Kickstarter Roundup, May 2018

by ThomasNo Comments

Recently there was good news in updates from two long-delayed Kickstarter campaigns I’ve backed and another thing I backed just ended, so why not do another review of projects I’ve backed that I’m waiting on?

One of the ways you can review your backed pledges is by going to the pledge page on your profile. It’ll have a list of your active pledges, all the things you’ve backed (“successful pledges”), and a really annoying section called “unsuccessful pledges”. I hate that last section — it “includes dropped pledges and pledges to failed or cancelled projects”. I hate that section because I have one, and only one, project listed there, a project I cancelled my pledge to because we had a financial crunch right at that time. So it just sits there, Kickstarter reminding me of that one time we had an emergency that caused us to cancel our luxury expenses because there was this Thing going on.

I suppose it’s like when you’re on facebook and they keep trying to get you to be friends that ex that cheated on you in college or how it reminds you that four years ago you had the cutest dog ever, not knowing it’s been dead for months and you were just about over the loss.

Thanks, computers! You’re awful.

Anyway.

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Section-Specific Table of Contents and Navigation

by ThomasNo Comments

Fantasy Flight Games just announced that Genesys, the generic version of the game system that runs their Star Wars and upcoming Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying games, is available as a pdf. I’m interested in that game because I love some of the things it does (I’ve gone on about how the boost and setback dice are some of my favorite dice in rpgs) and one of the example settings is Android, the cyberpunk setting for the Android board game (which I love), the Netrunner game line, and pretty much all of FFG’s near-future cyberpunk games.

But then I noticed it did something really interesting with the cross-references.

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Character Styles and Layout from Word

by ThomasNo Comments

Late last month, I wrote about paragraph styles in InDesign. Although at the beginning of that writing, I talked about how I convert marked-up copy with grep searches and why that needed to have standardized naming conventions for styles. When I finished that article, I realized I began by saying “when I first started doing layout” to introduce the marked-up copy concept, and never went into how I currently prefer receiving copy. That way? Word documents.

Marked-up copy has several things that can slow down conversion to layout. Just to name a few: authors have to manually insert [bold], [h2], and other tags; an author might not close the tag correctly, which will mess up your grep queries; an author might label things like the headings incorrectly.

A Word document seems to take care of all that.

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