I figured that more than complaining about the dearth of random and weird websites, I might ought to contribute something. I almost went to MassArt for new media installations. In those days I was a web monkey with a solid design bent and very orthogonal thinking. I still have a smidgeon of the thinking, we'll see what I have left of my design skills, but my tech skills are hopeless. Back then my tools were freehand, dreamweaver, bbedit, photoshop, flash, Perl, Solaris, mySQL. My last website was done with rudimentary css.

I would like to get right to the design and expression phase, I don't have an inclination to dive into coding. I also don't want to worry about security. I'll throw a few bucks down.

I'm still comfortable in photoshop, but would like a more fun tool. I cannot stand illustrator, and would love to have a vigorous chat with the folks at Adobe who chose to promote it and shelve freehand. Better yet, an even more vigorous chat with the moron at the FTC who approved Adobe's buyout of macromedia. You can bet that will be on the website. Is there any equivalent to freehand? I saw the post about a free, online illustration tool that came through recently, that might be a smidge rudimentary. What about dreamweaver? And how to publish? I don't care to learn about content management, scripting, databases, etc. if I can avoid it.

Bonus if there are AI tools to help.

There were a few years when RTS was a popular genre with games like Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and Starcraft being very popular examples.

But these games have mostly died out, and I was wondering if maybe I'm just not aware of modern RTS variants, or if there are good reasons why these games died off.

Like, are Tower Defence games a form of RTS?

Are there any RTS games where teams play against each other, so 2v2 rather than 1v1?

So I'm reading Asimov's short-story anthology The Complete Robot, which contains stories written between 1939 and 1977, and I'm fascinated by several instances in which Asimov tries to predict the future of robotics.

When he gets it right is just as interesting as when he gets it wrong, as even when he's wrong, he's wrong in very interesting ways.

For example, it's very interesting how Asimov seems to think that everything must have a positronic brain (which often produces something either identical or very close consciousness), when in reality we now have numerous useful robots that have nothing of the sort.

So this made me thinking, I think I'd like to write a story that was just like that, an exploration of universal themes that is facilitated by simplified technology. A form of retrofuturism. And since I had the idea, obviously someone else had it before. I wanna read it! More recent stories, especially those with old-school robots and artificial intelligence. Any suggestions?

Also open to other medias, but books would be particularly helpful.

I mentioned a small age ago that I'm teaching myself to make a skirt. I finally have progress I'm ready to share! The buttons are just sitting on there, and it needs a waistband, but it's nearly ready!

Taking shape!