Living in Verdana

June 28th, 2009

After months of procrastination, I now have a PDF copy of The Cloak Of Horus! on this site for you to read.

Let’s write down the process for making this PDF before I forget:

  1. Take the HTML copy of the script and open it in Microsoft Word. Not OpenOffice.org. Microsoft Word will preserve most of the HTML formatting and styles, while OpenOffice.org treats it like plain text. For me, opening it in Microsoft Word means opening it at work or on my parents’ computer. From this point on, editing can be done in either word processor.
  2. Change the page margins: 1.5 inches on the left, 1 on the right.
  3. Add a title page with the title, author, and contact information.
  4. Add page numbers to the top right corner of the page. Make sure there is an offset of -1 (to account for the title page).
  5. Go through the script and put manual page breaks at the bottom of every page (this is actually easier to do at the top of every page in OpenOffice.org). Make sure these page breaks do not separate character heading from their dialogue. If there is a natural separation due to stage directions, put a new character heading at the beginning of their dialogue on the new page.
  6. That’s it!

One other bonus: I am now using the typeface of Verdana on both versions of The Cloak Of Horus!. I like monospaced, fake-typewriter fonts a lot, actually, but I want to try to see if these are any easier to read. I find it a bit smoother, but I had to increase the line spacing a lot. This will waste many more trees!

Enjoy this very minor website change!

Populism, Yeah Yeah

May 20th, 2009

Last Wednesday I returned home from the city after sitting through a pedestrian, terribly uninteresting play. Still fuming, I went online, eventually making a routine check of Playbill’s website.

There I found something awesome!

With little other explanation, Playbill put up a gallery of photos from something called Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson: The Concert Version. The costumes were gorgeous, the set was lush, and both elements hinted at a weird, stylized show. The play I saw that evening lacked all of the above, so this seemed right up my alley.

I searched for more information, leading me to the play’s inevitable MySpace page. It had the show’s music.

And it was terrible.

Just a few seconds of the music revealed lyrics so thoughtless and instrumentation so tired that I closed the browser and went to bed, my faith in this show shattered.

But now this morning Critic-O-Meter sums up the reviews, revealing that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is terrible on purpose. The show is (at least in part) a send-up of Spring Awakening. As Critic-O-Meter quoted from Talkin’ Broadway:

With (intentionally) amateurish acting, (intentionally) poorly- and non-plotted and flat-out disconnected songs, and an (intentionally) irreverent attitude toward subjects of abject seriousness, this absorbingly effective riff on emo narrative by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman is as much a comment on the ragged quality of this kind of storytelling as it is a story itself.

Such a roller coaster of expectations! But now that I’m interested in seeing this show again, I see it is entirely sold out. Oh well!

I may not get to see the show, but I can listen to its terrible, terrible music on MySpace whenever I want. Hooray!

The iPhone and its Assault on Modern Theatre

April 24th, 2009

I attended last night’s preview performance of Accent On Youth. During the first act, a familiar, pulsing radio signal could be heard on the sound system—a data transmission from someone’s iPhone.

All mobile phones are miniature radio broadcasting towers, but for whatever reason the iPhone does not play nicely with other electromagnetic equipment. Every time I walk near my boss’s “unshielded” computer speakers, they make audible the rapid, all-ships-at-sea signal from my phone.

I assumed the actors were to blame—someone text-messaged David Hyde Pierce and his body mic advertised that to the audience. But was he even wearing a body mic? It didn’t look that way, and the house isn’t so large that you’d need intense amplification for a mostly music-free play.

Then an announcement was made before the start of the second act: “Please make sure your phones are turned off. All the way off, not just to vibrate.” So they suspected an audience member to be the culprit! Perhaps those in the front row were close enough to the microphones to interfere?

Or was I the offender? I never turned my precious iPhone off, but I did switch it to “Airplane Mode”. That counts, right?