the ramble dump

I get some strange traffic. Usually for this site it's all the bizarre, amusing and sometimes downright disturbing variations you could think of for the term 'fat man'. (While I don't really want to encourage any more of the wrong kind of attention: 'fat man in leather pants' and 'fat man eaten alive' are two of the more recent--and not the worst.) And with each passing month, as I upload more content, new keywords are generated.

This month, nearly half of all my visitors have arrived here through the term 'parachute pants'. Is this significant, I wonder? What could it mean? Is there an underground movement, utilising the medium of the internet, seeking to reinstate parachute pants at the forefront of our cultural consciousness? Could I really be in the midst of something so epic? Or maybe it's more of a tragedy--maybe there are just a lot of people who miss the days when they could wear said pants with pride, but are unaware that there are so many others who still share the same passions. Now all of them are floating through cyberspace oblivious that they are a mere proverbial atomswidth away from each other.

It's something to wonder about. Maybe I should start a new section.

I get a few for 'jabba the hun', which is reassuring. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who makes those mistakes. About a month ago I got a hit for 'something something oohoohoo', which puzzled me for a while. I get quite a lot of very specific queries for Amelia's website, from friends who are no doubt requiring more evidence that she actually exists because they are not willing to believe in her singularly odd appearance. There's a couple for 'custard fight', one for 'frilly slug', one for 'surging organza'. 'Mel's custard' is, of course, extremely popular.

There's one for 'untidy wife'. There's another for 'convoluted metaphor'.

There's also one for 'tweed metaphors'. I wish I knew the story behind this one. 'My life is a tweed metaphor!' would, I am convinced, be such an excellent thing to exclaim. No doubt it would also be in some way profoundly true. Likewise, I want to see the news report that must have contained 'claims against tweed were exaggerated'.

Such a small sample of web statistics contains so many possible stories. And so very many parachute pants. What path of life, what desperate query or moment of inspiration, has led these mysterious people to my unnaturally green pastures? Only Google knows.

Labels: starcustard, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 7:57 PM 0 comments

This whole thing was a disaster! Maybe if he looked into his new costume he would find help. NOOOOOOOOOOOO! It was a fluffy pink bunny costume rented from WarrenWorld Theme Park! The best thing he could do was to take a sharp turn left and go through the girls' bathroom.

It was five years ago this month, I realised, that I wrote the first parts of that Halo parody and put it on that legendary website which had been forged by the minds of two fourteen-year-old geniuses. In personal terms, that's a hell of a long time. Over a quarter of a lifetime ago, in fact. (Fat Man In Tweed proper had its second birthday sometime last week.)

Not only does this mean that the character of Master Beef, conceived by my fourteen-year-old mind, is five years old as well (and I'm still using him); it also means that I've been posting stuff online, under this guise of 'writer', for just as long. And I keep asking myself: why?

The original answer is obvious enough: I'm just playing around. That's what we were doing with Fod, and the myriad other websites that myself and the Artist Formerly Known As Olli created. That's what I've been doing ever since, with the boardfics as well as the websites. Whatever grand schemes I might stumble upon along the way, and however carried away or excited I might get about some big story or idea, in the end I'm doing it because I enjoy it. That doesn't mean I'm treating it trivially -- in fact, I put a lot of work into it, and probably take it all too seriously -- but ultimately this website is a hobby. First and foremost, it's a way to entertain myself, while at the same time being personally meaningful and fulfilling in the same way that any other hobby might be. I get to reap the personal benefits, whatever they may be, of exploring my own thoughts, performing amateurish experiments with the 'craft' of storytelling and nudging together a few other ideas.

The point of this website as an attempt at exploring myself and the world around me is a conclusion I at least sort of arrived at already. But this doesn't explain why I need a website to do it. Couldn't I do all this in private journals? Another obvious answer here which I've already given in previous ramblings is that by putting it online, I get to put it out there for everybody to see. I like to entertain others with this stuff, and maybe some distant reader somewhere will find something interesting about it beyond that, even if it's really not good enough to achieve publication anywhere else. That is the best and worst thing about the internet: you're free to post whatever crap you want.

The other thing about the internet is that you have a certain level of anonymity. Even if I put my name on every page, I remain mostly hidden from view. It's a weird position to take after admitting that I want people to see what I've written, but I'm actually more comfortable with it being read by silent strangers than by my friends, many of whom still don't even know this place exists. It allows me, as a ridiculously self-conscious person, to maintain this illusion of being alone with my thoughts, paradoxically aware that at the same time it's out there to be seen. This is why, on those rare occasions that some random person sends me a friendly message about the site, I find myself slightly unnerved.

Besides these floating few, however, and as much as I get paranoid about plastering my copyright over everything I post, it's probably another self-imposed, happy illusion to imagine that I have much of a readership at all. But Fat Man In Tweed has its benefits anyway. Being able to publish things at all makes me feel more productive, but posting online, specifically all on one website, gives me a focus point for my efforts. As a 'project', it feels more substantive and it gives me a place to bring my thoughts together. With the serial fictions like The Aberration, I get to conduct an ongoing exploration of my own version of ideas (in theory also leaving it there to be considered by others), and then, in areas where I feel like being a little more explicit, I can toddle over to this blog and write about it here, along with all the other stuff I've been thinking about. A lot of my more ponderous, recent blogposts tend to end on something of a triumphant note, not because I've made some important new philosophical discovery, but because I feel like I've been able to work through something on my own and come to at least some sort of conclusion.

Ever since its inception, I've been conscious of Fat Man In Tweed as more of an entity in itself than other website I've worked on. And because of that, it has turned into something else. All this going back and forth and cross-referencing myself could in part just be me dwelling in my own egotism, but the effect of having Fat Man In Tweed as a focus point for all these things, leading to everything sort of bouncing off each other, will hopefully mean that something will eventually begin to resonate in some kind of meaningful way. On a personal level, at least, I'm finding that this is true already, bringing to clearer attention those things that are really preoccupying my mind. The website, it turns out, can function as a nucleus of personal thought in unexpected, interesting, and maybe even useful ways. For all it contains, it's proving to be a worthwhile medium for expression in itself.

Labels: bananas and laxatives, boardfic, excerpts, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 11:00 PM 0 comments

Testing, testing with new design.

Ooh, nice.

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 11:08 PM 0 comments

Apart from some typing up of stuff, work on City of Anarchy has been completed. And only a week and a day late, too. I've been working on it since the start of the year, so I'll be glad to move on to the next thing, even if I'm now running really short on time.

The next thing being: The Aberration. Master Beef enters his fourth year of existence this month. Woot.

Fatmanintweed.com is now mine. I don't really want to say much about anything at this point, but you can expect things to start happening there very soon.

Labels: city of anarchy, the aberration, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 10:30 PM 0 comments

Melia wants me to let you all know that she completed the FMIT design miles before her deadline. You get to see that in all its big, green glory in a few weeks' time.

Until then, there are some interesting design mockups here to observe and discuss.

Edit: there's now this too, which contains a little bit of information on how it came about.

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 9:30 PM 0 comments

Excitement!

The design is on the verge of completion! Go see Melia's blogpost here. The green one is the one we're going for. Isn't it ORLSOME?! Send her all of your finest chocolate, beans and toothpaste.

We've decided to call the sections 'About', 'Prosefolio', 'Sketchbook', 'Blog' and 'Disclaimer'. Whether or not the colour of the design will change (like on the red page she linked to) for each section is something we haven't quite decided on yet. The numbers on the bar on the right will be there on prosefolio pages as easy access to other chapters. Otherwise, it'll be blank.

Olli has also chipped in and is just tinkering with it to see if he can get the linkbars on the left to be, as Melia puts it, 'foreverlong'. If that doesn't work, it'll probably be so that each linkbar is a slightly different length, just for the look of it.

Wow. I loves it. I loves it as if I'd done all the work myself. :)

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 10:05 PM 3 comments

I've set up an identity on Thunderbird and synchronised it with my AOL account, so any email I get now should be sent there and saved locally. Hopefully the problem of the disappearing emails is now solved.

I also thought I'd mention that the title and description of the Gnome Milk blog change every once in a while, and that although more often than not they have nothing to do with anything, just occasionally, there'll be a hint as to what's coming up in Gnome Milk projects, Agaffa and otherwise. This extremely clever idea is the product of two things: wanting people to keep visiting the blog even though there are hardly ever any updates, and also boredom.

'It's all very well putting together trailers and messing around with blogs,' I hear you cry, 'but have you actually done anything productive?'

To which I smugly reply, 'Why, yes I have!'

It's been a bit of a mental block for me figuring out exactly how I'm going to start The Aberration Chapter 5, but I've finally cracked it, and last night I wrote almost a page (A4)! Woot woot woot.

Also, I've been talking to Amelia about the site design, and apart from one or two specifications, I'm leaving her to do whatever she wants and then I'll see what she comes up with. This is mostly because I don't know what the hell I want, but feel free to see it as an act of generosity.

Labels: agaffa, the aberration, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 9:26 PM 0 comments

I'll start this entry with a bit of a mystery. Even though I've checked my AOL email preferences over and over again to try and make sure that it doesn't happen, every once in a while, the emails that are automatically 'saved on my PC' disappear. At first I thought it might be something AOL did every few weeks for some reason or another, but checking the main family account, this hasn't happened there.

As a result, I've started sending any emails I don't want disappearing to a Gmail account. I thought I'd done this with Agaffa Chapters 6 and 7, but it turns out I'd only done it with the latter. I asked Olli if he could sent me Chapter 6 yet again, but apparently he doesn't have it anymore either.

Shit.

I started a frantic search through every single folder in my account hoping to find it, which gave me nothing, and then I tried looking for anything of the chapter in my entire harddrive. All I got from that was a paragraph on Emporer Pseudonym's exercise machine. It looked like we were going to have to write most of the chapter again.

Thinking it would just be in vain, I then started to look through the computer's AOL files, looking for some kind of back-up. I found the files that manage emails. The relevant one didn't appear to have a filetype, so I tried opening it with Notepad. It was mostly just unreadable code, possibly encrypted or in a language only AOL could read, or probably just random characters because you're not really supposed to try and open it as a text document, but occasionally there were dates, email addresses and subject titles visible. I realised that some of these were emails that had disappeared from the 'saved on my PC' folder. Unfortunately, most of them didn't display the contents in anything other than the unintelligable code, but I looked for any Agaffa-related emails anyway.

To my surprise, I found parts of previous chapters of Agaffa, from when we'd done email relays (write a bit, send it, other person writes a bit, sends it back, etc) in readable text, even if it was often filled with HTML tags. I don't know why only these few emails weren't unreadable... there were also some early drafts of Starcustard and some other emails that were prepared in Word, so that might be why. It took me a while to scroll down through the whole text looking for Chapter 6, with the previous chapters slowly building up to completion as I progressed, but eventually, luckily, I found it... or at least, most of it. It has all the emails for Chapter 6 and therefore all of that chapter, but the final few emails' contents are just code, which I have no idea how to convert into English.

I've been trying various things all day... trying to get it so I can view the email in the AOL email window, searching for a decoder on Google, and even trying out some frequency analysis (replacing the most common character with the most commonly used letter in the English language and working my way down to the least common from there, stupidly hoping that whatever encryption there is will be that simple), but that got boring after about ten minutes. It's all been a waste of time.

So, like I said, we have most of the chapter, which is lucky. We've lost roughly the last third of it, possibly less. Now I'm just trying to remember everything I can about it...

The moral of this story is: don't use AOL.

I think it's odd that I've been putting more effort into avoiding having to rewrite it than we'll now have to do actually rewriting it. Oh well.

Labels: agaffa, starcustard, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 7:30 PM 0 comments

Righty. I'm back, and no more willing to get to work than usual. Still, here are some updates on where various things currently stand.

Agaffa: I've written down all the big changes I'd like to see in the rewrite, and I think once these are done the whole thing will be much more coherent. I'm just waiting to see if Olli has anything he wants to add now.

The Aberration: Lots of exciting stuff happening with this. I've made a lot of progress with where this is going to go, but there's very little physical evidence for this, most of the changes I'm making and the other ideas still only being in my head. As I've mentioned before, this rewrite is more than just polishing up the quality: there's a lot of big changes to the plot underway, the biggest changes being with the character Mike. For a start, his nationality's changing, because I want him to represent an aspect of British character which has grown in him as I've written the story. I'm also completely scrapping the court case and diminishing the TV show, both of which have been major parts of Mike's story, but the latter having very little bearing on the rest of the story and the former having none at all.

I've also been thinking about character histories, what effect they'll have on the events that occur, and how they can add depth to the characters and make the whole plot a hell of a lot more interesting as it unravels.

Website design: 'Easier said than done' has never been more true, especially when I find myself completely unwilling to make the effort. HTML/CSS is boring, and it doesn't help that I don't feel I'm going to get very far with it even if I can be bothered. Amelia has said she'll help me with that, which is fantastic, because now something might happen.

Stuff that's being discontinued: A Room Full Of Zombies, the text-based game, because, like with the webdesign, I can never work on it for more than ten minutes; and also City of Anarchy, because I've left the community it's loosely based on, possibly for good.

The Fat Man In Tweed launch: let's face it, it's not going to be happening any time soon. It'll be up whenever I feel I'm ready for it to be, which won't be until I've got the rewrites and the design done at the very least, and I'm not going to be giving myself any deadlines for them that I'll never live up to.

And, OMG, ideas for a novel, which have been knocking around in my head for several weeks. They're for a variation on an idea I've had for a novel for almost a year now, but I get the feeling I might actually start to write this thing soon.

Labels: agaffa, boardfic, city of anarchy, the aberration, webtechnical, zombies

# posted by Chris @ 11:51 PM 0 comments

I hate the IE/AOL browser. It has no friends and its mother is a whore. It doesn't like co-operating with CSS at all. Why couldn't it be a good little browser like Mozilla and put everything in the right place?

I need one of those ridiculously expensive things like Dreamweaver or something so I can get somewhere with this.

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 3:35 PM 0 comments

I actually got some work done on the TA rewrite. Can you believe that?

I've agreed with Olli on the idea of a sort of halfway-point website to link Fat Man In Tweed and his site, and to house Agaffa and the next story we're going to write. It'll have it's own design, too.

This means I'm going to have to rethink my own layout ideas, though. I had considered doing something like this for all the stories:

AGAFFA

Blurb goes here. Agaffa has many biscuits that Miss Darley does not, etc.

[1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Extras]

Each number would be a link to a chapter, while Extras would contain things like the annotations. There'd be an underline and overline when the mouse hovered over them.

The thing is, if I did that and just linked to the pages each chapter was on, it would make having a seperate website pretty redundant. I still want to make the story a part of Fat Man In Tweed somehow, though, because it's part of my 'online portfolio'.

I could just keep it having a link to each chapter and have the name of the website by the title of the story, in brackets and as a link. The change in design will probably be enough to show that it's a part of whatever we call this new site.

Labels: agaffa, the aberration, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 10:16 PM 0 comments

I say I'll do things, and then I hardly ever do. I didn't get any more of TA Chapter 5 done over the weekend. I never drew any room plans for the places visited in that chapter (although I've more or less decided what they're going to look like now anyway). I said I'd do sketches of gadgets and weapons and, er...storage rooms, apparently. I sort of did that, but then gave up.

I have, howevrar, almost finished a messy concept sketch of this new alien that's going to be in Starcustard. I might post that here at some point, maybe with a few annotations.

I get the feeling I'm going to need all the free time I have after the exams if I want to get the site up in the Summer, but I know I'm still going to waste it. It's just one of those inevitable things.

Inevitable, Mr Anderson.

The stories aren't really a problem. I'd like to get as much of them done as possible for the launch, but there's already a chapter of The Aberration and a chapter of Agaffa that will be new-to-fatman content, and the same'll be true for Starcustard in the next few weeks or so. It's getting Release 2 of the zombie game done, and also learning CSS and designing the whole thing, that's going to be the real challenge.

But I shall rise to the challenge!

If and when I feel like it, that is.

I'm really going to have to stop posting about the same stuff every entry. I'll try and post more interesting stuff, like concept art and more excerpts and random junk like that. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film is released this week. I could post stuff related to that once I've seen it.

Labels: agaffa, starcustard, the aberration, webtechnical, zombies

# posted by Chris @ 9:30 PM 0 comments

I've been learning CSS. :)

I now know some of the basics, like font stuff, spacing, borders, and having text do different things in different places on the page.

For a header, instead of using the tags 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5' or 'h6', I created a new one called 'moo'. I set the font size and other attributes for it, and in the Mozilla browser, it actually worked. It's a shame it didn't in the Internet Explorer and AOL browsers too, where it apparently didn't exist. I mean, I can always just modify one of the header tags you're supposed to used to get what I want...but it's just not the same. 'Moo' could have been the greatest tag ever conceived...

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 11:36 PM 0 comments

Olli and Eye finished the first draft of Agaffa Chapter 6 last night. That brings us to the halfway point for what we're aiming for by the end of next week, which is just about right.

We also talked about how we were going to have the LOTR parody sketches and Agaffa accessible to both of us. One idea was for one of us to have a section of webspace where we could put all the 'shared' files, with a password, so that either of us could use FTP there. However, apparently Rydia (the webhost we'll probably be using) doesn't let you do that sort of thing. Also, there's the issue of consistency when it comes to webdesign. Both of our sites are going to be portfolios of our stuff, so if we want all of it to be under one design, the shared area wouldn't really work. In the end, we decided it would be best for both of us to have copies of the texts, put in our individual page templates.

With the LOTR parody sketches, because it's not really a collaborative effort (we both write sketches, but each sketch is written by one person or the other, not both of us), I assumed I'd be taking all of my sketches and putting them on Fat Man In Tweed, leaving Olli to do whatever he wanted with his own, but that might not be what's happening. It might be better to have them all in one place, but if we're both going to have copies anyway, I wonder if there's actually any point in us both having each other's.

I got my first bit of feedback for Release 1 of A Room Full Of Zombies from him last night. And that's only 'cos I downloaded it onto his laptop and started playing it. :P It kept him interested for around fifteen minutes, which isn't bad considering how little there is to it. He thinks he's roughly figured out the order you're supposed to kill the zombies in, but he hasn't.

Hm...this blog should really be more exciting. I think at the start of my next entry I'll roll in on a unicycle, playing the trumpet or something.

Labels: agaffa, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 2:46 PM 0 comments

I got the FTP thing to work! I don't know what I was doing wrong last time, but I'm now posting an entry into Kommingle. I tried the SFTP thing and it did that constant page-refreshing thing again, but when I retried the regular FTP, it worked.

So...problem more or less solved. I can take it off Kommingle now that I know I can do it, and put it on Fat Man In Tweed in the Summer.

Olli's sent me what we've written of Agaffa Chapter 6 so far. Today I'm going to work on that and send the whole lot back to him so he can do his next bit, and then I'll get some Starcustard done.

Things are moving along nicely, and I'm happy. :)

Labels: agaffa, starcustard, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 1:14 PM 0 comments

I decided to try out the FTP thing by temporarily putting the blog onto the Kommingle webspace. Supposedly, this would allow me to have it on the site, but I would still be able to update it through Blogger. I haven't managed it yet.

The settings for publishing and archiving are definitely right, because I've checked, double-checked and triple-checked, and made all the necessary directories on Kommingle, but each time I try to republish the thing, it's saying there's an error. The connection is refused for one of the archive pages.

On the Blogger help thing I found something that said it didn't allow active FTP any more, and I'm guessing that's why it's coming up with this same error over and over. But, being the ignorant soul that I am, I could be wrong.

I've tried STFP. This is supposed to be the more secure option, but I can't get this to work either. It's stuck on 'Files published... 0%', and the page has been refreshing for ages. I did a little research, and it could be because it's a very slow process (I think Kommingle has to receive one block of data at a time or something similar), or it could be that the webhost, Rydia, doesn't support it, although this is very unlikely.

So...a little disappointing. I was hoping to get my head around that today, but never mind.

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 10:01 PM 0 comments

One of the purposes of this blog will probably be for me to talk at ridiculous length about the projects (writing, sketching and otherwise) that are going to end up on the site. I'm pretty sure I bore all my friends to near death by going on about these things so much on my regular journal, so this is a good place to try and redirect all that stuff to.

On fatmanintweed.com, in the hope if generating at least some vague interest, each story is going to have a small blurb. Just being there isn't really going to make anyone want to read them. People tend not to like reading stories off the computer screen as it is, so I should at least make some kind of an effort.

There's a thought...printer-friendly pages.

I think I'm going to edit/redo parts of The Aberration Chapter III (or 3, if you don't like Roman numerals. Why have I been using Roman numerals anyway? I don't know)...possibly even pad it out a bit, although anyone who gets through to the end of the second chapter will still be trying to recover from its stupid length, and will probably appreciate a shorter chapter if they decide to continue with it. A large part of Chapter III/3 was written in a day, and reading through it, aside from all the typos, it definitely shows signs of being rushed. I don't want to slow the pace of the plot, but some things are just a little too sketchy. I think the whole court case definitely needs to be expanded, but maybe the small parts with Master Beef and Phil need a little more attention too.

Well, I'll see how it goes. Consider these notes-to-self. Same for all entries in this blog for the next few months, really.

Labels: the aberration, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 9:23 PM 0 comments

I've been playing around a bit with Blogger and its various options and functions, and I should be able to do what I wanted, but if I'm going to avoid the use of frames, it'll mean having the whole index page being whatever I put in the Blogger template thing.

Once the design's sorted, it should just be a case of taking it and placing the weird Blogger code in it, rearranging some things. Then I'll have to sort out the FTP thing. Truth is, I don't have a clue about what it is I'm really doing, but pretending to is fun.

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 4:19 PM 0 comments

Hm. So here it is...the fatmanintweed.com news and updates blogthing. I don't even know why I've made it so early. If the site is created at all, it won't be for a good few months yet. Eventually (hopefully) it'll be embedded into the index page on the site, customised to fit in with whatever the site design is.

It's pretty much definite that we're going to end kommingle.com and start up two independant sites. Despite my lack of knowledge and expertise in the field of webdesign, I like the idea of having a website where I'm in (more or less) complete control. A collaborative effort certainly has its merits, but we both agree that having two independant sites will allow both of us to express ourselves exactly how we want to, without getting in each other's way.

So...here I am, talking to nobody. It's kind of pointless, but if anyone ever bothers to look in the fatmanintweed.com news archives in the future, this'll be here to show the early stages of how the site came to be.

Stay tuned, folks. The creation process starts here. :)

Labels: webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 8:25 PM 0 comments