ToDo: Find Mascot For OpenUru.org

[JWPlatt]

Disclaimer: This thread is a cheat. I'm putting this on the ToDo List only so I can immediately cross it off with some great sense of accomplishment.

This news is also in this forum because it is confidential for now.


Today is a great day. Why?

Because I got something cute and furry in the mail. Email, really.

Mac_Fife and I were chatting about rarified's idea of a puzzle. We can still discuss the puzzle idea, but our discussion evolved into something about a mystery sprite hopping around our web pages from time to time as a buildup to CWE.

From there I suggested maybe we need a mascot, because we already have a nice logo that Tweek originally designed. So Mac did what he always does - immediately finds a bunch of cool reference stuff he creates out of things he picks up from conversations like this. It's a gift he has for knowing what people would like to see and being motivated to find them.

I mentioned three ideas: a yellow rubber ducky, a quab, and a squee. Or maybe Mac suggested the squee. Or was it the quab? Anyway, he found a bunch of cute rubber ducky art, some stylized, and one, uh, rather too "Mother Goose" for my tastes. The duckies were nice, but wanting. I also figured everyone just wants to boil and eat quab, so a squee seemed more viable as a mascot.

So Mac found an adorable line drawing of a baby squee on DeviantArt.com, done by artist EA Derby, along with a bunch more of her Myst/Uru art. I contacted EA Derby, whose name I didn't recognize, but she knew me from posts "in the past" on the forums, knew of OpenUru.org, and really was enthusiastic about the idea. Without my asking more than just the use of the image, she offered a license to OpenUru.org for exclusive use of it and the high resolution source art. A very, very generous gift! So we can easily work it into our own art and develop a full color version if we want.

EA Derby was very professional about it, but said we needn't credit her (she'll get it anyway), and offered her thanks to us for helping to "keep the URU multiverse available to everyone."

It's things like this - the creative process, the evolution of ideas, the contributions - that really, really make my day. This is fun!

[Mac_Fife]

I see that E_Derby has taken the image off her Deviantart page, and replaced it with a note to say the the baby squee has gone off to join the "grown-up squees": http://e-derby.deviantart.com/art/Baby- ... e-81843746. And it appears that our new mascot is called "Mini", according to the note.

I guess "mini.gif" in page sources will be in no way revealing of anything .

[Mac_Fife]

JW - you need to get the Squee into the Blogs header image

[JWPlatt]

I wasn't sure yet whether to present her (Mini) somewhere yet. The idea originated out of introducing her more slowly and mysteriously.

Maybe take this to the puzzle discussion.

[Mac_Fife]

"Mini" is now active on the "About" page: As a sort of Easter Egg, if you pass the mouse over the word "projects" and the end of the phrase "patterns spread from person to person as they work together on projects" you should see her (very faintly) running across the masthead.

I'll do similar on other pages when I get time.

[rarified]

"Mini" is now active on the "About" page: As a sort of Easter Egg, if you pass the mouse over the word "projects" and the end of the phrase "patterns spread from person to person as they work together on projects" you should see her (very faintly) running across the masthead.

Didn't work for me (Opera 11, either native mode or Firefox masquerade). I put the output from the Opera error log in http://foundry.openuru.org/assets/Found ... e-errs.txt if you have an interest in looking.

Do you want me to file a JIRA?

_R

[JWPlatt]

Works for me in IE8 every time. It's very, very light (transparent) at this time, which is intentional. She walks or runs (depending on we'll-let-you-figure-it-out) right to left and stops at the logo.

Opera, Chrome and Firefox all played the animation once and would not replay until a refresh. It could be a local problem with local javascript, settings, etc.

[Mac_Fife]

Do you want me to file a JIRA?

I had a look at the errors, but none of those are anything to do with Mini: They all seem to be browser specific CSS extensions for things like rounded corners and opacity (don't you just love the way browsers adhere to "standards") and mainly for the Vector/OpenUru wiki skin. The animation only plays if you're viewing the About page from the menu - it doesn't work if you're looking at the "source" page in the wiki.

It is very faint right now and could easily be missed. As JW noted, for some reason the animation only repeats in IE, which is odd because I put a "Reset" callback in at the end of the animation . I'll have a think about that - it may be more to do with the way I'm triggering the animation than the javascript itself.

[a'moaca']

I get this. My browser is apparently very literal about mini.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/javabits/fx.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/javabits/mini001.js"></script>

<img src="/javabits/images/Mini_Blink_3.gif" opacity:0.0; filter:alpha(opacity=0)>

About OpenUru.org

[Mac_Fife]

The issue of only playing the animation once in non-IE browsers is because I got my DOMs mixed up - I was fading Mini in by increasing the opacity of the DIV holding her path, then fading her out by decreasing the opacity of the SPAN holding the image. That meant that when the DIV was faded in on subsequent attempts the contents were still transparent. D'oh!

@a'moaca' - I'd only expect to see that if javascript is turned off in the browser (although you'll also see that if you look directly at the page OpenUru:About in the wiki, since the wiki doesn't parse javascript in articles.)