out some old things to share. Maybe not. I’ll think about it. I probably won’t, though.

That said, I didn’t want to just tell you that and then give you nothing, so please enjoy this digital painting of a bear that I made a while ago. Must be about a year or more old , but I never did get around to posting it.

I used a Wikipedia photo for reference, if I recall correctly, and did the lineart on a layer on top of that photo. Then I did my own colouring, and added in some water color textures for the final touch. It’s no masterpiece, but I rather like it. I really should do more things like this. It’s so much fun, and my Wacom tablet needs more exercise.

So to round up – day 2 of Make Something Cool Everyday: medium success. I pass. But just barely.

The writing I did is part of a project I just started, that will probably be some time in the making. I’ll see if I can’t put what I have online pretty soon. I’d like to get it out there while the idea is still fresh. I want to do this out of some (likely misguided) idea that if it’s out there, I’ll be more likely to keep working on it. We’ll see I guess.

I’m going to do a bit more writing tomorrow, and maybe get the new CSS online. Also have some ideas on various improvements to the site that we’ll see about making a reality. That’s really it for now. Just wanted to throw this post up here to keep myself honest and on my toes.

When I did my blog rounds today, I came across this post on the great Design/Inspiration site Fubiz. Quoth I: “These are quite neat. Mayhaps I should do likewise myself.” And so I shall.

Here are the rules:

• Everyday I make something cool.¹
• Coolness is judged by my standards.
• Medium is not limited to one thing. I should probably make sure that I can post about it here though. Something digital then, most likely.
• This goes on for as long as I feel like it.
• Because it’s nearly midnight now, this starts tomorrow, on July 5th, the day after aphelion.

Visit this site everyday, tell your friends, watch me fail together.

Am I destined to repeat this tragic cycle endlessly? Am I doomed before I even begin? Will I again succumb to the same dark temptations of unproductivity and instant gratification?

Or shall I avoid the pitfalls this time?

Who can tell, really? But I shan’t give up. A procrastinator I may be – lazy to a fault – but give up on this I shall not. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Well, I’m trying. Again. Again-again.

The site is not finished. I have not spent overly long trying (vainly, foolishly) to perfect it. The code isn’t optimized. I can think of a number of improvements off the top of my head. I haven’t tested the site on anything other than Chrome 13 and Firefox 4 on Windows 7. I haven’t gone over the old posts to see they comply peacefully with this newly-made WordPress theme of mine. There’s no convenient way to get to the different archive views. I can imagine the site looks like expletive on smaller screen devices. So there are things to do. But there’s no rush. If not everything works, well… Eventually, it will.

I don’t have any new ideas or guidelines or mantras or rules or plans for this. Even this post – this re-re-introduction, as it were – was written in one sitting. No revisions, no second-guessing, other than a quick read-through for grammar and spelling. This time, no prestige. No pressure.

I haven’t much to say about the design. I wanted simple, and I made simple. I’ve been trying out some HTML5 and CSS3. Rounded corners, animation, new tags, web fonts. It’s fun to experiment, and that’s what I’ll do here. It won’t always be perfect, but that’s not what I’m aiming for.

And that’s all I’ll say by ways of a new introduction. Maybe I’ll post something soon. Hopefully, I’ll post something soon. As always, enjoy it or not, as it pleases you. Whichever the case, I implore you, please comment.

Ahem. Oops.

Weekly Report, Week 15

So no delivery on that post that I promised. It suffered something of a feature creep, which caused the delay that you all must now suffer from. It’s a terrible blow, I know, but please, you guys! Hang in there! I’ll try for this week instead. I kept coming up with ideas on how to improve it and it all got a little out of hand. I’ve reined myself in a bit now, though, so a publication this week should be within the realm of possibility. Then again, there are books to read, games to play and TV to watch. Sigh.

Better luck on the writing front though. I’ve been getting some real work done there. Listed a dozen or so conflicts that are inherent to the setting, and which, I am sure, will help provide a more lively backdrop. Also did a bit of work on the characters, some of which are beginning to flesh out quite nicely. And! And, you guys, I wrote a few hundred words of actual story. So that’s nice. I’m feeling inordinately pleased with the opening sentence. It introduces character and conflict, and has wee bit of setting too.

Goals for Week 16

Goal #1: Again, get that post out. Hope I’m not raising your expectations too much here. It’s not really all that special. Just something I did for fun a while back. Please don’t be all disappointed later.

Goal #2: Continue with the writing. Don’t let the pace slacken. In fact, pick it up a little bit more. Keep at it with the characters, keep writing the story, and keep building the world. Find the time to work on this.

So that’s good.

But not good enough. I need to step up my writing goals if I want to actually get somewhere with this project. So far all I’ve got is background info, and I feel like there’s a lot more ground to cover in that area. World-building. That’s a dangerous path for me. Easy to get stuck and just focus on the setting, while forgetting the other parts that make up a story. The setting is obviously important, perhaps more so in a fantasy story than in a more realistic work, but no novel gets far without characters or plot. No one wants to buy an encyclopedia covering a made-up world. Well, maybe they do, but not from an unpublished author.

So, anywho. That’s something that will need to happen. I have just enough of the world figured out that I should be able to start writing something at least. There’s a lot more to map here, but most of that can come later.

GOAL #1: Write at least 500 words of actual story, and at least 500 words of world-building and/or character description and/or plot synopsis. This won’t be enough if I expect to ever finish this project and start writing a new book, but hey: Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

I also have another post in the works. A little thing I made, well, a damn good while ago actually, that I thought I might update a little, tweak just a tad, and subject you all to, my dear, dear readers.

Thus we have GOAL #2: Put up that, uh, thing. It’s not that easily classified, to be honest. It’s a silly thing, and I thought it fairly amusing at the time. Still do, I suppose.

Well. Take care now. Do something good.

Tell me what you think.

By the way, the order here is completely random and does not reflect any sort of chronology or method. Also, I’ve only tried to do one of these gallery posts locally before, so we’ll see if this works. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll fix that tomorrow. It’s late enough as it is, and I need my sleep. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed.

UPDATE: Well, that was disappointing. Crap. Well. I’ll just disable the gallery part for now. Enjoy imagining the gallery that would be here if things worked. I’ll fix it up tomorrow.

UPDATE 2: I’ll be trying some thing to get this working now, so if you happen to visit the site during this time (not very likely, I suppose), expect things to look not quite right.

UPDATE 3: Ok, it all seems to be working. Silly mistake, really, but it’s all taken care of. Enjoy, people.

Weekly Report, Week 12

Right. Turns out I’m a bit of an optimist when it comes to estimating the amount of free time I’ll have on the weekend of my wife’s 25^th birthday. In other words, the success rate of last week’s goals wasn’t exactly stellar. I got some writing done, though. Just background stuff that I jotted down on the bus home from work. Not sure about the exact number (doing word count on longhand is time-consuming and boring), but I daresay it was a bit more than 500. So I suppose that’s good.

As for the promised post, well, that obviously didn’t happen. I made a few preparations, cutting out flattened images from Photoshop files, and so on, so I’ll see about getting it up later tonight or tomorrow.

As for my third goal, well, I did sit for quite a while re-organizing some of my photos, which I suppose could be construed of as at least tangentially a creative endeavour.

Maybe.

No? No, I don’t really buy that either, but I’m going to let myself off the hook this time. I’ll try harder this week, I promise. I feel a veritable truckload of good ideas besetting me even now, so prepare to be dazzled.

Goals for Week 13

1. Get the rejected design proposals post out. Ahem.
2. Do a bit of writing, say somewhere between 500 and 1000 words. Did quite a bit today, so the week is off to a good start.
3. Let’s see. What else? Create a little, get some ideas off the ground, put a little effort into some things. Maybe post something – anything, really. If not something new, then something old. Got a few things lying around that I’ve kept mostly to myself.

That’s it, people. Go create something.

So. What, then, do I want to accomplish this week? Let’s kick it off easy, with just a few things:

1. Write at least 500 words of backstory or actual story on my current novel project.
2. Put up the gallery I mentioned in the previous post — the one with all my rejected design proposals.
3. Put in at least an hour or two into any other creative endeavor.

I’m going to stop there for now, keeping it nice and simple, real loose for this first week. Let’s see how this works out. There’ll be adjustments to this format later on, no doubt.

With that, I take my leave for now. Tune back in later this week for that update, and if you haven’t already, why don’t you check out the archives for some old stuff to keep you amused (or not) in the meantime?

Part I: Self-Ridicule

The beginning, I hope, of a more productive phase in my creative life.

Hah! Pfft. Balderdash!

I believe that the pressure of actually trying to publish something here on a regular basis will go a long way towards me getting down to actually write some of the things I have running around my brain.

Bah! Humbug!

I think that writing something, or publishing something, anything, once or twice a week should not be a wholly unrealistic ambition.

What naïveté! What absurdness! Ah, the guilelessness of youth! That I ever could have convinced my sorry self to believe such a silly notion is, to be frank, quite laughable. The brutal failure that was to come from my asinine suppositions was, in a word, inevitable.

But that’s enough of that.

Part II: A New Hope

Why I stopped posting things here, I don’t know. I didn’t stop creating things, I just, well… I didn’t find the time to either finish them, or write about them. Or I didn’t take the time. Whichever it was, nothing happened. Suddenly I realized that it had gone over two months since the last post, and that just made me feel discouraged, which in turn caused me to further put off posting something new. Eventually, I guess I realized that I really wanted this blog/site thing, and wanted to start writing again. But by then it felt wrong to go back and pretend like it was just on a hiatus or something, so I decided to just redesign the whole thing and give it a fresh start.

The last post was on June 18, 2008. That was almost two years ago. I’m giving this blog another shot, but I think I’m a different person now. I’ve made some realizations about my creativity, about my priorities, about routines and discipline. About, well, life. I’ve learned things. I’m going into this with a few new ideas about how to keep content coming.

Part III: The New Design

I have decided to call the current theme “Decisivemess”, because that captures pretty well the essence of the process leading up to the final version.

The really short story is that this is probably somewhere around the twentieth version of the redesign.

The slightly longer story is that I was focusing on the wrong thing, putting all my effort into the presentation layer, rather than just taking a step back and looking at the content I had produced to see what format would be appropriate. What I realized was that first, I couldn’t really have a typical form of content with only seven posts, and second, that I didn’t necessarily need a featured post thingamajig, I didn’t need thumbnails for every single post, and I didn’t need infinite nesting of comments.

This said, coming up with a design still wasn’t easy. In fact, even now I’m not sure that this is how I want the site to look. Trying to find a middle ground between all my disparate interests, and what is trendy, and what is classic, and so on, was (and will be again) a difficult task. So no, I’m not entirely satisfied with this version, but at some point I just have to call it done and get to actually doing something worthwhile. I already have a lot of ideas about where I want to take the next version of the site (use HTML5, for example, and experiment a bit with CSS3), but all of that will have to wait at least a little while longer. For now, this is Vielfrass, even though it might be a bit unspectacular.

Someday soon I’ll post a gallery of all the design ideas I had before finally settling on this one. Some of them are pretty good, others not so much.

A note on browsers: I haven’t checked to see how the page is rendered in any version of Internet Explorer, and I’m not going to. Making sure a site is IE-compatible for a paying client is one thing – after all, a lot of people still use Internet Explorer – but here I do as I wish. This is not paying work, and it’s not a web design portfolio either, so suck it, IE.

In all seriousness, though, if you’re using Internet Explorer I recommend you to change to a safer, more reliable and simply better browser. Chrome is currently my browser of choice, but Firefox is a classic. Safari or Opera will also serve you well. They’re all better. So do yourself, the world-wide community of web designers, and the internet in general a favour, and change.

Part IV: A Fresh Commitment

So why do I think that this time is different? That this time, things will work out better? Well, I’ve set down a few rules to help me. A few guidelines to live by. Some mantras to repeat to myself in the wee hours of the night.

Make the necessary sacrifices

This must always be the first thing to do, and will probably always be the hardest. There are only 24 hours in a day, and if I’m going to squeeze in writing, something else is going to have to go, be it TV, games or sleep. This is the simple, cruel reality of it, the ultimate test of how serious I really am about this.

Set manageable goals

For me, having a list of goals to strive towards makes it that much easier to get things done. These goals can be short-term (write 500 words this week, spend an hour doing PHP programming for Project Whatever) or long-term (write that novel, make that game, get filthy rich). It doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that I write them down somewhere and make them concrete. Preferably, I should write them down somewhere I can’t help but see them all the time, like my desktop, or here on the blog, or my fore-head.

Find the routine

Some people would say that routine kills creative thought, and to some extent I might agree with that, but the point of this mantra is not idea generation, but the actual work of turning the ideas into reality. To get somewhere with any of the projects I have going, i have to stop treating them like hobbies that I can work on only when inspiration srikes, and start treating them like work. Because if I hope to someday, somehow make any money from any of this, work is exactly what it is.

Better done than perfect

Meaning that instead of endlessly working on something in a desire to achieve some sort of perfection, I will strive to get to a point where I can simply call it done. Finishing one project will make the next one stronger. Toiling away at the same one indefinitely will not do much good for anyone, least of all me. This mantra is about finishing things, and posting them here.

So there.

Following these guidelines will not only make me a better writer designer painter programmer whateverer, but a more productive one, too. The four rules are also repeated in one version or another on Mur Lafferty‘s excellent writing podcast I Should Be Writing, so I must be on to something. If you’re an aspiring writer, and have time to listen to a podcast now and then, you should definitely check it out.

I’m not going to say much about topics or publication rates. The former should be the same as before, and as for the latter, I’ll probably try to keep it weekly. Maybe I can post my short-term goals and present my failure to accomplish them to public ridicule. I don’t know. I’m going to start out trying for weekly and just see how that works out.

Part V: A Note to End on

Rounding this overly long and rant-like re-introduction off, I just want to encourage anyone who happens across this blog to please comment. If anything I post causes some kind of reaction in you, be it admiration, hate, inspiration or abject misery, I would really appreciate if you told me about it. So please do.

Click here to become mindboggled.

There, between some minor sporadic journal entries, and some never-played RPG adventures, I found this little text. What the hell, I thought upon reading it. This isn’t half bad. And so I decided to toss it up here. The journal entry just after it was dated 030511, so based on the regularity of my writings at that point in time I’m guessing this piece is from sometime at the end of April, 2003.

Take a look at it.

Some background, then. I play Guild Wars occasionally, and in the game, I am the leader of a guild called Ensis Equitas. This is me reimagining the same guild set in a dystopian future, where order is maintained by guilds of mercenaries selling their services to the highest bidder, or just pursuing their own arbitrary code of justice. The Sword of Justice, apart from being the literal meaning of Ensis Equitas in Dog Latin, is also the ginormous battle cruiser that serves as the base of operations for the guild.

Maybe I’ll continue this with other screens. Follow the life of a cadet, and make a series of it. I kind of like it, so it actually might happen. But we’ll see. No promises.

Click to view

I’ve been wanting to learn to use Illustrator for a while now, and the text in the center of this picture is the first step towards that goal. The shape of the word came to me on the train home a few days ago, and I couldn’t let it go. As for the word itself, it’s just plain cool. I’m actually thinking of using this image as the title screen for an upcoming project (if I finish it…), but we’ll just have to see about that.

Word design done in Illustrator CS, everything else in Photoshop CS3.

Click to view

1. I come up with a beginning for a story. Something that sounds cool. Just a scene that popped into my mind, or a sketch of a character or a neat setting.
2. I write a few pages going with the general theme I had in mind when I first got the idea.
3. Now, here’s where the trouble begins. I start getting grandiose ideas about the setting, the characters and the ending and how massively epic it could be, and then…
4. Then… I start planning. Building the world. Telling myself that I need to make sure I have the foundation right before I start writing the story.

And guess what: Planning isn’t as fun as writing. So in the end I get nothing done, or worse, I start writing on another idea. Right now, I have somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen billion projects that I’ve started writing on without completing even the first chapter. I want to write but I need to plan first, but I don’t want to plan because I want to start writing. My problem is this: How do I keep the planning to a minimum? How do I make sure that I have enough of a base to start building on, without loosing myself (and my precious time) in the tiny insignificant details that probably won’t end up in the finished piece anyway?

It’s frustrating is what it is.

Need to give myself a good lashing every once in a while, I guess. To keep me on track. And I do actually feel some pressure having this thing here. The blog, that is. I don’t want it to be just another failed project, so that’s a good thing. Gotta hang on to that motivation. Gotta keep that lash lashing.

Unfortunately what I’d come up with exceeded the maximum word count by almost 200 words, even after some editing after I typed it all up, and I liked it a little too much to just cut it all away. I tried, though, I admit, but I couldn’t get the feeling I was after in just 55 words. So that’ll have to be a project for another day. For now though, please enjoy the 232 words that I did write.

Click here to read it.

1. I have for a long time (say three years or so) been planning to launch a personal Web site just to make public the things I make and maybe, once in a while, write some random thoughts. And seeing how all the kids are using WordPress these days, I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and lo and behold! ‘Tis a thing of good. So there.
2. I believe that the pressure of actually trying to publish something here on a regular basis will go a long way towards me getting down to actually write some of the things I have running around my brain. It’s about motivation, you know. Taking the time. I think that writing something, or publishing something, anything, once or twice a week should not be a wholly unrealistic ambition.

But we’ll just have to see. Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t. I know I’ll feel better having this journal here, and that’s the important thing, isn’t it?

As for what you can expect to see here, all bets are off. I like to try new things. I like to try many different things. There’ll be artwork. Doodles, too. Scans of things I draw and paint. There might be 3d renders. There might even be music for all I know (although looking at how things are right now, that doesn’t seem very likely). Most of all though, there will be writing. Likely in combination with some purely visual layout or aesthetic that I thought appropriate or related or that just plain struck my fancy.

I guess, first of all, I’ll start posting some kind of backlog of stuff. Shit that’s been around for a while but that hasn’t really gotten out in a satisfactory manner. Not too far back, though. I don’t want to make any kind of archive of everything I’ve ever done. But I don’t want to put rules here. This is my site and the selection offered will be as arbitrary as I want. It’s good to be king.

Wrapping this up now, I just want to encourage commenting. Maybe I’ll disable the mandatory registration for now to make things easier. We’ll see what happens. But please, do leave comments.

With that, I bid you welcome. Hope you’ll find something here to tickle your mind.

Oh. And yes, I shaved my beard off. Big mistake. I’m growing it back out. I need that hair on my chin.