New Rooms Update
Stairs
The first new zone is the stairs. Is this the first website to scroll on a diagonal??? I think it is but I'm not sure. Initially I wanted to make this out of tables, a rather forlorn style of html:
but I couldn't get the individual table cells sized correctly. I guess that's why they tell you not to use tables.
Then I was going to hang up pictures in the stairwell, of my friends as kids or on Halloween or on Halloween as kids. I always loved that about going to Dan Wars' parents' house, the pictures on the stairwell. But I didn't want anyone to feel left out, so right now the walls are bare, that's TBD. Do you guys ever have a dream about stairs? I do.
Grand Ballroom
If you have a castle you gotta have a grand ballroom, come on. Mine's pretty empty right now but you can still go in there and look around. We're getting ready to show some new work by Tom Bubul, here's a flyer for that:
The show opens in the grand ballroom on April 8th, with a reception down by the pond at 1pm Eastern. But as I said, the room is open now (the show is not yet installed) and you can go in there and look around if you want. It's a nice room even with nothing in it but furniture.
The best part of the grand ballroom right now is the chandelier. While other parts of this website / this castle work on metaphor-- a link to a page is also a door to a room, and so forth-- the chandelier really is photons beaming through rectangular planes of glass. I mean objectively speaking it's both an image of a lighting fixture and an actual source of light. If you're looking at this chandelier in a dark room, it will literally illuminate the area of your computer monitor, your desk, your phone, your face.
Another "maybe first" for the castle is maybe this is the first website to have really high ceilings??? Can anyone fact check this for me? And while you're at it can you check if anyone else ever did "scratch and sniff website"? see: Coat Room, 2020.
Bathroom
There's no way (yet) you can meaningfully piss in the castle, but a bathroom isn't just for peeing and pooping, it's also a place to hide for a few minutes and zone out. So I think in that regard this is one of the better website bathrooms. I know it's not the first, but other website bathrooms seem to prioritize a social or exploration aspect like writing on the walls or chatting with people in adjacent stalls, and that's cool but that's not what I seek in an experience of going to the bathroom. I go there either to use facilities only available there, or to be alone and just zone out for a few minutes. What I mean is this isn't an artwork about bathrooms, it's a bathroom to the best of my ability.
Library
I moved the library to the third floor and hung up an inspirational poster. Everything else about the library is the same, including the ghoulie (Dean) that blows out the candles on the candleabra when you leave. I noticed a problem with Dean (unrelated to the move) where he doesn't distinguish between someone leaving the room and someone simply reading a document, so the candles are getting blown out constantly and you have to keep clicking on them. As a reader, that's a quality I want in a document-- the feeling that I'm no longer in the room, signified only by a disorientation upon my return. But in this instance... it's less than ideal. I haven't figured out how to fix this yet. Quite frankly the library is a bit of a mess but what else is new?
Dots
I started putting these little dots around, and if you click on one there's a little note:
