The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's "journal of journals" on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

Things That Just Seem Kind of Sleazy Now

• Facebook flirting
• Sites that spell out a word by including the domain suffix (e.g. http://fluf.fr)
• Neo-burlesque
• Car murals
• Anyone Oprah approves of
• The whole "my ad looks like it was shot for YouTube" thing
• The Reagan Presidency
• Weezer
• Every news channel but The Weather Channel

New Population Map Images

Work on the Population Map continues. Below are some test renders from last night. Click for high-resolution images.

The Animation:Master project file is 5.5MB in size, culled from about 7.5MB of data. Some of the random colors chosen by the script make neighboring states hard to distinguish, which will be corrected in jEdit with find/changes. The enormous Yukon/Koyukuk Census Area in Alaska, with an average of one person every 22.5 square miles, is so close to the ground plane that it's causing the software to glitch. The fill lighting is perhaps a bit too strong while facing west, and the key a bit dingy overall.

Griping aside, this project is coming along well in my opinion.

Moleskin Notes

These were my original scribbles for the population map project. I try to work as much out on paper as I can before moving to the computer.

Gawker Steals My HR Comic

How sarcastically flattering.

Here is Gawker's featured shirt of the day:

And here is the very first Human Resources comic strip, number 1 of 41, from September 2004:

Here's how it works. The HR comics were popular with my fellow grunts at the job that inspired them, and were widely circulated on MySpace. (They still get a few dozen hits a month.) Someone saw the strip, liked the punchline, and submitted it to Gawker. They couldn't spell children.

I guess I should be a little flattered that it was voted highly enough to get a shirt made.

But at least when design firm Pylit liked my Tape Case Bike Light, they were decent enough to pay me to rewrite the article for them.

Fun With Data

I started work on a project a little while ago, and it's probably past time I started blogging it. My intention was to produce a population map of the United States, county by county -- essentially, a map of the country's other topography.

Each cylinder represents one county or equivalent (e.g. an independent city, Louisian parish, or Alaskan census area). The circular area represents the land area, the height its population density, and the volume of each cylinder its population. The cylinders are instanced Animation:Master models generated by a script.

The population and land area data come from the U.S. Census Bureau web site. Location data is approximated from Census Burea .bna outline files made available on the Princeton web site by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne of the 2004 Election "Purple Map" fame.

The first version of the script could build one state at a time. With 254 counties, the most of any state, this is Texas:

The second could produce an arbitrary number of states with random colors, but each had to be loaded by hand as soon as the script finished with the previous. This is New England, where I was born and raised:

The first version of the script that could construct the entire United States took over 14 hours to run and had several bugs, one of which limited it to 99 counties per state. This is its first output:

Right now, I have debugged the script, analyzed its output for missed counties, and am working at sanitizing the input data to avoid screwups. I hope to have a complete work in progress by the end of the weekend.

You Can Put a Pig in a Dress, Too

This weekend, as part of my ongoing project of pretending to be my age, I picked up my first decent coat in Freeport, Maine.

Now to do something about everything else. This could take a while. Maybe I'll start with the hair.

Signup for Sandy

Having little besides time at the moment, I've decided to try out a new productivity tool. IWantSandy.com is an email-based natural language calendar/to-do notification service. It's by the original creator of the Blosxom CMS that runs the Space Toast Pages.

There was no setup required beyond email, password and confirm password. Thus far, I've sent the service an email asking it to remind me to call a staffing agency that's been doing some work on my behalf at 1PM. The message was in the following form:

Remember to call Tigres Pileser at the Windy City Senate at 555-555-5555 at 1PM.

In theory, IWantSandy.com will send a reminder to my inbox at 1PM today. Supposedly, it'll also store the contact, company, number, and so forth for retrieval at a later date.

We'll see how it does.

They Tried to Destroy the Metal

It's a Record

My roommates have gone through an entire roll of toilet paper in one day. Ladies, if any of you are looking for a nice young man to settle down and, I dunno, move in with... let me know.

Things I'm Embarrassed I Sort of Enjoy

• Jenna Malone
• The Westway theme song
• ArtDungeon.net
• Confrontation
• Slice-of-life stories
• Algebra
• Nerdcore
• Making do
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

It's Time for Another Good Idea/Bad Idea...

Inkscape: Replacing Static Palettes With Dynamic Swatches

Filed as a feature request on Inkscape's Sourceforge page:

The only major problems with Inkscape's workflow have to do with fill and
stroke selection. Without an object selected, the Fill and Stroke window
is greyed out, preventing the user from selecting a style prior to working
in it. This is fairly logical from a programmatic object/attributes
standpoint, but to an artist it's very back-to-front -- we don't expect to
begin drawing with a crayon and then change it to a marker. Likewise, in
everyday drawing one tends to flip back and forth between a few
commonly-used styles, but the only way to return to a style in Inkscape is
to draw a path, select another object containing the desired style, copy,
reselect the new object, and paste the style into it.

Replacing the color swatches at the bottom of the window with dynamic
swatches made up of previously-used styles -- including fill, stroke,
opacity, blur, etc. -- could improve Inkscape's workflow a great deal. The
current swatches take up a great deal of space onscreen but only serve to
duplicate part of the Fill and Stroke window's functionality.

With dynamic swatches, making changes in the Fill and Stroke window with no
object selected would create a new swatch. Clicking on a previous swatch
would bring it back to the first position and assign its style to the next
object drawn. I've put together a mockup of what this might look like.

"Windy City" Enters Its First Screenwriting Competition

My first feature screenplay, "Windy City," has been entered into the 2007 ASA International Screenplay Competition. The quarterfinalists will be announced by February 28, 2008, with the semifinalists coming out April 30 and the final winners being announced at the awards ceremony at the end of September, 2008.

As much as I dread (and typically fail) at self-promotion, it's nice to be back on the contest scene. Æsop's Council of Mice was my last animated film to play the film festival circuit, following the relative success of my award-winning debut Marboxian. Owing mainly to financial difficulties, I wasn't able to do much with Mice, and I've had to focus on making a living since.

It's been mentioned a few times here, but maybe it's time to introduce the thing. Windy City is a classic city mouse/country mouse story written by someone who's been both. It has airships and fantastic cities, natural and manmade disasters, and a whole laundry list of other exciting things. But that's not why you'll fall in love with it. The real movie is about a boy from the valley and a senator's daughter from the city -- Dan Assurbani and Nineve Sherrib -- and how their lives meet and grow more and more complicated.

Windy City started life as a treatment six or seven years ago. At about this time last year, I dusted it off and set about cleaning it up. Somehow the treatment became a full first draft by April, and I had some friends with a bit of theatre experience over to do a cold readthrough. I sat on the lessons I learned from hearing it out loud, and the remaining issues I had with it, picked at it for the next few months as life got complicated again, and finally -- in four days at a friend's house in coastal Maine -- burned through to a second draft in late August.

It's been an interesting year. Wish Windy City luck.

! Proper Usage

Software: Inkscape

Retired Addiction

"Aria: The Natural"

Longer and less plot-heavy than the first series. Great for chilling out with some weights and stretches before bed.

A Different Hill

In my dreams there's another Boston.

Where the Fenway and the E train should be there's an expanse of rundown, uninteresting concrete buildings. Maybe there's another line south of the E train.

Last night, after the flat concrete section came a neighborhood of steep hills with equally rundown platforms, roughly where Roxbury should have begun.

To the west, where Brookline should have been -- or at least the no man's land between the D train and Coolidge Corner -- was a shabby, Allston-like, busy Y-shaped intersection. There was a place I needed to go which was on the far side, behind the intersection, and hard to reach.

To its west, the ground sloped steadily upward for a mile or more. At the top (very high up), looking down over the city, was an abandoned set of concentric concrete terraces, enormous, an expanse of disused parking around a building that wasn't used anymore. Sumac and other fast-growing trees were taking hold heavily on the slope.

One night, there was a posh place above MassArt. The street sloped gently upward and broke at a compact building with a glass foyer. The main street curved to the right there. Another, smaller street broke off just before the curve, behind a wedge of brick brownstones, and continued up the same hill; it was much more neglected, and seemed to be where people lived. Maybe that hill was the same as the first. Maybe they were all the same hill.

Oprah Winfrey in Haiku

Scorn a man who says
Only what you want to hear

And now Doctor Phil

The Bestiary of Geekdom: Wikipedian

Added "Wikipedian" to the Bestiary of Geekdom.

Amazon.com's MP3 Store

Overall I'm pleased with the Amazon mp3 store. Good interface. Good prices. Previewing tracks and albums is intuitive, the samples are high quality, and you don't wind up with a desktop full of little .rm files after previewing them all.

The selection can be lean, even with slightly out of band tastes. I can only find one full VNV Nation album, while Rotersand turns up a remix album, and Seabound is MIA. That said, discovering new acts based on what you already know is easy and -- dare I say it -- fun, at least in the heavily incestuous world of electronica.

I didn't enjoy having to install an application to download full albums. I also didn't enjoy being forced to purchase using "one click" -- why can't I shop and then check out? I read through the terms of service, and there's no mention of watermarking or inclusion of my account info in the files, but I wouldn't call that conclusive. Will I get a nastygram from Amazon if someone swipes my SD card? Hopefully we won't find out.

Once I'd made my purchase and installed the application, the downloads were quick. On my Mac, the Amazon application created an "Amazon MP3" folder in my music folder and generated subfolders for artist and album in the iTunes style. The tracks were automatically imported into iTunes, although I found it odd that the application didn't create a playlist of the album. One question I haven't found an answer to is whether, like in iTunes, I can purchase the remainder of an album for the (discounted) album price if I have already purchased tracks individually.

Bottom line, Barry Adamson's "King of Nothing Hill" sounds great in iTunes, will play in TCPMP on my Palm Zire and can ride a thumb drive to my client onsites. At the same album price offered on the iTunes Store for a track that's locked to play only in iTunes on my own machine, I'd call that a deal.

Series

The web is littered with incomplete projects, and there's no reason for it. Typically, the author of a podcast, webcomic, art or even written blog series simply grows tired of keeping an open-ended project alive. Updating drops off, then links die or the server stops responding. Lives change and obsessions evolve, but why should so many great projects die a heat death?

Ignore the web for a moment and think about television. Television series are finite. Even "Meet the Press" (USA), "Coronation Street" (UK) or "Hockey Night" (Canada) are purchased by their respective broadcasters in set batches of episodes. These are called "series" in the UK, or, a bit less accurately, "seasons" in the US.

It's a good model. Rather than simply beginning an open-ended project, why not commit to a set "series?" If the project is successful, commit to another series. If interest wanes, tie it off at the expected ending and move onto something new.

To help with the process, I've dashed up a little web 2.0 gizmo. Input episode number, total series length, and series number (if applicable), then copy and paste the code for a little button into the entry's page on your site. JavaScript is required to produce buttons but not to display them, though older versions of Internet Explorer may have trouble displaying them correctly without running the included script.

Happy serializing.

Series:

(blank)123456789 0123456789

Episode:

(blank)123456789 0123456789 of (blank)123456789 0123456789

Copy and paste this code into your page:

Retired Addiction

"Doctor Who," Series 3

"Dead Dog" by Nicholas Ozment

Pseudopod Horror Podcast #055

Not a bad story. The language was very well used. I found the black dog myth and the narrator's guiltless infidelity a bit hard to lash together thematically, and some of the descripive passages and long flashbacks made my attention wander.

But I have a request. Referencing the "mini generation gap" comment I made on "The Apple Tree Man," could we hear a bit more from the under 40 crowd on future Pseudopods? I'm sure doing abhorrant things with a wife and kids at home is viscerally arresting once you have them, but trust me: down here, clawing our way into a dead and cynical global economy, there is horror aplenty.

DIY Coms

So let me get this straight. Now I get to watch...

• Shitty commercials
• Shitty commercials that look like they were made by amateurs
• Shitty commercials that were made by amateurs

Notes on the Matewan "Massacre"

From a description in Christopher M. Finan's "From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America"

The Matewan "Massacre" would make an interesting, if challenging film. Starts out with a classic Western-style showdown. Escalates to open warfare.

"Passengers on the Norfolk and Western trains went through the battle zone crouching on the floors of the cars while glass crashed overhead."

• Sid Hattfield (28). Police chief, former miner. Shot Albert C. & Lee Felts. Gunned down on courthouse steps.
• Albert C. Felts. Shot mayor Cabbell Testerman. PI for Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, deputized in neighboring town. Hired to evict fired miners.
• Cabbell Testerman. Mayor & town druggist. Authorized the arrest of the detectives for carrying arms within town limits.
• Miners. Payed in company scripp. Fired when they joined unions.
• Baldwin-Felts Agency Detectives. Seven killed by miners in initial gunfight, rest fled across river.
• President Warren G. Harding. Sent in Federal Troops.

OUTSIDE

• Rev. John Haynes Holmes. Eloquently denounced the violence on both sides.
• The ACLU. Only a few years old. Spoke out against the underlying causes.
• The courts. Widely abused injunctions to suppress meaningful picketing. Used sedition laws unevenly to ban violent pro-union publications while allowing employer publications to advocate violence openly.

A Chart of the Pressures Facing an Essentially Straight Modern Woman

Concept: An attempt to understand said topic, rendered in the form of a nautical chart.

Software: Inkscape

Download:

• PNG image, 640x2048 pixels
• PNG image split as wallpaper, 1280x1024 pixels
• SVG, unlimited resolution

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

See Also: My previous infographic of the second Lancet study of Iraqi War Deaths at one per pixel, and photos of "the island" near my home town in Maine.

The Great Facebook/AIM Plague of '07

I recently accepted an invite to Facebook, which should have been my first warning. I've worked hard on this site and this blog for the pleasure or pain of the internet entier, and I dislike the very concept of internet "walled gardens" requiring exclusive membership.

But join I did.

Facebook has a feature which allows you to issue invites via the AIM network. Last night, while attempting to add my roommate as a "friend" -- something I thought I'd already done in real life some months ago -- it discovered a second real-life friend on my buddy list and asked if I would like to add her as well. I asked it to invite them both. Somehow, that caused invitations to be sent to everyone on my AIM buddy list! Everyone. Including people who were offline. Just. Plain. Everyone. Several-year-old addresses, people I haven't spoken to in years, you name it, there's now a special invitation to Facehuggerbook waiting for them the next time they log in.

And there's no way to stop it.

As my here message now reads in iChat, "FUCK Facebook! Sorry ALL of you."

Admiral Bulletin

A game of storytelling
Rules for v0.1 (first beta)

[This document pertains to the version 0.1 rules. $file::bulletingame is the latest version.]
[Printer-friendly version]

Admiral Bulletin is a storytelling game set against a '30s pulp adventure backdrop. 3-6 players cooperate to tell a classic adventure in 9 chapters. There are no winners or losers, no stats, and no dispute resolution -- just rewards for bringing the awesome. Players begin by deciding what genre themes are allowed, deciding on a title, and coming up with locations. Play is a simple matter of speaking as many lines as you're allowed every round while trying to work in certain events that must take place in the chapter. As the game advances through three acts, these events change subtly, pushing the story toward its thrilling conclusion.

1. SETUP

To get started, players will need:

• 1 to 5 dice (six-sided)
• Counters (beads, pennies, etc.)
• Scrap paper

Optionally, players can print off from this site:

• A game sheet
• Event cards
• Character cards

One player elects to keep the game sheet. His or her job will be to keep track of Chapters and Locations.

Put a pile of counters into the middle of the table and give each player 4. These are the Awesome. Every piece of the Awesome is equal to one natural speaking breath.

Prepare three columns for Character cards somewhere on the table. These columns will track Protagonists (Pro), Neutral (Neu) Characters, and Villains (Vil). Characters are represented by a name on a piece paper. Two Characters are required in the Protagonist column at the start of play: Admiral Bulletin and Miranda. (See APPENDIX A. - CHARACTERS)

2. THEMES

Themes give a rough sanity to the game by deciding its boundaries. Themes must be chosen unanimously. Players may select as many or as few Themes as they'd like -- none at all is often a good place to start. (For available themes, see APPENDIX B. - THEMES)

3. TITLE

Players now choose a title for the Bulletin book they're creating. (Classic examples include Admiral Bulletin and the Snows of Tan Ana, Admiral Bulletin and the Lost Fleet, Admiral Bulletin and the Eudoxian Delay and Admiral Bulletin and the Foreign Star.) Record the Title on the game sheet.

4. LOCATIONS

Each player now secretly writes down four locations.

Every chapter takes place in one location. Locations can be as specific (The British Museum, The H.M.S. Reliant) or as general (France, The Pacific) as a player likes, as straightforward (Shanghai, The South Pole) or as intangible (Among the Ruins, At Tea) as need be.

The first player writes down "Eppings on High St." as the location for Chapter 1 and initials it. A Bulletin book always starts here, at Bulletin's headquarters.

Play proceeds to the right. The next player selects one of his or her Locations, and announces it as the Location for Chapter 2. This is recorded on the game sheet, along with the player's initials. The next player to the right may now choose one of his or her Locations, or return to one which has been used previously. Continue choosing locations in this manner until Chapters 1-9 have all been filled.

5. EVENTS

Before Chapter 1 can begin, the Events that take place within it must be decided. Roll 5 dice, and place the 5 Event cards corresponding to the dice rolls into a pile in the middle. (Printable Event cards are available on this site.) Add one additional, special Event card: The Hook. This is the Event that allows the player to end the Chapter. A Hook may not be played until all other Event cards have been used.

The player who rolled the location of the Chapter chooses one Event from the pile. Continue to the right. The next player may select any of the remaining events. Continue until all are gone, including the Hook.

Events behave differently depending on the Act of the Chapter in which they happen. (For all Events, listed by Act, see APPENDIX C. - EVENTS)

6. CHAPTERS

We're about ready to begin Chapter 1. The person who selected the Location (check the initials on the game sheet) starts. He or she announces the Chapter number and Location. All dialogue hereafter during the Chapter should be story content.

As previously stated, each of the 4 pieces of the Awesome a player begins with equal one natural speaking breath.

To begin, the first player slides one piece back toward the pile and speaks the first line. He or she continues until all four pieces have been used, and then recovers the 4 pieces for his or her next turn.

Example:

Lets say another player liked the bit about the fire in this example. He or she may award the speaker more of the Awesome from the pile in the middle -- completely on a whim. Use the Awesome to reward what you enjoy. The next time it is the first player's turn, he or she will be able to use the additional Awesome to speak more, or hang onto it for later.

Each player also has one or more Events which must be worked into the story. To play an Event card, he or she narrates its payload into the storyline and discards the card to the center of the table.

Example:

The cast is tracked with Character cards (which need only be scraps of paper with a name on them) in the Protagonist, Neutral and Villain columns. CAST Event cards allow addition and subtraction of Characters in these columns. SWITCH cards allow the movement of Characters from column to column.

Example:

When all Events for a given Chapter have been achieved, the player holding the Hook card is free to conclude the Chapter on any of his or her subsequent turns.

The procedure for beginning a Chapter repeats. Players roll the 5 Events for the next Chapter, add the Hook, and divide them up. The player who initially chose the Location for the Chapter announces the Chapter number and Location, and begins speaking.

7. ACTS

Chapters 1-3 make up Act I. This is the Act for introductions, both of characters and the overall contents of the story.

At the beginning of Chapter 4, Events change slightly. Act II -- Chapters 4-6 -- is the Act of switching. SWITCH Events can go in either direction, pushing the secondary cast regularly between columns. Your MISC. Event becomes a change of overall objective for the team.

Act III -- Chapters 7-9 -- are about danger and, ultimately, resolution. Characters can no longer be introduced with CAST Events. SWITCH will only resolve Neutral Characters into Protagonists or Villains. MISC. Events trigger dire snap decisions or the catastrophically unexpected.

APPENDIX A. - CHARACTERS

Some classic Bulletin characters are provided below to get you started. Printable Character cards are available on this site. Note that some Characters are restricted to certain columns, unless playing with the "Literary" or "Countercannon" themes.

• Admiral Bulletin - PRO
  -Must be in play
  Our hero. Head of the British Office of Special Projects, based out of the old Eppings Bank building on High Street in London, UK.

• Miranda - PRO
  -Must be in play
  Bulletin's second in command. A woman of mysterious past. Crisp, dry and sharp, she is the brains behind the Bulletin. When not on missions, she spends her days pondering and cataloguing the mysteries she's packed away from past adventures in the Eppings vaults. The precise nature of her relationship with Bulletin is an enduring mystery.

• Dr. Posthaste - PRO / NEU
  The Admiral Bulletin of a couple generations previous. He keeps a room at Eppings on High Street and serves as Bulletin's mentor. He has a taste for good mysteries and good scotch, and keeps a remarkably full schedule for an old man enjoying retirement.

• Robespierre - PRO / NEU
  -Requires Magic
  The jovial and unswervable Frenchman, with only a confusing swirl of illusions for a head. Overtaken by the mystical energies within at a young age, he has spent his life searching for the secrets of his peculiar transformation. One of Bulletin's oldest and most loyal comrades.

• Lord Timothy - PRO / NEU
  -Requires Antagonism
  So closely Bulletin's match in duties, rank and age that it's inevitable that they should deeply loathe one another, Lord Timothy never the less will work with Bulletin when the well-being of Britain is at stake. Suggestion of a past with Miranda, who is oddly pleasant with him.

• Merideth "Mimi" Songbird - PRO
  The front desk girl at Eppings on High Street, rarely brought on missions. She is young, anxious to please, and very smart. Mimi spends much of her time assisting Miranda, and regards the older woman with a hero's worship. Lord Timothy was somehow involved in her decision to leave New Zealand, and she becomes brittle at his mention.

• Madame LaChance - PRO / NEU
  -Requires Spiritualism or Magic
  French-Creole spiritualist given to remarkable feats of intuition -- or are they messages from the spirit world? Silky and aloof, but prone to open flirtation with Bulletin -- especially with Miranda in earshot.

• Space Boy - PRO / NEU / VIL
  -Requires Sci-fi
  An astronaut of the Royal Space Force, somehow transported back to Bulletin's day. He is garrulous, gee-whiz and mischievous -- not to mention a bit annoying.

• Tackwater - PRO / NEU / VIL
  -Requires Potboiler
  Headquartered in a forgotten office in the London Police Annex, Tackwater has men in high places, low places and everywhere inbetween. Sharp-featured, angular and greying, the ambiguity of his rank and responsibilities bequeaths him a great deal of power. Apt to call Bulletin in when he smells something above the profitable levels of corruption.

• Jim Gear - PRO / NEU
  Bulletin's miracle mechanic. A young Scotsman prone to shouting, cussing, cracking jokes and loudly complaining. If Gear can't fix it, it's a hippopotamus.

APPENDIX B. - THEMES

The currently available Themes are as follows. A game may include as many or as few as the players wish.

• Americans - Bloody hell, here come the Yanks
• Antagonism - Protagonists can have open animosity toward Bulletin
• Countercannon - Ignore Pro/Neu/Vil limits on all Characters, i.e. Bulletin or Miranda can become Vil, etc.
• Crossover [with ________] - Crossovers with other literary canons
• Literary - Pro/Neu/Vil limits expanded by 1, i.e. Miranda can become Neu, Timothy can become Vil, etc.
• Magic - Spells, sorcery and really magic things
• Mythos - Elder gods and cults of alien machinery
• Potboiler - Radically shrinks the scope of the story and refocuses it on slow-burn urban intrigue, typically in London
• Sci-Fi - Rocket ships and laser pistols
• Spinoff Adventure - Game does not require Bulletin or Miranda
• Spiritualism - A more subdued form of magic, typically offscreen and mysterious
• Steampunk - More subtle than sci-fi, focused mainly on anachronistic technology

APPENDIX C. - EVENTS

Printable Event cards are available on this site.

Act I (Chapters 1-3)

• (1 or 6) CAST: + Pro Neu Vil
  Add a Protagonist, Neutral Character, or Villain to the storyline.
• (2) SWITCH: Pro <-- Neu <-- Vil
  An apparently Neutral Character becomes a Protagonist, or an apparent Villain becomes a Neutral Character.
• (3) BACKSTORY: Pro Flashback
  A Flashback begins, focusing on a Protagonist. This flashback may be exited by any subsequent player at any time.
• (4) MEANWHILE: Pro, Neu, Vil
  The scene cuts to another character in the given Location. In Act I, this can be a Protagonist, a Neutral Character or a Villain. Both storylines may be intercut for the rest of the Chapter.
• (5) MISC: Shift in Weather
  The weather changes.

Act II (Chapters 4-6)

• (1 or 6) CAST: + - Neu Vil
  Add or eliminate a Neutral Character or Villain.
• (2) SWITCH: Pro <--> Neu <--> Vil
  Move a character by one column in either direction.
• (3) BACKSTORY: Neu Flashback
  A Flashback begins, focusing on a Neutral Character. The flashback may be exited by any subsequent player at any time.
• (4) MEANWHILE: Pro, Neu
  The scene cuts to another character in the given Location. In Act II, this can only be a Protagonist or a Neutral Character. Both storylines may be intercut for the rest of the Chapter.
• (5) MISC: Change of Objective
  The team makes a discovery that alters their line of investigation.

Act III (Chapters 7-9)

• (1 or 6) CAST: - Pro Neu Vil
  Eliminate a Protagonist, Neutral Character or Villain.
• (2) SWITCH: Pro <-- Neu --> Vil
  A Neutral Character resolves as either a Protagonist or a Villain.
• (3) BACKSTORY: Vil Monologue
  A Villain begins to give a monologue. The monologue may be exited by any subsequent player at any time.
• (4) MEANWHILE: Pro
  The scene cuts to another character in the given Location. In Act III, this can only be a Protagonist. Both storylines may be intercut for the rest of the Chapter.
• (5) MISC: Act of God or Desperation
  A desperate act by one of our characters, or a sudden catastrophic change.

APPENDIX D. - VERSION CHANGES

This is the first beta release.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

Admiral Bulletin PDFs

The following are (optional) printable materials for use with the Admiral Bulletin version 0.1 (beta 1) game rules.

Game Sheet
Print 1 copy per game. The Game Sheet tracks the Title, Locations and Themes for a game.

Action Cards (sheet 1)
Print 1 copy and cut out the 8 individual cards. This sheet contains:

• 5 CAST Action cards
• 1 SWITCH Action card
• 1 BACKSTORY Action card
• 1 MEANWHILE Action card
• 1 MISC. Action card
• 1 HOOK Action card

Action Cards (sheet 2)
Print 2 copies and cut out both sets of 8 cards. This sheet contains:

• 2 CAST Action cards
• 2 SWITCH Action cards
• 2 BACKSTORY Action cards
• 2 MEANWHILE Action cards
• 2 MISC. Action cards

Character Cards
Print 1 copy and cut out the 10 cards. This sheet contains sample Character Cards for:

• Admiral Bulletin
• Miranda
• Dr. Posthaste
• Robespierre
• Lord Timothy
• Merideth "Mimi" Songbird
• Madame LaChance
• Space Boy
• Tackwater
• Jim Gear

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

Plugins

The following are the plugins in use on the Space Toast Pages, in the order in which they were installed. Note that plugins should be saved into Blosxom's plugins folder with no file extension: do not add .cgi or .txt, for example, or they will not run.

Excludez

Available here. Prevents Blosxom from reading designated directories. Necessary to keep certain text files in the old pages directory from appearing as Space Toast Pages. Minimal setup, no headaches.

Blox

Available here. Automatically inserts paragraph tags and line breaks. Big time saver. Minimal setup. Has an optional "wiki-like" markup system, on by default, which was disabled after it mangled a Creative Commons license. Grinds JavaScript to a bloody pulp. (Would do well to disable itself inside comment tags.)

File

Available here. Allows the contents of text files to be inserted dynamically into templates and stories. Used to add the "Current Addiction" to the sidebar. Minimal setup, no headaches.

MoreEntries

Available here. Creates the "Next" and "Previous" links that appear at the bottom of the page when needed. Smart about when to add the links and when not to. Basic setup minimal, but changing the default wording and styling of the links requires digging through Perl code.

Meta

Available here. Required by the Entries_Cache_Meta plugin below. No setup, pain-free.

Entries_Cache_Meta

Available here. Allows a story to specify its posting date. Needed to backdate the old weekly issue Space Toast Pages and to keep Blosxom from treating edits as brand new postings. Poorly organized variable configuration slows setup.

WritebackPlus

Available here. Invites readers to post their comments about Space Toast Pages. (Hint: Dig through the >Run Fight Heal Magic line.) Complicated setup, but not out of line with total functionality. May need to be rethought if comment spam ever becomes a problem. Update: Was rethought when Comment Spam became a problem.

The problem of Comment Spam will receive its own posting shortly.

Retired Addiction

As if they're ever really retired:

The "Silent Hill 4: The Room" soundtrack

Letter to CNN

Dear CNN:
If you want to show your class, next time a Presidential debate ends, don't talk. Don't say anything. Just give us an hour of lovely American music -- Sousa, Copeland, Gershwin -- and allow us to think, discuss, and form an opinion. Is consideration no longer encouraged by the people of CNN? Every person you cut to after the debate walked into your studios with an opinion they wanted to deliver before the American people on prime time tv. That's the candidates' job.

"Need" in Screenwriting

A device I find useful when facing screenwriter's block is to focus on what each character needs in a scene.

There is a school of screenwriting that would have us believe that all scenes are defined by what the characters want, but I disagree. I've spent many enjoyable moments with friends not particularly needing or wanting anything, and that's what screenwriting basically is -- voyeurism. Overemphasis on need-driven scenemaking destroys spontaneity and overloads the script with tension.

Compare the following problem scene from the first and second draft of "Windy City."

First draft:

EXT. ESTER'S FLAT - NIGHT

PAUL
(surprised)
No, not yet. Not us anyway.

Second draft:

INT. SENATE - HIGH HALLWAY, CONT.

PAUL
We were out watching the airship
with everyone else.

Is the scene better? Who knows, but I'm happier with it. It satisfies my need.

(In case you're interested, I'm of the Jim Cameron school of screenwriting: "Just describe the movie.")

Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

This seems to be the summer of grand refutation for the "more is better" blockbuster. Spiderman 3, Shrek the Third, and the upcoming Live Free or Die Hard and The Bourne Ultimatum all seem designed to provide more of everything, but less of what we want. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is no exception.

Pirates 3 is a huge, clattering, whirring, blurring, shooting, smashing mashup of everything from the first two. Everything is bigger, everything is more. Every character is back. You've seen boarding scenes, but not like these -- never this huge, never this chaotic. You've seen naval combat, but you've never seen a ship literally chewed apart by cannon fire. It's fun while it lasts, and it lasts a long time, so why does it all boil down to a grand feeling of huh, well, all right then?

Pirates 3 is intensely all right, which alone makes it much more worth our moviegoing dollar than most of the summer blockbusters we've sat through. Most attempts at the kind of guiltless, unapologetic fun of Bruckheimer and Verbinski's Pirates series fail. It turns out that popcorn movies aren't easy. Pirates 3 has an extraordinary level of craftsmanship and amazing stats, but it also has a great deal of control -- the most frequently missed ingredient of such blockbusters. What it does miss are two apparently contradictory elements: focus and chaos.

Picture a movie as a two-dimensional graph, on which anything can be placed; the only rule is the x-axis, which is time. Where the movie deviates toward the bottom of the graph, it moves toward focus. The movie knows what it's doing, why it's doing it, and how it's certain to accomplish it. This is focus, in movie terms. Gosford Park is the most focused film you will ever see. It's also one of the most boring experiences you will ever sit through.

At the top of the graph is chaos; here lies invention, awe, the subconscious. The non-narrative films of Matthew Barney lie entirely at the top of the graph. Even the apparent dips toward structure -- the bike race in Cremaster 4, or the opera in Cremaster 5 -- are just feints. Whatever internal logic or focus the filmmaker may have in mind, it's not presented in the film.

At the bottom of the graph, Pirates 3 suffers, generally on the burdens of being the third of a largely unplanned trilogy. There are so many characters, so many plotlines. Betrayals happen so quickly and frequently from all sides that their resonances seems to cancel each other out, like plucking a guitar string from both ends at random. Who are the most important characters, what do they need to accomplish, and how? The movie jerks all too frequently toward the bottom of the graph, but never takes the time to make a solid, meaningful drive.

At the top of the graph, only one thing needs to be said: The characters take a trip to the afterlife. What makes the afterlife unique? Not very much, really -- same sea and sky, same cinematography. The best we ever get is Captain Jack Sparrow's private purgatory as a salt flat and a series of heat hallucinations. The mythical Far East is a series of generic nighttime sets which blow up predictably. Intangible sexual tension, which obeys its own unknown rules in the movies as it does in real life, is almost entirely absent. The movie wrongly believes that it's in too much of a hurry to ever just stop, take a breath, and look around.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End lies almost entirely in the middle of our imaginary graph, delivering with verve and finesse all of the audience's desires, except for the desire to dream.

Sketchbook Marquee

Concept: Faux ink and watercolor, pastel colors
Software: Inkscape
Download: sketchbook.svg

Blosxom Marquee

Concept: Visual pun logo, unpackable on closer examination
Software: Inkscape
Download: blosxom.svg

Podcast Marquee

Concept: Logo combination in faux 3D
Software: Inkscape
Download: Podcast.svg

Podcast: "The Music of Erich Zann" by H. P. Lovecraft

The Space Toast Pages present a free audiobook of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Music of Erich Zann." In his impoverished days as a student, a young American makes the acquaintance of an old musician whose singular genius draws him ever closer to the mysteries beyond the wall atop the Rue d'Auseil. This short story was originally published March 1922 in The National Amateur, 44, No. 4, pages 38-40. Rasmussen hates his voice, and hopes you will too.

Listen to podcast: TheMusicOfErichZann.mp3
[17 minutes, 52 second - 8.2 MB mp3]


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License.

Mid-Coast Preschool Services Development Screening Interview

Child's Name: Matthew Rasmussen Age 4yrs 4 mo. Date Dec 6, 1984

Four Years

Social:
1. How much does your child do for himself in dressing and washing up?
[X] Unbuttons and buttons clothing
[X] Washes hands and face
[X] Toilet trained day and night
[X] Cares for self at toilet mostly

2. How much does your child do for himself in eating?
[X] Spreads with knife soft things

3. Describe how he/she plays with children. gets upset w/ younger children interfering
[X] Understands taking turns/sharing
[X] Group play (2-3 children)

Gross Motor:
1. What does your child do when playing outside? Pretend play - Boats, Little puppy or Sandbox
[ ] Bounces and catches large ball -no
[ ] Pedals tricycle turning corners no - big wheel too large - snow on ground now
[X] Runs and climbs
[X] Hops on one foot

Fine Motor:
1. What does your child do with paper and pencil?
[X] Copies +
[X] Copies []

2. What kinds of toys does your child play with?
[X] Imitates bridge
[ ] Completes 6 piece puzzle
[X] Builds tower of 10 blocks
[X] Cuts with scissors

Mid-Coast Preschool Services
Developmental Screening Interview
Four years
Page 2

Language/Concepts:
1. How much does your child talk? very verbal

2. Can you give me an example of the kind of sentence he/she uses? Noah and Ethan are my very best friends

3. How well is he understood by others? very well
[X] Relates experiences, describes activities
[X] Names 3 Primary colors
[X] Says most sounds except r s th and l
[X] Repeats nursery rhyme or song for others
[X] Understood by strangers

Carolyn Rasmussen
Interviewer

Cloaking Blosxom

The correct form of a URL is where/what, as a web address exists to organize content. By default, Blosxom serves pages from www.spacetoast.net/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi, a machine-centric where/how address which breaks the above guideline. A method was needed to disguise the address of the cgi script.

Blosxom's main site includes instructions for hiding the ...cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi address on an Apache server by means of an .htaccess file -- a local preferences file. Unfortunately, the instructions did not work for this site.

The first method given for cloaking Blosxom (bullet three, step two) redirected requests for any address in the STP directory to Blosxom, including images, media files and old pages. For this site, it would have been written thusly:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^STP/?(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/$1

The second given method (bullet three) invoked Blosxom only if a real file could not be found. It had problems with directories. Since STP/web/blosxom/ is a real directory, Blosxom did not attempt to create a page there, defaulting to either listing the files in the directory or producing a missing/forbidden error. Here is how it would have appeared:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^STP/?(.*)$ blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]

Venerable Apache Server's developers are a strange, thundering race who produce suitably impenetrable documentation, but after some levelling up the following was arrived at:

Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^STP(.*) http://www.spacetoast.net/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi$1

Here is a breakdown. The first line overrides Laughing Squid's default error when trying to browse a directory without an index file. The second turns the URL rewriting engine on. The third tells it when to work -- in this case, when a file can not be found. (Notice that the missing directory line is now gone.) The fourth line tells Apache to remove "STP" and send the remainder of the address to the blosxom.cgi script.

This portion of the Blosxom installation took far more geekery than it should have. Strictly speaking though, it is optional.

Notes on Installing Blosxom

Blosxom's official installation instructions are concise and straightforward. Installation required only a standard FTP client and a text editor. (I used JEdit with the FTP plugin installed.) The blosxom.cgi script ran as soon as it was installed; SpaceToast.net's ISP, Laughing Squid, did not require it to be "blessed" first.

Configuration was straightforward. The settings are stored in the script itself. Many settings can be left at the defaults.

Fitting the Space Toast Pages' existing layout into the Blosxom engine was equally straightforward. An old Space Toast Page was sliced into three "flavor" files, the head.html, story.html and foot.html files, with Blosxom markup tags added where dynamic content should be placed. (An additional date.html flavor file is required. On the Space Toast Pages it is an empty file, as date stamps are part of the story template.)

Blosxom stores posts as plain text files in the "data directory" and serves them as html files or rss feeds from the "blog directory." The Space Toast Pages keep everything in SpaceToast.net/STP. Surprisingly, this doesn't cause a problem. Any of the posts on the Space Toast Pages can be accessed as raw text files by simply substituting .txt for .html in the address bar. The text file is a real file sitting on SpaceToast.net; the html file is a fake created by Blosxom when it's requested. An .htaccess file makes the ephemeral page look real -- more on that in the next post on cgi cloaking.

Why Blosxom?

I'd been meaning to add blog software to my site for some time, and of all the content management systems I looked into, Blosxom seemed to best suite my prejudices:

• Free and open source
• Small and easy on the server
• No annoying .php pages, as discussed in this rant
• No database -- nothing to yell at me if I make changes with FTP
• Plugins to add missing features

With Blosxom now up and running, I can report that it delivers all of the above, at the cost of the following:

• Missing, out of date and incomplete documentation
• Missing, out of date and incomplete plugins

Blosxom is ancient in web terms, buoyed along by its simplicity of design. The original site is no longer updated, and while the current developers have mirrored the site to SourceForge, they appear to have done little to update it. Newer plugins can be found offsite, without documentation or generally even descriptions of what they do. Plugins listed on the conserved original site are often dead links; mirrors of the plugin code can usually be googled, but any documentation not included in the code itself is often gone. Blosxom has only basic functionality without plugins.

It is (apparently) possible for an artist with only a modest technical background to install, configure and use Blosxom. The core blosxom.cgi script is bulletproof, and the original installation instructions are quite good. Setup is minimal, and there are no dependancies. An understanding of Perl is not required.

Plugins can be another matter. Many of the plugin problems fall under a recurrent fallacy of open source: "It's free, so I can be lazy." Certain plugins expect the user to be a Perl hacker, which is counter to the philosophy behind the software. Others omit documentation, or are abandoned with features incomplete. Blosxom's stop-and-go development over the years has not helped the problem. More on the plugins used on the Space Toast Pages will follow, after some notes on basic installation and the problem of "cloaking" the cgi-bin URLs.

STP Relaunched

The Space Toast Page has become the Space Toast Pages, a "journal of journals" on Rasmussen's various obsessions and experiments. The weekly issue format has been discarded in favor of a categorized, feed-friendly, commentable series of blogs and sub-blogs running on the free and open source Blosxom content management system. Thank you as always for reading, and welcome back!

Older Archive

For older Space Toast Pages (weekly "Issues"), please go to www.spacetoast.net/STP/previousindex.html. I'm working on bringing these into the new STP system, starting with the most popular and my personal favorites, and eventually running back to issue 112, but it may take some time.

Return to SpaceToast.net