Season Towers

There's changes afoot! Season2Ep14.net is undergoing a major re-design.

Over the next few hours the new CSS based layout will go live for the main archive (The Zone Noir will remain using the old layout for a few days, and will follow if nothing implodes in the meantime).

As a result, you might see the odd glitch as files are replaced. Posting is still live, but won't actually show up on the site until after the new layout is up.

Comments and feedback on the new layout are welcome! Hopefully I won't break anything.

The Season2ep14 e-mail has been playing up over the last few weeks - It seems not all messages have been getting through to Season Towers, and not all of our fabulously witty replies have been getting out.

So, if you sent us some witty discourse, and didn't hear anything back, do please send it again. The crack 24/7 support team is convinced that the problem has been solved.

Season2ep14.net is backup and running fine. No data was lost during the downtime, although do let me know if you think anything's amiss.

Damned interweb technology.

Season2Ep14.net is currently down after a hard disk failure in our server. All data and content is completely safe, and I have the daily rolling backup to fall back on if something does get zapped.

A new hard disk is currently being installed, so hopefully downtime should be no longer than an hour / hour and a half. I'll keep you updated.

I’m planning on changing the site layout in the new year, and in preparation I’ve been prodding photoshop a little. I’ve included two screenshots of the new layout below. Comments? Suggestions?



Bear in mind that the images at the top will change at random, just like they do at the moment.
There’ll also be a few new features launched alongside the new layout. Plus, for the web design savvy amongst you, the new layout will be built in pure CSS (the current design is all tables), so it should make it more accessible to people using different browsers and platforms, as well as being a little lighter on code.

The written word is all well and good. But the spoken word can be better.
The guys over at Geekintertainment have been doing a Buffy PodCast (basically a downloadable MP3, for those of you not in the know) for the past few months. The guys (two of them) sit down infront of a microphone, after having watched an entire season of Buffy over the past week, and talk about each episode in turn. They do a season a month, and have currently done the first three seasons of Buffy.



There's an odd mix of hardcore buffy fan obsessive tendancies, and very un-obsessive tendancies. Like knowing which actors originally auditioned for which parts, and not knowing what episode Jenny Calendar died in. But there's some great insight, some good opinions and just general buffy discussion.

Although, for my liking, there's not nearly enough Innocence discussion.
There should always be more Innocence discussion.

If anyone wants the RSS/XML feed for the BuffyCast on it's own (rather than the whole Geekintertainment feed) to add to their aggregator and can't find it, just comment here. It's not all that easy to find.

For those of you who might have missed it, this past weekend saw the kind of official launch of the much sneak-peeked Zone Noir.



Featuring Essays, a Beta Readers Directory, Fic (just awaiting that deluge of submissions) and many other ramblings of a Noiry nature. And hopefully soon to be the BtVS Writers Guild Noir Zone.
So, go on, check it out.
Submit something even!

So, it turns out, hot tea and routers don’t mix all that well.
I’m not entirely sure that the hot tea is the important part, as opposed to the liquidyness factor, but still.

So, that’s the reason for the total lack of posts this past fortnight. I was relegated to dialup, which meant e-mail replies, and nothing more. Damn pesky call charges.

Now however, I’m all speedy with my new shiny D-Link router. Which means not only updates to this place (and a humungous one is planned for towards the end of next week), but also much more regular updating over at the Season Towers LiveJournal.

A quick cross-post from the Season Towers development blog:

This Friday (25th) there shall be some downtime.
A brand shiny new Dell server (with all sorts of fancy bits in it) is being installed and things in general will have to be switched off during the switch over. So the site will be down during the switch.

The switch will be made at midnight on Friday, and the downtime should be around 3-4 hours. As long as nothing goes horribly wrong. Backups of everything have been made (and will be again on Friday morning), so there’s no need to worry about losing fic. You might want to hold off posting your fic on Friday though, as it might get added after we do the backup. And you wouldn’t want that.

For those of you that are interested, the new server is an Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz 800Mhz FSB with 2x100gb sATA Hard Drives in RAID Configuration running Windows 2003 (Web Edition). That will be hooked up to a Dual 1,000Mbps Network Interface, the same as the old server.

The Fanged Four have a helpful little vampiric Family Tree here.

Housekeeping: For those of you who haven't noticed, Season2Ep14 now has a pairings function for all fics - So if you have any fic on there go add the pairings option so that people can find your stories easier..

Time magazine has an interview with Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, wherein they talk about writing, fandom and the ineptness of book/comic to screen conversions. Also, nakedness.

"I always say, I will never do anything that's not genre. People go, well, what about Roseanne? I'm like, yeah, okay, but . . . That to me was genre because it was a sitcom with real people in it which, to me, was at that point a fantasy. I always tend to think just left of center, to remove myself from the world by one step. It is very freeing, and it's a particular way of coming at stories and looking at them that I find the most beautiful stuff that I know comes from, ultimately.

It's all stories about people. I mean, that's all anybody's writing, with very few exceptions. I can't imagine doing anything just straight up, unless it was a period piece, because so much of science fiction is basically creating history. A fascination with any time that's not ours is inevitable, so I love period stuff. That's the only thing I could imagine myself doing right now that wasn't straight-up fantasy. "

Welcome to the Season Towers Writers Room.

Season Towers is the LiveJournal writers resource and challenge site for Season2ep14.net, an automated BtVS and Angel FanFic archive. You're welcome to mosey on over there and browse the archive, or even Post Your Own Fic.

In the future I hope to post interesting articles, resources or essays about the process of writing ('Specially FanFic) or aspects of the Buffy'verse that I stumble upon, as well as issue Fic challenges for posting on Season2Ep14. There's already a development blog for Season2Ep14, located here, so there shouldn't be any geek talk taking place here. Although it's surprising how I can manage to slip geekiness into most things.

Feel free to friend at will, no need to ask.