Changes

I've changed the look and feel ...

It's not set yet, there's still lots of room for tweaking. And some "it ain't perfect yet" procrastination too.

Why the change ? Regular readers will be fully aware that I follow various youtube gamer people. I found watching their gaming videos to be more fun than playing the games themselves. They'd add their unique character to what was happening on screen. One of those is Kim from the Yogscast and in her weekend vlog, she explained how dyslexic people can have trouble reading black text on a white background. Words will swap and move around, changing the meaning completely.

That made me think. Especially as I get similar issues too. If I've been looking at a page of text on a pooter screen for a while, when I look away I have scan lines across my vision. They fade quickly but yeah, that bugs me.

And then I thought - are visitors not coming back because they can't read the text ? That's never a good thing. We internet author people should be accomodating you. Yes, you. The person who is giving up their time to come read what we write, listen to what we record, watch the stuff we play.

I use a few tricks to try and make my Walls Of Text more readable.

That was one of them ;-). I find the one sentence short paragraph to be a good exclamation point or a think pause.

I'm open to more ideas for improving the readability but the basic theme will be white text on black. The way pooter screens work, there's a bright back light which is filtered down into the image we see. So a white background glares out at you. I've had trouble reading my pages when sunlight is hitting the mobile screen. Perhaps it's less battery hungry on mobiles.

Anyway - this is the second of two posts that have come from watching Kim's vlog over the weekend. I quite enjoyed doing my sojourn to Pratchett's Disc on Saturday. It reminded me that games are supposed to be fun and I'd been interfering with that fun by trying to log a trading route on a spreadsheet. That's micromanaging, minmaxing and other nasty Not Fun things. I'm running the rares circle in a trading Clipper and trying to fill the ship up for each step. I've abandoned that and just gone back to just running the route and not worrying about filling the ship up.

Yep. I enjoyed the sightseeing trip and I'm back to enjoying the game again. Oh and the cricket in the background was great too. Guess which country won unexpectedly ? :-)

I loved the response too :

Dear Heart - loved the pretty pilot pics. That makes producing them so much worth it.
Rhianna Pratchett (yep, that one) - had a peek at the post and favourited the tweets telling her about them. Rhianna Pratchett noticed me ! That's awesome.
Pixie gave it a thumbs up - instant smile.
Kim didn't look (I think) - but I kinda expected that.

Before I met Dear Heart, I was trying to get Kim to notice me. I'd been picking up on the "I'm so alone" comments on the videos. There were other cues too. And I'd been thinking - she's amazing, she's into similar games to me, I'm what she's looking for. So you can imagine the frustration when all the attempts to communicate (hopefully not going over the line into stalker territory !) fell on deaf ears. You peek at the twitters and there's not many responses from Kim to people who send her messages. Ok, there's occasionally a little flutter but on the whole, the communication is just within the inner circle.

It's a different face to what you see in the videos. Saying that, I don't watch much of the Yogscast output now, they're playing games (99% Minecraft) which just don't interest me, the creativity has died. In my opinion. They still get hundreds of thousands of views but for me ... yawn.

As you can tell, my heart's looking in another direction now.

Towards someone who communicates, someone with huge empathy, someone who can understand my often quirky way of looking at things, someone who I can be utterly honest with (including the stuff that everyone hides behind the armour), someone interesting, someone who makes me break out into a MASSIVE Grin when I get one of her messages.

Someone awesome. And with an inner strength which astounds me.

I consider myself lucky to have crossed paths with her. Just wish I could see her more often because ... virtual hugs are no substitute for little hands sneaking their way around you to wrap you in a big hug.

PS I was going to talk about other changes too - I've got a very good idea what my bathroom will be when refitted. Just need to :
Actually go to Wickes before the design people go to bed.
Check out more options
Figure out why some people do taps that you literally can't put your hands under (you've seen this in pubs haven't you ?).
Get the house into a standard that I'd be happy exposing visitors to.