Winning at Life

So for the past 3 days I've been nursing a headache and somewhatFlu.. last night went out.. stayed up till 5am watching Rage and woke up feeling..wonderful

..abet with a cat in my face who then climbed on my back and refused to budge...such is my life.


But at least in my antisocial sickymode I managed to get the header coded up. That's usually a day in itself since it's a important balance between 'fuctional', 'useful', and 'fancy' and 'too big' / 'pain in the arse' for everyone else.

The testboard which I use for development is a bloody mess atm. Neon colours, random textures but it's starting to feel like it's going somewhere........ now i just need to decide on the overall look and have somewhere to aim for. My big concern atm is that converting WWB from it's current setup to PunBB will cause a bit of a day of explosion, you can never quite tell how everything will go and with so much that can't be copied between boards it's a bit like flying from the seat of your pants.

But that's still a long time off yet. Right now it's more a case of getting it 'right' no matter how long it takes.

My big aim on the project is to make things smarter. Forums still seem to be stuck in the trap of having to be well..forums. and people find ways around it by using portals, websites and the like to avoid the well..forumness of it all. To me the forum is the focus, but it doesn't mean you can't use what's available to make things better and easier for people.

Ideally I'd like to create something where newbies get all the info they need to join on the main page. Members (who of course don't need that) will get stuff tailored to them instead. It seems obvious with the way content is presented these days that so many look the same. They use the same templates, done in the same style to fit whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is, why build a site that looks just like every other and has the exact same idea? I can't count the number of X school of magic located in X town with X as headmaster/headmistress forums I've seen in the last few years...and to not even be looking for them! Is it ego? or are people truly afraid to break out of the bubble? What's worse is that even with a quick glance you find that almost all of them are in effect the same board... couples of the month, boy of the month, girl of the month, Disney, A list stars or model face claims.. after three years I've come to realise that the majority of roleplay is remaking the original series with the cast of whatever-show happens to be popular amongst 20 year old girls at any point in time.

So the world is full of americancentric shallow smut, violent and Hollywood inspired stories with characters so unrealistic it's laughable. I've realised this is my problem, maybe if I was 'in' with that culture I'd find it fab to write crackships and ship ships and wtf all that crap means. I've never grown up idiolising Hollywood. My household was more likely to have BBC shows, the news (back to back from 4 different stations each night) and Australian dramas, scifi's and bygod films with subtitles! I grew up on SBS and the 'Auntie' ABC with old small televisions and a fascination with documentaries, science and books. I've probably watched more documentaries in my life then romances. I've watched the 'naughty' SBS foreign films shown late at night to manga cartoons my uncle showed me as a child. I don't watch that much TV anymore. Instead I tend to see writing as describing a film going on in front of your eyes. Forgive me if I'd rather it be a weird foreign film with actors and actresses I don't recognize and a plot that isn't all laid out on page one, and yes it will have subtitles and puns and innuendo a plenty that would be lost in translation to any poor unfortunates who stumble upon it looking for Princess Diary's number five million.

But youknow what? as long as there's one other person out there who 'gets' it.. and doesn't mind flicking from the MarySueDisney RP network to ours, I'm winning :)