It's November already. Every new month I'm surprised; I have a terrible sense of time, and every month is simultaneously too long and too short.

I had a busy October, it turns out, though it's odd for me to think of it like that. I did do a lot of stuff, though.

Surf Club Zine

I finished up and submitted a high-effort entry to the Melonland Surf Club Zine! I'm quite proud of it. Adding a transition to Kalechips's themepicker created a very cool effect, and I really enjoyed playing around with different styles. I think people really underestimate how useful and versatile clip art packs are, and I think I did a good job presenting some cool looks! The writing itself isn't very long, but this did take me a super long time.

The "stark" minimalist theme was really hard! It's not really up my alley, and it's a bit awkward to try to showcase images by not including a lot of images... I had a lot more black and white pictures I wanted to cram in, but restrained myself.

32-Bit Cafe Halloween Event

I had a blast with the 32-Bit Cafe codejams I participated in, so I decided to join the event planner group! And since I'm a sicko for Halloween I volunteered to take on the Halloween event. We had a list of ideas for themes and activities and I, being a maximalist, thought, HOW ABOUT ALL OF THEM??

I tried to prioritize legibility and not go overboard with anything – flashing GIFs, animations, et cetera – while still making both the submissions page and the display page interesting and fun and stylized.

Aster's idea was a shady cryptid-focused newspaper, so I took the newspaper angle on styling for the event! The general idea being that "the 32-bit Gazette" is a reputable normal paper and "the Sensationalist Spectre Spectator" is the tabloidy goofy one. I gave the Spectator a different undertone and paper texture and fonts to help distinguish them while keeping them both themed.

I must say, columns are annoying to work with! They don't cooperate with text-wrapping, at least not as far as I could figure out, so I ended up sticking Karithina and Surge's pieces in side-scrolling boxes.

The doors thing was my idea – I was worried I didn't explain it very clearly and assumed hardly anybody would do it! It was a thrill to see so many submissions for it! I love the variety of looks. My hope was that it could be a pixel art thing for people who're artists, but still doable and fun for people who aren't artists. I think that turned out nice!

Wrestling with iframes for the costume showcase was harder than I expected; it ended up being kinda fiddly to get everything sized and looking the way I wanted it, and z-indexing the "visit" buttons on top and positioning those was a bit of a pain. I think it ended up being a pretty nice/cool effect though, so it was worth it!

In the end this event had 24 participants! That's a lot on our side of the web, and it seemed like folks had a fun time and I got a bunch of compliments on the page styling for display. A success!!

I'm not big into winter holidays so I am not going to be as bold for the end-of-year event; I do have lots of ideas for jam themes and events, though, and I'm excited to try and help out however I can with various things!

It's nice to be useful, and it's nice to see people enjoying something I helped out with. I'm glad everybody let me run wild even though I'm a noob to the Cafe and events and the event planning group; I had fun.

Weird Web October

Thanks to loren posting about it on the 32-bit Cafe forum, I was really excited for Weird Web October! I didn't end up doing as many pages as I wanted to, I lost momentum and couldn't quite get it back... I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed. There are ideas I didn't get to implement.

Honestly, I also kind of psyched myself out; there were so many good and interesting pages being made for the event that I started to feel self-conscious about my own skill level/abilities/taste/etc, which made it harder to work on stuff than it really needed to be. I'm good at talking myself out of doing stuff.

Still, I had fun doing the pages I did do, and I'm glad I went for it! I would love to do it again next year. If it happens again. Well, if it doesn't officially in this form, I can just do it on my own, haha.

Octothorpes are really really neat! I hope more people organize events and things using them.

Ultimately I want to make things that are weird and interesting and fun, but all of that takes a lot of effort and time for me... I am not someone who is "naturally" super creative and interesting, I suppose. It's hard for me to feel confident in something that I haven't put a lot of time and effort into... maybe next WWO I'll be better at loosening up and just doing stuff instead of trying too hard and getting self-conscious.

Anyway, reminding myself firmly that any amount of webcrafting is a good amount and I didn't "fail" by not doing all 31 prompts... I did 11, which is a whole bunch.

Non-Event-Related Website Stuff

I put together a Halloween graphics collection and added that to my "for you" graphics section. I guess this is actually event-related as I put it together for the Cafe event, but whatever. I edited all those PNGs to be transparent myself and organized them all into folders... it took a while. Decorating the main page for Halloween was also event-related, but whatever. I did that.

I spruced up the layout for the Gooftown section page – nothing too major, just a lot of small changes. Changed positioning, changed font, added labels to the unlabeled links, added a fun gradient border and a mouseover effect to the little bit of text, made the links hover scaling a bit smaller as the Clip City giraffe was a bit much. Hue-rotate is a fun thing to animate in theory, although in practice it always seems like at least some of the colors look muddier than I think they ought to! I dunno. Well, it's neat anyway.

I added a Guesttome for putting grim pronouncements, cryptic statements, and bad omens in, based on a conversation on the 32-bit Cafe Discord with Aster... I think it's a fun page. I'd like to do more in that style, maybe.

Moving onto my long-standing todo list, I finally updated the ASCII art museum! I took down and redid the layout entirely, because when I went to update it with a new batch of art I discovered that my code was SO bad and messy that it would be really hard to actually add anything to it. So... I fixed that up a lot! It's a bit less zany, as every piece now has the same frame, but I did add some chairs to sit down on and it's much more manageable now.

Aaand I finally got some new sitebuttons that are a bit more reflective of the vibe around here! The light blue one felt somewhat outdated due to the main page no longer being light blue... I wasn't sure what to do though, so I asked loren to make some buttons for me and they graciously agreed!! I also tried out making my own... so now I have several more buttons.

Ah, and of course I added more links to my links page and my resources page, but I'm kind of always doing that, so it's a minor note. On that note, I am now listed in the BUKMARK.CLUB, which is a directory of sites that have directories!

November Ahead

For November I think I want to focus on finishing up and updating stuff around the site, working on knocking out some stuff that's been on my todo list for a long time.

So, on the docket, from lowest to highest effort:

That seems like a lot for just one month... uhhh... well, I'll see how much I get done. I really do want to focus on "catching up" – finishing and updating things in place already rather than getting distracted by shiny new stuff. My fandom section has taken a backseat as I haven't been in much of a fandom mood; we'll see if that changes.

The Marigold Town shop is the big project; currently I have a good chunk of it done that I'm happy with, but I have a lot more work still to do to get it anywhere near presentable.

Other things I did in October: discovered I am allergic to Something (don't know what, though!) and tried out the Fediverse which so far I do not like very much. It's not as bad as Pillowfort, but that's not saying much.

Beyond November....

While I'm laying out plans...

I have a couple of pages in progress that aren't up yet! An index page sort of thing that'll have a lot of stuff in it; I'm working on copy/pasting all my goodreads reviews into it, which is time-consuming; a reverse "about" page; and a page dedicated to old web ads - that'll be adarchive.nekoweb.org when I get to it.

In terms of things not really in progress but on my mind: I want to make a scavenger hunt, I've been thinking about trying out making layout templates, and I want to make a page for my cat. I've also got vague dreams of making my favorite real-life knickknacks into transparent pngs and putting them on a page, but I don't have a great way to take pictures to facilitate that. Maybe it'd be fun to have a bookbinding section of my site. I keep going back and forth on whether I want to make a site manifesto. I want to recreate the "bad" websites from that how-to-website book I took pictures of. I've been considering writing some tutorials for small easy but stylish CSS things.

That's everything I can think of at the moment!