If you didn't realize it, the layout of the site has changed.
I know that many of you subscribe to the email service and never really come see the site, so you might not have noticed the layout change. Those of you who visit the site have probably noted the new design, which has been up for a day or two.
Incidentally, if you haven't signed up for the email service, you can do so using the box in the (now) right-side column. Bloglet is pretty cool in that it lets you aggregate your blog email subscriptions. For example, I subscribe to my own site (to make sure it's working, not some weird vanity thing), Pseudomain, and ScriptyGoddess (who knows why), and my daily email contains a composite of all three sites. Plus, they don't send advertising in the email, which is a great bonus.
Anyhow, the picture on the site is a Xevoz figure that I assembled. When I saw it at the store I immediately had two thoughts. First, I thought that this would make a wonderful graphic for the site. Second, I thought that this thing looked an awful lot like the evolution of the Stickfas line, which you might have seen here before. Even after searching the box for a Stickfas logo, I didn't find one until I got home. It turns out I was right!
Anyway, the concept of the toy seems on par with how Lego really should have done Bionicle. Actually, I think I would like Xevoz history to be as rich as Bionicle's history, but the gameplay aspect is pretty cool.
Unfortunately, this is another one of those games that I'm never going to know a person who wants to play with me. Perhaps I will have to craft a web game that uses pictures of the models, eh?
I'll take this moment to reminisce about one of the gifts I had given to Adam for his birthday. I actually went out of my way to find one of the Lego Technic sets to give to Adam, since I had just been through a series of small Technic models and was quite addicted. It wasn't the full gift; there was something else to it, but that was the non-certificate half, the half that Adam could hold and say, "Wow, I got this." Adam thanked me for the gift, half joking that his son would have a good time putting it together.
The next week at our game when I saw Adam, he was shocked that he underestimated the Technic assembly skill. I was amused. The next year, I gave Adam a Stickfa (not as difficult, but still rather cool) for his birthday, along with some gift certificate.
Sunday, I set about to get a picture of this Ninja for the site. Being that it was such a fantastic weather day, I took the little guy outside and set him up on the sidewalk. I took about 15 shots of him at different angles and settings with the digital camera and then took my files back to the computer.
I knocked out the background like I do with every image like this: Corel Knockout. This model took a long time to get the detail right - About 3 hours. Knockout did a very good job at removing the background, but there were little pieces of sidewalk rock that had blended in with the gray in his body here and there. These required more detailed attention.
Additionally, I bothered to knock out the shadow, which was a lot of work because it needed to be separated from the model details. Unfortunately, there isn't a working graphics package (just Fireworks at this point, since my eval of Photoshop expired along with my eval of PhotoPaint 12) on my new computer, so I couldn't preserve the shadow for the web design. I think it still looks pretty good.
The new font up there is called "Kendo", part of the ITC font collection. I had a devil of a time trying to get .net and Delphi to generate heading graphics dynamically for each article. As you can see, it's still not working. For some reason, .net can't see the Kendo font (I suspect because it's not OpenType, but TrueType). And although the Delphi application worked on my home system, it didn't work on Windows 2003, also for no reason that I could determine. So you're left with plain H1 titles. For now.
I added the dash of red up there, which I won't admit to being blood, but that's the general idea, it seems. You'll also note that links on the page don't have the normal underline under them any more, but a weird "blood smirch" that I cranked out in Fireworks. It's not too detailed because it's only 4 pixels high, but it adds a cool effect to the text, I think.
Berta and Abby went out to A.C.Moore last night and bought me a large piece of blue poster card. I set up the ninja on this late last night and took a couple of pictures in really bad lighting. It only took a few minutes to get a decent-looking knockout with the blue background removed. I didn't spend too much more time on it because the lighting was very obviously inferior to the pictures I had taken outdoors, and I had already put the hours of work into the ninja guy already on the site.
I'm thinking about including a few more ninja pictures, and after I work out the last few layout glitches, I'll be offering some alternative skins for you frequent visitors to choose from. W00t! Geeky goodness.
