First, this is already making the rounds but deserves to be reposted. It is an adorable fox, being a fox and adorable. It's name is Freddy. Freddy is a girl fox. Thanks ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
qotcpcf and saraphina_marie for the link.
Moving right along. I've just started my second year of grad school at MBC, and have spent the first two weeks dealing with a sinus infection. Fun times! Mostly over it now, though. The most annoying part is that it's kept me out of circuit training. That's right. One of the professors in the program does circuits in the morning. It's required for third year acting students, and everyone else is free to attend if they want. I made the first two meetings before I got all sicky, so it's been over a week for me. I learned during running that the big secret is not making a big deal about the missed sessions - if I let myself feel guilty about it, I'll hide from it rather than go back. And I do want to go, I'm just not going to until I clear up completely. Mostly I console myself with the fact that the people who are teasing me for not showing up to circuits are in horrible pain.
PS - I lost ten pounds from running over the summer and eating a little better. By "eating better" I mean "only having half as much dessert." It's all relative.
So yeah, grad school. This semester is Dramaturgy (applied theatrical research) and Visual Design for the Early Modern Stage (choreography, blocking, creating visuals using people). If I stay a third year for my MFA, Dramaturgy is what the degree will actually be in. The last class slot is taken up by a Directed Inquiry, i.e., starting my thesis. I've already denuded an entire section of the library - PR3071 now exists only as a descriptor of the types of books located in my study carrel. Good times! My aim is to create a for-actors edition of an Early Modern play (possibly R&J) that gets around many of the problems of a)edited texts, b)texts designed for scholars, and c)if possible, paper editions.
Here's how the game is played: I'm going to describe a magical, nonexistant computer program that does everything I want it to do, and you tell me why it doesn't exist and how I may be able to fake it. Both wysiwyg editors and programming languages are possible for the faking it bit.
From what I know off the top of my head, here are the issues. PLEASE correct me when I'm wrong.
Flash would be almost perfect for what I'm describing, except possibly that I would have to you know, learn Flash. Even with an editor, I'd have to do lots of things manually (adjusting stage directions). Most importantly, it's not something that people could print easily. What I really want is to have someone like a director move a stage direction to where they like it (in the defined range) and then print out copies of the play for their actors. I don't think Flash handles that.
Desktop publishing software gets me something printable, and may take care of some details like keeping stage directions near the relevant speeches. But it doesn't allow for any kind of web display, and can't be messed with on the other end without the other person a)also having teh software and b)having full access to the document. This means no one can read it, and I can't give people informed choices, only a freedom so great it verges on anarchy. I might as well have copied and pasted the text of the play off the internet and said "Here, have fun."
Word and Excel files are accessible to most people, and can be locked to prevent tampering, and may be able to handle pop-up comments of some kind. But I don't think that enough choice can be left to people to be able to move certain things around. Like, I know that form fields and drop down menus and etc. can be left open, but that's not the same as moving a stage direction around in the left column.
Textbook illustration programs, like SmartDraw, would be good for creating fake screenshots of this imaginary program in action. Maybe even of faking the program itself, since I could just be dragging a textbox around a highlighted area. But I don't think it would actually do what I wanted it to. Even if this is secretly the answer (there's a way to limit where objects can be dragged), no one would have access to the file without a $300 program.
So that's my thinking so far. During the project that initiated this idea, I created a physical version in Microsoft Publisher. The stage direction column used inward facing arrows to delineate the possible range for the action - a downward arrow means that this is the earliest the action can start, and an up arrow means it has to have happened by now. It looks kind of like drafting blueprints. If there's no shiny electronic way of doing things, it'll be a reprise of this method.
It's not the worst thing in the world, especially because it's native to the paper format - I don't have to worry about how it looks online and off, just off. It will also make clear to the actors that there are choices available to them that the director may not be considering. And also remind people later on that they don't have to stick with what they've already got. It does means the notes go back to being intrusive. And doesn't make people who are smarter but less tech-savvy than I say, "Ooh, wow, we should give him two degrees and a job based solely on the electronic bamboozlement that just occurred." I certainly wouldn't be doing this in Publisher again, either way.
Oh, also. I have acquired two new pieces of hardware. The first is an iPod, which I call music from a farther room. It is black, and actually holds all my music. Plus my music videos. Plus all of my pictures. I used to sport one of the 20G 4th Gen models, pre-color. It was sort of weird when, a month after I got my old one, they introduced a model (the iPod photo) that was color, held more, and yet somehow had a greater battery life. I have finally rectified the matter. Now I just have to figure out why all my attempts to have it automatically synch up with my Google Calendars are coming to naught. And fight pressure to get more music just to fill the thing up.
The other item is a laptop, which bears the name of Ulalume. I haven't had the itch for a laptop in quite some time, mostly because of the way I used to use them when I had one. My laptop was a desktop replacement - a big heavy thing that ran games well and could be transported to NY when I went home for the summer. That was all the movement it did. I never took it to the library, or the cafe, or what-have-you. So when, one move to DC and two catastrophic spills later, I wound up with a desktop, the need for portability just wasn't there. During the NEH conference this summer, I finally started to think to myself, "Man, I wish I had a laptop with me for typing/note-taking/internet/minesweeper.
qotcpcf and saraphina_marie for the link.Moving right along. I've just started my second year of grad school at MBC, and have spent the first two weeks dealing with a sinus infection. Fun times! Mostly over it now, though. The most annoying part is that it's kept me out of circuit training. That's right. One of the professors in the program does circuits in the morning. It's required for third year acting students, and everyone else is free to attend if they want. I made the first two meetings before I got all sicky, so it's been over a week for me. I learned during running that the big secret is not making a big deal about the missed sessions - if I let myself feel guilty about it, I'll hide from it rather than go back. And I do want to go, I'm just not going to until I clear up completely. Mostly I console myself with the fact that the people who are teasing me for not showing up to circuits are in horrible pain.
PS - I lost ten pounds from running over the summer and eating a little better. By "eating better" I mean "only having half as much dessert." It's all relative.
So yeah, grad school. This semester is Dramaturgy (applied theatrical research) and Visual Design for the Early Modern Stage (choreography, blocking, creating visuals using people). If I stay a third year for my MFA, Dramaturgy is what the degree will actually be in. The last class slot is taken up by a Directed Inquiry, i.e., starting my thesis. I've already denuded an entire section of the library - PR3071 now exists only as a descriptor of the types of books located in my study carrel. Good times! My aim is to create a for-actors edition of an Early Modern play (possibly R&J) that gets around many of the problems of a)edited texts, b)texts designed for scholars, and c)if possible, paper editions.
Here's how the game is played: I'm going to describe a magical, nonexistant computer program that does everything I want it to do, and you tell me why it doesn't exist and how I may be able to fake it. Both wysiwyg editors and programming languages are possible for the faking it bit.
- This program is useful for creating play-texts that people can read. Preferably, it would be a little like programming, in that what I have access to and what my audience has access to are two different things. I don't want to hand someone a word.doc and have to tell them "Just don't mess with things, or you'll lose it all." I want all the working bits and pieces tucked away where the average reader doesn't see them. Once I put the play together, other people wouldn't need to open it up in editing to see it. Being able to read it without the program is also useful (e.g., people don't actually need to have a Flash editor to see a Flash website).
- It can handle two columns, one for speech and one for stage directions. There would preferably be a way to connect stage directions to parts of the text while I work, so if (for example) I added a bunch of text to the speech side, I wouldn't have to then move every single stage direction down manually to compensate.
- The program could handle notes in a mouseover fashion. Words or phrases which required notation (done by footnotes or glosses [definitions off to teh side] in a paper edition) would instead be a different color, and rolling over or clicking with the mouse would bring up a small, easily dismissed, floating box with the info inside.
- On the user end, stage directions could be moved through a certain range. In other words, if Romeo can actually kiss Juliet at any point during a speech, a reader would be able to drag They kiss anywhere in the stage direction column within the height defined by the speech. I'd be setting the limits for each stage direction on the back-end.
- The finished product could be embedded into a website.
- Either from the website, or from the program itself, a copy of the play (just the speech and stage directions, not the notes) could be printed.
From what I know off the top of my head, here are the issues. PLEASE correct me when I'm wrong.
Flash would be almost perfect for what I'm describing, except possibly that I would have to you know, learn Flash. Even with an editor, I'd have to do lots of things manually (adjusting stage directions). Most importantly, it's not something that people could print easily. What I really want is to have someone like a director move a stage direction to where they like it (in the defined range) and then print out copies of the play for their actors. I don't think Flash handles that.
Desktop publishing software gets me something printable, and may take care of some details like keeping stage directions near the relevant speeches. But it doesn't allow for any kind of web display, and can't be messed with on the other end without the other person a)also having teh software and b)having full access to the document. This means no one can read it, and I can't give people informed choices, only a freedom so great it verges on anarchy. I might as well have copied and pasted the text of the play off the internet and said "Here, have fun."
Word and Excel files are accessible to most people, and can be locked to prevent tampering, and may be able to handle pop-up comments of some kind. But I don't think that enough choice can be left to people to be able to move certain things around. Like, I know that form fields and drop down menus and etc. can be left open, but that's not the same as moving a stage direction around in the left column.
Textbook illustration programs, like SmartDraw, would be good for creating fake screenshots of this imaginary program in action. Maybe even of faking the program itself, since I could just be dragging a textbox around a highlighted area. But I don't think it would actually do what I wanted it to. Even if this is secretly the answer (there's a way to limit where objects can be dragged), no one would have access to the file without a $300 program.
So that's my thinking so far. During the project that initiated this idea, I created a physical version in Microsoft Publisher. The stage direction column used inward facing arrows to delineate the possible range for the action - a downward arrow means that this is the earliest the action can start, and an up arrow means it has to have happened by now. It looks kind of like drafting blueprints. If there's no shiny electronic way of doing things, it'll be a reprise of this method.
It's not the worst thing in the world, especially because it's native to the paper format - I don't have to worry about how it looks online and off, just off. It will also make clear to the actors that there are choices available to them that the director may not be considering. And also remind people later on that they don't have to stick with what they've already got. It does means the notes go back to being intrusive. And doesn't make people who are smarter but less tech-savvy than I say, "Ooh, wow, we should give him two degrees and a job based solely on the electronic bamboozlement that just occurred." I certainly wouldn't be doing this in Publisher again, either way.
Oh, also. I have acquired two new pieces of hardware. The first is an iPod, which I call music from a farther room. It is black, and actually holds all my music. Plus my music videos. Plus all of my pictures. I used to sport one of the 20G 4th Gen models, pre-color. It was sort of weird when, a month after I got my old one, they introduced a model (the iPod photo) that was color, held more, and yet somehow had a greater battery life. I have finally rectified the matter. Now I just have to figure out why all my attempts to have it automatically synch up with my Google Calendars are coming to naught. And fight pressure to get more music just to fill the thing up.
The other item is a laptop, which bears the name of Ulalume. I haven't had the itch for a laptop in quite some time, mostly because of the way I used to use them when I had one. My laptop was a desktop replacement - a big heavy thing that ran games well and could be transported to NY when I went home for the summer. That was all the movement it did. I never took it to the library, or the cafe, or what-have-you. So when, one move to DC and two catastrophic spills later, I wound up with a desktop, the need for portability just wasn't there. During the NEH conference this summer, I finally started to think to myself, "Man, I wish I had a laptop with me for typing/note-taking/internet/minesweeper.
Current Music: Katatonia - Evidence
4 comments | Leave a comment