Tag Archives: spaceninja

Thumbnailing

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Thumbnail sketches

My graphic design teachers would be so damn proud of me. I’m working on the new design for Space Ninja, and I’m finding that it’s a much bigger project than I anticipated. It’s not just a simple new design, I’m making major changes to the way things function, and the flow of the entire website, not just the blog. As a result, my normal methods aren’t working. Usually, I would just open photoshop and start making mockups. I usually only go through one or two mockups before I start coding. Lately, I haven’t even done that, and I’ve instead jumped right into the text editor and let the design come from the CSS.

This time, though, I started out “properly” by doing my research. I’ve been slowly bookmarking dozens of sites over the last few weeks, and today I whittled the list down to the select few that really spoke to me. Then I made printouts of those and scrawled notes in the margins of what I liked and didn’t like. Then, armed with a short list of the features I really wanted to incorporate, I actually sat down with some paper and started making thumbnail sketches of what I’m thinking. Actually, I still haven’t done enough sketches to satisfy my old professors, but it’s already way more than I normally do. Next up, I’ll pull together a few photoshop mockups before I jump into coding.

Space Ninja History

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Space Ninja Cave Painting

I first got online in the early 90s. While some of my friends were goofing around on BBS‘s, I was using my dad’s Compuserve account to post icons I had designed for Windows 3.1. Later on, in 1995, I had dial-up Internet access at home, and a friend had shown me Joe the Circle, one of the first webcomics. This really kick-started my interest in web design, and I had a website on Geocities that year. The idea for Yellow Number Five was born around this time. I graduated high school in 1996, and my early website (which was already coded by hand) moved to Xoom, and then later to my first ISP, SpiritOne, when I started working at Egghead.

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Fun With Google

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Take Home Final

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Yarrrr… (I say that quite a bit… Pirate noises are the best). Well, since I last updated, the term has ended successfully! Out of my three classes this term, not one of them had a traditional final. Graphic Design III had a large final project which was due last week, and then we didn’t meet during finals week at all. American History gave me a take home final. That’s right. A TAKE-HOME final. Oh my god. I thought that I had seen the last of those (and multiple-guess tests) in high school. Oh man. It was great. Two essays on stuff I hadn’t read, but I had plenty of time to research the material right in the text. And then in my Capstone class, we had a final presentation on some really simple concepts, and our last class was just doing those presentations. Really informal, there was food. It was cool. And yet, even though I didn’t have any traditional finals, I’m glad to see this term gone by. Only two left now.

I’m broke again. That sucks. I thought I had a couple hundred dollars left to buy Christmas presents with. I stopped by the ATM… $10. AAAGH! How did I miscalculate that badly? Oh well… Annie’s agreed to loan me what I need in exchange for me paying her half of rent next month.

As the term ended, I got more and more wrapped up in getting stuff done. Then I got really really sick over Thanksgiving. Following that, I was too busy doing schoolwork to clean. Then Annie got a touch of what I had, or something different and was sick for several days in a row. Needless to say, the house was a wreck. Garbage all over, papers piled up on the counter, food all over, not a single clean dish in the house. It sucked. Usually, our place is pretty clean, but we just couldn’t clean. So finally, yesterday, we just sat down and did it. Annie did the dishes, and I picked up everything else and when we got done, our house was livable again! Then she baked chocolate chip cookies!

I had the greatest week ever at work last week. Our boss came in and informed us that there was a big pile of surplus computers in the back room that he would let us gut if we wanted. They were all 486s, and we couldn’t take the cases for legal reasons, but the motherboard and all the other components were ours for free! All we had to do was take them apart! Miles and I together snagged about 13 machines, total. Miles got a few Macs in there, and all the rest are PCs. Now, most of them won’t work (they were surplus for a reason), but if we can even get four or five functioning machines out of this, we can put Linux on them and buy a cheap case, and we’ve gotten fully functional computers for free! The parts are lying on my floor in a box right now, waiting for me to inspect them and pass judgment. I can’t wait.

Tons of good ideas on websites lately. Steve and I are working on a new idea to put up on all the front pages of our sites. We came up with a new logo(s) for Fojar that I’m going to work on. I already put up a new front page for yellow5.com. Miles and I aquired big bad fojar and big bad spaceninja to make competing propaganda sites. I’m working on the new CNS page for work. I’m having fun. In the words of Tank from the Matrix: “It’s a very exciting time!”

And hopefully, now that it’s the break, our team will make some progress on Cube Fighter! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, visit play.fojar.com. I’m really excited about the concept, even if Jester thinks we’re wasting our time. What does that punk know anyway? Just because he’s got a job in the “real” game industry. ;)

Communion

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I’m in a thoughtful mood at the moment. I’ve been reading the fourth book in Whitley Streiber’s Communion series. It’s called The Secret School, and it’s about visitor encounters he had as a nine-year-old. He talks about when he had a severe fever (107 degrees) that lasted several days. Everyone thought he was going to die, and he remembers the preist coming and giving him confession. He remembers meeting “Eddie.” a young boy who played with him in his room. Eddie said he was here to take him, once he died. He had a sense that he could play with Eddie after that. When he asked Eddie what his last name was, Eddie replied “Oh, Death.” They wrestled, and eventually, as the fever died Eddie left, but not before he had a peek at the gates of heaven and St. Peter. He remembers St. Peter as a very large man in a blue uniform with a baseball cap.

This really interests me. I’ve felt for quite awhile that various religions are simply different ways of viewing the same underlying reality. Is it possible that none of us really comprehends what happens after we die, so all religions spring out of various ideas? And as we are raised in various systems of thought, we view that reality differently. This would explain why a nine-year-old, who had been raised Catholic, would see what he expected to when he was near death, but saw it his own way. Death, rather than the traditional image he hadn’t been exposed to, was a young child who played with him, and St. Peter wore a baseball cap. It’s an interesting theory. I think it’s the closest I’ve come to a religious idea that I could agree with.

In other news, I managed to break my artist’s block. Annie did some poses for me while watching TV last night and I started drawing again, which was great. I’m going to try and start doing some sketches every night for about a half hour. I also managed to come up with two news stories for Y5, and a new logo for Space Ninja, a task that has been haunting me for awhile now. Hopefully by this evening, I’ll have a start on a new interface for Space Ninja and all will be going well. :)