A goodbye

I have been thinking for a while about the destiny of this blog and I have realized that, differently from the times when I have started up, blogs are being a bit outdated.
Especially this kind of blog, where a lot rotates around reviews and screenshots of "daily life". Everything has been replaced by other tools/websites, which I had already tried to integrate on the blog (see the https://www.goodreads.com/).
Of course, I could use this to write something different than what I had tried to make this blog for, but time is a very limited and I have ended up prioritizing other things and this blog has never took off as I'd wished.
Therefore, it is a time to call it a day.

Nowadays, Mattias is the chef at home, so there is little I cook worth mentioning

For the other "activities", without taking in consideration that the time put into them is very limited so there is not that much happening:

You can still ready about our house related activities on http://villabellevue1910.blogspot.com

For travels or restaurant I am using Tripadvisor: https://www.tripadvisor.com/members-reviews/AriannaB

For books and manga I use Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1054618-arianna

For movies, there is Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/user/id/790202006/

For games, there is BoardGameGeek: https://boardgamegeek.com/user/aryhann

And for anything else, I am mostly using Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/aryhann/

For the few ones that have been reading here, I thank you for your time and hope that you will follow some of my stuff by checking the sites above.
See you!

Nostalgia

During the past months, I have spent a lot of energy trying to find the time to update the blog.
I have surely small and uninteresting things that I would like to pester everyone with by sharing them through the blog, and although I have been taking notes of what I want to talk about, I have barely managed to prioritize finding the time for this.
The result is that some stuff got obsolete and some "classical" posts have not happened (the one about Isabella's birthday for example).
Said this, it seems though that everyone survived just fine...

On top of this desolation of posts, I have also noticed that most of the older posts, which were enriched by wonderful pictures, have lost the appealing side (the pictures, that is), since they were on some free online service and it seems that doesn't work anymore.
Well, if anyone gets the urge to actually be curious what certain things were or not, I have of course all the pictures (I hope) so in that case, I would try to fix the post, otherwise, I hope posterity will forgive me for my lazyness.

During the last months, apart some house improvements, which has brought also, together with the piano, boxes full of manga, books and university material (wow, I was keeping my notebooks in such order), a wave of nostalgia, especially "musically" wise.
Nevertheless, when going back to Italy for the summer holidays, I checked for more find from the prehistoric age and got some nice hits.

Anime from the 80s

Although our kids are not exposed to the same quantity of anime that I have watched (both because we are a bit stricter with the TV than my parents and because we have to go through youtube for watching them), I am trying to gently push down the culture I have been growing up with. 

Finding these two books was great. "Il pianolibro" was a cute book with small extract of the anime opening titles in simplified piano score format. There was also a little keyboard that could have been used to play pedagogically the songs. Unfortunately, that got broken very quickly.

Since now the kids are watching Captain Tsubasa (Holly e Benji) - finally, by the way - they like me to play that quite much.

The other book, Memole has also the opening title piano score on the back and Isabella loved the story. I hope to find the cartoon online sometime. 

Mermista, She-ra Princess of Power and Angella

After visiting a friend of mine, who had a fantastic book about the Masters of Universe, I ended up searching my She-ra dolls, where She-ra was the sister of He-man. If you don't know who they are, or you are too old, or you are too young, in either case, I recommend to study a bit on Google :-)

The dolls became very popular with Isabella, so I was forced to bring them to Sweden. 

Sadly, Angella's wings have been broken almost from the very beginning and now the shields and the sword are quite brittle and break every two seconds....

These were the 90s instead

Finally, I have found also the piano scores of one of Take That's albums (I would have preferred though to have "Everything changes"). Luckily, I was so cheap that I just went and did photocopies of the piano score. Not funny to play those songs when you don't have a boy band....

Summer Restyling

Summer is on its way (just a bit more than one week to go) and I have decided to refresh the blog with something new.
Some new background and colors as well as a new format (3 columns instead of 1).

Still a lot to do, I have of course (!) big plans and I am using the time needed to rock Isabella on her little bouncing cradle to do some of the things I have in mind.
So, this is not going to be the final result (hopefully), but we are getting closer!

Some suggestions or feedback so far?

How to use a cute font when blogging

I have been using some unusual and fairly complex system to display cute fonts for headers and such in my blog. However, I had problems of transparency with Chrome on Ubuntu (see this post) since what was generated was basically images with some strange setting and, I had recently noted that the hosting of the font, on Webs.com was not working any longer and I didn't think that was a stable solution for what I had in mind.

Taking inspiration from other blogs (e.g. my friend Chiara's one), I had decided to find a simpler way to make the blog cuter, without too much fuzz.

After some quick Google search I found this wonderful page and decided to use some of Google Fonts. I think I have been playing too little with the web in the latest years to not know that Google has a font API as well as realizing that the modifications to the blog layout were not just HTML settings and some weird language, but the so call CSS language, which I am now somewhat learning by playing around with the blog. Nothing fancy or complicated, but just made me realize I have been out of the "business" too long :)

Now, I will play around more with some fonts and hope I will have a nice result!

Engaging the reader

It is not easy to keep the interest up of the few readers of a blog! There are so many blogs and maybe one lands on some blog when searching something on the internet, or simply, when surfing from blog to blog.

In search for inspiration, I have viewed several blogs that were suggesting at the end of each post, related subjects-posts. Today, I discovered that adding such feature is really simple! It is enough to use the LinkWithin widget, which takes few hours to sort out all the blog content and make proper guesses.

When doing this, I have noticed that my fonts got screwed up! I need to fix that - I wonder what is wrong with the Webs account where the fonts were lying....

A mixed post

I have so many things I would like to blog about, but for the moment I will limit myself to two.

First of all, I have retouched once more the blog graphics. This time I have corrected a tiny "misspell" in the header image, adding the right Swedish vowel. Secondly, since I got nicely pointed out that reading all the blab that I write with the previous color font could make a person sea-sick, I have changed it to a darker brown. I hope it has improved! Feedback is always welcome, good as bad!
Finally, I have improvised and this time, without the help of a tutorial, I have fixed the sidebar and added the same separator as between the post. So now the blog looks more coherent in itself. Fancy!
I still have the Chrome transparency issue on Ubuntu, but if some other geek wants to help me out with that I will be happy. I have sent a bug report to Chrome, but so far, they have just ignored it.
I think I would like also to have the pictures I post in some nice way. Fix the transparency of them and maybe a bit the border. But I am not sure I will do it also for the pictures of the previous posts.

Secondly. Let's change topic fully and talk about a game that we have been played about one week ago.
Arkham Horror. I think the main horror is the rules and the amount of cards that one has to display over its table. We just have a small expansion, but if one is geek enough, probably you would need to play on the floor to have the perfect area to play on.
The game is based on the novels written by Lovecraft, set in Arkham, a town in ...somewhere in USA.
Some divine monsters and other kind of creepiness are terrifying the town and the big Cthulhu one day, might decide to wake up and destroy everything.

So, the game is about being collaborating together in order to avoid that one of the Ancient Ones will wake up, by entering dimensional gates, exploring the other world, closing and sealing the gates and solving some other entertaining task, like killing various types of monsters.
All together, the game is pretty funny, but playing it the first time can be really a killer. Many cards, many rules, a lot of explanation that can be a good resolution if one suffers of insomnia, and so on, however, it is exciting to try to beat time (and the game itself) attempting to avoid all the catastrophes that instead the game is placing just in front of our heroes....

If you are an Arkham Horror freak, I really recommend to check this funny site:Indie Squid Kid. Hilarious against Carcassonne :-)

Some minor beauty changes

Yesterday, since unfortunately we couldn't fulfill our romantic plans to celebrate our third wedding anniversary due to sickness (it sounds like we could not fulfille a time plan in a project ;-D), I ended up having some free time to work on the "ugly" things of this blog.

I hope you can see the minor changes!
First, I have fixed the header name and the title of each post by changing font. I think this is much more readable!
I have found that I could drown into a huge amount of free cute fonts by looking at the usual homepage. It is there that I found "my" new font and I am sure I could have spent some more time looking there.

I then decided that I wanted to enhance the blog by adding a post divider. This was an harder task, mainly because I could not find a post divider that I liked (too many were just silly blinking GIF images with a terrible graphics).
Adding a post divider was a fairly easy step. It was enough to follow this guide.
So that was quick enough.
I then tried to revive my graphical skills, but by using GIMP and by not having the right image, I spent a lot of time without doing anything good (just wasting time :-( ).

Desperate, I was ready to beg the authors of The Cutest Blog On the Blog to fix a separator, when I saw that eventually among the extras there was something for me...thank God!


And now...what more I have to fix (excep the Google Transparency issue on Ubuntu that noone wants to recognize as bug?!?)

Work in Progress

Hej Hej,

Today I am trying to play around (instead of trying to decrease my hideous to-do list) with the style/design of the blog.

If you are using Google Chrome it will look horrible, since there are some problems with the transparency of some images.
Nevertheless, I have followed this *awesome* tutorial for personalizing a bit the fonts used and I think we are getting closed to something nice.
What I don't like (except the horror with Google Chrome), is the fact that there is so much space around the font title and the font seems a bit too thin to be read properly. Maybe I should find another font?

I have also modified the header, but I am not fully satisfied there either. I don't like so much the frame around it and I think the font for the Blog name is a bit too "unclear".

What's your opinion? :)