The Blog redesign: Retro Halloween edition (｀㊥益㊥)Ψ

Today I figured I would just straight up focus on redesigning the blog's colors and MAYBE change a font or two whatever I have the time to do today by 5, I will try to do. I want to do some animation, preferably some CSS animation if I have time but we'll see how long it takes me to find all the classes I want to edit.

First step; Halloween palette.

Halloween is my favorite time of year, always was since I was a kid. The feeling of the leaves changing, the smell, the crunch, the spooky scare your sister toy commercials on TV in between the Halloween specials at the time and the occasional heavily edited for TV horror classic. The ghost hunter shows claiming they all had the ONE single edge with some goofy gadget or medium. Sometimes getting invested in them and convincing yourself you got a ghost in your closet til December.

It's weird how Halloween just kind of drags a kid out of me, I get almost back into the times when my grandmother was hand stitching my costumes. There were a couple years I didn't want to go out and I hate myself for that. But I carry that memory happily. It was nice that she cared enough to custom make costumes that fit me. They were actually never uncomfortable, to be honest... and they were pretty elaborate for one woman to throw together in the evenings of a month. Those things and the old days with the Simpsons tree-house of horror episodes. The people doing crazy decorations in their neighborhood because they loves the idea of freaking people out the most on that night of mystery and reward.

Everything lead up to it, school started and you knew that was the next most important date. You had to get through the days at school because October first would come and with it all of the glory of Halloween time. The aforementioned specials and home made costumes.

I wonder if I should maybe base it on one of those costumes. One I have the most vivid memory of. The scarecrow. It's got green, orange, light tan, black and brown. Then add some purples as a sky with some oranges in it? Oranges for the pumpkins, Jack o Lanterns are like my favorite fucking icon. They can be so much and can only really normally exist around Halloween. I suppose we could have other ways but you know... maybe it would get tired. Some things are best left where they need be.

So I also need to work out the green, it needs to fit in there somewhere and it has to be fucken' fluorescent like the goos of aforementioned sister scaring brands.

Greens are highlights. Purples are low lights and a few highlights. Oranges and browns run the low to high. I need my headings to be bright green perhaps. I could make a quick night sky with a moon and a witch in pixel art with some dithering and random brush poking. Alright we got step one and two.

Find palette, make pixel art banner and branding with palette. Go in hard on the Halloween look and feel within the time limit. I must try to finish this by Monday so I can get back to work on Yarrdachi. I need to do at least ONE Halloween project and it might as well be my site. More people will be able to see that than the crystal jack o lantern. I think I will make that a year long project with Toghairm to start once I have a solid base for Yarrdachi and can generate at least some monthly content I can spend the spare time with those two. I gotta think long term.

Might be wise to change some bits. Anyway I will start with just modifying the site colors next. It's nearly 2pm now, would like to get this done by Monday. So in the interest of time, enough screwing with pixels.

You can tell the story of this blog so far in a short series of pictures.

While doing this I went and modded my lighting system to increase the max sleep time on the animations to 300k.

I did a bit more hammering on it, it's another day now. Sunday, actually.

So I feel like it needs a bit more work. I think I should do the Happy Halloween logo in a lower resolution and blow it up for one.

Next I think I should maybe tweak the colors a bit more to match the highlights and low lights in the cover art.

Oh yeah, in keeping with the theme of maintaining the front page of the site as a geocities 90s throwback page made in a modern technology... I did this quickly before bailing yesterday...

The landing page is just what happens when you hit yarrbeard.com and has a link here to the blog.

Anyway, shrinking that resolution...

Here's a visual of why the resolution needs downscale.

If I had the time I would animate the background as well, the web blowing and the flying things having a floating movement.

Also wish I had more time for that popping effect, I want to tweak the frame speed on them a little but I don't really have time to be messing around with that right now.

Anyway, instead of replacing the header with a sprite I am going to try something foolish. Yeah, some css animation. There.

Alright, it has a blend of many things now, with the primary focus being of a particular scarecrow costume my grandmother made that I have a picture of and will not be sharing, bugger off. It's not the best thing ever, if I wanted to take a week on it I would do some more animations and spend a lot of time getting it all blending with pixel art borders animating like strings of lights or whatever but for this year I will keep it simple so I can work on Yarrdachi.

Also ended up doing this trying to animate something for the header but settled on just some glow effect instead, kinda want to do something else with that time. Also it came out broken as hell, the alpha just does not want to export as a gif well.

Anyway I think I like how it looks for a Halloween throwback kind of thing. It reminds me of Halloween when I was a kid and yeah, that's kind of the point of the thing I guess.

I got my glowing green thing, I got my spider webs, I got my night time purples and my childhood memory costume colors.

Tomorrow I am back to the Yarrdachi front end. I just really needed to do some Halloween stuff because I don't expect to finish my new Halloween light on time this year. Already had to abandon the Halloween game project because of hardware failure... and that whole nearly obliterating my wrist thing.

Anyway, I think that might be all for today. It's Sunday and maybe I should allow myself a little time to just relax in a week.

Cheers. Happy Halloween.

Many images courtesy of some rabbit hole diving on Geocities archives. Anyway a couple more tweaks on that langing page.

There are a lot of memories in there. I hope all remain good for these people, but life do what it do sometimes. Anyway, I'm out of here.