Old blog archive: 29 April 2002

*shrieks*

Lee, if you see this, THANK YOU!!!

*composes self, though she still has a goofy, little-kid-at-Christmas expression on her face*

I’ve been keeping in touch with Lee Agosta, the guy who “wrote” the PoDW RPG module for D&D, and he offered to send me the rest of the Pirates of Dark Water documentation he has. It came today (I should’ve asked him to send it next week, as it’s Georgia Tech’s finals week…ack!! Got one tomorrow, another Wednesday, and another Friday ^^; ).

I’m TOTALLY blown away.

He sent a thick bundle of paperwork, as well as a video tape–I don’t have a VCR in my dorm (I don’t own a TV or a VCR, and the TV we do have is my roommate’s–they had a VCR, but it belonged to the girl who left after fall semester, whose place I’m taking now, so to speak), so I haven’t watched that yet–I’m guessing that’s a good thing, though, or I’d be distracted FAR more than I am now, and I can’t afford any more distractions this week. ;o) Tomorrow’s final’s not bad at all (Women, Literature, and Culture–exactly like our midterm, which I made an A on–even if I make a B on the final, I’ll still have an A in the class), but Wednesday (4th semester Japanese) and Friday (Economics, which has never been my strong subject)…they aren’t going to be fun. :o/

Ack, enough about finals! I vent enough about those in my regular weblog as is. ^^;

Anyway. So here’s a rundown of what he sent me:

– 6-page stapled set of papers, with pages 1-5 being quickie synopses of the original original Dark Water episodes (this whole thing was drafted in ’90 and edited in ’91)–and the descriptions are different from Dark Water! In episode 2, Ren gets wounded with a crossbow shot from Konk here, while in the episode, the Atani soldiers fire a round and one hits a gold cup Ioz is holding at his chest, so it doesn’t technically wound him. In episode 3, the island isn’t the monkey-bird island of Pandawa–it’s just an island with a monkey-bird tribe on it, being held as slaves by “a group of evil humanoid aliens.” And in the series, it seemed that Tula didn’t think badly of Ren for wanting to stay–I never quite understood that; it seemed like she was clinging to his arm but Ioz hauled her after him or something…I’m not entirely sure. :o/ And at the end, originally Ren and Niddler’s ship was supposed to be crippled by a leviathan and THEN found by the Maelstrom–in the series, their ship’s just captured by the Maelstrom, period. In episode 4, Ioz’s friend is Mantus, not Zoolie. And in episode 5, the play of events is a bit different than what ended up being in the series. The last page has a list of credits of some of the major actors, showing that they’re definitely acclaimed members of screen, stage, and television productions of the past.

– 2-page stapled set of papers with really quick blurbs describing the main heroes and villains of the series.

– Full-page color print of what I’m guessing is concept artwork–Bloth grabbing Ren’s arm as Niddler’s trying to fly away with Ren in tow, and they’re right by the constrictus pit–and the constrictus is reaching up to grab at Ren’s leg. It’s AWESOME. I think I may get it framed or something…

– Dark Water: The Series Bible (yes, BIBLE! *shrieks again*). It’s a 50+ page packet FULL of information about the series, written by a person named Sean Roche in November of 90 and then revised in March of 91–there hints about why things are the way they are, some cryptic descriptions–the character descriptions from the RPG are from here. There are synopses and…just all sorts of AWESOME stuff. I read it in full, but will come back and add details later.

– 15 glossy sheets with the Hanna-Barbera logo on them, so I’m guessing these are officially official. *grins* Synopsis, character profiles of Bloth, Ioz, Joat, Konk, Mantus, Niddler, Ren, Tula, and Zoolie, sheet of group spot drawings, 3 sheets of action poses, one each for Ioz, Ren, and Tula, and a character expressions sheet for Tula. I believe these sketches/poses were incorporated into the RPG book–I took it home last week (I’m moving out of my dorm this weekend and had to get lots of “unnecessaries” out of the way), or I’d check…they look familiar, though.

– 14 sheets of SCHEMATICS. I know there have been people looking for these, so… *grins* Anchor, catapult, attack scout, scout ship, and 10 of the different decks from the starboard side of the Maelstrom.

*REALLY wishes she had a scanner* I may just go, “Screw it!” and buy one this summer. I’ve been wanting one for a while to update my art site and stuff as well, and to scan other stuff for my PoDW site…I’m looking through all this and wondering how I’m going to incorporate all of this into my site. *grins* I hope it’s okay with HB/WB that I do, too!

But I was sitting here, flipping through these earlier, and going, “…oh, man, how is it I get so LUCKY? How have I lucked out in finding connections like this, and finding people who are so willing to help me build my collection and learn more about the background of the series?”

*grins*

I can’t WAIT to see what’s on the tape he included.

*giggles like a schoolgirl again*

Old blog archive: 27 April 2002

(tried to post this last night, but Blogger was having issues.)

Maybe I should provide a status update on the site…

Got a new layout decided upon and basically tweaked. (Basically. I’m still not totally happy with it, because it scrolls horizontally in anything below 1024, which makes me cringe, but I just didn’t like it any other way. And I caught a look at Dais and Kento’s Room‘s new layout (not sure how new it is; I haven’t been by in a long time) and instantly felt the urge to do something more modern, so I played around for a while yesterday with layouts and just came away feeling disgusted and cheater-ish, and I came up with nothing good to speak of anyway, so.)

Anyway. This new layout is really similar to the current one, except it doesn’t involve frames, and the colors are brighter. I may even bug my friend Andy to teach me snippets of PHP to incorporate, but I like changing the side menus to signify where on the page you are, and if I used PHP while changing the side menu–that’s just pointless. ^^;

What’s done so far? *pops zip disk with site-in-progress on it back in and takes a peek to refresh her memory*

First off, I’ve changed the organization of the page. There are fewer categories, each category having subpages. We have:

Site Information – about, FAQ, news, updates, credits
Characters – profiles–I may incorporate voice actor mini-biographies into here as well
Episodes – list of links to summaries, but with quickie 3-line mini-summaries under each episode title
Images
Downloads
By the Fans
Dictionary
Links
Interact
Miscellaneous

Done with site info and episodes–I’m still struggling on the layouts for the character bios, so I’m going to come back to those after I’m done with everything else. (Every time I type “bios” I think of the computer term, ooops. ^^; ) Well, I’m relatively done with the episode section–I’m wondering how to redo the individual pages…like, should I give them new layouts, or keep them as the same black-on-white plain Arial pages? They take long enough to load as is because they’re just so long, so…I’ll probably leave them as is or something. I may put up the .doc files so people can download them and read them at their own leisure, too.

But as for what else has changed–oh, I’m taking down the sound clips because those things (all of which I captured) are PATHETIC. -_-; I can’t believe I left clips with such crappy quality as those up for so long! And the “By the Fans” section is the formerly known Fan Works section, but it also includes the Unexplored section too. That should be about it…I’m also not sure if I’m going to change the layout of the dictionary (which will still be a popup–it’s much easier that way), and I want to figure out a different way of doing the image galleries than how I had them before–thumbnails? There’d be a LOT of those, though, so probably not…

But that’s where the site stands. It took me long enough to come up with this layout, and with exams coming up–I may get a bit more done tonight, and then no more until Friday, most likely. Though Friday’s going to be spent packing, so I can check out Saturday–still not sure about my housing situation for the summer (long, kind of aggravating and involved story)…so that’s definitely going to be the main thing on my mind at week’s end. But by Monday I’ll definitely be settled in someplace, and will get back to work on this in full during the week I have off before the start of summer semester and my work term. (I could work on this at work, but I have no zip drive there, so probably not.)

And that’s where I’m at right now. :o)