Dragon's Musings

Darcania

Darcania

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Darcania
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Dragon's Musings

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my blog.

You may think a blog about an autistic-depressive person would be very depressing, and you would be right. Except this blog isn't about me, it's simply findings or miscellaneous thoughts I have involving what I do throughout the day. Any that turn out to be really depressing will likely be placed on DeviantArt as a Journal instead, and any writings/drawings I may occasionally do will also be placed there. So feel free to give me a watch there, too. If you don't feel like watching, I will place a link here. Just don't read any that have /journal/ in the URL if you don't want to read anything depressing.

This will also serve as a place anyone with questions to me may be answered, even the depressing ones. However, unlike those other dirty peasants bloggers, I will be providing posts of my own accord every now and then, too.

If you're wondering why an autistic-depressive person would ever start a blog, I have two reasons: For one, writing out a short summary of my life (Warning: Depressing) helped me feel better about it in general; for two, I want to practice writing more, whether the topic is the intricacies of my depressing past or my opinion on different types of cheeses. Topics involving NS won't be covered unless asked for. At most, they'll be mentioned in the midst of another topic otherwise.

Also, despite the title, dragons won't be covered beyond mentioning a character. This is, after all, an RL blog. If you want to know more about dragons, I encourage you to visit my Factbook or my Factbook drafts. If, for whatever reason, I need to speak in character, that will be marked off.

Finally, don't expect updates to happen too regularly. Sometimes it's difficult to find something that isn't depressing to talk about, and even when I do, I may be too lazy.
 
About Deadlands

Let's see... For my first topic, I think I'll cover a tabletop RPG known as Deadlands. At the invitation of my sister, I joined a group of her friends to play Deadlands. In all, including myself, there are seven people.

For those who don't know what Deadlands is, a long summary is provided in the Wikipedia article linked above. TL;DR: It's the same as the Old West, like the kind seen in spaghetti westerns, but with a twist: In 1863, a link to a world of evil was created. The denizens of that world, Reckoners, seek to turn Earth into Hell, but they need the entire planet to be in the grips of fear to do so. So, they create all sorts of abominations and atmospheric horror to get the population's fear up.

Several years later, around 1879, the campaign begins.

And so we have the six PCs: a Jewish sheriff who doesn't know law, a vigilante who became the sheriff's Deputy and knows more about law, a Mexican rail worker who doesn't know how to fight at all, a scientist who sells animated ducks to children, and then two brothers.

As my character is one of the two brothers, I'll go into detail below. Note that the below background is not finalized, as I have yet to discuss with the Marshal (Deadlands' version of the Dungeon Master) and the other player who controls the younger brother. Note also that it was the other player who came up with the names, so don't call me uncreative or anything like that, especially since I made both these backgrounds in the span of about an hour.
John and Jack Harkness:
John Harkness was born on July 3rd, 1841, soon before his brother Jack. Born in the slums of New Orleans, the two were orphaned when John was 10. The two survived by conning local citizens, Jack providing the honeyed words and John providing the muscle. Due to John's big mouth, though, they rarely got much money. As they got older and more desperate, they began burgling. Jack would gain the information and John would break in. During this time, John learned how to pick locks and remain unseen.
When John turned 20, he joined the Confederate Army and fought the Union in several battles, surviving only due to his natural talent for the gun and his sheer dexterity. He managed to get promoted to the rank of Sergeant before a disastrous command, caused in no small part to his lack of smarts, lost him his rank. He still maintains to this day that he does not believe his drinking buddy was a Union major. However, due to his sheer skill with a gun, his superiors allowed him to keep the LeMats that came with the rank.
In 1863, one day after his birthday, he fled from the aftermath of Gettysburg upon seeing fellow soldiers rise from the dead and attack former friends. His skill with a gun and stealth allowed him to escape. To this day, however, John is still unsure as to what exactly happened and remains in denial. Now a deserter, he fled west, his two trusty LeMats always at his side, in an attempt to avoid the remains of the Confederate Army, becoming a no-name bounty hunter to pay his way. Unfortunately, his lack of smarts often left him with nary a penny to his name.
Eventually, he heard of a man named Jack Harkness. He followed the trail (getting lost quite often) until he finally found his younger brother in 1875.

Jack Harkness was born on [date], 1843, soon after his brother John. Born in the slums of New Orleans, the two were orphaned when John was 10. The two survived by conning local citizens, Jack providing the honeyed words and John providing the muscle. Due to John's big mouth, though, they rarely got much money. As they got older and more desperate, they began burgling. Jack would gain the information and John would break in. During this time, Jack learned how best to manipulate the minds around him.
Whereas John left to join the Army, Jack instead ventured out West in an attempt to make a name for himself in the wild frontier. While he lacked the military training and sheer talent with a gun that John had, Jack learned the ways of the West quickly. He managed to separate a man from his Winchester '73 using his honeyed words and the little money he had, after which he managed to become a bounty hunter of some repute.
Taking on smaller targets than John did, Jack made up for his lower skill with a gun by getting local sheriffs to cough up more money than was originally offered, using his wits and words to squeeze as much money as possible from the law. Due to this, Jack was a much more successful bounty hunter than his brother would become. Unlike John, Jack never encountered the supernatural in his adventures in any major way.
Eventually, he heard of a bounty hunter trying (and failing) to track him down. After a much more successful investigation of his own, he reunited with his older brother in 1875.

Jack and John became quite the reputable pair of bounty hunters, using the same pattern they did when they were younger: Jack would gain information while John would do the shooting. Unlike before, however, Jack was a mighty fine shooter himself and would support John with his rifle, though he remained further back so John would take more of the hits.
In time, however, John divulged his trouble with the law, and at the urging of Jack they moved further west, tracking down a new target, Chuck, to pay their way.
Click to expand...

As you can probably tell, my character is a very specialized shooter with a big mouth, no smarts, and no money. He wields a LeMat Carbine and a LeMat Revolver, so he, in essence, has four weapons, since LeMats have shotgun barrels as well. In the future I hope to get another LeMat revolver, since there's no kill like overkill.

Naturally, this left me with no money, so I'm a heavily armed guy in rags. I didn't even have enough money for provisions, so I don't even have a backpack. So, yeah, this is an interesting start.

If there's interest, I'll cover anything that happens in future sessions. In the meantime, I may do a post on what happened in the first session.
 
News Box

Warning: This topic is about web page coding. I try to leave it readable enough, but don't say I didn't warn you. It is, however, an interesting look at how a coder goes from idea to reality: throw in code, find bug, fix bug, find new bug, fix new bug, find newer bug, fix newer bug, and so on.

Note: This is not a shameless advertisement. I simply wanted to post about something I did today that I was proud of, even if it was a very small thing. It's usually only small things that I can be proud of, anyway.

Hello, again, everybody! All 44 potential duplicates of you!

Today I did something that I'm quite proud of.

For those of you who don't know, I'm an administrator (and also the Provisional Vice Delegate) of a small UCR by the name of The Northern Alliance. I don't entirely know what it's about (I was just invited because the Founder needed help setting up the forum), but hey. You can view the off site forum for the region here. (You might want to do so, since this post has to do with those forums.)

Note: If anyone was wondering why my nation suddenly left the WA, that's why. I was appointed the Provisional Vice Delegate.

One of the first things I started working on when I was left to my own devices to improve the forum as I saw fit was a News Box, like the one you can see right up there at the top of this page. Since I knew only a little JavaScript, I looked at the source of that very same news box for, um... "inspiration". (Sorry, Elu! No hard feelings, right? :) )

However, that thing was way too complicated for an amateur like me to understand, so I abandoned that route and instead looked around for a much simpler news box code. I found one and added it in.

Unfortunately, it was really bare-bones (you couldn't even collapse it) and had a few bugs with CSS, so it didn't quite match the aesthetic of the rest of the forum. For that reason, the Founder asked that I keep it in a locked away test theme until I could fix it.

So I looked around and investigated all sorts of things around what could cause that, reading through the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript, all that. Since I had no idea what I was looking for, I didn't find my answer.

Eventually, though, another admin, Reewa, changed the BBCode that the news box script pulls from so that the bugs would be mostly hidden, though they were still evident. We then moved the code so that it would appear in all themes, effectively releasing it to the public.

I wandered around and did other things, learning more about JavaScript and the ways of the Zetaboards before I finally realized what the issue was: the HTML for the news box didn't match the HTML for the rest of the board, so the right CSS wouldn't apply. As well, the incorrect JavaScript function was used to inject that HTML into the page (append() was used when before() should've been used).

So I fixed that. And it finally worked! It perfectly matched the aesthetic of the board! But there was still an issue... it wasn't collapsible.

I considered adding another JavaScript function to collapse it (by now I knew more about JavaScript), but there was an issue with that: How would I make it so that the collapse button would match the theme? With my still-limited JavaScript knowledge, I couldn't figure it out.

But then it occurred to me: Why code a collapse function and make it match the theme when Zetaboards already did that? All the Section (like Port Thel, Magicality City) already had a collapse button.

So I discarded all that JavaScript from before and instead created a new Section called "News". I checked to see if the section showed up, but it didn't. Obviously Zetaboards wouldn't just blindly show an empty section. So I added a dummy forum (for the sake of utility, I left it as a Redirect, like you would see with the Citizen Registry, that linked to the post that the news box pulled from) and checked again. It worked!

But now I had to make my own JavaScript to change that dummy forum to the actual contents of the post. I knew enough about the HTML of Zetaboards and about JavaScript to know that I'd have to get that part of the page and change its contents. So I looked up how to do that ($(document).getElementById("id").innerHTML) and fixed it up.

It worked! I had a fully-featured news box that matched the aesthetic of the rest of the forum and was collapsible! The page even "remembered" if the news box was collapsed whenever it was loaded!

But then another issue appeared: When restored, the News Box showed the dummy redirect forum. I looked at the URL and found that it had an anchor jump in it (a.k.a. it had a # followed by the name of where to scroll down to, like #new in thread URLs). Because my code had a little artifact in it from the old code that checked to see if the URL matched (exactly) the home page. Since the # threw it off, it wouldn't show.

So then I fixed that (with regular expressions).

New issue: When clicking on the section name ("News"), it would go to a page that only showed that section... and the dummy forum.

Fixed: Changed the regular expression.

Then I had an idea to make it so I wouldn't need the stupid regular expression (in case there were other random pages that had the News section). If the page had the News section, the code would execute. So I applied that change.

New issue: News always shows the dummy forum.

Turns out I was calling the code too early. Since it was called while the page was loading, no page had the news forum (according to the code). So I fixed that.

BOOM! Finally, it was fixed! I had a fully functional, fully featured, fully aesthetic news box!

PARTY!
:dance: :band: :bar: :wave: :cheese:

-cough-

<EDIT>Be aware that the Collapse button doesn't appear if you're only a Guest, like with any section. I did, however, make a little gif that shows that it does indeed collapse:
ceTnMYX.gif
</EDIT>

So, yeah, that's how I coded a little feature in a little-known forum.

Code: 
$(document).ready(function() {
  var element = document.getElementById("forum-3172819");
  if (element !== null) {
    $.get(main_url + "topic/7987065/1/", function(Q) {
      element.removeAttribute("class");
      element.innerHTML = '<td>' + $(".c_post:first", Q).html() + '</td>';
    });
  }
});

In other news, today's my middle sister's birthday. Since she and I hate each other, I spent today with one less insincere birthday wish.

If there's still interest, I'll post about my first session of Deadlands sometime this week.
 
plembobria:
Are you a confederate?
Click to expand...
No, I'm not a native or citizen of any political entity with a confederate governmental structure.

Is that what you were referring to? If not, you can always make the question a bit more clear. I am, after all, autistic, so I can't really read very far into people's statements.
 
Darcania:
plembobria:
Are you a confederate?
Click to expand...
No, I'm not a native or citizen of any political entity with a confederate governmental structure.

Is that what you were referring to? If not, you can always make the question a bit more clear. I am, after all, autistic, so I can't really read very far into people's statements.
Click to expand...
Do you retroactively support the existence of the Confederate States of America?
 
plembobria:
Do you retroactively support the existence of the Confederate States of America?
Click to expand...
I don't really know all that much about the motivations behind the Civil War (I discarded all the terrible history education I received), so I can't in good faith support the existence of the CSA. However, if the stereotypical motivation is slavery, then no. If it's the other stereotype, states' rights, then also no. I'm sure they could have figured out a way to improve states' rights without causing the deaths of millions of people in an incredibly bloody war (iirc). If they couldn't have, then they also really should have avoided such incredible casualties.
 
No, but I didn't know how to close the one here! And it's so annoying when you're on your phone!
 
Oh, hey, this thing exists. I forgot. I think I'll keep tabs of my sessions of Deadlands here, since they've been quite entertaining.

Deadlands: Campaign #2


The basics of the game are laid out in the above post; however, since it's a new campaign, there are new people and new characters!

Right now there are seven PCs (though only six players):
  • John Rockefeller, a rich, obese mad scientist obsessed with himself who owns a ghost rock[note]Ghost rock is coal imbued with the souls of the damned, providing more power (and also screams) when burned, though not everyone knows the nature of ghost rock.[/note] mining company and who doesn't know the meaning of the word "no". Invented a disintegration ray. (No relation to John D. Rockefeller)
  • Running River, a Native American shaman who had to kill her murderous brother to protect her tribe and now just hangs around with everyone else since her tribe died anyway. Favors the bow as her weapon of choice.
  • Zeorus, a mad scientist who got kicked out of his college he was professing at for his "unethical" animal testing. Also obsessed with himself, though he simply believes he is above the petty squabbles of the rest of the world. Invented two things: a "flamethrower" that spits fear gas instead of flames, and a collar that mind-controls a bear named Teddy that he always travels with.
  • Henderson, an elderly Huckster[note]A Huckster is a gambler who took to gambling with evil spirits to gain magical powers.[/note] who once ran a bandit clan and who still has an underground network paying him every so often. Also has a camera to take pictures of the posse's travels.
  • Mums, a reporter for the Tombstone Epitaph[note]The Tombstone Epitaph is basically a conspiracy newspaper that publishes talk of the supernatural. They're more correct than they and others think.[/note] who also runs a shady snake-oil business on the side.
  • Unknown (since I don't recall the name), a small, illiterate child who's very good at pickpocketing. Zeorus picked her up as his apprentice, and thus she is on her way to becoming a mad scientist. Invented a glove that throws molten ghost steel[note]Ghost steel is steel created with iron and ghost rock instead of iron and coal.[/note].
  • Kenneth Cooper, aka Kenny, a half-Indian, alcoholic Texas Ranger[note]A Texas Ranger is a lawman with jurisdiction over all the South, though their main job is to kill monsters and keep talk of monsters quiet.[/note] who's been around the block a few times and has been cursed by evil spirits as a result. Favors the LeMat Revolver and a bottle of whiskey as his weapon(s) of choice.
The above names aren't necessarily accurate, so the above list may be edited at a later date. I may also add in a link to character sheets of all the characters at some point.

Since several sessions have passed, it may be a while until I'm caught up with the most recent session (where a lot of crazy stuff happened, even more than the standard levels of crazy).
 
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