Well that was productive!
Well as some of you may know, I have a hobby of helping out a small roleplaying game company called Ruminant Productions. This help comes in a variety of forms including writing, rules developing, art director-ing, and more recently (as of today) website managing.
Those of you who know me, know that post 1994 or so, I've been an anti-fan of the web. Well that's not true. Basically between 1994 and 2004 I was an anti-web. I felt that it served no purpose other than to distract people from the other more useful services the internet provided. The web was clunky, non-standard, full of horrible websites and even worse tools for them. Those few websites that people actually took time to create were masterful, but they didn't make up for the drabness of everything else. Being a programmer I was offended by HTML, and then XHTML. I saw CSS as a decent way to standardize HTML but realized its true purpose was to take the coding out of web design and put in the hands of artists! The tragedy! Then came along PHP (fucking hippies) and JPS and ASP, which got it a little more right...
Then I went to college, got distracted with the whole classes thing but the web kept evolving. First came web based email (which I was admittedly using even before college, so I could hide emails from my parents who didn't know such types of email existed). Flash games. Then web commerce with Ebay and Amazon. Then file sharing (Napster). Then web streaming (YouTube). Webcomics. Oh glorious webcomics. Google begin its slow and steady rise. Web based forums. Web based chat. IMDB reared is oh so interesting head. Livejournal and the eventual "blogosphere". RSS feeds (which I admittedly was a little late on) and the growth of Social Networking (MySpace and Facebook). Web based MMO gaming (Kingdom of Loathing, Legend of the Green Dragon, Billy vs Snakeman). Now serial web novels. Google of course helped revolutionize information sharing amongst people and will soon be coming with Wave.
The point is that some how the web became the central hub of the internet. IRC is still there. FTP is still out there. Secure shells still exist. I heard that even newsgroups are managing to survive (although Gopher and BBSes are long gone). Somehow the web molted from something infinitely ugly and unusable into a massive communication device that allows a small company like Ruminant Productions to develop games despite all its employees being scattered across the US.
And from that I somehow managed to take over control of a webpage designed by Paged Media, and spend half a day making it into something I find reasonably interesting to read without throwing my computer screen across my room, pulling out all my hair, and sacrificing my RPG books to the Great Gygax. Actually I even got into the "zone" that I normally only reserve for programming and playing with legos. Amazing!
And so today, present to you: RuminantProductions.Com
A half polished diamond that still needs a bit more hard compression to truly shine but I have faith I'll get there. I put this website forth to you, friends and strangers. Treat it nicely.
Those of you who know me, know that post 1994 or so, I've been an anti-fan of the web. Well that's not true. Basically between 1994 and 2004 I was an anti-web. I felt that it served no purpose other than to distract people from the other more useful services the internet provided. The web was clunky, non-standard, full of horrible websites and even worse tools for them. Those few websites that people actually took time to create were masterful, but they didn't make up for the drabness of everything else. Being a programmer I was offended by HTML, and then XHTML. I saw CSS as a decent way to standardize HTML but realized its true purpose was to take the coding out of web design and put in the hands of artists! The tragedy! Then came along PHP (fucking hippies) and JPS and ASP, which got it a little more right...
Then I went to college, got distracted with the whole classes thing but the web kept evolving. First came web based email (which I was admittedly using even before college, so I could hide emails from my parents who didn't know such types of email existed). Flash games. Then web commerce with Ebay and Amazon. Then file sharing (Napster). Then web streaming (YouTube). Webcomics. Oh glorious webcomics. Google begin its slow and steady rise. Web based forums. Web based chat. IMDB reared is oh so interesting head. Livejournal and the eventual "blogosphere". RSS feeds (which I admittedly was a little late on) and the growth of Social Networking (MySpace and Facebook). Web based MMO gaming (Kingdom of Loathing, Legend of the Green Dragon, Billy vs Snakeman). Now serial web novels. Google of course helped revolutionize information sharing amongst people and will soon be coming with Wave.
The point is that some how the web became the central hub of the internet. IRC is still there. FTP is still out there. Secure shells still exist. I heard that even newsgroups are managing to survive (although Gopher and BBSes are long gone). Somehow the web molted from something infinitely ugly and unusable into a massive communication device that allows a small company like Ruminant Productions to develop games despite all its employees being scattered across the US.
And from that I somehow managed to take over control of a webpage designed by Paged Media, and spend half a day making it into something I find reasonably interesting to read without throwing my computer screen across my room, pulling out all my hair, and sacrificing my RPG books to the Great Gygax. Actually I even got into the "zone" that I normally only reserve for programming and playing with legos. Amazing!
And so today, present to you: RuminantProductions.Com
A half polished diamond that still needs a bit more hard compression to truly shine but I have faith I'll get there. I put this website forth to you, friends and strangers. Treat it nicely.