The Gleebleblog

Hey everyone! In an effort to resurrect this blog, I have decided to alter my posting schedule. I’ll now attempt to post every Wednesday, rather than regularly every pretty-much-never. Future posts may occasionally be rather short if there is nothing important to report.

If I had a sufficiently cool hat, I would do this (warning: rapid flickering at one point) to indicate my resolve to do this.

   - Rob

Now that the website is up, it is time to concentrate on the next progress bar shown on the front page: Spoonhammer needs a script. This poses some problems.

The first of these is that it is already half-finished. And by half-finished, I mean that lots of random chunks of it were written about two years ago, and that these random chunks’ total length is about half of the plot. It is worth reemphasising that these random chunks were written a long time ago, as I was not particularly good at writing back then: properly introducing characters, for example, came second to skipping ahead and writing about SPACESHIPS AND EXPLOSIONS!!1!, and planning a cohesive plot was a distant third.

Basically, the first section of the plot was a complete mess. I replanned it. (click on images below to enlarge)

If you really want them, there are higher-resolution copies of these images here and there (warning: large files). Unfortunately, they are unlikely to help you understand the incomprehensible scribbles in that tiny notebook any better.

Incomprehensible though the scribbles may be, they represent a (probably) far more cohesive plot-beginning than we initially had. For a start, characters are actually introduced, as you can see from the list of names at the top left of the first image. A full explanation of what’s going on would take a while, so I guess you’ll have to wait until you can see that part of the film.

Edit: fixed inaccurate use of [sic] notation.

Oops, this isn’t the middle of February.

Nevertheless, the refresh of the Spoonhammer website is now up – in a manner of speaking. It’s partly-functional, but there are still some problems with it, including:

• Everything is broken in older browsers. Anyone using Internet Explorer 6 should use the ‘low-bandwidth’ layout to- wait, what am I talking about? Anyone who’s still using IE6 should get a real browser, if they even know what a web browser is.
• The front page is terrible. Not full-blown Boxbot-esque levels of terrible, of course, but it looks broken in subtle ways (and of course there’s the table-based layout used at the very top - unnoticeable, but knowing that this is there irks me)
• The low-bandwidth and white theme changes do not work on the blog, hence the title of this post: the badger is the Gleebleblog, and the grandfather clock is the rest of the website. EDIT: no badgers were harmed in the making of this website.

After that long stream of negativity, I suspect you will be skeptical of any claim that the website should be adequate for most interested people.

But I’m going to make that claim anyway.

Full story »

So yeah, anyone who sees this blog might notice that nobody has written anything since November. Sorry about that.

Incidentally, this isn’t intended to be one of those whining apologies for not writing more; sorry if it looks like that. ‘Tis just to let everyone know that we’ll be back after the winter exam season is over, which should be… oh, let’s say around the middle of February.

Feel free to throw cabbages at us if we’re not back by then.

EDIT: following complaints, the last sentence should be amended to “throw cabbages at Rob".

Nothing particularly exciting going on, but here are some of Things That Are Happening:

• we’re messing around with some new thingamajigs, specifically Technorati. Apparently it wants us to post the code E57BMPNBX93J for verification.
• Small changes to the blog graphics
• We’re also on Youtube now.

Blender 2.5 Alpha 0 is out too.

EXCERPT, but not from the Spoonhammer script.


ROB excitedly jumps up and down. Exit stage left.

ROB (off-stage)
Ooh, shiny! What happens if...

A pause.

ROB (off-stage)
hehe, I crashed it already.