social day

Stuff I did today:

0. Turned off ads on Rita because the Patreon campaign passed $55/page!

1. Handed off my Genesis to Fluffy. I’d bought one along with a copy of Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles to use as photo-ref for a Further Confusion ad last year, and finally got sick of having it kicking around the living room floor yesterday. I offered it on Twitter and they were the taker; we hung out chatting for a while too.

2. Visited with Liz Meinert, an old friend from New Orleans. She’d been stuck half-dead for the past twenty years due to Mysterious Unspecified Problems, that finally turned out to be heart issues. She had surgery recently, and is bouncing back with a vengeance – something I can really sympathize with, given how I kinda completely shut down for most of twenty years after my father died, and am now running wild doing things like pole dancing! It was pretty great to hang out and talk about nerdy nerdy stuff.

3. Tweaked the Javascript scrolling for Rita. Or rather for Bayeux, the theme I abstracted out of Rita’s style. I improved that a little more in a few other ways; I may try to package it up for submitting to the WordPress theme archive before I go to bed tonight. It works fine for me on Safari and Firefox; I should probably test on Chrome but whatever, and IE? Whatevs. Also I switched Rita over to using Bayeux.

edit. submitted it, here’s the ticket for it. I r open source.

Bayeux

Bayeux: horizontally scrolling comics for Comic Easel.
bayeux-1.8

I have decided to package the custom theme I use on Decrypting Rita into something that other people can hopefully use.

This is the first release, and still has a few things hardwired for my comic – if you’re afraid of editing a few bits of text in a PHP file, and poking at some CSS, this theme is not yet for you. Check out the readme.txt in the archive for more details.

The name, of course, comes from the Bayeux Tapestry, which presents the story of William the Conqueror in the form of one very long horizontal scroll. Scott McCloud cites it as one of the precursors to what we call “comics” in his book Understanding Comics; it’s arguable whether something lacking the modern innovations of “panels” and “dialogue balloons” qualifies as “comics” but it’s definitely “sequential art”!

Anyway. Good luck; let me know if you get it working on your site. If you can’t then I may try to help you out but no promises – those pages of Rita ain’t gonna draw themselves!

(And if you add in controls for the stuff I didn’t, please toss me a copy of your modifications – I like it when other people do my work for me!)