Aquarionics

Jonathan takes Dorathea to task for taking Mark to task for Mark’s archive system.

Seeming as how my archive system works much like Mark’s, only (From Dorathea’s POV) worse because you have to choose a year as well as everything else (It’s still three clicks, because my monthly archives are full posts, but even so…), I should be on the defensive. First, I agree whole-heartedly with Jonathan on the subject of weekly archives. I once offered them (Via a kludge of Klind’s select date-range feature, which I have yet to find a nice interface for in [E]2), but because I didn’t find them terribly useful, I dropped them. The unit of archiving for this weblog is the Month and the Post, weeks make life confusing.

The benifits of the Tiered structure are, for me, three-fold. The first is sheer weight of numbers. I’ve been blogging for three years now, posting once every day, with occasional holidays. I have archives going back to January 2000, Even a list of *months* is getting on for forty lines in a navigation box, weeks would be… what, about a hundred and fifty lines? Sod that. I don’t object to long pages (See the category page for “Personal”. Since everything before august last year got filed there it’s about half a meg of HTML), but I don’t want to overload the front page.

The second is logical structure. If you’re looking for a post by when I posted it, you’ll probably have a rough idea which month it appeared in, and what year. You probably don’t want to wade though another thirty calendar tables, All large navigation is drill-down out of necessity of not fusing the average users tiny minds with too much information. Again, weeks fall down here because they are a halfway house between the openness of a month and the claustophobia of archive by day. If you want a post by category, use the archive by category instead of by date. Bada-bing, as I’m assured they say in the states.

I agree that three clicks to the current archive is a little overboard, and my solution to this (as of today) is to display the current year archive on the front page of the Archive section, or I could to put a “Last six months” list after the Recent Comments down the left. Putting the whole archive on the front page, though, strikes me as overkill at this size.

Once of my quests in life is to introduce my significant other to the delights and wonders of being a Gamer. Not in the D&D type sense, but in the Quake, Doom, Unreal, Warcraft, Tropico, Monkey Island, GTA, The Sims, Command and Conquer type sense. In this, I appear to have succeeded, because she’s been playing Planescape:Torment all day.

Planescape is one of the best RPGs out there, and certainly the one with the best plot line. Baldur’s Gate may be huge (And we are talking about hundreds of hours for the series here) but the plot-line does involve an awful amount of “Okay, can’t rescue person who’s being tortured yet, must level-up some more”. Baldur’s Gate 1 in particular suffers from this, the four hour gap close to the beginning between the “I don’t know what I’m doing, all these things are happening to me” and the first bit of actual exposition. In Planescape there is no tedious back story, no “You grew up in a town called Candlekeep on the edge of the sword coast” lengthy monologue. You wake up, in a mortuary, with a talking skull beside you. With amnesia. It’s now your job to find out who you are, and why you are in a mortuary.

You are in a mortuary because you died.

The plot thickens.

Note, it isn’t the player’s job to get this information out of the game, it is the game, or at least a major part of the first three-quarters say. The plot changes, too. Certain people won’t join you if you follow certain principles. Nothing major, just different side quests, different PCs, the main Nameless One’s quest is still there, always.

Meanwhile, I’m getting back into games mode. This week was spent brushing up on my C++ and learning the absolute basics of Windows Programming and DirectX interfaces. Now I have to take three steps backwards, and learn all the bits that my University course didn’t cover, like Classes. Course, the best thing for me to be doing would be Java, since that’s what I appear to be mixed up in most, but my bad experiences at Uni with the language (including a teacher who gave us code written out longhand that didn’t either compile nor match up with what the course-standard-IDE thought the process calls were). Python has been put on hold whilst I go back to basic principles of Real Programming.

(I’m not a coder, I’m a scripter. The main difference involves main event loops, I belive. I learnt to code in BBC, then Q, then Visual Basic 4 & 6. None of which require any kind of constant state loop. I’m having to unlearn a lot of stuff, which is probably going to help the rest of my programming too. Yay)

I’ve tidied my room.

I have one room in the house in which I sleep, work and play. It hasn’t been cleared up since roughly September, when I moved the stuff from the floor to the bed and back again to look for a book. In this clear-out, I found 20 CDs, 5 books,

Lord Of The Rings: The TV Series:

This is a fansite dedicated to the much loved “Lord of the Rings: The Series” television show, which was produced by Warner Bros. after the huge success of the Lord of the Rings movies (directed by Peter Jackson).

(Via Añejo)

(Aquarionics on Pornolize)

Drugs are bad. look at where drug money goes. Taxes are good, look at where tax money goes.