Adventurer's Journal

I don’t want to get into the politics of the Covid-19 response (the consequences are depressing, no matter which side you think is correct), but being essentially home-bound for a few weeks has left me with ample time to go back through my Steam library and fiddle around with stuff that has been gathering digital dust for a while. By happenstance, I installed Beamdog’s Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition, mostly for a chance to laugh at the polygonal graphics (dang, but Aribeth has some pointy things that shouldn’t be pointy; and I remember someone creating “jiggly mesh” to make those pointy bits jiggle – go figure). I sold off my original Diamond Edition game at a garage sale many years back, so I snagged Beamdog’s remaster when it went on sale sometime back as a replacement (let’s not get into the pending stress catastrophes that my bookcases have become over the years – they are sagging in place where I didn’t know it was possible for them to sag). After installing and rolling up a basic Elven Ranger, I remembered that I had written a “Beginner’s Guide” for the game. It was still there, but at some point during the intervening 15 years, Chrome decided that Flash objects were a no-no, so every single one of my menu links were broken because the object that held the link wouldn’t load; Firefox wasn’t any better. Edge at least loaded them if I allowed Flash on a per-session basis, but I don’t do Edge and I’ve long since removed Opera and the other browsers, so I couldn’t say how they handle things.  Well day-um! Where I thought I would be wasting time laughing at an almost-20-year-old game, it looks like I needed to go fix a crap ton of broken stuff so I could refresh my memory and THEN I could waste time with the game. To cap things off, I got rid of the copy of Dreamweaver that I used to write the guide (and create all of those non-functional Flash objects). Not that I would have expected something designed for 32-bit Windows XP to work very well on 64-bit Windows 10, and I’m not going to shell out $250 per year for the current version. “Software as a service” is a whole other rant, but I wouldn’t use it often enough to justify the cost in any case. So back to Notepad++ I go, the whole while wondering whether I remember enough about HTML to fix the parts that needed fixing (I did, and Lord, it is tedious). I’m pretty much done with the Prelude and Chapter 1 and have mostly got the page edits into something resembling a routine. Give me a couple more days and the whole thing should be up and running again. Maybe then I can go back to grousing about lockdowns and laughing at Aribeth’s jiggly bits.