Testing my own wiki for Romeo and Juliet. :)

Wikipedia uses the easily-edited power of a wiki framework to create a growing encyclopaedia which can be added to, updated and corrected by any reader. Wow.

I've been hunting for an easy - or at least manageable - way to implement a wiki on these pages. Since the structure relies on access to server software, it's not too easy to do on a hosted site. I wonder whether it might be something I could implement on a dedicated server at BHASVIC?

O. M. G. It's Wednesday the 28th of August. I've got my induction day at BHASVIC tomorrow. So much for my 'holiday'. It was only two extra days, if you take into account bank holiday Monday. Right. Re-adjust. Get my head round new job. Gear up for uni. Gear up for R & J. I so should've taken another week off.

I wasn't even thinking about it - I figured I've got a long weekend, on my current timetable I don't work Mondays. But there it is. First day tomorrow. There's paperwork and reading to do. And I've got to conceptualise the whole thing. Do a mode shift. Again. I can't just do it at the weekend, because I'm thinking about it now, and if I think about something I haven't conceptualised, I can't - hey! - get my head around it.

What's the point of this post? To let off steam. Nobody's reading anyway. :)

I read about Nomic ages ago in a book by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a meta-game in which you change the rules of the game itself as you play. I never thought I'd see it in use, but here, of course, it is, on the web.

Found on Meatball Wiki: WhatIsaTroll:

I would rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.

WikiWiki - means 'quick' in Hawaiian. This is roughly how Tim Berners-Lee originally concieved of the Web - many hyperlinks, anyone can edit, practically no design features (eg tables and images), a pure network of information. It's amazing, it's unlikely, it seems self-referential and circular (or is that just the way I'm reading it?), try it here by starting with the Wiki Getting Started Faq and see where it takes you :)

Foop Blog is another Brighton-based blog, property of Andy.

Having bugged Maximus at Neverwinter Vault, there's now news and a copy of the beholder pic up on their site. Looking forward to Polyhedral's update, and any other offers of portrait work for creatures...

Been in touch with Polyhedral: he likes the Beholder pic and will be including it in future updates of the file :)

Started reading the wonderfully grim and pessimistic series of books by the so-called Lemony Snicket (apparently a nom-de-plume), going under the title A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Having devoured the first within a couple of hours, I ran out to buy the second two. Apparently there will be thirteen in total (a suitably unlucky number), but I gather only six have been published so far.

They continue in the tradition of Philip Pullman of writing books for kids that aren't all brightness and roses - and, like the Harry Potter series, are a pleasure for adults.

They're written in character as modern-day Victoriana - the three protagonists are orphans named Baudelaire, and a key character is a banker named Mr. Poe - but the odd refrence to walkie-talkies or motorcycles creeps in, alongside the anachronistic use of such Americanisms as 'I guess' or 'cookies'.

They're simple, rich, charming and beautifully illustrated - and cheap. Check 'em out. :)

Created a picture of a beholder, a mythical creature modeled by Polyhedral for use in NWN. I've yet to hear whether he'll actually use it with his model. Watch this space...

Ahhhh. Sunday. Wasting time playing GTA3 and messing with it using the GTA3 Mod Database. Joy oh joy oh joy. Hm - haven't I said that before somewhere?

Some late-breaking old news: The full text and compleat history of "All your base are belong to us".

Ah, Saturday. Ahh, a day off. The start of a holiday. A Bank Holiday Weekend. Nothing to do but laze around on my balcony and read A Brief History of the Future. Joy oh joy oh joy. :)

Great, very obvious, very funny famous-faces-as-fantasy characters over at The Portrait Portal. For Baldur's Gate 2, but could be converted to NWN. Worth a laugh, anyway :)

Thanks to Wake for helping me track down the link to the original pic on which my NWN druid was based: found via Google at UNESCO-WebWorld-Cultural Cyberspaces-Memory of Central Asia.

upsideclown

Good stuff.

t h e v i r a l f a c t o r y - the viral marketing experts

Fan-fricken-tastic digital comedy movie clips :)

Adactio: Journal - another Brighton Blog.

My last day today at Swandean School of English in Worthing.


My group grinning for the nth camera.

The group photo at the end of a course is traditional; some poor sap from the next classroom is presented with a row of about ten cameras, and we all stand in a group and say 'cheese' until our jaws ache. :)

A number of original photographs on which Bioware's artists have based their portraits are crawling out of the woodwork over at Neverwinter Vault.

There's quite a furore among commenters about this. I said in my original tutorial that using photos as reference, and tracing over them to get the basic structure, was a standard fantasy art technique. My first fantasy art hero, Boris Vallejo, says as much of his 'fantasy-realist' paintings, in his book on his methods. Even so, he does so in a defensive tone - combating the unspoken suggestion that tracing, or painting over, means you 'can't draw'. People have used the phrase 'rip-off' of Bioware's beautifully rendered and detailed images, where the structure has come from another artwork.

I'm amazed at the can of worms this has opened up. As I have discussed in an earlier post or two, the subject of IP (Intellectual Property), including copyright on digital photographs which are so easily downloadable from the internet, is something of a hot potato these days. The law is very tight on it, arguably too tight; and if one or two of Bioware's artists have used the photos without gaining permission, they may well face lawsuits. The source images are by professional photographers, of famous actresses, and they have become part of a product which earns the company money. (I'm really surprised they didn't take their own photos, as Vallejo does.) They would seem to be eminently suable - and a legal battle may have to be fought to decide whether the paintover counts as an original work, or 'fair use' of some sort.

I'm relying on not pissing anyone off, being too skint to be worth suing, and not making any money from my artwork to protect me from litigious wrath. It's not even my profession, so I can't be seen as earning notoriety to fuel my other paid work. I'm a teacher, not even an art teacher. (Except to the extent of the tutorials you can find on other pages in this site.)

I'd guess that Bioware's legal boys have checked this situation out, and that comes from the assumption that the artist was open about his or her methods, and the use of source material to produce the portraits. When talking to PC Zone about the possibility of having my work on their coverdisks, the use of source issue came up quickly. They're only including my originals and copyright-free paintovers. Better to be safe than sorry; the magazine is being sold.

But what if the artist didn't know the law, and/or didn't tell anyone about his/her methods? (I was quite ignorant of the tightness of the copyright laws when I started doing my paintovers.) It'd be terrible to see this issue blow up in the company's face. I wonder whether there might be a knock-on effect to other companies too?

Cool Mock 80s Website which is actually a teaser for the new GTA3 game 'Vice City'. Nice.

Interesting bit of news on Neverwinter Vault:

BioWare Pulls a Crosbie?
While searching for some reference material for a portrait he was going to do for a friend, Robert stumbled onto a picture of film star Catherine Zeta-Jones that looks surprisingly the same as the portrait for Sharwyn, an NPC character from the game. It seems that the portrait techniques used by Crosbie are not that uncommon which is good to know.

New Portrait on the Neverwinter Portrait pages of the Ready Room up today!

Hehe, a little mention at Neverwinter Vault:

We're going to be calling our new file section "Module Prefabs", where you can add all your custom armor, items, areas, weapons that other players can use to help build their modules. Thanks to portrait pioneer Crosbie for the suggestion as well as all the people who sent me ideas.

'Portrait Pioneer' - that's qot quite a ring to it... :) Cheers Maximus!

Late-Breaking News: Had a message from Rhianna Pratchett yesterday that some of my portraits will be appearing in PC Zone Magazine at the end of the (next?) month. Wahey!

Pics will include my from-scratch ones, two paintovers from copyright-free sources, and of course the one of Rhianna herself. Should be on the DVD, maybe the CDs too. Cheers Rhianna! :)

MULHOLLAND DRIVE

Cool website, extraordinary movie.

Maybe it's just Lynch-by-numbers - you get bits of Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Twin Peaks - but hey, they're great numbers. You can't beat Lynch's astonishing set-pieces, even if his anti-narratives lose you.

Mulholland Dr., which started out as a TV series that was too odd for its network, comes off a bit like Peaks turned into Lost Highway. Like that movie, this one turns on a knife edge halfway through, but it's the inverse: where Lost Highway (by my reading) starts out as a slightly trippy narrative, then becomes a dream reverie when the impossible plot point occurs, this film is readable as dream narrative until the turning point. Everyone you thought the characters were becomes turned on its head, and you can see them as the dream-logic reinterpretations of actual characters whose story you discover at the end.

Rather like Three Colours Red, which does it in the very last scene, the ending makes you recast everything you've seen in arrears and view it in a new light. In Three Colours it gave a backbone to the whole reason for telling the three stories; in Mulholland Dr. you see why, for example, Naomi Watts' character seemed too goody-goody to be true, and why so many jarring and freaky things have been allowed to happen.

Though the 'real' story comes out at the end, it too seems to be told in a reverie, and may also be a skewed telling of 'the story'. For me it made sense that way, though, and helped resolve that feeling of narrative giddyness where you really don't know what the hell is going on.

When I first saw Lost Highway, my reading of it was that it was deliberately unreadable: that Lynch had purposely broken every coherence in order to leave the viewer with that 'giddy' feeling. After the third viewing I came to the opinion that the second half should be discounted as a fantasy retelling of the story so far; and that gives it a certain kind of sense. I might be wrong. There are still holes, I'm sure. But the holes are a bit smaller and more managable.

Watching Mulholland Dr. with this reading in mind, I was looking out for clues that a similar structure might be at work. I'd heard it compared to Lost Highway and was reading everything as provisional, potentially to be revealed as unreal, and was waiting for the hinge to come up. When it did, it all fell into place. Well, more or less.

But having brought that expectation to it, is that what's going on there? Was this dream/reality structure even in Lost Highway in the first place?

Don't you just love Lynch?

Must do some more NWN Portraits. *Makes mental note to self*

Ghost World was a good'un. Second film running featuring the extraordinary Scarlett Johansson. Why's she extraordinary? Perhaps it's in the name; she sounds like an old-school movie star. Looks like one too. She was perfectly cast in The Man Who Wasn't There, looking like a young Frances McDormand. She's not incredibly beautiful, not even incredibly good, just very very watchable.

Hey, the Blog Cabin looks nicer than the Ready Room front page. Hm. Reorg time?

I've got a bloody goddamn evening off! So I'm going to watch Ghost World. I've got a lot of movie catching up to do - I'm supposed to be a Media teacher and a Film student, for christ's sake. Managed to see The Man Who Wasn't There last night, Coen classic; need Mulholland Dr., Charlotte Gray, Iris, and stacks of others.

I fricken' hate HTML sometimes. It's taken me an hour to find two misplaced <BR> tags that were buggering up my layout. Sheesh. Bloody bedtime. (I got 'em though!)

Strolling down Western Road, Brighton.

More on the IP/copyright argument from Lawrence Lessig:

O'Reilly Network: Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 [Aug. 15, 2002]
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.

BlogChalking
Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United Kingdom, Brighton, Central, Paul, Male, 26-30!

BlogChalking helps people to find blogs of interest by using keyword information like this. Kindly ignore this post, but note, in passing, that I have been 'chalked'.

Searching for Brighton-based blogs, came across clagnut, a web design/randomness site, beautifully designed with stuff worth nicking from. :)

Wahey! I'm on Google. A search for the Ready Room, the Blog Cabin, or my name will turn up a result for this site. The Internet is not only amazing, it's amazingly amazing. Ego gratification ahoy! :)

OK, so round at Adam and Dan's place about a week ago we got into a discussion - nay, competition - about who was the biggest geek. This drifted towards "Paul is the biggest geek. Discuss.". I can now refute that proposition: I am a mere 18% geek. Evidence follows:

You are 18% geek

OK, so maybe you ain't a geek. You do, at least, show a bit of interest in the world around you. Either that, or you have enough of a sense of humor to pick some of the sillier answers on the test. Regardless, you're probably a pretty nifty, well-rounded person who gets along fine with people and can chat with just about anyone without fear of looking stupid or foolish or overly concerned with minutiae. God, I hate you.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Old Harrovian (College, not the School) Sarah being Tess on the cover of the new Penguin edition of Hardy's classic. :)

The following is an interesting article on copyright, intellectual property and the ownership of the intangible in the 'Internet Age'. Quotation taken from the article :)

COPYRIGHTED PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE DIGITAL DOMAIN

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
- Thomas Jefferson

I was alarmed to read this post at Neverwinter Vault about copyright issues in the use of 'found images' for NWN portraits. It seems a site has been brought down by a complaint from an artist whose work had been converted into a portrait for the game.

Where does my own work fall? I'm not taking other artists' work wholesale and converting it to NWN format, and I've gone to the lengths of creating a tutorial to make it absolutely explicit what work I do with a portrait, and what is in the original. I link to the original and the site too.

I don't think this constitutes theft of intellectual property. Of course, or I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't dream of taking, say, a Vallejo portrait and painting over that for use in NWN. (In part because I wouldn't need to, but mostly 'cos I don't think he'd like it.)

However, if an artist or subject complained and asked me to remove a portrait, I guess I'd sigh, and remove it. I'd hope, though, that the credit, the little bit of traffic I might send to their site, the amount I alter the image and the fact that it's just a hobby and not-for-profit, would be enough not to offend anyone.

The definition of Intellectual Property, the protection of it and the uses to which it may be legitimately put by others is an increasingly complex issue. It seems the law errs on the side of being too heavy-handed at the moment, and relies on people's judgment when not to exercise it. It's interesting, too, that parody is protected but other use or alteration is not. (My portraits, I suppose, would not count as parody, but rather the latter.)

What metaphor are we to use? Theft? Paintings or pictures of architecture? Internet = public domain? Academic citation? Parody? Warhol's soup cans? Dada? Sampling in music? Clay? Collage? Redistribution? Fraud by impersonation?

Each casts a different light on the process, and is dependent on the amount of alteration, if any, made to the image or text; and who is claiming authorship of the 'new' text, or what part of it.

My angle on the work I do with paintovers is that it's a bit like clay (I use the original portrait as material to work a new model with), partly paintings of architecture (It's an image of someone else's work, but they're often not contactable, and the final image incorporates other elements), partly citation (I don't claim that the work is entirely mine and I cite my sources).

I'm riding on this theory at the moment: As long as there's no problem, there's no problem. :)

Last night of the play at Lewes tonight. Ah, then it'll all be over.

I think we had the cast party last night. Went to a lovely, huge, middle-class house out at Ringmer in the downs. I'm such a city boy I never get to see as many stars as you can when you're out in the country, away from all the light pollution. I could see the Milky Way. Got pissed, smoked over my limit (currently theoretically 10 a day) then went round to a friend's house to fix her DVD.

Got back at 5. Slept till 3. But I can! Hey, it's Saturday. :)

..And Blogger's back up again. Don't we lose our temper when things don't go our way.

If anyone's here looking for new NWN portraits, sorry for the hiatus, but as you can see I've been dead busy this last week, and portraiture has fallen by the wayside. I'm looking forward to having my evenings back again, and some of them will doubtless be spent knocking out another portrait or two. :)

BTW, it's be nice to get a comment from anyone passing through... I have no idea whether this page is being viewed at all, since Lycos' stats are down at present. Even a 'hello world' would be interesting...

How much is a blog just a space for personal records? How much a public forum or soapbox? Depends, I suppose, if you have 'a public' or not.

Tits. Blogger down. I've only been doing this a couple of days and the bastard thing's down. Typical.

...Or is this a cunning ploy to get people to pay for 'Pro Blogger'? They say the best things in life are free. They also say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Contrary buggers, aren't They?

As promised, early picnickers at Lewes Castle.

The crowd was smaller tonight - Thursdays are always peculiar. As always, it takes the wind out of your sails a bit. You can't hit your level right - either you fall a bit flat (like your jokes) or you figure, right, I'm going to go for it, and you hit it too hard.

It seems the quieter audiences also enjoy the play, but they're smilers rather than laughers. An audience creates its own norms. It only takes a small group of people who laugh out loud to set the rest off... or, that doesn't happen, and everyone feels they have to be polite and English about it all.

Two more nights to go. Weekenders should liven it up a bit. :)

Didn't realise I hadn't posted a link for The Brighton Little Theatre. You can book tickets for the show there, and they generally do good quality amateur productions. If that isn't an oxymoron.

I was going to post a lovely pic of the crowds at Lewes Castle picnicking before the show tonight - but my little cam buggered up somehow and all it stored was multicoloured fuzz. Bugger. Instead, here's a shot of the cheeky onlookers who grab a snatch of the show without paying. The skinflints. :)

It worked well outdoors, with a large and increasingly pissed audience. The Little Theatre felt a bit cramped - you have to be bigger outside, and it suits the broad strokes of the characters. What I'm trying to say is that we got laughs for a change. And that's always a Good Thing.

I'll see if I can't grab a pre-show snap for tomorrow. Hope it doesn't rain.

Quoteland "Slump, and the world slumps with you. Push, and you push alone."
-Laurence J. Peter

Phew. Tired out. Up too late. Bit burnt out at work. First night at Lewes tonight. Need Coke. Need coffee. Need nicotene.

Testing the archives. Yes I'm still awake.

The play in dress rehearsal at Lewes Castle

Dress was fine, but a little shaky for some reason. I think we're all a bit tired, and the sudden appearance of lighting, changes of exit, the sound system going wrong and so on, all conspire to throw you. It'll be fine tomorrow, though I ought to be getting some sleep.

But of course I'm up at nearly two in the morning. Why? Designing a page to put my snaps on, from the new digital camera. Which of course is vital. Twat.

I get picky about things - once I've started, I keep thinking: I'll just tweak that, hm, maybe that will work, and so on - until it's nearly two in the morning. Before I've quite noticed.

If I was doing something useful that'd be fine...

Gave in to temptation and bought an ickle mini digital camera. It's crap, but it's fun. Expect to see the Ready Room and the Blog Cabin inundated with poxy little pics of extremely low quality. :) Might just have to take it to Lewes Castle this eve for the dress... I wonder whether we'll actually have any lights tonight...

Britons watching for meteor shower

After the tech at Lewes Castle tonight - which wasn't much of a tech, since the lights and sound weren't up due to a power shortage (doh!) - I went down to the seafront and sat by the West Pier to watch for shooting stars.

It wasn't quite two a minute, but half an hour on the beach, smoking a fag and watching the skies, saw a handful of Perseids - sharp little streaks across the sky that made the scattering of watchers on the beach say 'oooh!' and giggle.

So I wasn't going to stay out on the beach all night. I came back home at eleven, and I keep popping out onto the balcony every few minutes and looking up at the sky. If I'm lucky, in the corner of my eye, I see another one.

19.37PM BST, 12 Aug 2002
A celestial light show is promised tonight - weather permitting - as the Earth ploughs through a thick cloud of comet dust.
The Perseid meteor shower, which puts on a display at this time every year, is now approaching its maximum intensity.
It will peak tonight sending shooting stars blazing trails across the sky at a rate which could reach two a minute.

Quoteland: "The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life."
-Andrew Brown

I taught my English students the word 'Blogger' today. It's not every day you learn a new word, so I thought I'd share it with them.

They guessed it was something violent - like to punch or fight. I said No, it's non-violent, in fact it's very nice. So they said, Is it like shag or hump? I don't know where students learn their English these days...

When I told them the root was 'weblog' they gradually cottoned on, though most knew 'to log on' but not what 'a log' was, except for one guy who'd watched Star Trek. (Captain's Log, stardate 20345.13...) Ahhhh, said the Japanese. Blogger. Then they tried to look it up in their electronic dictionaries to get the Japanese word. Silly sods. :)

Brad Nault has posted his first portrait to NWVault. It's all over for me as a portrait maker. He's absolutely superb - a professional illustrator, all from scratch, the portraits knock everything else into a cocked hat. Great stuff.

Forgot to switch on my alarm clock. Thank God I woke up and raised a bleary eyelid... maybe it's my subconscious telling me I don't really want to go to work? Naahhh...

Conjumen has posted a hakpak of my Neverwinter Nights portraits to Neverwinter Vault. This means you can use 17 of my pics for NPCs in the game. Nice :)

Well. A long day spent intermittently attaching stuff to my pages, inspired by the new blog section you see before you. You learn something new every day.

I was particularly pleased to find the commenting system; I'd wanted that for my Portraits Pages for yonks. Can't be bothered to update now, though; it's a quarter to one in the morning and I've got work tomorrow. Mondays. Who invented Mondays?

Tech rehearsal for The Country Wife at Lewes Castle tomorrow. All my evenings will be spent doing the play. Hope it doesn't rain :)

Testing the enetation commenting system.

And now testing using the Blog This function to add a post from anywhere without even using the link. I like things to be easy. BTW, if you're bored shitless by this, I did warn you.

Testing the Blog This function of Blogger... don't bother clicking this link, it only takes you to look at my Vanya Pictures.

And now the blog is installed on the Ready Room, you probably got here from there. As always with in construction works started on a Sunday afternoon with nothing better to do, expect this to be uninspiring until I get inspired. Try Crosbie's Neverwinter Portraits instead, that's much more interesting. :)

Probs with the ftp link to Crosbie's Ready Room, so this is gonna sit on a blogspot, at least for the time being...

Hello and Welcome to Crosbie's Blog Cabin, and experiment in blogging new to Crosbie's Ready Room! Expect erratically updated rubbish to appear here when you least expect it.