Appassionato

One blog post for the past year

Categorised as Design, Personal, Romance, School, Site-Related & tagged with gaming, Internet, maplestory, relationships, uni, wow.

In the last post, I said that the business card design was the first step in getting to this version 20 design. Guess what? I lied. I almost forgot that I had ever designed what I should now refer to as Appas­sionato Version 19.5. Indeed, this is the reason I once blamed Sheng Han for using a header back­ground image similar to mine:

All my guy friends thought this was the best design I’ve ever came up with, totally un-Rilla style, and it’s actually the first photo manip­u­la­tion I’ve done. Reasons why I didn’t go through with it:

• It looked perfect on my 1024 x 768 screen, but when I switched to a laptop with 1280 x 800 screen I realised that it was too small.
• The file size of all the images was too big for a blog.
• No one ever notices my favourite part of the design: the hanging wire aka “skip to footer” link.

Main crux of this blog post however: summary of the past year of my life.

Academics

1. Up to my June finals, my course­work track record was straight As and A+s. However, just 3 days before the round of finals, I broke up with my ex-boyfriend and found out he had been cheating on me. So, my exam grades plunged.
2. I thought I did amazingly well in the November finals, but for some reason the results were only mediocre.
3. I got crazy angry at a bunch of overly-competitive “friends” for always coming to ask me about exam results after a long dry period of com­mu­nic­a­tion between us, like it’s the only thing worth talking to me about. Grr.

Overall, absolute shit-all year in terms of academics.

Romance

On 14 November 2009, I had my first date with my current boyfriend, Stephen.

Basic story is, we were in the same MapleStory guild a few years ago but never really talked. He added me on Facebook randomly in October. I was almost going to ignore the friend request but intuition (probably?) told me to accept. For the following week we were spamming each others’ walls with essay-length messages and we were getting teased by our own friends. Then we moved on to texting and calling each other for hours and hours each day. One night we talked until 5am and he told me he was inter­ested, so la la la.

Stephen’s the first boyfriend that my best friend Sean has “approved” of. It’s been 7 months and we’re still lovey dovey so all’s good. Probably the only things we ever argue about is me con­stantly asking if he still wants me when I’m PMS-ing and World of Warcraft.

Gaming

1. September 2009: finally decided to quit MapleStory for good. Before then, I was waking up at 5am quite regularly to level at double speed and sometimes I’d spend $50-$100 a month, totally ridicu­lous for a “free” online game.
2. December 2009: Stephen got me into World of Warcraft (how ironic that a paying game costs me one-tenths of a free game). Initially I was crying for being a noob, always getting ditched and always getting lost. Then even­tu­ally when I levelled my hunter to Level 80 (max) everything got so fun and addictive. I had to cancel my sub­scrip­tion tem­por­ar­ily to attend to exam studies this month.

And that’s about all I can think of that really happened over the past year. (Sorry for the long post and I’m finding the long list of cat­egor­ies & tags ‘lol’).

Now, in response to sug­ges­tions about the current design:

• I chose BIG text because most of my visitors are now using screens bigger than 1280 x 800. But I just decreased the font size by about 10% of the original.
• Changed text colours so I believe everything is now com­fort­able for reading.
• I know the book designs were better, and fixes the random-floating look of the top nav­ig­a­tion links, but the smallest I could reduce that book to before it started looking “bad”, was still too big. Big headers can be good, but when it’s a heavy graphic it increases loading time and the colourful design would overwhelm the text content, which should be the main thing for a blog.

I added some new pages: Writings and Past Designs, which are pretty much just old content from before.

And unfor­tu­nately, my Macbook has some issues with its audio output so it’ll be living with the repair dudes for the next few days. No new additions until it’s back!

Related posts

• One year hiatus is over!
• My new and prettiful food journal blog
• Loyalty is difficult when it’s ugly!
• Good to be home
• Season’s Epilogue WordPress Template

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