On the 8th of the 8th 2008, I managed to get everyone (or at least enough people) to agree to start a new roleplaying game. We choose Spirit of the Century as the first game to play because its, apparently easy to pick up and just play (only one person in our group has played it before and I have a textbook knowledge of how to play it). You’ll be able to read write ups of it here on our roleplaying group’s site (in fact you can see write-ups and characters from all our games on that site).

Unfortunately my wife comes down with the flu the next week and is pretty bad this week too. So I haven’t actually managed to attend any games! Arg. But hopefully there is next week…

phoenyx.net are finally closing it down. Unlike the last time I said the Fudge is dead, this time it’s official. The FudgeList will be gone by August 26 (archives will still be available). I think perhaps in the long term this will be a good thing (for many reasons that I’m uncomfortable saying in public). I do hope in the short term, perhaps, that this might consolidate the remains of the community around something new or alternative, such as fudgeforum (though I’ve barely used it myself), but I suspect it’ll just disappear for a while, subsumed by the Fate community (which isn’t a bad “fate” I guess).

I still have Reboot, though I should kick Brad about where its at. Also my “secret” project L___ H_____ was a Fudge-based roleplaying game, that I’m quietly working my way through to putting it online, in some form of free (though originally I had planned to try and get it published). I’ve even already put some of it online on here (here and here) and even had Chris of Seraphim Guard interested in buying the rights for the Story Hooks bit. But I admit that I was beginning to feel that the FudgeList wasn’t going to be the place to announce it. In short, I’m not stopping being a fan of Fudge.

In the meantime, I plan to setup a small website that generates a monster FudgeRPG feed pulling in the known FudgeRPG feeds out there since the phoneyx.net one disappeared quite a while ago.

BTW for those reading from the Fudge community, you can see just my Fudge posts using this tag (or even better Fudge and Roleplaying posts using this link).  There is even unique RSS feeds, so you don’t have to read about Fringlish or TDOMF updates.

See ya all on the other side I guess, where ever that might be.

I don’t pretend to be a great web designer or programmer. Most of the stuff I do is really just tinkering and as part of that I decided it was time to create a new look for thedeadone.net, which involves creating a new “Theme” for Wordpress. About a week ago, I got the theme up and running, the layout done. I’ve kept adding configurable options so that I can use it as a standard Wordpress theme and also have it customised to how I think thedeadone.net should be done. I decided, as a first step, I’d change the colour scheme to match my previous theme, then install the new theme here and start using it.

A week later I’m ready to throw my laptop out the window. At first, I didn’t find it hard, modifying the CSS stylesheets to get the right look and spacing. I checked it in Opera and used Firebug in Firefox, everything was great. Then I tried it in Internet Explorer and elements were all over the place. Slight padding changes would shift around half the page, I had to start again, adding fixes and changes to get it to work in Internet Explorer. It sucks. It’s like writing code that is completely standards compliant but finding it doing utter different things on different operating systems.

Anyway, I’ve started to use the new theme here. It’s not finished, lots of stuff to do on it, but I’d rather see it in action than continue to work in the dark on it.

This is the frontpage of my previous theme

And this is an example of a category list

This is the brand new frontpage, still lots to do, but much better

Just for comparsion, here is the new theme

(Hopefully I’ve manage to lick that thumbnail cropping issue). Anyway, I did some more drawings over the weekend. I re-did the design of one of the ones I did for this post, so that it’s not so phallic:

I also did some new ones, continuing to base them on my “secret” project L___ H_____:

I also pulled out my charcoal and pencil again, concentrating on contrast, making sure my pencil lines are right (kind of taking my tips from my ink work). I like what I produced, though I feel should have placed it in a background. I’m also getting a bit annoyed about the scanning process, it always seems to take from my pencil work. I should really look into improving it.

Also on holidays, I played more with ink, even bought more pens. (Wordpress is still cropping my thumbnails, so click on the images to see them in full)

The first was a design I had been doodling for while, an icon for this website in fact, I like it so it may be appearing soon as a part of this website design!

This second one, was something more of a experiment with shapes and I liked what emerged. It’s very, em, primordial I guess.

I then decided to try and do an Icon for my L___ H_____ RPG project:

I really like it. It might even work on the front cover of a book, maybe. So I ended up trying to do a few for the different types of Gods in L___ H_____ RPG:

I had done a third one, but the lines came out wrong so I plan to redo it. The second one here also is unintentionally phallic so I think a redesign is in order. The first one works though and it’s quite cool too because you can turn it upside down and it still works!

I’ll probably do more, it’s sort of enjoyable way of design and drawing: methodical, creative and surprising. However, seeing them on the computer screen does change them a bit. If you like them, drop me a comment!

So over the holiday I got to some drawing. The big thing really was that I started to use charcoal, not a major step but something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. But I started with a simple tonal study, to get my eye and hands back into the swing of it (for some reason Wordpress has cropped the thumbnail so to have a proper look at it, click on it):

So my first effort with charcoal was this (click on it to see the bigger version):

It was done as quick experiment on my sketchbook (across two pages) of a twig. I did the outline in ink. However you can see where the charcoal smudged accidentally. I liked it, it was much easier and faster to pull out the change in tones using the charcoal than with pencil like in the tonal study I did first. But a lot messier and prone to accidents.

I then went out and found something to really try the charcoal out on. In Chargey, where we were on holidays, there is lots of really old lovely things. There was this “saint” statue on the side of the old house, worn by weather, it had long lost its head. I love the fact that it was just a lump of rock but somehow you were able to perceive that it was once a detailed statue (again Wordpress has cropped the thumbnail, I’ll have to find a fix for that):

The first one was done with pencil and charcoal. I didn’t do any of the background which I think distracts from the picture, loses it’s context, but I also found the final work messy and, well, a bit random. The second study, I outlined in ink first, including the background and then tried to capture the tone of the stone statue with charcoal. I think the second one is better but loses the feel of the statue. Everyone who saw the actual drawings preferred the first one, because the contrast between ink and charcoal was much more noticeable than the digital copies here.

There was a second statue, much bigger than this one but also very similar. This time I tried toned paper (i.e. not white):

The first thing that hit was the effect of the grade of paper. My light pencil marks were not working, so I dove straight in with the charcoal but I couldn’t make any tone… just black and a tiny smudge. The effort was a bit, well shite. If you knew the statue in the house, you’d recognise it, but I think it failed to capture anything else.

What this highlighted for me was the effect of the type of paper on my drawing, in particular with charcoal. On my notebook (the twig) I was able to get a really good strength and contrast of tone, but on my A4 sketch pad, the paper is thinner. It has a different effect, harder to generate really deep tones. But the coloured paper was the thickest of them all but it’s texture made it impossible to create contrast in tones at all. I’ve always known that paper makes a difference, but it was always negligible for me. With ink, I would place a spare page underneath thin paper so it’d soak up ink that leaked through. Also the way my coloured  markers’ ink spread, was really affected by the thickness of the paper.

So my first thoughts on charcoal is that it’s cool. I like what I can produce with it, but it does require further playing with it. And I love its messiness.

I’ve been working on a new theme for thedeadone.net for a little while now. The functionality is about 90% there. The layout is 99% done. But there is about 50% more to go. I have to choose colours and modify the layout with icons and images to make it “pretty”. I also need to make it work for the forum so at least I have a similar theme across the two sites.

I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.

If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?

Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.

It’s becoming a common query about how to make the content field in a TDO Mini Forms WYSIWYG (”What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get”). A WYSIWYG editor is where you see that your input is bold when you set it to bold, instead of seeing it plain with bold tags around the text. This tutorial will run you through quickly how to set this up.

There are tons of javascript implementations of this that can change a normal HTML textarea into one of these WYSIWYG editors such as TinyMCE or NiceEdit. The post content field (and Custom Fields set to Text Area) use the standard textarea element and so can be “skinned” by these libraries quite easily. This is why I haven’t really integrated one of these libraries into TDOMF, I don’t want to restrict user choice and I also don’t want the huge bloat. You could, for example, use the same installation of TinyMCE to skin your comments input form as well as your TDOMF form. However I’m constantly asked how to do it. So lets take TinyMCE, and run though how you might add it to your TDO Mini Forms form.

1. Download latest version from http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

2. Unpack the tinymce_<ver>.zip

3. Using an FTP client, upload the contents of jscripts (i.e. the tiny_mce folder) to your wordpress site. Best place to do this is under wp-content (i.e. wp-content/tiny_mce).

4. Make sure its readable from the web. You may have to set the permissions using chmod 755 or chmod 777 on the directory and it’s contents depending on your host configuration. You can probably do this from your FTP client.

5. Now, you need a form with a Content widget it on it. If you use the default, unmodified form, you will have one. If not…

5.1. Go to the “Form Widgets” page.

5.2. Drag and drop the Content Widget from “Available Widgets” to “Your Form”.

5.3. Click on the icon beside “Content” and disable/uncheck the “Use Quicktags” and “Restrict Tags” options if they are checked. You can perform any other customisation of the “Content” Widget here.

5.4. Do any other widget customisation and then click “Save Changes”.

6. Now go to the Form Hacker and add this to the top:

<!-- TinyMCE -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo get_bloginfo('wpurl'); ?>/wp-content/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
tinyMCE.init({
mode : "exact",
elements : "content_content",
theme : "simple"
});
</script>
<!-- /TinyMCE -->

Save the hacked form.

7. View your form. The Post Content now should have a WYSIWYG editor!

I used the “simple theme” in this tutorial. TinyMCE supports more advanced editor and other options, so please check the TinyMCE documentation and examples.

And NO! You cannot use the TinyMCE editor that is built into Wordpress. The Wordpress TinyMCE has been seriously hacked to work with the Wordpress UI and cannot be used independently.

You can also extend this approach to use TinyMCE for Custom Fields.

8. Add a Custom Field widget to your Form using “Form Widgets”. Set the Custom Field “Type” to “Text Area”. Disable “Use Quicktags” and “Restrict Tags” options. Save the widgets.

9. On the “Form Hacker” use the “Reset” button to pick up the latest changes.

10. Now scan the code of the form for the Custom Field textarea tag. It should be something like this:

<textarea title="true" rows="10" cols="40" name="customfields-textarea-1” id=”customfields-textarea-1″ ><?php echo htmlentities($value,ENT_NOQUOTES,get_bloginfo(’charset’)); ?></textarea>

Please note the name of the custom field textarea element. In this case it’s customfields-textarea-1.

11. Now at the top of the form add this:

<!-- TinyMCE -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php echo get_bloginfo('wpurl'); ?>/wp-content/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
tinyMCE.init({
mode : "exact",
elements : "content_content,customfields-textarea-1“,
theme : “simple”
});
</script>
<!– /TinyMCE –>

Note that I’ve appended the name of the textarea to the “elements” array.

12. Save the hacked form.

13. View your form. Now your content and your custom field widget use TinyMCE.

If you want to configure TinyMCE in even more complicated ways, please refer to the TinyMCE documentation. You can, for example, configure a Custom Field differently to the post content, by having the tinyMCE.init called separately before the different elements. In a similar way, you can add WYSIWYG editor to your comments, if you are so inclined.

Any questions and queries are probably best served on the TDOMF support forum. If you did find this helpful, please consider dropping me a few euros, thank you.

Children cannot cease but find new ways to embarrass their parents. Alice, our 4-year-old, actually is not that bad but there was certainly, shall we say, a public incident, while on holidays. We were staying in this lovely old country house and we had got this great big inflatable pool out the back. The kids were hopping in and out all day long and we had allowed them to take up the habit of peeing on the grass behind a tree (rather than run across the hard stone floors inside while wet). Alice’s older cousin, who is a boy, stayed for a week and she started copying him, learning that she could pee standing up if she was wearing just her swimsuit.

Anyway, on the last day of the holidays we drove for 6 hours straight back to Paris. The kids were wrecked from being couped up all day in the car so I took Alice and Tristan, our 1 year old, out to the little park beside the apartment block. There was a small playground, too big for Tristan, too small for Alice but they still played there. As Alice was climbing up the ladder to the slide, she froze, clenching her legs together. “Daddy. I need to go to the toilet.” She looked like she was about to pee right there and then. Okay, okay, I thought. I lifted her down and said “we just have to go out of the park and up the lift. You can hold it that long can’t you?” She nodded her head while biting her lip. I picked up Tristan and started strapping him into the buggy when Alice called out “Daddy, I can pee her!”. She was pointing to a small patch of grass, outside the little playground, beside the very public pavement through the park.

“No Alice. We just have to walk over there and go up the lift.” So I went back to strapping Tristan in and then I looked again over at Alice. She had pulled her trousers and panties down to her feet and was about to try peeing standing up. Two mothers, who were sitting on a bench while their own children played, were in fits of laughter. Of course, I couldn’t pass it off with a witty comment because my pidgin French is awful. I had to finish with Tristan and then pull up Alice’s trousers and walk off with my bright red cheeks. Arg.

While on my holidays last month in France, I came across some humorous “Fringlish”. Check this out:

It’s a brand of sugar, in a pink colour, called “Daddy”. That’s right you can buy your Sugar Daddy in France in a pink container.

And then I came across the “Plate of Terror!” On one of my first trips to France, I was given a menu in a restaurant that had bad English translations on it and in the desert section they had for Chocolate Mouse: “Chocolate Moss”. This time, I was surprised to find the “Plat du Terroir”!

Plat Du Terroir on the Menu

Note: Terroir actually means Countryside (i.e. Countryside Dish) and it was gorgeous, hot French cheese and potate and lovely ham. Yum.