The GHAWG Diaries, Part 4
What's happening behind the scenes to bring new GHAWG content? The GHAWG Diaries is my recap of what I've been doing.
Base image came in another form from PublicDomainPictures.Net. Edits made using MS Paint.
Introduction
There's more to #GHAWG than just daily zapfic entries and the spreadsheet I use to track them. There's research. There's review. There's also thought and inspiration. Then there are the tools involved in doing any of those tasks.
Just to keep things from getting scrambled in my head, and also to document for myself what I've been considering, I began keeping a diary of my activities as they concern #GHAWG. With posts in the GHAWG, Uninterrupted series on hold at Act 5 while Act 6 remains in progress, I decided to share these diary entries with everyone on Hive blockchain.
On Mondays which don't feature a GHAWG, Uninterrupted post-- GHAWG-U-- I'll post diary entries from the previous 7 days or between GHAWG-U posts if the time between them is short. For Part 2, there are 14 days' worth of diary entries. The first entry starts on 2023-October-2.
Before anyone scratches their heads at a few terms, here are 3 I began using since the previous post:
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
Rat Bike | Code name for #GHAWG (the first and current zapfic serial) |
Blue Lion | Code name for the middle zapfic serial in the GHAWG Universe |
The Bronze | Code name for the final zapfic serial in the GHAWG Universe |
| Monday, 2023-October-23 |
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📓 Sunday I published GHAWGnav as a long form post I pinned to my blog page. Today I published "The GHAWG Diaries, Part 3". For tomorrow I sheduled for publication a post explaining how I used Scalable Vector Graphics to make the logo for Guardia Courier Services, David Guardia's business back in Bayonne, New Jersey, US. I don't have enough GHAWG content to publish daily yet, but that's the goal. 📓 Today I began designing the logo for Rhonda Bella Logistics, the trucking business she owns. The initial design may or may not resemble the final design which gets recreated using SVG, but I have to start somewhere. This is the first design:  )It's just the letters RBL which traveled along a path and left lines. I'm not sure how this effect is described by web developers, but the best description I can come up with is "extruded text" like some paste coming out of a tube. My inspiration for the RBL logo is the logo used for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games (Source: [SCCOG.org](https://www.sccog.org/1984-olympic-games)):  )This logo came to be known as "Stars in Motion," and this is the effect I want to achieve with the RBL logo. This logo will undergo many revisions before I can use it as part of The GHAWG Universe. |
| Tuesday, 2023-October-24 |
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| 📓 With my mother's new computer arriving today, I didn't have much time for my own computer use (never mind Hive and GHAWG). As it is, I experimented with the RBL logo. I changed colors; I added an outline to letters (made possible with the `stroke:` property in the CSS used by SVG). Sadly, the effect I wanted to achieve comes out the same whether I create the image using SVG before capturing the image to use in MS Paint or I create the image in MS Paint from scratch. If anything, I will need to simplify the effects. |
| Wednesday, 2023-October-25 |
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📓 Today I was listening to the theme from the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, "Olympic Fanfare" performed by Academy Award-winning composer John Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra. This theme was so popular and successful that it has been used at all Olympic Games ever since. I was listening to this theme because I was looking for inspiration for new ideas regarding the logo for Rhonda Bella Logistics (RBL). The RBL logo I worked on yesterday-- )had greenish letters which were outlined in InLeo Orange. As I look back at the Stars in Motion logo used for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games-- see Tuesday, 2023-October-24-- I notice that no strokes were used (either that, or the stroke color was the same as the fill color). Also, the Stars in Motion logo had one color per star (blue, then white, then red). I'm experimenting with colors and fonts for the RBL logo. Once I get the RBL logo looking the way I want, I will create a version of this logo in monochrome (not necessarily black and white). |
| Thursday, 2023-October-26 |
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📓 At the moment I have zapfic entries for `Rat Bike` queued up for January 2024. I stayed there for a while in part because the story was getting out of control and I needed a way to get it back in line with my plans for `Blue Lion` and even `The Bronze`. This morning the solution came to me in a dream, and it was to use Rhonda Bella's gifts as a Dreamer to complement David Guardia's as a prophet. Her dream won't make sense to either of them at this point, and its meaning only becomes clear during the later stages of `Blue Lion` and during `The Bronze`. Her dream is a device to bring the story back in line with the feel it had for most of the ride from Bayonne, to STURGIS and from STRUGIS to San Diego. I can't explain here what Rhonda's dream was about, but I can say that helps the story advance. 📓 I finished typing Rhonda's dream. It took a while, but I managed to get to fit within a 240-character thread (including hashtag). Now I need to figure out a transition from behavior prior to the dream and behvior afterward. 📓 Before the day ended I mapped out Old Route 66 from San Bernardino, California, US to Needles, California, US. Needles is located almost on the border separating California from Arizona. Friday I need to study the digital map to see what's around not just for tourism (it is "Route 66") but also for lodging. This part of California is mostly sand, if not desert, so camping outside overnight isn't a good idea there. |
| Friday, 2023-October-27 |
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📓 I began preparing the weekly summary post for tomorrow. Zapfic entires 190 through 196 are covered. All that remains is creating the cover image. Tone and story shift noticeably starting with these entries. 📓 Today I began redoing my profile banner using SVG. 4 polygon shapes didn't come out as I had expected, and figuring out where the math went wrong took me too long. Instead, I used rect shapes to simulate what should have been done using polygon shapes. It means extra calls to the SVG rendering engine used by web browsers, but it was easier to work with for my design. Next is to get the font-size: issues figured out before I take a screen capture of the final version of the SVG banner.
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| Saturday, 2023-October-28 |
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📓 Today is Weekly Summary day, so I spent the morning working on the cover image for the post. That's all I needed to do, but the front-end wasn't cooperating with me. On the bright side, I discovered that even though the front end will retrieve the same content whether the URL followed the pattern https://{domain}/{posts}/{ACCOUNT}/{stub} or https://{domain}/@{ACCOUNT}/{stub}, it will render that content in different ways. Why this is, I can't say. All I know is that it will take me a while to adjust all the URLs to show https://{domain}/@{ACCOUNT}/{stub}.
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| Sunday, 2023-October-29 |
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📓 Today I reviewed the late December 2023 portion of my zapfic queue. I decided to include 2 mini-stories for the purpose of getting the Brothers Marchenko (Hank & Frank) and The Kids (Sanjay Rampersad, Lionel Odunsi, and Lindsay Etxeberria) more involved. These additions allowed me to remove 2 later entries and replace them with entries which fit better. In getting these bonus entries made, I moved the digital map from San Bernardino back to San Diego where the 2 mini-stories take place. This is where The Mongols and (for now) Harry Hoqualogue depart the story. 📓 This week I need to update all GHAWG posts so that URLs not only reflect the domain inleo.io |
