I made a few changes (again) to the galleries on the website. I decided that instead of entire separate pages of galleries of things like dining, Victoriana, which give us an idea of certain aspects of the characters and the world they live in but are not the most essential information, I would make them video galleries.
So I arranged the images with captions in a video format, and some of them are a bit long to look at in complete silence. Well, you can, but if you do like a little music, I decided to use music that is mentioned in the book series. Example: Michael Curry's love of Vivaldi. Two of the videos have music from The Four Seasons. Spring and Summer, specifically.
They are not fancy; I've uploaded them to the Parlor's YouTube channel and embedded the videos in each page with a video gallery. YouTube videos that are embedded will still let you mute the sound, add the video to Watch Later, share, and it can be done right from the website page the video appears on.
I've been going back and forth with the site's graphics and organization so much that I haven't worked as much with the text. I write the text for the site myself, and any text I have not written that appears on it is sourced. This has always been the case.
The site will be 15 years old next month! While that is quite a milestone, something that happened around the same time is that I was in a car accident. I had whiplash, which happens when you're slammed around in your seat after being rear ended. Of course, the back of my head hit the headrest pretty hard, right about where the occipital lobe of the brain is.
Did you know the optic nerve goes from your eyes and back to the occipital lobe? That is probably what caused me to go lights-out for a few seconds at noon on a lovely, sunny day in June. This is where I must insert a PSA: if you are in an accident and/or you hit your head hard enough to be unable to see for a second, YES, you do need to get to a doctor. Whiplash is obviously a potential result, but it's your head you need to make sure is not damaged worse than it might seem.
I've always had good memory, but ever since, I have struggled to remember little things, and possibly to form long term memory to some extent. I knew there was a reason God decided I would love Post-Its!
In any case, it's not easy to remember what you wrote fifteen years ago. As I have been working with the site, I've often reflected on the things that have changed since 2008. Not just in technology, but in the world. We know a great deal has changed in terms of how the public responds to particular issues, and even in what we know about our own genetics and our genealogy.
As I watched the series, the comparisons came up a lot. Rowan advising Tessa on how to deal with a bunch of modern day witch hunters by using the example, "Don't feed the trolls"; Rowan on the phone with an adoption agency that could not have handled Rowan's "adoption" in 1991 because they weren't around until 1995...
In the book timeline, 1991 would have been a year after the events in the three books that are the Lives of the Mayfair Witches...1995 was when I first read them...
Anyway.
I come back to a scene that was, I believe, in the first episode of the AMC series Interview With the Vampire. There was Daniel, older, cantankerous, and getting more and more irritated by the second as he described what caused such massive changes in journalism as he knew it.
"This little f***er changed all of that." Daniel said, and then held an object up that fits in one's hand: a smartphone.
It certainly has.
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| Image: GetNotifyR |
This little dancing banana was used in my Parlor Chat several years ago...