Author: John Scott Tynes

There’s a good article about the late comedian Bill Hicks on Salon. Hicks was a terrific comic, as black and profane as anyone not quite at the receiving end of an instant lynch mob could be, but with a core of righteous anger and truth that made sense of his attitude. He was insulting and even cruel because his disgust and rage at the world he lived in was so deep and heartfelt, yet his hope for a better world was intense enough to compel him to change things the way he best knew how: on stage, in front of a microphone, grinding it out night after night.

Anyway, give it a read. The section towards the end about the differences between the U.S. and U.K. editions of a new biography on Hicks is especially amusing.

At last–my revamp of Mike Daisey’s site is up and running. Check it out at:

http://www.mikedaisey.com/

If you don’t tinker with web development, you should skip the next chunk of this dispatch. It’s 100% geeky.

Those still reading may be cringing when you see Mike’s new site. “My God! You used frames!”

Yes. Yes, I did. Bwah hah hah hah!

I used frames for Mike’s site despite their generally bad reputation. Thanks to lots of Javascript, I think the implementation is solid. If you bookmark any content frame, or open a content frame in a new window by itself, the site fixes itself with all frames correctly and loads the specific content frame you bookmarked or opened instead of just going back to scratch. This allows for effective bookmarking within a frame site, although you do have to right-click to bookmark a specific content frame rather than just the main site URL.

I’m pleased with how it worked out. There are still improvements I hope to make down the road, but my knowledge of Javascript is minimal at best and those improvements are more demanding.

For example, you’ll notice the stupid way in which banner ads rotate. Yes, it’s just a couple of different files that Refresh into each other. I’ve been unable to find a single banner-rotation script that works with the site. Some of our banner ads just need to load a URL into a new window (requiring a TARGET tag). Others need to reload three of the four frames with new content, a Javascript call that replaces and generates the HREF URL.

Some banner scripts don’t allow the TARGET tag needed to open the clicked link in a new window. They only let you specify the URL itself, which they pass to a function that generates the full HREF tag.

Others allow you to specify the full HREF tag. But because the HREF tag for the load-three-frames banners is itself a Javascript call, thereby nested within a Javascript call, the whole thing crashes.

On top of everything else, we’re hosting Mike’s site on Windows NT. This drops my options for scripts dramatically–no Perl, for example. We’re on NT because of the host, which gives us practically unlimited bandwidth for a very reasonable price. This is a very important feature because of all the Quicktime movies we serve, and so far this host is the best-suited and most-affordable option we could find, excepting the fact that the damn thing runs on Windows.

So, after trying a dozen or more banner-rotation solutions, the clumsy META REFRESH is the only one I get to work. Ah well.

=====> Non-webdev-geek content resumes here.

I bought a new microphone today for the video camera and then made a boom. Thanks Home Depot! I got 4 sections of 1/2″ x 24″ PVC pipe, threaded at both ends, with connectors. The 1/2″ threaded tip is a perfect fit for the threaded attachment to the mike–I can screw the mike right onto the end of the book and go from 2′ up to 8′ if needed. It’s freaking brilliant and it only cost $7.

Tomorrow night I go to New York City. I’m so pleased they got the light memorial up and going. The photographs look lovely. I’m looking forward to the whole experience, actually.

In the afternoon before the flight I’m heading to Wizards of the Coast to sign copies of Call of Cthulhu D20 with several other contribuors. WotC is setting aside a couple hundred copies to sell through their online store. These copies are signed and each includes a CD of music by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, a compilation of existing tracks assembled by WotC just for this edition. I believe there’s even a little rules supplement for use with the CD. You put the CD in on random play during your game, and each song applies different modifiers to combat and such while the song is playing. It’s a silly idea they did for fun, but who knows? Might be good. I expect the books to be beautiful.

The new issue of Tablet is out, and their website has been updated. Take a look at my film column this time out, which has two excellent movies, one lame short, and the most ghastly porn film I’ve seen yet. I also did an article about the Arab and Iranian Film Festival, playing this coming week in Seattle.

I just went to a press screening of Big Trouble, and I want to go on record as saying it’s the biggest Hollywood turdburger I’ve eaten since Mission to Mars. This is the new film by Barry Sonnenfeld, whose Get Shorty was funny and enjoyable. Big Trouble is in the same vein: a caper flick with a big cast, including the usual motley assortment of criminals, cops, and civilians.

It’s a big, dumb, shoddy, smug film, reminescent in quality of the 1980s crapfests of Paul Mazursky. Martha Stewart even makes a cameo, with her head CGI’ed onto a dog’s body. There are endless Xena, Warrior Princess jokes. The entire cast is wasted, and Tim Allen is more leaden and unfunny than ever.

I remember when Barry Sonnenfeld was a talented cinematographer, and showed a flair for good fun with stuff like The Addams Family and Get Shorty. But with the tepid Men in Black, the awful Wild, Wild West, and now this, he’s on the express train to obsolescence.

Don’t worry, Barry. Paul Mazursky saved you a seat.

Fortunately, I also saw a press screening of Panic Room, directed by David Fincher. It has one of the strangest opening credits sequences I’ve ever seen, but once you’re over that hump the film is superb.

I was a bit baffled that Fincher chose this story to tell, after his bravura turns with Seven and Fight Club. But it turns out he’s made something of an old-fashioned Hitchcock thriller, a real nail-biting twisty pleasure–and the main theme, by Howard Shore, does a remarkable job of conjuring up Bernard Herrmann’s soundtracks for Hitch without being imitative.

Fincher lets his love of CGI-assisted camera movements get the better of him early in the film, resulting in a goofy endless tracking shot that even passes through the handle of a coffepot. But he delivers the goods from start to finish. Jodie Foster is as strong as you’d expect, and the rest of the cast is solid. Dwight Yoakum is especially freakish as a scary thug. Fincher has done the best reinvention of an old-school thriller in years. Kudos to David Koepp for a fine script.

I’m Channelling Larry King Dept.

Never register a domain with networksolutions.com. Twice as expensive as everyone and very frustrating to deal with . . . I now route all of my incoming email through Spamcop.net for $30/year. They do a great job of stripping out spam with automated filters. Been using it for about a month and it’s working wonderfully. Consider this an unsolicited and enthusiastic testimonial. . . . Greg and I have written far too much material for UA2 and aren’t done yet. Either the page count & cover price go up or we have to cut a lot of stuff. Dunno which yet. Publishing is a tough business . . . Went to a semi-formal roast last night for a friend, and it was excellent, raunchy and full of potshots at everyone present, the way roasts oughta be. The crowd was mostly comedy actors, and they were charmingly savage to each other . . . Had dinner with Aaron Vanek, director of The Yellow Sign (which I scripted), who was in town briefly. Still not done with the final cut of the film, owing to computer-graphic effects and sound mixing. It’s a volunteer project, so he can’t really crack the whip that effectively–the people working on it have other responsibilities and so forth. But they’re in the home stretch. Hard to believe he shot this two years ago. What a never-ending story . . . I was hoping to get Dispatches switched to the new software this weekend but it didn’t happen, so still no comments . . . So frazzled from work and social commitments that I hid in a restaurant this morning for a couple hours just reading a book and avoiding everyone. It’s The Street of Crocodiles, one of two books by Bruno Schulz I received for my birthday (thanks Pete and Thom!). Read the first three chapters and they’re just beautiful, stunning and poetical in their imagery. I could see the scenes so clearly. I haven’t read writing like this in a while and I’d forgotten what it’s like . . . Feeling weary and beaten-up these days, at the same time that I’m nonetheless having fun. It’s just my schedule that’s been so punishing lately. I need to do a better job of saying no to invites from friends, hard as that is, because I just feel like I’m running up walls all the time . . . Off to watch a film for review, and another tomorrow morning–I’m seeing Panic Room, the new David Fincher film, which I’ve been looking forward to . . . Worry not, I promise not to write like Larry King again.

Do you want to rock out? Sure, we all do. The next time you rock out, why don’t you use one of these exciting, officially licensed, Star Wars electric guitars?

I particularly like how they only make them with villain images. If you want a Luke, Han, or Ewok guitar, you are not worthy of the rocking out, or the rock outing, depending on your time zone.

But where is OMAC’s officially licensed guitar? Lo, the gods doth weep! MAKE MINE OMAC!

Comments are gone for now. I’ve begun setting up Dispatches from Revland under the new software, but won’t be able to finish it until this weekend. By Monday, I expect it to be up and running with comments and so forth.

My plan had been to migrate my entire site to pMachine, the new SQL-based software I bought, in one swell foop, as they don’t say. But I’ll start by moving Dispatches to it now and then tackle the rest of the project this summer.

So, comments are toast. On Monday they’ll return, though the old comments are gone, gone, gone. On the bright side, pMachine has been very easy to set up and use. Thanks, Clinton!

The comments function has broken again, and I think I know why. Blogger assigns every posting a unique number, which the comments code uses to reference which post a comment is attached to. Recently Blogger’s master numbering rolled past 10,000,000. It’d been 7 digits for a long time, and now it’s 8. I took a cursory look at the commenting code (a php script) and found one place where it appeared to use a 7-digit number as the base number. It hasn’t retained a single comment since Blogger hit 8 digits a few days ago–though it still emails me what you type in–leading me to believe this is the problem. I don’t know php at all, so it’s not something I can fix. If any php wizards out there want to take a look at the code and see if they can fix it, let me know. The commenting system I’m using isn’t supported by the author anymore, and the last time I tried to find the site I got it from, I couldn’t even locate it. I’ve been planning to switch blogging systems this summer, but whether or not I can do that before my travel starts, I don’t know. Nag dabbit!

Ah, heck. I’m way behind on Dispatches because I’ve been spending evenings watching the second season of The Sopranos. And on Sunday night we had a mafia dinner party at Ray & Christine’s. She made grilled sausage & peppers, and a seafood marinara on spaghetti, and then we watched The Godfather on Ray’s ginormous home theatre. What can I say? Leave the gun, take the cannolis. We even had cannolis for dessert.

Booked solid now. Wednesday night next week I’m going to NYC, no return ticket. Might be a week or two. It’s a shuttle airline, flat rate, $130 direct Seattle-NYC. Amazing. Mike and I are shooting a bunch of short digital video pieces for his website, and happily his publisher is paying for the whole thing. The day I get in, Thursday, Mike is doing an appearance on TechTV and wants me to appear in the bit posing as Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. I need a black turtleneck. No idea if I can act, even in a comedy bit. Mike on IM: “Best way to find out is to stick you on live national television.” Should be completely stupid and fun if it goes off. Must remember: no profanity. Fuck. I’ve never been to New York before.

Double booked: Seattle to Copenhagen to London on April 23rd with Karen. We actually fly over the roof of the world instead of via NYC then across the Atlantic. We stay with James Wallis in London for a bit, and then eventually take the chunnel to Paris. Then it’s the train to Switzerland to visit Karen’s college roommate, and then a flight to Barcelona. Two weeks or so in Spain. My aunt and uncle live in Malaga now on the southern coast, and the guys who do the Spanish editions of Unknown Armies, Three Days to Kill, and Puppetland are in Seville. Our trip is much inspired by looking at who we know lives where. We have to travel cheap, so we rely on the kindness of friends and family over there. Poor as church mice, but at least we can take a trip.

Triple booked: Back to the UK in July as guest for a convention called Convulsion. Then, I expect, at least six months of no travel whatsoever. Second half of the year is about hunkering down and writing something or other.

That’s what I did today. Worked on UA2, back after a week away from the project to push forward on Mike’s website revamp. So much to do still. Started writing new stuff for the GM section. I get to write up the profiles of the Sect of the Naked Goddess/the Affinites and what used to be the True Order of Saint-Germain. Finally nailed these things down after several years of hand-waving. In UA2 you can play a Room of Renunciation! Bwah hah hah…

There’s another DG computer game image I forgot about. It’s not a live, in-engine screenshot like the one linked in yesterday’s dispatch, but it is kind of cool. It’s at Flying Lab’s site.

Here’s the funniest damn thing I’ve read all week, a beautiful, savage skewering of a journalist whose laziness and presumption are a wonder to behold.

Much to write about, including a night of city politics and a morning at an athletic club, but time is short and I must fly, you fools!