purity

Its like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are completely white and all you're trying to do is make a white square. You can see what pieces join together, but you never know if you're putting them together correctly. You feel the edges and stumble from connection to connection. You focus on forming large sections of interlocking pieces, only to decide - often suddenly - that its all wrong, and so you pull them apart and try again... and again... and again.

Yet there are moment when you understand how it all comes together. You can see all the jigsaw pieces and know how all they all join to make the white square.

Yet those moments are only fleeting. As soon as you try and grasp it, that blinding burst of clarity fades, leaving only a quiet emptiness... resonating with the mere memory of knowing.

We are sustained by these echoes of gnosis; they are the beacons that guide us on our journey forever towards the elusive.

But fuck its frustrating.

The logic of MSN & iChat

Thanks to André Pang, I just discovered I can use iChat to talk to the MSN Messenger Network. Sweet. I'm not sure its a good thing as I largely use iChat for work and thus only log into MSN when I get home. Then again, the great thing with iChat is you can easily disable networks... [ponders]

(and André, I still haven't read the book... but I'll get to it this weekend!)

BTW, I installed Logic 7.2 last night. Wow. This upgrade was 8 gigs! But features some beautifully subtle UI changes that help the intuitiveness of the program. The new 'save project' feature is especially welcome. It collects all audio recordings, all sampler instruments, and all plugin setting sand dumps them into one directory. Wow. Archiving made easy. I've ALWAYS had problems with archiving my music projects. I can never get full playback of the work I did under Cubase, because of the softsynths and plugins I used. Its one of the reasons I switched to Logic Pro -- I wanted to limit my soft synths, samplers and plugins to what was 'in the box', so I could open up my projects in the future... easily. Ironically, the only old projects I can playback easily were what I made using PlayerPro, a music tracker for the mac... and those tracks sounds like arse.

Sometime a decade ago

Newspaper Clippings of the Tempting Kind

With a head full of spice,
and rusty scissors of egotism,
he cuts out the grainy picture
from the newspaper, pinning it on his wall.
A shrine is built around this icon,
words, stale bread, discarded dust,
amount on the altar, as if
the picture could truly save souls
(and in particular, his).
He whispers to himself, half-formed hamlet:
"O cursed self spite,
was she born to set me right?"
His half mumbled prayers,
and burnt toast offerings,
may go unnoticed
to the sacred star,
pinned upon his wall,
that is his skull.
Then again, or so he thinks,
wishes, and would die for,
maybe the posted polaroid
of himself, is postered
upon the door of his most...
He hesitates,
draws a breath -
hits his hand hard
heavily on his hazy heart -
then denies those
immortal words, so they
cannot haunt he.

We all kill caterpillars,
before they can grow
and sprout butterfly wings
from dark brown cocoons and float free,
or spread the mocking markings
of the cliched melancholy death-moth.

Was it butterflies in his chest,
or death-moths unable to rest?
His room, now bare, is to know never now.

.uno.

I mean, what do I owe them? Certainly not the truth.

Screencoding Part 1.5

Screenwriting with textmate 2.0

This is pretty freaking sweet. After growing tired of Final Draft's frustrations, Oliver Taylor spent a year learning CSS and XHTML to develop a bundle* for TextMate (an OS X text editor). Essentially, it writes out screenplay as a plaintext document with a bunch of invented xhtml tags. The real genius is that the bundle leverages TextMate's feature set to effectively mimic most of the automatic formatting of Final Draft. You can create 'character shortcuts', there's auto-completion of slug lines, automatic indenting etc. All the stuff you want with screenplay software. It can also import/export Final Draft files, and export HTML, XML, PDF, etc.

This is a great example of lateral thinking. Programming languages, e.g. Python, are highly structurally rigid. Modern Text Editors are designed to deal with myriad structured languages and do 'on-the-fly' processing and display of said language. Leveraging such a program to deal with another form of structured language (screenplays) is just genius. Its screencoding!

Some real cool things:

a) TextMate costs USD$40. How much for Final Draft 7 again? TextMate is a *super* powerful text editor because its designed for coders. Features like folding and regular-expression search could be useful. Its also got a highly active an involved developer. (c.f. Final Draft)

b) Part of that power is TM's extensibility. You can easily add your own custom functions to this bundle (including FD's command-1, command-2 element switches), and share the love. There's also no reason why in the longer termy many of the deeper features in FD couldn't be replicated e.g. stats regeneration, character pages, advanced pagination** Even simple things like changing the colour of particular elements should be pretty easy... Don't like having Character names in pink? Change it!

b) The document is plaintext tagged as XHTML. If people are smart, there could be momentum to adopt Oliver's tags as *the* standard for openscreenwriting formatting.... For the scribopherian's out there, this means there could be an easy way to post your script excerpts to your blog. A standard way. Wouldn't that be neat?

c) If it is adopted as the open standard for screenplays, it also means you could get other developers replicating the functionality of this bundle across multiple applications on multiple platforms... all writing the same format.

d) This also means it could tie into other open source production applications for scheduling, script break downs etc.

e) This creates competition and competition breeds innovation. I think part of the reason that FD and MMS have stagnated is that there just isn't any competition.... and there's no room for commercial competition in such a niche market. This could be a case of the longtail biting back.

Caveat: I haven't actually tried the bundle but I am excited by the idea of what it can do... and thus encourage anyone who is remotely impressed to blog about this... momentum is a very very very very power force for change.

[ impressed ]

v1.1 of this document. Tidied up.

* Essentially, its a collection of 'bits' glued together to make TextMate optimised for a particular development environment. Bundles exist for Ruby, Python, C++, CSHH, etc. They give you short cuts, proper colourisation, formatting etc. appropriate to whatever code you're working in.

** I suspect this will be the greatest weakness with this approach. TextEditors are not particularly well known for their page layout control. Mastering your margins may prove a problem... currently. Its a solveable problem and if there's enough momentum,

turtles all the way down #1123

this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll be a thistle be a this'll

epiphany # 345

I think I've worked out the dating thing. Women don't want to date people, they want to date checklists from cosmo.