@Ree@Dreamwidth.org

The Quest for Cheesy Memories

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 21:32:55 GMT

Dink Smallwood is just as ridiculous in HD (more, because of its pixel jaggies!) and I have just finished playing a user-created module (The Quest for Cheese) that has an exploding ducks spell. I'm underselling it but the spell is quite satisfying to use.

I ran into a little trouble, though. I played the mod umpteen years ago, so it was basically brand new to me now, and I got stuck at one point. I was confident that I had come across walkthroughs for D-Mods before, so I plugged the main game and mod titles, along with "walkthrough", into DuckDuckGo and hoped for the best.

What I found was this. You see that bit at the top, where it credits the walkthrough to a site resurrected by someone called Jaina? That's me! I'm Jaina!

It's been a day and I'm still processing how I feel about it. The site wasn't mine originally and I deleted it years ago, thinking nobody would miss it. (Also I think my free hosting was going paid-only, costing more than I cared to pay. I had hosted mirrors of the mods themselves along with the reviews, and I didn't think the reviews without the mods themselves had much appeal, and I didn't care to pay to host it all when I thought nobody else cared. So I deleted it altogether.) I don't think I even have the website files anymore.

But the content is not gone, because I was not the only one who cared.

I'm not sorry I stopped hosting the site; it was the right call for my circumstances at the time. But I'm happy that it meant enough to someone else that I came across a shoutout and information from it, still preserved, in the year 2023. And playable Dink in this year! On a portable device!

From a certain vantage, living in the future can be so awesome.

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if it ain't broke, I ain't got to it yet

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:26:20 GMT

Guess who has two thumbs and (temporarily) wrecked her website! It's me! (And I got it fixed too!)

Haha, I wanted to do one thing with my website, and then I found other stuff I should do with it, and somewhere in the midst of it all, I discovered that it was all running on PHP 5.6! (Current is somewhere in the sevens/eights, for reference.) Long ago, I had meant to keep one subdomain (a version of Legend of the Green Dragon) running a then-slightly outdated version because it wouldn't work on newer ones, but apparently now either everything would be running insecure PHP or everything would have to be upgraded in one fell swoop. I took a moment to say goodbye to my LotGD install, toggled the upgrade stuff in cPanel, and clicked a button to finalize it.

And then nothing on my website would load!

Because of a snippet of decrepit code dating back to 2003!!

And then my famously spotty rural internet cut out!!!

I got it worked out though! Eventually. I don't remember what all went into the repairs, so maybe some rare helpful gremlin took pity on my stressy self and slipped something back into place, instead of out of it.

So that's sorted. Now if I can just convince Jellyfin to let me play my Christmas playlist... (Hopefully that's simpler. Strongly suspect the playlist simply no longer has a valid owner, and manually editing one in may fix it. We shall see!)

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Djew the thing

Tue, 03 May 2016 21:47:42 GMT

I do love those moments when you're trying to do A Thing, and your searching turns up a forum post along the lines of "I was trying to do A Thing and it turns out it's much easier than I thought! All I had to do was insert Tab A into Slot Z." Here I was, writing code to handle things manually, and it turns out that all I have to do is populate PmWiki's $AuthList array and it's done. I mean, I'm still me, so I fiddled with a bunch of other stuff and got my error_log quite long, but I seem to have cleared up all the errors and learned some new stuff. Whee! Also, in the name of programming, I indulged in an extra Djew and I am quite sure that it shows. No regrets! Only caffeination!

I do have some non-internet things that I want to get done today, and I think I have just enough time left to get them done.

Have a good day, everyone!

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coming together

Sat, 16 Apr 2016 00:51:00 GMT

Ugh, I'm so sick of looking at login screens right now. I spent a couple hours today working on my latest pet project: single sign-on integration between a forum and wiki for my writing group. There are still some things to iron out, but I appear to have gotten login-logout tied together at last. I still need to confirm that rights levels are being set correctly and there's a fair bit of cleanup around the auth system no longer in use, but that will have to wait. It's past suppertime and I've not even got something cooking. Probably high time I fix that.

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onward and upward

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 20:17:26 GMT

I made the slightly short-sighted decision to try my hand at a new website coding project. At the moment, I'm elated because I got a datum that I needed into the code where I needed it. I'm not an experienced programmer by any stretch, so I'm going to leave that unborked code alone until tomorrow and ride the high of "it did a thing yay!" for today. Whew! Now that my foot is in the door, I think the remainder the the project shouldn't be too bad. It won't be something I can slap together in 15 minutes, not at all, but it should be fully doable. The worst part would be if I decide to get all fancy and check user groups (which would require additional coding) but that isn't at all necessary for the immediate future.

I made a thing and it worked. Wheeeeee. Feels good.

Speaking of feeling good, I spent the weekend before the last laid up with a sore throat, and when I was feeling better, I went for a long walk in bitter cold wind. Guess what happened then! Yup, Return of the Sore Throat! I was still sick this past weekend. Ick. But it did give me plenty of time to collect information about my project while I felt too ill to actually get into the coding, which likely helped a great deal. Information is good to have.

Got messages off to a few people online who were/are going through assorted Not Fun. I can't change their circumstances, but I can offer a listening ear and some sympathy. There was a time when my own life was too much for me, leaving me nothing to offer to anyone else in need; I was not a good friend then. I'm glad that I'm doing well enough now to extend a hand to those around me, even while I wish they didn't need it, because I want all the good things for my friends and none of the bad. And I wish it didn't all hit the fan when I was still shaking off that stupid throat bug.

Looking forward to stuff.

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CSS for great joy

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 13:00:34 GMT

Yesterday I whiled away my afternoon touching up my CSS skills. I took the general look (and some specific graphics) from the default Phorum template, Emerald, and turned it into a skin for the Twine Encyclopaedia. I ran into some trouble with margin collapsing, but I got it sorted. The result is, I think, pretty good; what do you think?

I am very pleased with myself for making the pretty thing. It was a little disheartening at the beginning, and irksome in the middle, when I didn't understand where my problem lay, but I quite enjoyed the final leg and end result.

I made that. Neat. I'd forgotten how nice that feels.

(I would have sworn that I posted this last night. Oh well. This works too.)

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amiibos, PmWiki, and dwarves

Sat, 04 Apr 2015 02:40:22 GMT

I spent a frankly embarrassing period of time in doing it, but I got my preorder in for a Ness amiibo. I'm ridiculously happy with myself!

Having some trouble with roleplaying. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. Possibly it's the open choice? Maybe I'm too used to playing linear video games and the like, where there are several ways to advance, but they all lead in the same general direction.

Finally bit the bullet and decided to install a wiki for my private roleplaying data. PmWiki turns out to be like 0.25 megs or something! Even my little web hosting account can handle that! So that's done and I've spent a completely stupid amount of time customizing my install. (Some of it was useful, like tweaking the search results so that passers-by don't get stuff from the wiki help pages unless they're specifically looking for it. Most of it is me having fun with conditional markup and coding. That part is time wasted.)

Bah, I'm not good at postprandial journaling. I'm sleepy and happy and possibly a few more of the seven dwarves.

Have a good one!

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