So Much Old School

Yet more from cleaning up the personal way-back-machine: The official shafted.org WinAmp skin!

Whippin’ the llama!

WhiteStar put together the Shafted logo and site design and I turned it into an accompanying WinAmp skin.  Pretty sure I did the graphics manipulation in CorelDraw.

That’s basically as old school as you can possibly get: CorelDraw.  WinAmp.  Original Quake.  Blogs before anybody was calling it blogging.  Back then people were throwing around “e/n site” which in the context that became “blogging” simultaneously meant both “entertainment and news” and “everything and nothing.”  We were all too young for it to hold together, but it was pretty great in its teenage/twenty-something drama filled way.

For the record, I can never keep straight if it’s Nickelback or NickelCreek or both that everyone hates these days.  Either way, Leader of Men remains a fantastic song.

Rocketship Ancient History

I found this while cleaning out archives on one of my servers: The original sketch for the Rocketship Games website.  It’s pretty awesome, in a 1990s-WWW kind of way.  The original site actually had a lot of custom code.  News scripts (blog), forum, link roll Firefox extension, and so on.

The original rocketshipgames.com site design.

My original gaming blog, driven by a custom backend and Firefox extension for posting.

Eventually the site moved to a much less visually busy layout like it has now.  Still though, the top banner graphics have pretty much stood the test of time, which is awesome.  I think you actually could make a layout like this work really well and look like a super pro gaming site.  It’s just tough to make a dark, patterned background like that work well.  Something to think about for a site update in the future.

Centre Rock eventually went up as a free print & play boardgame.  I’m actually really proud of it.  It looks great, plays well, and has well written rules.  It’s just a shame it’s never gotten in front of more people.  I have some vague notion of adopting it into a Flash/mobile game, but we’ll see.  A boardgame people played would still be real cool.

Relic Hunter is also a super super awesome game that I’m real proud of and actually got a lot of plays.  Daryl and I have just never gotten it together to really write down the rules and polish it up.  Hopefully someday…  It’s not for no reason that when Caitlin and I moved into our house I had box after box with labels like “Unfulfilled hopes and dreams.”

New Blog Location

So, the Rocketship Games site moved to a new host, and as part of both that and a general reorganization, my blog’s URL has moved to this new location  that you’re reading right now (http://rocketshipgames.com/blogs/tjkopena).

There are a couple closely related things motivating all this; in no order:

  • I’m convinced the previous host had lost a big chunk of my MySQL database containing the blog, seemingly rolling it back to an old version in a backup restore or something like that.
  • The previous hosts’ server environment was getting a little old, and definitely a pain to work around.
  • We’ve got some exciting, somewhat higher profile new stuff coming out for Rocketship Games.
  • I wanted to de-personalize both the main site and the original blog location.

So, the original blog URL (http://rocketshipgames.com/blogs/tjkopena/) is going to be for general Rocketship Games announcements and such, and I move here.  That last point is also why the boardgame review articles came off the main site.  They’re still available on BoardGameGeek, but will also probably be making their way here.

At first I was really torn about restoring all the old blog contents.  Part of it was that I lost about 18mo–2 years of posts, so all of the book and movie reviews are gone, as well as some great game recaps.  At that point there was a little bit of a “Well, if we lost so much, just let it all burn!” feeling going on.  There’s also something to be said for starting fresh.

However, having restored it, I’m super glad I did—there’s even more to be said for awesome pictures and a lot of great stuff with good friends.  So, none of the old URLs will work, but everything should be here except for that 2 year period sucked into the warp.

As a side note, I have no idea why all the old posts have funny little ‘Â’ characters preceding many sentences.  They don’t seem to be in the actual database entries…