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May 29th, 2021

thoughts

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Launching Rize Projects

D&D description DM Skills App/TikTok

ideas for describing dark skinned characters in more interesting ways

Use colorful language!

Be mindful of the adjectives you use because those help characterize the characters you're describing.

For example when you use descriptors like "dark chocolate" and "caramel" you're describing something that is sweet or bittersweet. Something that is a commodity, something that is consumed. Maybe that doesn't describe your character.

What if instead of saying "she had dark chocolate skin" , you say "she has skin as dark as the sea"?

What if you told me that "her open palms were weathered like unfired clay"?

What if you told me "her eyes were as deep and warm and patient as the night sky turning to dawn"?

What if "her hair coils back on itself like a flurry of storm clouds resting above a stilled mind"?

This is a character who has more of a personality even though she hasn't said a word and nothing has been said about what she's wearing.

When we're mindful about these things we're pushing ourselves to be more creative, to be better writers, and to do service to the characters we're representing.

Thinking about UI/UX for App/ActivityWatch

ActivityWatch has a lot of power but the UX isn't the greatest. This is pretty typical for opensource apps for a couple reasons

Design by committee fundamentally doesn't work

Most open source projects are started by engineers with minimal design background.

tangent I wish there was a place or a pipeline where new designers could be matched up with open source projects that are open to UI changes. So many new designers create fake projects for their portfolio when there are real projects out there that could use the help!

What are some time-tracking UI exemplars?

Rize for macOS

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Launching Rize Projects
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exist.io for a general tracker

Projects/Physical Book of Pocket Articles

Book Pages

Cover

{{TODO}} create a draft version of the cover

Table of Contents

Article Pages

Title Page

{{TODO}} correctly position article start

{{DONE}} correctly position 1 body text box

{{TODO}} correctly move to the next page when page is full of text

{{TODO}} correctly position title

{{TODO}} correctly position author

Page numbering

{{TODO}} correctly position page number

{{TODO}} correctly number page

Body Page

{{TODO}} correctly position 1 body text box

{{TODO}} Correctly split between text and image

{{TODO}} correctly move to the next page when page is full of text

Notes page

{{TODO}} add free notes page(s) at the end

Are the fonts I'm using open source?

Gill Sans - no

What about Gill Sans MT?

Could also check out the google font Lato

Garamond - no

tangent #[inbox]

Replace with EB Garamond

{{DONE}} Do I need to include licenses in my repo?

Switch up the code to use the new google fonts

This became a huge issue, font rendering of external fonts is sketchy at best

Some render like this

image

while others just come in as the default boring font, ignoring font styleing

{{TODO}} figure out a way to dynamically load fonts

{{DONE}} tangent {{POMO: 25}} fix/update App/Tautulli

May 29th, 2021