“One fat. Two fat. Red fat. Blue fat.”
I’ve been watching this comment thread evolve all weekend. I’m not sure what I think about it yet. I guess I feel a little bit like Piro when he doesn’t understand how people can react negatively to something that he does out of love. MintChaos.com is far from perfect. But it is a personal project, and it’s only two months old. It is inconsistent and unfocused. The only real force behind the weblog portion of MintChaos.com is a personal determination to make myself write. Because I have avoided it for most of my life. As a result, my writing tends to be forced and full of technical errors. I’m working on it.As for MintChaos not being wallpapery enough. Is there a way certain types of sites should function? These three popular webcomic sites suggest otherwise. Things might change once I get around to retooling MintChaos.com, but for now we have a layout that was created before I knew where MintChaos.com would go. If you must have a wallpaper centric layout please reset your bookmarks to www.mintchaos.com/wallpaper/, the proper home of the wallpaper archives. It has been here the entire time.
If any of you would like to critique something that would be useful to me, critique the wallpaper. What works? What doesn’t? What makes you want to use something as a wallpaper?
Not all comments were negative, most were not. I do appreciate the feedback.
While pondering these things, I took the time to set up a MintChaos store Currently there are t-shirts available featuring both the green and pink basketskulls.
Xian 04:39 AM, 04.22.02 - p-link
Comments: “One fat. Two fat. Red fat. Blue fat.”
re: feeling like Piro - you’ll get past it. Or you won’t, and you’ll be like Piro without the benefit of having Dom and Ed and a bunch of protective forum-goers around. After a while, it is no great surprise that you can do something for free that you love and people will whine about some aspect of it. If you’re more mature than, say, me _ sometimes this whining actually helps. It’s easy to set up something and really like it, but then changing it around because of a suggestion is much harder (and changing it around because of someone’s whining really is maddening!). I know of what I speak since I worked on my paperdolls for so long. You think you get flak… Try having an audience composed of impatient young girls _
re: consistent design among genres of websites - as a matter of fact the Sinfest and Penny Arcade sites really annoy me, in terms of that snippy little Jakob Nielson school of design. Sinfest takes half a minute to load the actual comic on a modem connection and even if it didn’t you scroll all the way down and if you scroll too far you’re at the bottom and you’ve missed it so you have to scroll a little up. There’s a lot of wasted space and a lot of things probably no one looks at past their first couple of visits, while the comic itself is somewhere near the bottom of the page. Penny Arcade, same sort of thing. You’d think the focus of the site is the comic, but apparently it’s Tycho’s rants, which are only interesting AFTER you read the comic. The comic itself is tucked into a little tab which apparently has nothing to do with the rest of the site - that is to say, 90% of the front page is non-comic related and 10% (if that…it’s still early) is what you’re actually looking for.
I quite like Penny Arcade lately, though. I stopped reading for a long time. But that has nothing to do with anything, as does, um, the previous paragraph.
anyways… time to get back to studying. two exams today _
Liana - 05:26AM Monday, 04.22.02
What’s this about paragraph tags being automatically added again? _
Liana - 05:26AM Monday, 04.22.02
Xian lets you mark up your comments now. One implication of this HTML-allowed, let-she-all-hang-out technology is that MintChaos.com won’t ‹p› for you.
Brian - 08:50AM Monday, 04.22.02
Ah yes: the other thing too.
Wallpaper. I like the brash, detailed, intuitive wallpapers. We’re talking like Crickited series and Angel face and Flower Shower. These are all wallpapers that have an elegant visual, um, concept but are still appropriately obnoxious.
GAME!
Brian - 09:22AM Monday, 04.22.02
I’m all about making yourself write. And I’m glad to see you do it. I just felt like it had stalled out at some level, and that you were no longer acheiving/addressing this goal.
Dad - 03:40PM Monday, 04.22.02
I don’t know about that assessment about the cricketed wall paper. I happen to think that it is pretty cool wallpaper in both concept and design. I like it so much it is my wall paper for the week! _ keep up the good work Xian!
Chris - 11:03PM Monday, 04.22.02
I don’t know about that assessment about the cricketed wall paper. I happen to think that it is pretty cool wallpaper in both concept and design. I like it so much it is my wall paper for the week! _ keep up the good work Xian!
Chris - 11:03PM Monday, 04.22.02
gomen about the double post.
Chris - 11:04PM Monday, 04.22.02
Chris — re-read Brian’s post; You’ll see that he likes the Cricketed series. Xian — I only give constructive criticism because I care; Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother, right? I want to see your site kick as much ass as possible, because I know you’re good for it. I’m not one of those braindeads that think that being a friend is all about blindly agreeing. You are one of the most talented art-type humans I know personally, so I want to see more of your art when I come to your site!
Eric - 12:24AM Tuesday, 04.23.02
And yes Eric, you are right. MintChaos has been begging for a redesign since the day after it launched. But I haven’t been able to get anthing done on it yet. Because of all the time I put into it in the first place, I had to let it set for a while and get my other projects in order. The new deisgn will not only have more wallpaper art, but it will also showcase my fine art. I think you will like it. In the mean time, you can amuse yourselves by buying artichoked tile coasters from the MintChaos Store. -_^
Xian - 08:36AM Tuesday, 04.23.02
Eric, I did read Brian’s post and his post said “These are all wallpapers that have an elegant visual, um, concept but are still appropriately obnoxious.” I was just saying that Cricketed is not obnoxious, that’s all. plus how can he get better with out “keeping up the good work.” I never said he was perfect or his art was, but I believe in pointing out good points in art and other things so the artist or who ever can know what he is doing right not wrong. build the peeps up, don’t knock them down buddy. How can criticism be constructive if you go for the throat when you do it? That’s all that I am going to say on this subject. sorry for the not so exceptionally long, but still long post.
Chris - 09:33AM Tuesday, 04.23.02
Chris, a weird fact about humans is their occasional use of such items as ‘ironic distance’ — often in conjunction with such items as ‘sardonic humor’ — how creepy!
Brian - 10:21AM Tuesday, 04.23.02
Chris: I think in the context of Brian’s post “obnoxious” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though it may not have been the word I’d have used since it’s easily misinterpreted. For example, we hear Mr. Christian grumble about Thomas Kinkade - that kind of stuff he does is the exact opposite of obnoxious (well, it’s intended as such at least.) So what Brian is getting at (or my interpretation, that is) is that Christian’s wallpapers can be nice and pretty to look at without being sappy and bland.
Hope that helps!
Liana - 11:02AM Tuesday, 04.23.02
Yah, I was assuming Chris was the Chris we know, who knows how we communicate with friends. But, it appears to be an overly sensitive yay-sayer that considers our posts “going for the throat” of our long-time friend. Yeah, “build the peeps up” even if you think they could do better than they are, and want to encourage them to do so!! Woohoo idiocy!
Eric - 11:10AM Tuesday, 04.23.02
Yay for clicking on a new comment thread and losing my comment. _
As I was writing before… One of the books I read in my Linguistics class talks about the differences in communication among different cultures, and used the example of Viennese culture to explain this. Thing is, Americans tend to go into a conversation with the intent of keeping it friendly. We want everyone to be happy, to have their say but to keep things polite and smooth. You stay away from religion, politics and sex and that’s it. You’re not having a big debate, you’re just having a conversation. Viennese, on the other hand, look at it differently. You’re all adults and the relationship is already just great, everyone is already friendly and we’re on the same page so we can get straight to the big political discussions. It’s not about keeping things smooth and happy, it’s about really having an invigorating conversation.
So I think what I’m getting at is that, maybe, Eric would do well to learn German and vacation in Vienna. _ But I think what I’m really getting at is that we’re not on the same page. To us - that’s me, Brian and Eric - the idea that we’re all interested in cutting Christian down is laughable. We all support the website, we all like the wallpapers we like. Brian has some of Christian’s artwork on his walls and he’s spent time helping Christian figure out how to put the interesting things in his life into words and on his website. When Christian gets a cool job doing his artwork, we’ll all be celebrating for him too. But Chris, you don’t spend time with us anymore so you don’t know all that. What looks to us to be a continuation of this real-life relationship - where we know where we all stand and continue accordingly - looks to you like an attack, and that influences how you reacted. So, and I’ll be quite honest here, it looked to me (and I imagine to Eric as well) that you were going after Brian unfairly, and everything goes straight downhill from there.
So…chill. Don’t bother defending Christian from enemies he doesn’t have. Christian, post something new so we can all whine and moan about that instead _
Liana - 07:17AM Wednesday, 04.24.02
I do have a tendency to ramble, don’t I? _
Liana - 07:17AM Wednesday, 04.24.02
Abundance, like want, ruins many.
breast - 03:12PM Monday, 04.18.05
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