So, as noted elsewhere, the idea behind the Order of the Rose / Dìqiú Suite reorg was to set that cycle of stories apart from the four Symphonies of the Sword and give them their own sort of thematic identity.

During the process of developing the graphics for the OOTR and DS pages, it occurred to me that I might also re-dress the Symphony No. 4 index page slightly, changing the title graphic, to make the page a sort of visual bridge between the earlier Symphonies and OOTR. Since S4 is set following a significant timeskip after S3, and begins a number of threads that carry into OOTR (e.g., Juniper, the Klingon Civil War), I thought that might be appropriate...

... but then I thought, hang on, the whole point of this exercise was to set OOTR apart from the Symphonies, and now you want to make one of the Symphony pages look a bit like it? Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose?

I can see both sides of the above argument, having basically posed it to myself, but I haven't decided what to do about it. So this post is basically me thinking out loud at the end of a busy day that hasn't led to anything visible (I'm in the process of recording some missing audio, HTMLing a few more Minis that deserve more prominent placement on story pages, and - at long last - overhauling the UF Chronological Listing page, which is a horrible crufty mess underneath and out-of-date on the surface).

For the curious, this is what the OOTR-style S4 page would look like. Basically the same, just a new banner graphic.

On the downside, working on all this backend stuff means I'm not getting much actual creativity done this week. So hopefully the housekeeping will be done with soon and I can get back to that. I'm not sure how realistic the goal is at this point, with only three weeks left, but it would be nice to have DS05 done before I go back to school. I'll be taking the last of the math-heavy courses required to finish my MET minor and my senior seminar to finish my HTY degree this fall, so I expect I'll be pretty busy.

I'm also playing around with the idea of taking ART 100 (Drawing I), because a) I need three credits to stay full-time, b) I don't want to take more than two really mathy engineering classes at a time if I can help it, c) More HTY classes would be redundant at this point, and d) it's annoyed me for a long time that my hands don't know what to do with my ridiculously visual imagination. I dunno, though. Three credits' worth of tuition is a lot of money to pay to learn to draw a vase, which is probably about all the first class gets to, and the only one that still has an open seat is at 9 in the morning. I can barely walk at 9 AM, much less make my hands and eyes do precise things. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.