New home for my baking!

As some of you may have noticed, this blog of late has been sliding away from the geeky and into the more domestic. Okay, that's an over simplification - but it is quite clear that as I've been doing more and more baking, I've been posting about it here. And this really isn't the place for that - this blog was meant to be about games, and writing, and design, and things like that.

So, my baking stuff has a new home: Silly Kitten Bakery! I won't be removing the baking posts I've already written here, but I will be rewriting them for the baking site. I also won't be posting baking stuff here in future, unless I'm doing a particularly geeky design. (Wheatley cookies are planned for the not-too-distant future!)

I will now return Rae's Nonsense to the geeky nonsense. Starting tomorrow. Because I'm sick today, and I'm not entirely sure my thoughts will be coherent. You have no idea how many times I've had to backspace and rewrite this post to make it make sense...

I'm a tech genius!

It's amazing. It's awesome. I've done the impossible. I've done something I never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd be able to do.

I've installed xampp and Wordpress on my desktop.

Okay, okay, so I'm not REALLY a tech genius. I know that, as far as genius goes, putting Wordpress on my desktop is... well, nowhere on the list. But to me, who uses Blogger at the moment purely because Wordpress is still a tiny bit scary, being able to actually use it without being online is nothing short of awe-inspiring. To me.

So. At some point in the future, there will be one or two Wordpress blogs appearing by yours truly! At least one of them will be a baking blog, so I'll be moving all the baking stuff to that. (If I'm making particularly geeky cookies - such as the Wheatley ones I'm hoping to do soon - they'll be posted here as well.) It may be awhile - I'm learning how to make my own Wordpress themes from scratch - but eventually, it will be awesome.

Almost as awesome as me installing Wordpress on my desktop. Yes, I will stop going on about it now.

Diablo: the game and its comic counterpart

Sometimes I write articles for the Proud Lion blog. Most recently, I wrote an article comparing the five-part comic series based on Diablo, and the popular game that inspired it. To check it out, click me!

You can check out the main blog by clicking me instead!

Blog? Oh yeah, that blog...

For awhile there, I was doing really well with the blogging-every-day thing. And I was rather enjoying it, too. I looked forward to sitting down each night - or sometimes in the morning - and writing something new. Then I ran into illness, and wrist pain, and real life for a couple weeks and was noticeably absent from my blog.

As you may or may not have noticed, I am struggling to get back into that mindset. I have a hard time getting the energy to write, let alone coming up with something to say. And I have plenty of things to say, but I have to admit, sometimes I wonder if what I have to say is actually of any interest to people.

This post isn't intended to be a whine - mostly - but more of a thought collection followed by a question. For those of you that read here and blog yourselves, how do you get the motivation to keep doing it? When you go for awhile without writing, what do you do to get the energy back? And what do you write about when you do? Inquiring minds (read: mine) would love to know.

Let's make this year a bit more interesting

Happy 2013 folks! Hope you all had a good one.

Now, jumping straight into my topic for today: me and this blog. I've not been updating it nearly as much as I'd like. The last few months have been particularly trying for my writing, between NaNo and December-writing-burn-out and life and everything else.

Part of the problem is, no doubt, that I feel a need to make every post particularly interesting. If it's something I don't think will make an impact, I tend to think it's not good enough. Part of it is being too tired to think of something to write that will make a substantial post, and not just a short word splat.

But I'm hoping to change that this year. I will still endeavour to make more interesting posts, with good content and fun stuff. But I'm not going to stress so much about making every post something special. I'm not going to worry about if something is good enough for my blog. It's about me and my thoughts and my life, which means anything that happens to me or crosses my mind can be considered good enough for my blog.

I'm also going to try to write more. I make no promises - I have a busy year planned, and may not find the time. But I'm going to try. I like keeping this blog, and I don't want it to go dead. So here goes - let's see what I can do this year.

Repeating myself

I have this little habit. I have a tendency to repeat things I've already said. Part of it is quite simply because I like to talk, and sometimes forget I've already said something. The other part of it is I talk to a lot of different people, and quite often forget what I've said to who. My poor boyfriend has heard me rant about the same things over and over and over again - purely because I can't remember if I've said it to him, or one of my other friends, or at all.

The same follows through on this blog. I am likely to repeat myself at some stage. I probably already have and just haven't realised it yet. I can live with that. It may mean that some of my posts will seem awfully familiar. Sorry about that. But to be honest, I'd rather say the same thing more than once than spend ages searching through all my posts to make sure I've not said this very thing before. Ah well.

This post does not have a conclusion. In fact, this isn't much of a post at all. This is my brain when I've been living on sugar, caffeine, and frantic novel writing for a month...

(Mostly) Done.

There we go! New layout in place, some of the new images put into place, and pretty much everything working as it should. There's a couple new page tabs up there, but nothing on them yet. The sidebar on the left isn't done, and something isn't quite right with some of the images.

Unfortunately, now that the blog is put back together, I'm going to focus far less on what it looks like and far more on making sure I've got some proper content. With all the stuff I plan to do over the coming months, I'm sure I'll be able to find something to talk about.

Let it begin!

Right. I've been dragging my feet over this long enough. The new blog look is going up tonight. It will not be amazing. It will not be spectacular. But it will - hopefully - be functional. And eventually, whenever I have time to tinker with it, it will hopefully be good looking.

So things will be a little odd-looking and weird for the next few hours. Sorry about that.

Progress! (Finally...)

So that long list of things I have to do has finally been written out on paper. I'm fairly confident I have enough stuff to keep me going until at least the middle of next year. It's a bit terrifying that I've given myself that many things to do. And not things I necessarily need to do, just things that I want to do.

On the upside, I've had a few days this week to make some actual progress on that list! I've written an article for Proud Lion (which will hopefully be going up next week!), done some work on our mess of a garden, continued my efforts with learning to program, made a start on a knitting project I've been delaying, and finished balancing my board game.

I've also been doing quite a bit of work on the redesign for this place. I initially wanted to make the new design completely from scratch. However, I soon realised the folly in this: I don't have the faintest idea how. Explanations online of how to figure out the convoluted Blogger-ese that makes up what should be straight-forward CSS were less than helpful. So, I went with a different approach. I selected a standard Blogger template that vaguely suited what I wanted to do with the blog.

Then I edited the fudge out of it.

It's not done yet, obviously. I've managed to pretty much get the layout in a way I like, and that took some doing purely because my CSS knowledge is only functional. (I know how to make it all work, but I don't know all the properties off by heart. I definitely need a massive reference sheet.) I've got a basic colour scheme picked out, though that wasn't hard - it's not going to be too much different from what I had before. What I have left to do is background images and the like. Once that's ready to go, it will be uploaded and put through its paces on the blog!

In other news, I accidentally erased my old blog layout

Yeah, looks a little different. Sooner than I intended. See, I have a secondary blog - a test blog purely for design purposes. I thought I was toying around with that when changing the template around. But, actually, I was on my real blog. Stupid me. So, my old blog layout is gone, my old edits and custom stuff I did for it vanished.

So, that redesign I mentioned? Looks like I'll be doing it a little sooner than I meant to. Oops.

Another redesign? Really?

I have a problem. It's a combination of tunnel vision and a toddler's attention span. I do something interesting for someone else, and suddenly I am intent on doing more of it for myself. And then I think, well, I could do more than one, right? I could do a bunch, right?

Yeah, I'm looking at redesigning the blog.

I have a history of this, sadly. My previous blog, dedicated only to writing (and long since gone dark), went through several redesigns in the short time I kept it active. I would be happy with it for awhile, then feel the need for a change. I like trying out different colours, styles, layouts, and so on. I'm a bit goofy that way.

Maybe it all relates to my stance on change: I like changes when I'm in control of them. When that control is taken away from me, all change is bad. When I have the power, I like to make things different on a semi-regular basis. It's why I change the layout of my furniture every two years, almost like clockwork. It's an odd little habit of mine.

So, it looks like a redesign is on the cards. I'm hoping that if I do it from scratch, rather than relying on a template somebody else made, I'll be happy with it for longer. Who knows. Guess we'll find out, huh?

Awesomeness of the Week

It's time for more brilliant stuff I've found on the tinternets!

The Bloggess

This has got to be one of the best blogs I've ever read. Most of the time she is absolutely hysterical. Sometimes her posts are extremely serious, but are still a fascinating read. Particularly funny is her response to people who send her stuff to advertise on her blog. I mean, what better way to reply than to send them to a link with a picture of Wil Wheaton collating paper?

The Bloggess, Jenny Lawson, also has recently published a book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Though I haven't gotten my hands on a copy of it yet, rest assured it's only a matter of time.

nanDECK

So this one's probably only of interest to you if you design games, or if you want to make your own version of a game you like. All the same, this is an awesome little program. nanDECK lets you create your own cards for your games. It's styled in a way that lets you write very simple, HTML-style code to make the cards. This makes card creation very, very fast and easy, particularly for when you're in the early stages of prototyping and playtesting.

I'm currently using nanDECK to make the prototype cards for my own board game project-in-progress, Twisted Tales. (That title will probably not stick. Or it might. I don't know yet.) It's been a brilliant way to quickly put the cards together and print them without any thought to the finer details... yet.