IRAGINATION

When I was drawing the first frame of Meet Sheep Man, I was thinking on some scene from the Mega Man X3 opening.

I couldn’t resist so today I checked out how close I got to the real thing. Here are the results.

I kind of nailed X’s stance, but Zero is way far on the right. Honestly I don’t think I’d have used that. Also in the game the image is flipped horizontally. Probably I could have done a better work by actually watching the scene while drawing, but as sudden as the whole idea was at the moment, I thought I already achieved the dramatic feeling with the ‘zomg extreme’ armors and seriousness, so I just went on with the rest of the strip.

BTW, The Mega Man Network found my comic. Neat!

http://gonintendo.com/viewstory.php?id=107309

I remember how I ranted when Mega Man 9 was announced because of the downgrade graphic wise.

I have to admit that I have learned to love these games. Announcing them in all seriousness with high marketing budgets and press releases is a parody on its own right of the game industry that puts a smile in my face. I have been converted to love this.

I was expecting to make this post yesterday but nothing happened.

Today I checked out briefly between breaks. It didn’t happen instantly. Some pages were accessible, others were not. I guess that’s how it was planned. Slowly, sections were taken down from time to time. The process was started, and it was a matter of time to witness the final result.

So today, somewhere between commuting and dinner, Fire Man Lives and the whole Geocities where shutdown for good.

Well, as simple as expect the content of your Gmail inbox be there forever, Geocities was one of those things that you could naively say would be there for good for no other reason than it’s been there for as long as you can remember.

When I read about its closure, I couldn’t help to ponder about it and make some retrospective. After all my first websites and the ones from many friends were hosted there. Good times.

With this, a link of the past is broken. For the Tweeter generation, probably this went unnoticed. For me, embarrassingly enough, I could not let go. So I backed it up.

For nostalgia sake, Fire Man Lives will be stored here for as long as I can. This is close to 10 years old content, so don’t be too harsh.

Um, update your links?

Although I’m very satisfied with the progress so far with Bass Abyss, I’m still unable to release a new version. I’m getting closer, but fixing the code has been too entertaining.  It’s an endless feedback cycle. The ideas I get in my job get applied in the game, and the ideas I get from the game just happen to solve some problem in my job.

The milestone version 1.0 should be something special, and not just another maintenance update. I’ve done some major revamps in many sections, stuff to be really proud of. But after a few days the hype is over and it just doesn’t look like it was such a big deal, even less worth an update. Probably it was, but I’m too used to not look back and be already very concerned with the new stuff I’m doing.

The only pressure I have when I stop to think of it is “well, maybe this is taking too long”.

September is almost over. I really want to have something for October, even if it is an unexciting maintenance update. To achieve that I guess I’ll have to come to terms with the high bars I’ve been setting.

Oh well. I just took a little break to write something. In the mean time, have a cute short hair Balandra sketch.

I don’t know what’s wrong with Coppermine’s url tags but it’s not rendering properly the url that I entered in the description of my last pictures.

Until I find out, here’s the credit of the Mega Man Zero style X I’ve been drawing:

http://harvestwks.blog59.fc2.com/blog-entry-162.html

Bonus sketch:

If for some reason the site looks weird, please clear your browser cache. I did a heavy rewrite of the layout and now I’m using a table-less, css, div-based (or whatever is the buzzword) design.

After clearing the cache and if I did everything right, you should see no major difference. That means everything went well.

I’m tinkering some applications in my work and they require a similar process, so as usual I try to apply the experience gained and use it here. This should make easier for spiders and similar machines to index my site, by being presented a more semantic layout.

I took the time to support as back as Internet Explorer 6. Considering the magnitude of the markup change, I kind of take pride that the site looks good even on it. Hack free. As soon as I’m done with other tasks, I might look at Internet Explorer 5 and older, if feasible, but don’t expect it soon. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all look nice on Windows. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to work with those browsers but I just can’t neglet the majority of visitors that browse with IE. Hopefully they’ll migrate to IE8 and I won’t have to look back at IE6 again. I have no access to a Mac system anymore so I’ll have to think positive and trust it looks ok on it.

And if you use Chrome, Safari or Firefox 3.5 you can enjoy nice drop-shadows.

I’m still not done with this process, probably 95% of the site that uses the main layout has been reviewed and cleaned up. There are some tables I won’t be able to get rid off on a reasonable amount of time as the ones in the Illustrations section. That markup is  generated by the gallery software it is based on, Coppermine. On a side note, it’s a turn off that that project seems kind of stale but I’ll keep using it for now hoping they release some big update that lures me to use it more often. WordPress, the software I use for the news front page and this blog, has seen many major upgrades in the same time period, and that kind of motivated me to do some research on its tool-set and related technologies available.

On the horizon there are the mobile browsers, the console browsers. There are so many customizations I’d have to make to support them, but rest assure they’re in my road-map/wish-list.

Now evaluating forum software.