Thunder Sky and Website Ponderings

Last night, I watched a spreading smear of gray across the sunset: clouds, towering and wispy-edged. I welcomed them, waiting for the first drops to fall, but none came. All night and through the day, the clouds hung overhead, now dark and gray, now thin and white, but always there. Taunting. Mocking. At last, this evening, I heard them rumbling in the distance. And then the raindrops fell, cleansing the skies.

The rains have come, if briefly, at last.

We of the itching noses and throbbing sinuses rejoice in this day.

--

Nearly halfway through July, and nothing worth blogging about. I suppose that's a good thing, in a way. I'm still hacking away at the mountain of ignorance between me and a better understanding of HTML/CSS and related website arcana. My goal is to post brand-new websites before the end of 2009. To that end, I updated Brightdreamer Books for probably the last time before I overhaul my web presence. I'm still deciding what I want to do with my sites, and how I want them to go about doing it. The more I learn, the more I'm intrigued by possibilities, and the more I'm plagued by too many options. I'd like to keep my reviews up and running, if only because it took me ten years to bust 600-odd reviews and I'm loathe to chuck them in the recycle bin, even if I'm probably the only human being who knows they're on the Internet. Most likely, my book reviews won't change drastically in content, only in style and background coding. (I also need to figure out if there's any way to promote an amateur book review site; it would be nice if I got a little something back out of my Amazon.com affiliation other than an excuse to add cover illos to my reviews.)

As for Skyhaven... well, the days of click-and-take cyberpets seem to have gone by the wayside, save for specialty sites (read: cliques) like Gaia online, Pony Island and the like. (It's possible some cyberpet-like entities exist on MySpace or Facebook, but I don't have accounts at either place and have no plans to get them, as they sound like royal pains in the arse to manage.) No, the trend now is interactive cyberpets, along the lines of NeoPets, Virtual Horse Ranch, and other places designed to eat one's free time (and often one's money: pay subscriptions are gaining ground in the cyberpet world as well.) Even grade-schoolers seem capable of launching (if not necessarily maintaining) interactive pet sites, and I must admit part of me is tempted to give it a shot. Fun as it looks, though, I don't think it's going to happen For one thing, there are only 24 hours in a given day. For another, the moment you deal with interactivity and subscriptions, you open a whole can of worms I've spent my life avoiding: dealing with people. Sure, some of the potential players would be nice and friendly, but it's the Other Kind that ruin things. The idiots who refuse to read rules and spam help forums and e-mail with poorly-spelled run-on sentences demanding assistance. The beggars. The trolls. The disgruntled players (or ex-players) who take out their frustrations with hacks and viruses. I just plain don't want to deal with them.

So, what am I to do with Skyhaven? Delusional as I am, I've always considered the site's strong suit to be the story, the words and the backgrounds I threw together. They were as much the excuse for the adoptable critters as the critters were the excuse for the words. When I tried redesigning the Skyhaven Hunt to eliminate most of the writing, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure "old school" style, I found I lost much of my motivation to continue. It just didn't feel as fun on my end as I thought it might. I guess I'm still mostly a writer at heart, and the new Skyhaven will have to honor that if it's going to survive. Right now, I'm contemplating ways to merge the old-school text adventure style with something that might appeal to today's instant-gratification market. I don't want to abandon all progress, but it needs to be on my terms, and employed in a way that fits with my creative style.

In the meantime, I'm still trudging ahead with my Internet education. Somewhere in that tangle of codes and acronyms and scripting languages lies the key to realizing the future of my sites.

The Halfway Mark: Resolution Update

The above is the result of several days of playing camera tag with the local goldfinches. We usually don't have that many - indeed, we stopped feeding nyger thistle seed some years ago due to total lack of interest - but this is an unusual year, apparently. Not only do we have goldfinches hanging around (at least two pairs of them), but the thistle feeder's been perhaps the most active one in the yard; birds'll fight each other for the privilege of a perch. I think it may have something to do with the loss of local thistle fields; most of the open land where they used to find wild thistle has been "reclaimed" in the past couple years. So maybe we're the only game in town for thistle seed eaters. Or maybe thistle is a distant relative of tobacco, and the birds actually are as addicted to the stuff as they act.

Okay, back to the title...

Today being the last day of June, the sixth month of the year, we are now halfway through 2009. In the interest of wasting time and internet space, it seems like a good time to check how I'm doing on that resolution list from January.

1. Develop More Income Sources. (Bonus: Obtain Business License.) - Well, I can't claim much success on this front, unfortunately.
2. Spend at least one hour daily creating. (Bonus: Start online sketchbook.) - If "one hour daily" can be counted as "one hour daily, at least five/six days a week," then, yes, I'm definitely seeing progress here. At least, I'm doing much, much better on this front than I was last year. As for the bonus, I started my ConceptArt.Org sketchbook on January 1, and the thread's up to five pages. I think I've posted at least one new item a week, usually more than that. Hooray for me... now, if only I could actually start to show measurable artistic growth...
3. Follow through on at least one creative book/site/course. (Bonus: Develop 2D/3D/animation program skills.) - I started out okay here, but I seem to have fallen off the wagon somewhere in mid-spring or so. I blame the weather... and the pollen count.
   
4. Finish at least one marketworthy story. (Bonus: Submit said story/stories for publication.) - Nope, hasn't happened yet, though I'm forcing my way forward on a couple of my stalled-out monstrosities; with any luck, I'll be able to check this one off by my birthday. I'm not holding my breath, though...
5. Overhaul web presence. (Bonus: Relearn "basic" skills - HTML, CSS, etc.) - After some serious procrastination, I've finally started moving foward on this project. (The observant may note the new Link of Interest - W3 Schools - where one can learn such things for free online.) As I thought, things have changed in ten years, and the stuff I got away with back when I started the sites looks like it won't work these days, or much longer into the future. I think it'll be easier to start over from scratch than simply retrofit my old sites to the newer standards, but if it needs doing it needs doing. Once more, I hope to have something to show for it this fall, but we'll see how it goes.
6. Organize, clean, weed out my space. (Bonus: Rearrange shelving/storage.) - I won't lie. I haven't made any progress on this front. If anything, I've backslid. Fortunately, budget issues mean I haven't accumulated too much extra junk.
7. Walk/exercise at least 3x weekly. (Bonus: Walk even on work days.) - Eh, what can I say? I have good weeks and bad (a.k.a. lazy) weeks here. Hopefully I can have more good weeks than bad by the end of the year.

So, that's how I've been doing. I feel like I'm doing better on resolution follow-through than I was this time last year, so we'll see if I can carry the momentum through to the end of December.

To Anyone Who Has Ever Written or Read Fanfic...

This is probably the least useful or informative post in my entire blog, but I felt a certain obligation to share this.

Basic Instructions: How to Write Fan Fiction (Rated Strong PG)

As a reader and occasional author of fanfic (the G/PG kind), I had to laugh. With so many older shows now freely available to a whole new audience via the Internet, I wonder if this sort of thing isn't being written by a new generation of fans right now. (Assuming, of course, it wasn't written back in the 80's... dear gods of heaven and earth, it better not have been...)

Free as a Dragonfly

This seems to be a good year for dragonflies. This guy was one of a pair who rested in an elderberry tree off our porch; they obligingly waited while I got my camera, and lingered long enough for several shots. Most others I've seen this year haven't been so photogenic, but they have been fascinating to watch. Just the other day, over at Grandpa's house, I wandered into the backyard and found myself surrounded by dragonflies. Huge, beautiful dragonflies, at least five at any given time. They circled and swooped and cornered and dove, moving in manners that seemed contrary to the laws of physics and nature. Not a one ever landed. I quickly gave up trying to capture them on camera. Instead, I simply stood there in there midst, letting them weave their aerial magic around me.

Okay, back to the title...

I'm writing this blog entry on the Little Black Critter, which has been sadly neglected of late. My excuse was that I didn't have a wireless connection to keep it updated, and I got tired of it constantly nagging me for something I couldn't provide without heading out of the house. (Yes, the ability to take one's computer and camp out at any given Starbuck's all day is one of the chief attractions of laptops for most people, but I'm a reclusive and antisocial beast who doesn't think nearly so well when surrounded by cell-phone yakking, caffiene-addicted people. Or most any people, to be honest.)

Back at Xmas, I received a gift card from a relative, which I'd intended to spend on remedying the LBC's connection woes. Alas, time kept slipping away, as time is wont to do, and I kept putting it off. The times I looked online for help, I only got more and more confused by an inpenetrable wall of terminology and conflicting product reviews. And so I cowered, and I waited, and yet more time slipped through my less-than-agile fingers.

As June arrived, the long-awaited digital conversion left us with an unexpected complication. We had thought, as cable customers, that we'd be safe from hassles. According to an e-mail sent out less than three weeks before D(igital)-Day, that wasn't the case. We ended up having to get cable boxes and digital converters installed, a process that turned into a much bigger headache than it ought to.

So I thought about it. It was six months into 2009. We're already wrestling a bunch of new boxes into the house. And the old router seemed a bit fidgety now and again. So, I figured to heck with it - I'm gettin' me a wireless router.

And so I did.

And if this blog entry, written in the living room on the Little Black Critter, publishes, I'll know everything is working right, leaving me with one more toy and one less excuse.