Website

Finally updated to Drupal 6.3, a security update.

Wasn't much to tweak, just had to remember my hacks for taxonomy.module (to sort taxonomy by weight and name) and taxonomy.pages.inc (depth = 'all' instead of depth = 0). Oh, and the latest Views release candidate introduced some small changes that had me go into the announce_block view to fix how it displayed the date field. (It was putting a label I didn't want.)

More or less it was a painless update (as it often is) so woo! I could either do more tag cleaning, or just sit here and space out at the screen. :P

*stares*

...or I could try to update Marinelli theme. I'm a version behind, but I rewrote enough code from the original that it'll be a bit of a pain, considering the fact I am all lazy about learning to use a revision control system. I really should get into that habit sometime soon. :/

Ugh... for some reason I'm way too hot, even though it's 2 am and I have the huge fan at my back. I think I must just be stressed out. :/ Some difficult stuff happened (not to me, though) that got me all tensed up. So I'm gonna lie down soon.

I spent the whole day in DR, and not actually getting many survival ranks. I've just been tweaking these training scripts Manze gave me, which led to a rash of redoing old scripts I already wrote before, and adding some new ones, too. I've got almost everything that I'd actually like to script scripted. :O

And Talliska has something like 12 ranks of general survival until circle 33.

I'm gonna run D&D 4e tomorrow (well, later today!) I'm not all that prepared, but I'm still going to try and test stuff out with Kalli and Jon. I suppose we'll just try and see what happens. :O There's a lot of rules in the DM book, but I think I'm just going to use the basic XP total guidelines and put random stuff per room, and traps. (Dun dun dun!)

Ugh. I haven't written for too long. Well, 4 days is long to me.

I'd been stressing over writing the Reborn Again stuff I posted on my wiki last night. I'm not even DONE with it all and I'm all worn out from writing it. Mostly because I had to try to figure out how BESM works AND write a whole set of custom rules for it. And I'm still not done with the fluff. I keep getting questions about all the important locations in RA world and it's bugging me that the docs are incomplete. GRR.

I've wanted to run the D&D roguelike game all bad, too, but because of all that other writing I had to cancel it... and now I'm supposed to run Emberdays today but I'm so damn worn out from worrying and writing and depriving myself of sleep that I'm so certain I won't be running my best game.

But, I really, really can't cancel again. *sigh* I seriously just want several days to rest my mind. I just keep praying that somehow I'll just pull out some amazing creativity out of nowhere and make this next part of ED work.

Truth is though, I really just want to lie down.

...well, to be honest it's something I've wanted to actually redo for a while. The Caduceus site, I mean.

Here's the main page that I've already shown before, and the actual journal part. The purpose of the journal will be for Jon and I to write in-character things about Ryshy and Alexsei, to help us flesh out how we'll separate them from Exalted's Creation and into Eskarne (my original setting for the Anthegenia Cycle, and yes, also the name I gave the Great Bird in Reborn Again. It means "Mercy".)

For the user profiles, I ended up using a nifty Nucleus plugin for customizable profiles. Even if there'll only ever be two users for the Caduceus, I just had to get it done *right*. ^^;

I went through a few different and interesting blog software and CMSs before settling back with Nucleus, one of my staple favorites:

I've been working on a layout -- and I mean a very SIMPLE layout -- for the new Caduceus site. I had everything done, more or less, but then discovered that the top banner (which was a centered image) was always shifting a few pixels to the left compared to the splash page.

Yeah, so it's just a few pixels, who cares, right? ... I do! D:

So I raged for a while (all last night, in fact) trying to figure out the issue, when it finally struck me just a few minutes ago. It's the *scrollbar*. The scrollbar was messing up the centering for short pages. x.x So I followed the advice I found here and put in a

html { overflow-y: scroll; }

in the CSS to force a scrollbar all the time. Gah~ I really do hate CSS, have I said that before? n.n

Figures that now that I have more time to myself I'd do MORE RP, yes? These projects are meant to be a lot more lightweight and slower paced games than the other stuff I was trying, though. And it helps satisfy my curiosity about messing with non-Exalted systems!

Reborn Again: Destiny's End - Unfinished page for my BESM game, which should start in August after I'm settled in Montreal. I'm probably being a lil' slow with this one, but it's *Reborn Again* and so that requires some more attention to detail (read: perfectionism) from me to write all the necessary docs.

Roguelike Adventures! - A D&D 4e game, good ol' dungeon crawler in the style of a roguelike game. This site is more or less complete (with players' charsheets) and is almost ready to run. :O I just need to poke at the DM book and get a good method of churning out random dungeons and such.

I really hate when I lose my posts... Now I have to rewrite all about Soul Collectors. Grrrr.

It went all right, though, and the players were great to work with (even the ones I originally thought might flake out or be problematic somehow.) Thy are used to a faster-paced game than I usually play/run, though, and I found that a bit hard to get used to, at first. Keeping up will be something I'll have to try hard at whenever I run -- though on the other hand, since everyone's posting so fast, there isn't nearly as much need to spend on detail.

Unfortunately, that ALSO means that when I do want detail, I have to describe as much as I can ahead of time. x.x

The players *seemed* to like the premise, which was to bring a Solar sorcerer to the center of the Black Chase and protect her as she casts the Benediction of Archgenesis, on the new moon of Ascending Water.

Just did a few changes to the node layouts. So exciting, huh? :P

I decided (after editing Talliska's journal to do the same) that I'd only display categories on the teaser, and put the tag list at the very end of the full node view. Makes things look less cluttered, though it doesn't actually reduce db queries, since I have to traverse the terms *anyway* to pull out the categories separate from the tags. But that's to be expected.

Also I tweaked the code so the author/date/categories will only display for blog entries. (Pages are static, and events have their own dates on them anyways.) And I went into contemplate and edited the node template for events so it wouldn't use <h3> any more.

Now I really want to play Talliska in DR, but I keep futzing around with the journal instead! =_= And making things like this (a placeholder page, helped me practice basic CSS) and this (made with Nucleus - I'll stick a PSU screenshot in the layout later to make it look more interesting.)

(Also, this post ended up LONG!)

But I've mostly gotten things set up the way I wanted them, now. Here's some of the annoying things I had to contend with:

1) The user login box had odd formatting for the list bullets. I was actually ranting to Kalli about this for a while. I finally fixed it, by taking out the line-width argument the creator of my base theme (it's called marinelli, by the way) stuck in the loginblock CSS.

2) I made the BAD mistake of trying to activate the theme developer module packaged with devel. I don't know WHAT was wrong with it, but it started eating my PHP memory like crazy whenever I loaded the modules page. Geez... I had bumped up the max allocation in php.ini to 40M and it was still trying to allocate more! And it started spitting bunches of raw code at me, too.

Bleargh... I hate CSS. I really, really hate CSS!

On the other hand, though, I have Drupal 6.2 running now, after a day of slaving over database backups (I had to do a restore at one point, it was painfully slow and nervewracking), manually updating modules, having to redo my URL aliases at least twice, and *re*-learning Views because Views 2.0 has an entirely different layout to it. (I managed to get all my views working again, though, woo.)

I'm still poking at various little niggling details of things. Having such a beautiful monitor is a blessing and a curse... I *love* the way my site looks on my screen, but some of the colors just look horrific on Jon's. Argh. I grew out of sticking to web-safe colors a long time ago, so I guess that's to be expected, but it's annoying looking over his shoulder and thinking to myself "Bleah, that looks SO much uglier than I thought it did!"

Oh, I managed to find a non-database query intensive way to print categories and tags per entry. But I still have to tweak the full views... now they print tags twice. WTF! Ahhhh, going to be a long night still, I can tell.