Little MIDI Memories

I stumbled on this site surfing yesterday (when I should have been fixing bugs, but that's another story). It's got all the music from DOOM and DOOM II -- and, for good measure, all the music from Wolfenstein 3D -- served up as MIDI files. You'd think that after ten years, I wouldn't remember that music, but hundreds of hours of obsessive play have burned these tunes into my head. It was really, really fun to listen to them all again, especially the better ones (I'm particularly partial to e1m5, e1m8, and e2m1). It's worth listening to if you're an old fan, or a student of game music, so much of which is utterly forgettable (then and now).

DOOM still stands out as a classic precisely because so much attention was paid to the style of the piece, a fact which is much more apparent today, long after its technology has ceased to be cutting-edge. It was the first game that actually made me feel frightened. The music was a very important component of the whole. Some of the music is straight rock-action riffing, which is all right, but the better music successfully conjures up the dark and dread-filled world of DOOM. I think the music stands up really well, even after all these years, and even though it's only available as MIDI files.

PS: I remember how this game and its music sounded on my Gravis Ultrasound card. It's a shame the GUS died, because the Soundblaster just didn't do justice to DOOM. In fact, the Soundblaster, which shortly after DOOM's release became pretty much the only game in town, kind of sucked. But that's the magic of the marketplace for you!

CafePress and Playwrights' Platform

The Playwrights' Platform Store has just gone live. I have to say, even though the products are pricey, the convenience of CafePress is hard to beat. If you've got art, and you don't want to pay any setup fees, CafePress seems like a good choice. I learned of them because my company used them for its own promotional products.

CafePress's model is very simple. They combine their products (t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, notebooks, and the like) with your art in an on-demand manufacturing process. They provide the web front-end, credit card processing, shipment, customer service, and everything else. You provide the art and the promotion of your "store". They're assuming you'll be able to provide interested customers who want your art on their backs. There are no setup costs and no minimum runs. Each product sells for a base price, which CafePress keeps, plus a markup, which you keep. In the case of Convoq, the markup is zero, since they're only interested in spreading their logo around. However, for Playwrights' Platform, I'm interested in using Platform-branded products as a fund-raiser, and therefore our products have a substantial markup.

I'm going to reserve judgement on them until I've actually got some sample items in my hand, but so far the experience has been very positive. Although setting up the store and its products wasn't a trivial process, the hassle was as low as it could possibly could be. The work also let me dabble in being a graphic designer: all the artwork on the store (and on the Platform's web site) is my own. I'm actually very pleased with the way the "Write Power!" graphic turned out. (...and that it's found a home at last -- I originally designed it for another group, but they didn't care for it.)

Hack the Vote at Pregnant Chad 2004

My new short play Hack the Vote (a.k.a. Red State, White Hat, Blue Screen) has been accepted into the Pregnant Chad 2004 Festival, sponsored by the Stormy Weather Players of New Windsor, NY. The festival will be held from August 11-14, 2004, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York (it was originally scheduled to be held from May 5-8). I wasn't able to make it to New York to see the 2003 Chad festival, in which my play dog_eat_dog.com was performed, so I am doubly determined to get out there this year!

I was particularly hoping that Hack the Vote would be accepted into the 2004 Chad, simply because its theme (the electronic voting-machine mess) made such a nice mesh with the name of the festival. I'm happy that it's come to pass.

The big surprise on learning the roster of playwrights for the 2004 Chad was the representation of Boston playwrights in the lineup. In a slate of 20 plays, there are (at least) six Boston playwrights! Three of the pieces were first tried out at Playwrights' Platform.

Masters and Idiots

My coworker Mark Waks has posted the following Programming Koan :

The mark of the Master is that any Idiot can maintain his code. The mark of an Idiot is that only a Master can do so. Attend this lesson, my son, and be enlightened.

I'm proud to say that by Mark's definition, I've written some pretty masterful code in my day. I'm also ashamed to admit that I've written some idiot code. I will attend this lesson better. As to whether I'll ever become enlightened, who can say?

This koan does, however, put me in mind of the Tao's admonition:

Great perfection seems chipped,
Yet use will not wear it out;
Great fullness seems empty,
Yet use will not drain it;
Great straightness seems bent;
Great skill seems awkward;
Great eloquence seems tongue-tied.

Unreal Tournament 2004: The King Is Back

If you like first person shooters, this is going to be a very good year. Sometime later this year, so they say, we're going to be treated to Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. I can honestly say, however, that I can wait for these releases. Let the developers spend as much time as they want on tweaking and refining these games, which I'm sure are going to be just spectacular. I can wait, for I have Unreal Tournament 2004.

The original Unreal Tournament was the finest first person shooter of its day. It's a great game even today. It still looks good, it still sounds good, and of course it's a good performer. The single-player game was a little thin, but for an after-work fragfest, you couldn't really beat UT... until now.

I have been playing the UT2004 Demo for a few days, but it was just so mind-blowingly good that I had to rush out this weekend, the first weekend that UT2004 was available as a general release, and get my own copy. I haven't done that sort of thing in years. I expected that the other FPS fans at the office -- there are at least four other guys besides me who like to play -- would do the same, and indeed on Monday I discovered that they had.

This isn't the place to post a review, which I don't want to do anyway, and in any case I haven't played this game more than a few hours. Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident that this is going to be my favorite FPS of all time, but it does have one little flaw. You see, it's a pig.

UT2004 is not the lean, mean, FPS that the original Unreal Tournament was. That game is a classic, and it still plays beautifully. No, UT2004 is a pig. Did I say that already? It comes on 6 CD-ROMs, it takes about an hour to install, and it takes 5.5 GIGs on your hard drive. It also takes several LONG minutes to do its initial load, and each level is equally slow. The load times are very poor, and should have been dealt with during development. Plus, the performance is poor unless I turn a lot of details off. Now, my machine is no slouch, but it sure feels like one when I'm loading this game. However, once we're in the level ... man, oh, man, is this one sweet game. It's polished, it's slick, it looks pretty and sounds great, and the game play (always the most important thing to me) is excellent.

I already know that in order to really enjoy UT2004, I'm going to have to buy a new machine altogether, and not skimp on any of the specs, either. The new box is going to have to have a really fast processor, the best video, the most memory, and the fattest disk I can get. Well, except that that's going to be pretty expensive, that's not a horrible prospect.

So Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 can take their time. They will be ready when they're ready, and I'm sure they will be very, very good. In the meantime, go buy UT2004. They're only charging $39.95 for it! And in the meantime, upgrade your machine. (If those other games take up the kind of disk that UT2004 does, you'll have to updgrade just for that reason alone!) The King is Back!

So You Got Rejected

So you got rejected, too.

We all know the feeling. You worked hard on that script. You poured your heart and soul into it. And you were justifiably proud of it. You thought it was one of the best things you'd ever written. You sent it out, and you were sure it had a really good chance to get in this time. You didn't dare to actually hope, much less count on it getting accepted. Somehow, that doesn't make the sting of the rejection letter any less.

On the other hand, it shouldn’t sting all that much, and you should get over it pretty quickly. After all, if you’re not getting rejection letters, you’re not sending your material out, and you are sending your material out, aren’t you?

So you got rejected. Welcome to the club, playwright!

The first thing that every beginning playwright has to learn is that rejection of your material comes with the territory. The second thing to learn is that it’s not personal. It doesn’t even mean you’re a bad writer. Even if you’re the best writer in the world, you’re still going to get rejected a lot. There is no correlation between the quality of your writing (assuming that we could objectively quantify that, which we can’t!) and the number of rejections. The only quantity that correlates with the number of rejections you receive is the number of submissions you make! When I submit, I assume that no more than one out of every 100 submissions will get accepted. (But that’s me. Your mileage may vary.)

The business of being a playwright is all about playing the numbers, which means sending out a lot of submissions. The process of reading scripts, and selecting them for production or publication, is extremely subjective. Not everyone is going to see the merit in your script. In fact, most people won't see it, even if they're looking carefully, and even if you’re an especially gifted writer, which I’m sure you are. To be brutally frank, your script stands only a modest chance of being read at all. However, every once in a while, someone will pick up your script, and read it, and be excited by it. And the best way to maximize your chances of having that happen as soon as possible is to keep writing, and to absolutely paper the world with your submissions.

By the way, you may not believe me now, but it will make you feel better if you take the time to see the plays that were selected, because nothing is better proof of the process’s utter lack of objectivity than to witness some of the entries that were chosen over yours. (Besides, there are sure to be lots of other playwrights there who also were rejected, and you can all go out and dish afterward.)

So all right, you got rejected. So they didn’t get it. Well, to hell with them anyway! ( – until next time, when we will all package up our best work and send it to them for another round.) The only thing left to do is to keep preparing your submissions, and to keep writing. The other alternative is to give up on writing altogether, and I don’t think you want to do that.

In the meantime, what do you do with that rejection letter? Some people just throw it away, but I could never bring myself to do that. I collect them, actually. I’m not bragging or anything, but I have personally amassed a file of hundreds of rejection letters. I used to paper my home office wall with them, as a testament to the sheer volume of publishers and producers who have so far shunned me (and will be sorry some day). However, eventually my wife felt I should take them down. (She was concerned that they might be a fire hazard.) Therefore, they went into a special file, which I peruse from time to time, and in fact over the years I have become quite a student of rejection letters.

Rejection letters come in many varieties. They're usually very simple, professional form letters. Sometimes, they'll merge your name and the title of your script into the letter, so it looks individual enough to assuage some of the hurt. Often, though not always, they will bear a real person’s signature, and occasionally, the literary manager or the artistic director will be gracious enough to write a personal note on the letter (to soften the blow a bit, I suppose). Still, that's nicer than the average form letter. The worst kind of response, something I get about 5% of the time, is a photocopied form letter with a space for your name to be scribbled in. (In case I didn't get their point, one theater company even sent me one of these without bothering to pencil in my name!)

You can do what you want with your rejection letters, of course, but the whole point of the essay is that you should be getting them, and you should be getting a lot of them. Being a playwright means you’re playing a sort of lottery, and every submission is a ticket. You can’t win if you don’t play. So: here’s to rejection!

Confederate Bears

A few months ago, when my wife and I were in the mall doing our Christmas shopping, we wandered into the Franklin Mint Store. Not that we thought we were actually going to buy anything at the Franklin Mint Store, but you never know where inspiration might hit, you know?

It's hard to describe the Franklin Mint. I suppose that once upon a time, they were a specialty manufacturer of coins, gaming tokens, and medals - you know, the kind of things you'd expect a company that calls itself a "Mint" would manufacture. At some point, though, they started selling collectible plates, and I guess that was the beginning of the end. I mean, once you've crossed the line into collectible plates, the barriers are smashed, and before you know it, you're selling die-cast Harley-Davidson motorcycle models, ceramic Princess Diana dolls, Dale Earnhardt “The Intimidator” collector bears, and the Jeff Gordon collector knife.

It's easy to dismiss the Franklin Mint as just a sort of Mecca of High Kitsch, but it's really a fascinating place to visit. There is more than one cultural thread running through this company, and the fact that this store was in a solidly middle-class mall in the suburbs of Boston is proof that there are no class or regional differences when it comes to bad taste. For me, however, the single most interesting genre that the Franklin Mint carries is the Civil War. The thing about their Civil War coverage, you see, is that it's almost overwhelmingly one-sided. The Franklin Mint sells items like the Pride of the South Civil War Pendant, the Stonewall Jackson Collector Watch, the Pride of the Confederacy Dinnerware Collection, and every imaginable variation of Robert E. Lee (knives, sculptures, watches, rings, etc.) By contrast, Ulysses Grant gets a couple of knives, and George Custer gets one. One sort of senses that these products are less than enthusiastically produced and sold: variations on “Pride of the South” permeate the Mint's advertising copy on the Confederate products, but nowhere can you find a reference to anything like “Pride of the North”.

(Why do people romanticize the Confederacy? I just don't get it. Leave aside the fact that they lost the war. They were fighting for a manifestly evil cause – which may not have been evident at the time. It sure is now! “The Civil War wasn't about slavery,” a friend of mine from Georgia once said. I guess you know he's white. “It was about States' Rights.” Sure, OK – it was about a State's right to take away human rights.)

Bearing all this in mind, imagine how I felt when I saw the most bizarre cross-pollination I have ever seen at the Franklin Mint Store:

Confederate Bears.

There were actually teddy bears dressed up as Confederate soldiers.

One of the bears was just called “Pride of the South”. I think one was Robert E. Lee, and the other was Jeb Stuart. I might have the names a little wrong – but there were three brown bears, and they were all wearing Southern uniforms.

I was left shaking my head, with so many questions:

Why were there no Union soldiers?

Why were there no black bears?

Did bears only fight for the South? Did only brown bears fight for the South?

Did brown bears keep black bears as slaves?

Did bears have a position on the Missouri Compromise?

I can't give a link to these products on the Franklin web site – they seem to have been buried pretty quickly. But they were definitely there. Perhaps this was an attempt to appeal the to the wives of the men who were buying the 14 1/2” Robert E. Lee Battle of Fredericksburg Knife . Maybe they sold out the entire production run. Or maybe the idea was a total flop. Maybe there's just nothing cuddly and cute about traitors who wage war on their own country to preserve their “right” to own human beings. I'm not sure.

PS:I just tried to find these bears again. I went back to the mall to find the store; I wanted to take some photos, but the Franklin Mint store wasn't there anymore. I guess General Sherman had finally gotten to Burlington. There were some carpetbaggers running one of those shoestring stores in its place, selling Bonsai trees.

12 Reasons Same-Sex Marriage will Ruin Society

It's true, of course. Same-Sex Marriage will ruin our society. We should be thankful that our Glorious Heroes of the One Party State are working night and day to ensure that this menace never comes to pass, and they aren't about to let little things like reason, logic, fairness, or the U.S. Constitution stand in their way. The The Gator Gay-Straight Alliance brilliantly deconstructs their boneheaded arguments.

Who's the Flip-Flopper?

The Daily Kos has this terrific article which details the flip-flops of George W. Bush. Bush is trying to make the case that John Kerry is a crazy waffler. I think it's a stupid game to get into -- I don't happen to think that changing your mind is necessarily a sign of weakness or lack of integrity, and it's not clear in any case that Kerry's done all the changing he's accused of -- but if Bush wants to play that game, he's just as vulnerable to the charge as Kerry is.

God Hates Shrimp

God Hates Shrimp : It's true. If you eat shellfish, you're going to Hell. There seem to be more verses in the Bible that condemn shellfish eating than condemn homosexuality, and they're much less ambiguous.

I wonder if the "Reverend" Fred Phelps has ever eaten a lobster. God, I hope so.

"Drenched in Water"

The rocks that NASA's rover Opportunity are examining were once "drenched in water", according to NASA. The crater was once a habitable place, according to project scientists, but no word on how long ago that was. The press conference was carried live on NASA TV. This is a very exciting time in Mars exploration.