New Year's Swag (a typical pandalion shopping trip)

Today my boyfriend and I went for a little shopping trip to see if we could pick up any sale bargains ^^ I really needed to buy some new trousers but I struggle buying trousers (I'm pear shaped or something :P) and I also don't enjoy shopping for them D: So kinda ended up buying stuff I didn't intend to buy. XD But hey, it's good to have some New Year treats!

1 - A cute soft sweater from Next. I think these days, for buying any clothes other than shirts (which I buy all over the internet), Next is almost the only clothes shop I actually enjoy going to and find stuff I like in. No doubt the next couple of months will still be pretty cold so I need more things with long sleeves :D

2 - Doggy purse/wallet also from Next. It was just too adorable really. Animal faces on things generally always make them better.

3 - Various hot chocolates from Whittard, and a cute handpainted mug reduced in the sale :D Before my mum says anything, yes I have LOADS of mugs for tea, but this one was the perfect size for drinking hot chocolate :3 As for flavours, they had lots of fun kinds! We went for cinnamon, cherry and mint.

4 - Hazelnut coffee and chocolate covered espresso beans, also from Whittard. I'm generally a tea drinker and only drink coffee on occasion, but I've had this flavoured one in the past and it's *lovely*. Something for Saturday mornings :) And chocolate espresso beans are just quite yum. XD

5 - 2012 planner for the Creative Procrastinator - in the Calendar Club sale. (word of advice - just wait till January 1st to buy diaries or calendars, so much cheaper XD) Anyway, I had to get this as it's just too perfect for me. I think "creative procrastinator" is my middle name(s). The middle is filled with handy boxes for writing what you have to do, such as "Things I need to do but that can wait a day, or two, or three.." and "Things I absolutely have to do unless I absolutely don't want to do them". Each week also has a Procrastinator tip, or bit of wisdom. My favourites include: "Better to do nothing and avoid looking bad than to proceed and look like a total idiot", and "Some people say nothing is the worst thing you can do. I challenge them to tell me the last time a war broke out over nothing." XD

6 - Christmassy chocolates in the sale at Hotel Chocolat - Hotel Chocolat is one of those shops I love to look in but have never bought anything from before. The sale seemed a good excuse to :D I always think I'd rather have a very small amount of high quality chocolate than a big bar of something cheap and rubbish ;)

So yeah, that's some typical pandalion swag, would often include games but I'm intent on finishing fallout: new vegas without getting distracted! Bye for now!

Django from a Web Designer's point of view

I've just made my first Django webpage live. It just has some text, shows the date/time and has an admin interface that I can log into. Looking at it, it really doesn't look like much, but today, I got over a hurdle with the framework I've been getting to know for the past few months, and it feels pretty good. I decided to make a post about my experience and what I've learnt of using Django so far.

What the heck is Django?

According to djangoproject.com:

"Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design."

Sounds quite lovely, doesn't it? A year ago I probably didn't even know what Python was. I'm a Web Designer/Front End Developer, who spent most of the past few years as an all-round Graphic Designer before itching to get back to writing code as well as (and probably more so than) designing things.

HTML and CSS, along with simple, clean, user-focused design are my specialities, and I'm pretty good but still improving with Javascript/Jquery, but I have had some experience with back-end languages. In the past I've dabbled in asp and php along with mysql to do some database-y things, and Visual Basic lessons at college introduced me to some basic programming principles (unintended pun there ;)

So yeah, it's been a long time since I've done much other than HTML/CSS, and when I joined the team I work with currently and found out that our site was built on Django, I really had no idea what that was. But after working closely with back-end developers in recent months, I've got to know Django a lot better.

I work with some really talented people, who all seem to share the opinion "eww php",  and promote the DRY (don't repeat yourself ;) philosophy of the Python programming language and Django framework. I'm not getting into a debate about it because I know when it comes to web development there are TONS of different views, but in my opinion, DRY couldn't be a bad thing. Design is great and all, and designs can be beautiful, but code can be equally beautiful. One of the reasons I never tire of writing html and CSS is because I think there's always a challenge there to create beautiful, readable code that makes sense to other people and that is crafted and constructed in the nicest possible way (yes I know HTML & CSS aren't technically code, because people seem to get pedantic about that on the internet, but you know what I mean).

So the whole DRY thing sounded really appealing to me. As an FE developer working in a team using Django, the first part I had to get to know was the template system. I think this alone pretty much made me fall in love with Django :D It feels incredibly simple and nice, the way in which you create base templates and various pages based on them. Previously, in asp/php, I would have used include files for this, which I guess is a similar concept, but I don't know, the Django template system just feels nicer.

(I'm not going to explain exactly how it all works at this point, but if you are interested you can learn loads at the official documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ and djangobook.com :).

Choosing Django for my site

I've needed to set up my own personal site for a good while now, having put most of my effort into work projects lately. As I want to dabble more in back-end stuff as well as front-end, I was wondering which language I should choose. I *could* brush up on php again, after all it's a pretty popular and widely used language. But that didn't seem like a good reason to use it to me, Django seemed more elegant somehow, and I really wanted to use the template system, as well as the nice built-in admin it comes with, which allows you to update the content on your site without having to spend time building a bespoke interface just to do that.

I guess the hardest thing to me was setting up a Django site on my own (not just the templates, while the programmers do the rest). The template code is described as "designer friendly" but the majority of Django is aimed at programmers, as it involves editing/writing Python and using the command line to do most things. I must admit I'm used to installing something by downloading some sort of zipped file and double clicking an "install" icon ;) 

So, installing Python and Django with the command line was a challenge on it's own for me. I followed lots of tutorials on the net, but I think that especially with something like this, there is a big gap between copying code that someone is telling you to write and seeing it do something, to *understanding* what the code is doing, why it works, and how you can use it to make your bespoke project. And sure, the command line basics aren't by nature that difficult but you I'd had my head in Photoshop and InDesign for years, and I didn't even know how to navigate my way around files in the terminal.

After installing Django locally, I had a lot of fun trying to get a simple app or page working :) I wouldn't say that it's difficult as such, just.. Python-y, and I guess for me there was a lot of new stuff to understand. I tried a lot of tutorials online, but generally they'd be making sense and then I'd get to one point and go "WTF?" or just suddenly lose the flow and be really confused. You really only need to edit a few Python files to set up a django site, so it is a fairly simple process, but not understanding the lines of Python and being confused about certain things made it all seem very tricky at times.

After getting something straight forward working locally, I decided to just go ahead and get some hosting so I could get something running there and get on and make my site. I went with webfaction.com for my hosting, as I heard they had a simple one-click installer for setting up a Django site. This did really make it a lot simpler than when I tried to set it up locally even, but I'm glad I had a go at doing that too.

Even after getting the basic app set up, I got confused about making a view and setting up my templates. If you look at the Django documentation it runs through models, the API and views before even getting to templates, so yeah, there was still stuff to get a hold on before I could really dive into the template fun. x_x 

What I've learnt so far

So yeah, finally I have a basic page set up, and as I said at the beginning - it doesn't look like much, but I think (for a web designer ;) I've learnt a lot so far!

- I can now use the command line to ssh into my web hosting, navigate folders, create folders and files and edit them (I've been using nano which was installed by default on my mac), as well as restart the apache server, and sync the database.

- I understand the main Python files that you need to edit to use Django, a lot better. (settings.py, urls.py and views.py). I know what settings to edit in order to make the site work, look at the database and enable the admin.

- I understand how to configure a URL for a view

- I've set up some database fields, displayed the values from these on a page, and managed them using admin (I did this in an earlier tutorial, so I need to revisit it, but again, I think I have a good understanding of how to).

Most of all, I think I have a pretty good idea now of what to do to set up my own blog for example, and I feel pretty proud of that, and also excited to use Django more. I haven't spent long on the design/actual site yet because.. well I know how to do all that pretty much, but my aim was to understand how I could use Django to do it, and I think I've got over my "stuck" hurdles now ;)

To summarise, I think that Django is a bit trickier to get into for a web designer, than say PHP, but so far it seems a really elegant and nice framework, and I would really recommend the template system to web designers. I'm looking forward to developing my site now, and I'll probably update more about how it goes.

Thanks for reading! :)

The week I fell in love with Skyrim

Skyrim makes you stop and enjoy the view

So, I forgot to finish or post this at the time I wrote it, about a week after Skyrim's release in November. I wrote a bit about Skyrim in my "videogames of 2011" post buut, I realised when writing it I kinda forgot some of the things I loved when I first started playing it so.. I wanted to post this even though it's late and record the fun I had (or have had so far) with Skyrim! Some of it touches on things I wrote in my other post but whatev'! I included screenshots from my own games :)

=====================================================================

I hadn't been playing videogames hugely for a while, but on Friday 11/11/11, for some reason I remembered that Bethesda Studios' open-world epic RPG Skyrim was coming out. I blame my boyfriend for assuring me that I'd done enough hard work around the house and that it would be okay if I got the game.

He may not have realised what a mistake that would be at the time, considering how addicted I've been to it since last Friday. XD As you may know (duh), I love videogames, but especially RPGs, and most of all those that allow depth of character customisation (because that's what roleplaying is all about, right?). As much as I used to love the Final Fantasy series, since playing RPGs that allow you to do so much more than follow a generally fairly linear path playing a spikey haired emo teenager (sorry FF), I don't think I could go back.

My first taste of the Elder Scrolls

Okay so horse armor might have been my favourite thing in Oblivion *cough*

Shortly after getting my Xbox last year and whilst researching RPGs to try out I found Oblivion, the fourth Elder Scrolls game. My boyfriend was familiar with the Elder Scrolls games as well as some friends I play Dungeons & Dragons with, so I decided to give it a try. I was *quite* hooked on it for a while, but I got tired of it quicker than I would have liked. I liked the open-world, my first taste of archery in a videogame (Me - "this comment surely must be wrong, but maybe archery in 3D? XD"), and the dungeons, but there never really seemed to be the sort of rewards worth playing for. The dungeons got too samey, the townspeople got annoying, the "enemies levelling up with you" was PRETTY annoying, and I didn't like the way the main quest and side quests interacted, made it feel like you had to be "careful" which order you did things in as they effected the world so much.

I don't want to set the world on fire (much)

Someone said I look like Batman.

After getting bored of Oblivion, I looked into another RPG, Fallout 3. I'd never actually heard of an RPG with guns before, RPG always meant swords and magic to me. I was also rather used to playing games with "blue skies". So I was unsure I'd like it but had heard really good things about it (and found out that Bethesda, who developed Oblivion, developed it) so I picked it up.

Well, that game surprised me. After initial thoughts of "this is like Oblivion in a wasteland", it quickly began to feel like an entirely different game and I felt it was stronger than Oblivion. I felt more attached to my character, I feel like the game lead you through both main quests and side quests in a good way, and there was always loads to do but it didn't get "samey". It felt like there was always a purpose for exploring and collecting things and loads to do in terms of weapons - finding, repairing and building your own. The atmosphere always had me sucked in too. After 80 odd hours I completed the main game and the majority of sidequests as well as played some of the expansion sets, so I decided it was time for a break.

Then came dragons

I don't have any screenshots of dragons so here's a horse.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't entirely stop playing games after Fallout 3. :P I played some of Borderlands on the Xbox, which was enjoyable, but then I got a bit of a "hack and slash" urge and played Deathspank from XBLA. That's a really fun game I might talk about another time, but anyway what with moving house and packing the Xbox away, I hadn't played anything in a little while..

So yeah, SKYRIM. It's strange for me because this might be the first time I ever bought a game on release date. (or at least one of very few that I don't even remember). The problem with when I played Fallout 3 was, I was talking about everything I loved about the game, but noone else was really talking about it much anymore, since it had been out so long. Well, I guess that wasn't a problem as such, but the nice thing about Skyrim has been seeing everyone else's thoughts at the same time, watching other gamers uncovering the game and knowing you're not the only one completely taken in by this world.

I mean, I've kinda been talking about it to anyone else who would listen anyway but still, it's nice to find other people who appreciate the art, music, love, and work that goes into a videogame, (or a great deal of them anyway ;) Hurray for the internet I guess :)

Things I love so far

I love wandering around doing silly things like this.

I won't go into loadsa detail in case of spoilers I guess (Me - "unlikely now.."). But..

The massive world
It looks even more beautiful than Oblivion did, tall snowy mountains, trees and plants, wildlife (rabbits and stags, as well as mammoths which are pretty awesome). It's an icy fantasy world (suiting for the time of year too :) and there's just so much to explore.

Character options
Skyrim introduces perks, similar to those in Fallout, but more of a Diablo-ish skill tree really, and this gives you a lot more options than Oblivion did for how to shape your character. I feel like I have reasons to want to level up my character, for example aiming to get shield skills. At the same time whatever skills you use will level up so you get rewarded for playing however you want to, which is cool.

Dungeons
The dungeons so far are varied and interesting providing various fun scenarios for sneak attacking bad guys :)

Little extra things to do
Apart from following a main quest, side quests and fighting, I love when RPGs give you the chance to do more, well, "mundane" things. Those little things in real life that can be satisfying, like cooking, picking flowers, fishing and decorating a house.

The score
Skyrim has a beautiful, atmospheric soundtrack - I'm still waiting for my CD to be delivered :(

---------------

Well, that's all I wrote, but to summarise - I think Skyrim was a massive improvement on Oblivion, and I would like to get back to it after I finish Fallout: New Vegas, I think, because I *do* need to finish the main quest! Though I still think playing Skyrim properly requires quitting your job, and not doing anything else ever, it's so massive! But that's not a bad thing, and I think Skyrim did something great for videogames last year - showing how popular a SINGLE-PLAYER game played with a normal controller by people sitting in their armchairs can be (yes I'm looking at you kinect, and to an extent wii), and that a videogame CAN be as popular as a movie too.

I also think Skyrim has something to give everyone, whatever type of character you want to play, how much time you want to spend, what kinda things you want to do in a game. So yeah, if you haven't given it a chance, you should ;) It's a wonderful fantasy world to become a part of, and to me, it's really redefined the level of detail, quality and depth I expect from all games now.

Looking at my screenshots has made me miss Skyrim - I look forward to getting back there!

I love inventory screens (thoughts on a personal project)

A bit of a random sketch after the subject of inventory/equipment screens popped into my head again tonight. I've been wanting to do a project for a while now that combines some of my biggest loves - front end coding, cute art, and RPGs! More for personal reasons than anything else, and to learn new stuff along the way (database integration using django for example, which I'm *still* trying to get my head around!).

I've not got far yet (I'm a panda, we don't rush these things..) but, I have a lot of ideas and one is that it must include levelling up because - I love levelling up! :D And also, as the title of this post says - I love inventory screens. XD One of my very favourite things about RPGs is acquiring new equipment, heading to the inventory screen and seeing what the effects of equipping it will be, and how it might power you up :D Not all games allow you to see your stuff on the character right then, but I quite like when they do, especially cos I like to see the effects of how stuff looks together, etc. (yeah, girly ;)

My vague coding related RPG idea is something to do with wanting to level up my skills myself, and maybe because I just want to make everything more like a videogame! I also like the idea of something humorous, cute and fun, hence my "geeky joke shirt". Deathspank on XBLA is a bit of an inspiration for this particular sketch too, it's a funny action RPG created by Ron Gilbert who also worked on the Monkey Island games, and it's just all very silly. On a sidenote, I miss Monkey Island style humour in videogames! It feels harder to come by a funny game these days.. :)

Deathspank Equipment Screen

So yeah anyway, I think I'd like to work more on lots of different parts of this, besides how it might all work on the back-end (how you level up, and collect items etc), I think designing various items and the effects of them would be pretty damn fun too. XD And then drawing the graphics! As usual, I'm being way too ambitious at this point but, it's fun to think about anyway and we'll see how far I get next year..

Oh, on another note, something I think also fueled my equipment/inventory love is Ragnarok Online, a very cute Korean MMORPG, that I used to play for the SOLE reason of acquiring more hats. XD Here's a little shot of one of my characters, with a friend I used to play online with. HOW cute are those hats?

Ragnarok Online - more like Cute Hats Online

Bye for now, and happy equipment hunting!