In a Blanket Haze of Ephedrine January 8, 2020

I’ve been so damn scattered lately like you wouldn’t believe. God, so many different projects. So many different projects. I sorta hate not being able to focus these updates on one project in particular, but that’s the nature of the beast at the moment. It’ll calm down. Always does…

Get a load of the stones on this guy

As I discussed in “Big Chunky Rides Again”, I kinda threw the world into the deep end when I neglected anything resembling a proper introduction section with Tesserae 1.0. No more of that; easing people in with a full section, explaining everything involved from the terminology to the workflow. Everything seems clearer this time, and borb seems to agree, thankfully.

Also, Color-coded sections return! Tesserae 1.0 used a few different stylesheets, namely a global for layout and then a color-only one that gets loaded depending on the section topic, which is set using an AutoSite variable and a few conditionals in the template. I knew I wanted this to return in Tesserae 2.0; it makes everything pop a little more visually.

To accomplish this, given that I didn’t actually write any of Tesserae 2.0’s styling, I methodically subtracted out the color declarations from mini-nord.css and shoved them into their own stylesheet. I can then modify this one for each section and load them in using the same conditional setup I had for the original Tesserae.

I’ll potentially get a little bolder with it, but for now, I kinda like it all as accents.

Down in the cellar again

Dreams of what he remembered the outside world to be tormented him again. Simple pleasures like a sunrise to meet, idle conversation with the priests, and open windows on a warm Quintilis evening, all stripped without a thought. These only grew more vivid over time to further salt the wound; expanses of larkspur and aster and healthy, bright gladiolus would open up in front of him, and he’d trace them with his eyes as he basked in the lush grass, enjoying its texture on his exposed skin—only to wake up against his desk in an otherwise bare study.

The dhole leaned further against the bannister and nuzzled the collar on his soft robe for comfort. “Official Bookkeeper”—a title he didn’t even choose.

The spirit’s been there as far as writing goes, but I’ve been struggling to sit down and actually write anything. I have the rest of “The Fatal Commons” in my head and I’m hoping to finish it up in the first half of this year. Whatever comes of this next chapter, it’s basically gonna be as close as I’ve ever come to admitting what happened between Brianna and I on main without outright linking the RP. (Wasn’t even a good RP if I’m honest >_>)

I have Pennyverse brewing for later on in the month. Would like to get the first instance of Riley and Colton interacting down on paper around the anniversary of Darkpenny. I missed Colton’s birthday on the 4th, but I figure giving him a head start on his recovery come the 17th might make up for it.

Oh, and I’m sure there’ll be gayness soon too, speaking of anniversaries~

I fucking hate the internet so goddamn much fuck

Caby’s been trying to get me into using DeviantART (CoffeeColoredBadger on there because I’m a massive faggot), but between the pretty consistent complaints about Eclipse and the fact that I don’t feel I fit in much, not doing visual art and all, I’ve been rather lukewarm on it. It’s not that I don’t like the site, or that I don’t wanna participate. Hell, I remember spending many a late night browsing it on my DSi almost a decade ago now, so I have a history with it even. I just don’t feel I belong there just yet.

Nevertheless, I’ve been giving it the college try, figuring it might make for a good writing backup (plus being able to submit all the Pennyverse stories to the group would be nice), and it’s not exactly making its case, I’ll say. To put it simply: the literature editor is beyond an afterthought, and that’s not even the worst part.

On the editor front, it’s about as minimalist as it gets. To a fault. WordPress’ block editor feels good and makes sense when you’re trying to lay out a post, but DeviantART’s editor combines the clunky “you’re on your own, shitdick” feel of a text editor with the functionality of an incredibly basic word processor. Like, WordPad basic. Let’s recap:

• You get one box to put in a title and one box to put in text. Nothing else. Formatting options pop up when you highlight text, because that’s obvious.
• Whitespace and paragraphs are completely non-standardized. WordPress has paragraph blocks that keep everything consistent, but DeviantART’s editor has no such thing. Leave a blank line between paragraphs? Don’t? I have no clue.
• Headings? You get one button. If you want a smaller heading, you have to click that one again. Potentially six times. (And no, headings don’t remember what size they’re at, so you can’t see if something’s an H1 or an H2 at a glance. Just gotta remember it. Shitshow.)
• No chapter options! How the fuck are you gonna give me a prose option and not let me have chapters? Caby says it was originally meant for poetry, which is fair, but still inexcusable.
• For that matter, no multi-author support, no summaries, no author notes, barely anything more than a cover image.

For all the shit you can throw at Eclipse, I never got this much of a sense of “rough prototype” from the rest of it. Unfinished, perhaps. Less functional, absolutely. But nothing quite says “this bit’s basically a placeholder” like two plain text boxes and no indicator of where you’ll be whisked off to when you click the “Submit” button.

But wait—this gets better. You know what I was greeted with when I finally got Darkpenny all formatted and submitted?

An empty, glitched gallery! The story shows up in the group, but not in my own gallery, on the old site or on Eclipse. What a disaster.

So yeah, I’m basically convinced DeviantART is only meant for visual art, despite any attempts to claim contrary on their part. Gimme a few months to at least draw Flareons alright and I’ll get back to you. (toyhou.se has such a better literature editor, it’s not even funny. Do appreciate that site a ton more now.)

One of these days, all these projects will be filed and finished and I can have a clear head again. For now, enjoy the scramble!

Tags: "The Fatal Commons", DeviantART, Pennyverse, Tesserae, Web Design,