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Okay, within the last few weeks, I came to a conclusion: a) while dog-old Safari version at the university boxes messes up the Avarthrel site rendering pretty badly, the new versions of webkit don't mess it up at all, so I have hope. b) I was under the impression that MSIE 7 was supposed to fix all bloody awful buggy CSS rendering crap, but no, it doesn't. God. Damn. It. If the CSS validator says I'm good to go, and the site looks just fine on the browsers I use, you would expect it to work perfectly in most recent versions of all major browsers, right? RIGHT? It's 2008, Microsoft! Goddamn it.

*sigh*
Okay, I'm all better now.

So, I just decided I'll try to support those browsers I have at hand, and the easiest fix to the rendering bugs is that I'll just refuse to serve any stylesheet at all to MSIE. I could tolerate buggy rendering in past, but better to have an ugly site than badly messed up site that you can't read at all due to various funky box rendering issues. I wish I had the time, energy and resources to debug the styles, I really do...

Failure to communicate, part 1: I just re-re-re-etc-submitted The Sweet Side of Death to Elfwood - okay, so I was not reading all of the instructions regarding image credits. I hope the thing will be published there, too, one day. I really do.

Failure to communicate, part 2: Tested the Avarthrel website in Opera, seems to be fine. Tested it in Midori (webkit-based browser), seems good. Yet: Tested it in proto-ancient version of Safari and lo! it blew up. Tested it in Internet Explorer 6 and words fail me. CSS sure is hard! I have no idea how the website works in IE7, but I sure hope it does better than it does in IE6. Regrettably, I'm not able to test the site too well in IE7 and I don't have the energy or inclination to make any hacks to support the bloody thing either. I can only really test it actively on Iceweasel/Firefox anyway... so here we go, I just went and added a Firefox download button on the page. =)

I just added some jQuery-based leet graphical effects to the Avarthrel website - now you can show or hide the comment form with neat effects and all. No changes to the comment scripts themselves though.

I've come to the conclusion that for some reason, writing stuff with Emacs + LaTeX doesn't work as well as it should. I guess that my quest for ultimate word processor seems to be forever ongoing... I really hope things will change when we get more semantics in OpenDocument format (and OpenOffice.org UI) and I'll be able to find motivation to write a bit better and less hacky pieces of software to support the workflow.

I've almost made progress in trying to decipher the utter lunacy that is OpenOffice.org Basic. One day, this modify-stuff-for-draft-printouts script of mine will actually work!

Thanks to sitting by OpenOffice.org once again, I've actually written some new stuff lately. I hope it will turn out to be something. It's got to be something eventually, right?

Well, it seems that the impossible is possible, and I managed to finish this particular phase of updating the Avarthrel website. A new look -- and a new logo, too!

Okay, I think I'm finally in proper condition to write something about the latest story.

But first, a few random comments on web design. Or, even before that, a few thoughts on fantasy art. I have some personal problems creating engaging fantasy art, and that's because fantasy art requires attention to detail. So, creating an interesting-looking web site for fantasy literature would require making artwork with a bunch of details.

Thanks to PHP & SimpleXML, the main Avarthrel site now has a side bar with a site map. I just got a massive deja vu feeling - and yes, turns out it's not the first time I've written a side bar implementation. My Neverwinter Nights site had such a sidebar too, but it wasn't XML-based - it was raw included PHP4 code from... God knows when. Well, at least it still works. It appears I have utterly destroyed (save for the copies buried deep in Subversion) the Common Lisp -based madness.

As far as the Avarthrel website redesign goes, I've got to say I have a giant job ahead, because I'm not a Visual Guy. Yesterday, I told my friend that I have something specific in mind about the site's new design: "a bastard child of Thief: The Circle, T2X site, and Elfwood story pages". How interesting and original it turns out remains to be seen, but one thing is sure - it'll probably look much better than what's out there now.

Also, I started using rsync to push changes to the Avarthrel site. Since I have different configuration files for the development box and the webhost, and there's stuff I don't want on the webhost anyway (such as .svn directories), I can't push the files right on, and I've always used scp. But now, with a little bit of --exclude and --dry-run, it turns out updating stuff with rsync is actually pretty easy!

Just a quick update - I upgraded to Movable Type 4.2 and would like to know if stuff works. Don't mind the dust, please!

As far as status updates go, I've been in a kind of a slump recently - I really didn't have time or energy to write anything this summer. Very awful, that. I've tweaked the story I've been working on this week, however, and discovered some truly awful passages of text. It can happen to everybody!

It seems that the stories I submitted have been accepted by Elfwood mods... you can read them right here in my user page. Very nice! I've actually gotten some comments about the stories! This doesn't happen too often - nobody comments on my stories in deviantART, for example. Wow. This is really cool.

Okay, a quick note. (Again, because apparently you can't post stuff using elinks, Movable Type wants blood.)

A few days ago, I posted a new story titled When Compassion Calls. I've never really written and published a story I was happy with in just a few days... or maybe this marks the return to the "stories I'll deepy regret about" later. I sure hope not. Well, the story is out there in the web page, deviantART...

...and I hope, in some time, in Elfwood, but that depends on the approvers. I also sent Carnival Wolves at the same time. Let's hope for the best...

The first Avarthrel game that I know of is called A Tale of a Missing Ball. It was a short text adventure / interactive fiction game that I made when getting some grips of Inform 7 interactive fiction authoring system.

Creating the game has been a fascinating experience. Inform 7 is probably right up there with Ruby among the "programming languages that are actually fun to develop stuff with". I may make Release 2 later on, just to make the game a bit more interesting and better written; now, I just wanted to let it go for a while and, maybe, let people say what they want about it.

The irony is, I can play the game in the GNOME Inform 7 development system, but damn if there's an actually working interpreter out there that works in Linux - the game is in blorbed Glulx format, and as such, finding an actually working interpreter is hard and building it from source is damn near impossible. And I'm not running open source software through Wine if there's allegations flying around that there might be a piece of software that actually, like, works.