The bus smells of tired
Autumn cold bites slow
“Home James” will be said soon
Author: Leigh :) Stark
-
Haiku on a bus
-
Draft Panel of “Jim’s Bath”
So the whole “making the storyboards for the Ninjas vs. Pirates” bit made me want to do some more animation, and since I’m a freelance journalist, I sort of have that ability to handle some writing and animating right now.
In any case, I’ve come up with a small story I might be able to throw at Tropfest next year and I just thought that you – my one and only reader – would like to see the panel I’ve bee nworking on for the past hour and a bit.
It looks better up close so make sure to click on the image… I’m planning to keep the style pretty rough with an almost “dried paint” look. I’m doing a tone of layering here and don’t worry, there will be character animation. It’ll be loose, expressive, and likely piss me off… but I think it’ll be worth it in the end.
-
Pirates vs. Ninjas
Ok, so I have an idea. A basic idea, a simple idea, but for all intents & purposes an idea.
It’s an idea my brother doesn’t like but Ross and I have gone to work on it regardless. And here it is…
A pre-pilot with a very quick script playing off of the old “Ninjas versus Pirates” geek argument mixing with a fake news network.
That’s the simple bit. There’s a bit more complexity to it as we’ve scripted more bits & pieces for this concept, but the overall idea is to have a fake news network with comedic bits.
No, this isn’t like The Onion or The Chaser. We don’t purport to be funny… we sort of just hope we are.
If we hit, we hit. If we miss, we hope to land on something soft & plush so as not to hurt our backs. We like our backs.
In any case, here’s the simple pre-pilot video done with audio recorded over Skype and in person, as well as the gallery of storyboards below in case you like some of the cute little pictures that I edited into this video.
[flv]https://www.leighlo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/prepilot.flv[/flv] (more…)
-
Goodbye Serendipity, Hello WordPress
Today marks the day that I jump ship and head towards a different blogging platform.
For the past few years, I’ve been using Serendipity, a very capable and extremely well-made open-source blogging platform. Several years before I started Leighlo.com, I’d run a couple of my own blogs on different engines. Each of these tended to be inflexible, irritating, and useless at resisting Spam. When I got my hands on Serendipity, though, I thought that I’d finally found a team that new what they were doing.
Serendipity was brilliant. It was fast, strong, and secure, and it gave me some level of customisation that my puny Earth brain could wrap itself around.
But in recent months, my love for Serendipity has started to lessen.
As I use WordPress more and more for my work at The Gadget Grill, the size of the community as well as it’s sheer ability to be modified makes me want to move. I’ve been using Serendipity a while and now it’s time to move on.
I have a new design, a new logo, and the ability to add some cool features like Twitter… because no one Twitters more than a freelance tech journo.
Well, maybe a porn star.
Or John Mayer.
Regardless, moving from Serendipity is a little hard so in case anyone’s thinking about switching over too, here’s a link you’re going to need.
There’s an early version of this converter floating around… version .7 or .8 or something and it just doesn’t work. It’s not if you have a large blog in the slightest and doesn’t seem to work well. So this dobschat bloke has gone and made it better and it actually works.
A couple of notes though:
- If you ever used those parentheses codes, you’re out of luck. Posts with those will come up with the [img] or [url=yaddyadda] in the actual writing as it has here.
- Be careful with what type of permalinking you set up on WordPress because the directory structure could mess around with image & multimedia linking in posts.
- Anything you’ve left as a “draft” in your blog entries will now be published. So… you know… if you’ve got that as a situation, you’ll need to go through one active installation of Serendipity to fix things while setting up the WordPress one.
- If you used some of Serendipity’s statistics plugins, you’ll lose all of those hit counts. You might also lose any links Google have made to you, but that’s expected with the transition to a new page.
But that’s about it. Brilliant work, imports the comments and pages with all the dates intact. I have my blog in a new form and now it’s ready to go!
Well sort of. I’m sure I’ll be cleaning out the non-WYSIWYG codes out of older posts for agggeeeeesss.
