The blog of a person....yeah that sounds good.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Wizard needs food Badly

Hiya folks! Today's big stupid rant will be made in a tiny hard-to-read font so you guys can skim right past it without having to read my angry nonsense. So you can fly past my shit and get to the art at the bottom of the post which is more interesting to look at anyway.
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Why do people claim that making a website is easy? Why? What counts as easy to these people? What counts as difficult? I dont get how these people can put these things together and then say it's a piece of cake.
Every year at some point I get a bug up my ass to try, once again, to make a website. Every year it usually happens during a part of the year where I'm looking around and wondering what I'm doing with myself, which equates usually to little. This year, I think it's the flea situation that started it. The fleas are still here, by the way. Every night, I go through a lengthy spot check to ensure none have nestled their fat nasty little flea bodies somewhere on my person. This means checking my shoes, then my socks, removing them, checking my feet, removing my pants and shirt, checking my feet again. Then removing my underwear, checking my groinal area. Grabbing my pajamas, checking them for fleas. Slipping them on. Checking my feet again. Checking under the bed. Checking on top of the bed. Checking under each sheet. Checking the pillows. Checking my feet for a third time.

And even after all that shit, I still wake up with flea bites on my forehead. These things are like fucking spies or something. I know every nook and cranny here and by some miraculous espionage power, they seem to have found a way to hide. Maybe they are hiding up my ass. I do not know.
So despite this, I wake up each morning and go through a second spot check to make sure there's no dormant fleas on me. I try not to spend much time at my place, because it's so damned boring.
I havent been in my own kitchen in like a week now.
So being in my own place for a long period of time, alone, is very depressing. My portfolio is leaning against a table, covered in dust (and fleas too, no doubt), the tv is on playing the cartoon channel, and it's roughly 80 degrees in here.
It's quiet. It's bland. It looks like a storage facility. And so my mind drifts to other thoughts.
And the thought it drifted to is, once again, building a website which leads me back to the point I started this story with.
Why is it so hard?
A simple google of "website building tools" or "how to make a website" brings up a tidal wave of trillions of websites, far nicer than I could make, shrieking about how easy it is to make a site.
"Get Started Here! It's Easy" flashes the button. I click. And like so many times before, it's not easy. My eyes are quickly bombarded by scads of pdf's and documents and flash based interactive knick-knacks horking on and on about html, css, php, flash, dreamweaver, .com, .org, .net, and thousands of other things that I cant grasp.

Am I just stupid? Is that it?
I keep going back and looking through these things and seeing live videos of how real codemonkeys do it, and I am still lost.

Years ago during the humiliating GalactiMovies and GalactiGames fiasco where I was led on a chain by a silver-tongued bastard into a partnership with a game website, I almost got a decent grasp on how this sort of thing worked.
I had a white index. This index contained a link which took me to the frontpage of the website. I assume thats what a domain looks like. There was also a folder. Things I placed in the folder, now had a host on the site. For example if I dropped "poo.swf" into the folder, then suddenly galactimovies.com/poo.swf existed. I don't know how or why, but it worked. Then came time to attempt to get it to show up in a list. I spent hours online chatting with the silver-tongued bastard, as he guided me in how to give the flash a proper page (like galactimovies.com/poo) and even with his guidance, it still took a good 10 or so tries to get anything to work the way he claimed it was meant to.

I havent really done much with sites since, then. On occasion I will attempt to try again with site building, but it always ends quickly. The internet is a lot more complex than it was when I found it. When I first came online, it was to look at all the pokemon fan sites that existed all over the internet. Most of which were made with code thats even simpler than the codes this blog uses.

Another problem that I run into is that I know almost noone with a site who is willing to show me how to make my own. They either get frustrated because I dont understand these "simple" instructions they give me (like the clusterfuck that is known as Actionscript), or they want to make the site for me and host it on THEIR site which doesnt help at all because then they have full control over all my shit, which is not something I really want.

From what I've garnered over the last few years, the two important things needed are webspace and a domain.
Webspace, the kind you want, costs money. And the kind you dont want is the geocities kind. And next, you need a domain name. Which also costs money. I don't know WHY it costs money. Who does the money go to? Who owns the internet and charges people to have sites and domain names and all this crap? What company needs to be paid to give out a name that ends in .com? I already pay for cable so I can have mildly fast internet capabilities here (when I'm not leeching off someone's wifi). Why do I have to pay MORE money for a name?

I just dont get it. It's like FTP. FTP is a clumsy crappy way to send things, but by god, it makes sense. Because its actually SIMPLE. It's actually EASY. Why doesn't FTP get a big flashing "IT'S SO EASY" button to lure idiots like me in with so we have muck about on pretentious websites trying to understand futuristic muck that robots have written.

Most of this is caused by my demo reel, which I think was in my last post or something.

I wish Firefox could do FTP as easily as Internet Explorer or some IRC software. I still recall when I was trying to upload Aftertaste to MentallyDetached's servers. With firefox, we must have tried it like 4 different ways. With Internet Explorer it worked the first time.

No headaches! No frustration!

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and my immature rant has come to a close.

Speaking of MentallyDetached, I havent talked to him in like a month. I haven't seen him on AOL instant messenger in like a month.

Thats not good. I hope he's ok.


I've had the last 3 days off. Which has been nice. I've been linking people to my blurry choppy demo reel on youtube. Mostly local media studios around here and animation companies online. I'm not certain if that's what you're SUPPOSED to do when they ask for your reel. I assume it's ok to send them links to youtube. Maybe it isn't. I don't know. Youtube is so friggin blurry. It's like being drunk while wearing someone else's glasses. I've been doing concept art for a guy who is making an rpg. Pro Bono. See now I sound professional LOL. Watch me use buzzwords. Whee.

The project of making cute designs continues.
A couple days ago I finished up 3 goggled little munchkin things. A red one, a green one, and a blue one. Each on different colored shirts.
And today I made a goldfish in flash. I think this is the first time I've fully colored anything in flash with my tablet pc.
Usually I just drag the contour line art over to Art Rage and paint it up in there.
But today I stuck with using the brush tool in flash.

I like how it kinda looks like it was colored in with markers. You can click it to make it larger.

The big version is a vector PNG, and his right cheek is transparent, so he blends in to any color background. Which is handy.

In sadder news, my friend BlueHippo had his apartment broken into AGAIN. And his dumb friends and idiot neighbors won't help him. They've stolen lots of money, and now his wii. And the cops wont help him either.
It pisses me off. BlueHippo is like the friendliest person in the universe and life just shits all over him.
I wish I could be there in his apartment, waiting with a baseball bat, for the thieves to break in again. What a satisfying (PING) that bat would make as it clobbered skull.

Man I have to pee. Good day.

4 comments:

Pinao said...

Hey, the only reason I say a website is easy is because I have Dreamweaver.

By the way, nice fish.

Anonymous said...

most people in the animation industry put their showreels on a dvd or a video file on a cd.

Anonymous said...

O lawdy I weesh I could jus sqeeze da goots outta dat feesh, oh look at me now I is rhymin like the old mississipi bullfrugs on a warm o summa neight wit da wifey, speaken on da wifey, she done got herseelf a whopin big ol tomcat and he is bein use to fil our bellies rit up tu du brim i may say, I MAY SAY.

Anonymous said...

I found making a totally flash based website is the easiest thing to do...

urrr...

I never finished mine though, bought a domain name + hosting in june 2006, started making a site and never bothered to complete it.

Crap, I really should.

And yeah, just get your head round some of the basic actionscripting and it's a piece of cake.