Slayer: The Series
December 30th, 2005
Since I’ve been working on it a bit more in the downtime that is my office over Winter-een-mas, I thought I should take a moment to sort out a way to chronicle my Slayer crap, as I so delicately call it, from my normal blog crap.
Slayer: The Series is a game based on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (and if you noticed that URL resolves to something different, there will be a post about a new server in the coming months to explain it). We all sit at a table and … well … play vampires and vampire killers.
If you don’t ‘get’ an RPG by now, I’m not going to sit and explain it. If you really want to understand it, start here. But don’t worry! This post isn’t about RPGs, it’s about why I actually run the website for our game.
And, yes, it’s all levels of nerditude to be the webmaster for a game, but shut it, okay? There’s a reason for it.
Being able to play with my game and being able to play with webpages are two different joys. The game lends itself to imagination and creativity and sometimes the simple ‘What if we made opening credits (5mb) to our little game…’ sort of question develops into me learning how to use Final Cut Pro.
Essentially, I use the game a starting point to expand my knowledge of the world and how to manipulate computers to do what I want. I’m not great at it, but I can use this to learn.
Admittedly, yesterday I re-learned the number one fucking rule of Web design: It must work with the most commonly used browsers.
Stepping back, you have to understand that I have two ‘components’ to the site. The wiki and the blogs. I use the blogs for character journals and episode guides. The wiki is for … well everything else. They must look alike, if not identical.
My old site design was using Egyptian Dawn and Cheops because we ran an Egyptian theme last year. I got the site working and I made it look how I wanted and it was perfect. On Firefox, Opera, and Safari. It looked like ass on IE for Windows.
Stupid, stupid me! I knew better and I never thought to look.
So after a day of dicking around and trying to make it work, I had to admit defeat and find a new design.
I thought about making my own (which I’ve done a lot) and I doodled a half dozen ideas, but as it was getting later in the day, I realized I just wanted something dark, with two columns, that would work on the wiki and the blog.
On top of that, and I quote Ipstenit, “I like the [Egypt] theme, but it’s not very gamer. It looks like we take this stuff really seriously.”
My idea was to scan the list of Wiki ’skins’ and find one that said ‘I’m based on a WordPress theme!’ and then hope it would fit in. And lo, there was the Dusk Skin, ‘…heavily influenced by the great WordPress theme by Becca Wei…’ And when I checked out Becca’s Dusk Theme I realized it addressed Ipstenit’s concerns.
It’s a little gothic, it’s a little dark, and it looks pretty. It’s simple and fast to load. It was the work on 20 minutes in MS Paint (the crappiest image making software known to man) to make a favicon (the li’l icon in your browser) and … well I like the look.
After I finished it, I thought ‘I should have a place to talk about Slayer and the weirdness of the coding and the gaming and so on.’ And then I said ‘I have a fucking blog, you shit head!’
So I tweaked my blog and viola! Here there’s a special section for talking about Slayer. And I can send people to here to see what the hip-hop status is.
Categories: Online Life
