Avalon County Entertainment System

Primetime Programming Update: Avalon Broadcasting System (Channel 17)
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2411

21:00 [Action Adventure - Animated] Lensmen: The Brave and the Bold Special
Weapon of Choice - After 400 years of adventure, Chief Gryphon is no stranger to old friends he hasn't seen in years, or even decades, suddenly reappearing in his life. His yeoman even has a special code for it in the IPO personnel database. These occasions usually go smoothly enough - but when someone special walks out of a dark and bloody corner of his past and asks him for a favor that challenges his ethical boundaries, what will he do?

This program replaces To Be Announced on the weekly programming grid for October 10-16.

Hooboy. I want to buy the DVD already. Is that a good sign (for you), or a bad sign (for me)...?

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Christopher Walken?
Okay, probably not.

Polychrome

>Christopher Walken?
>Okay, probably not.

Although he would be a great choice to be, ahem, "walken out of the shadows".

<ducks>

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

>Although he would be a great choice to be, ahem, "walken out of the
>shadows".
>

http://mirrors.rit.edu/instantCSI/

<shades> YEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!!! </shades>

Lime2K
The One True Evil Overlord

I keep trying to catch episodes of To Be Announced, but it's always being replaced by something else. I don't know how the network expects it to build an audience when it's not shown on a regular basis...

>I keep trying to catch episodes of To Be Announced, but it's always
>being replaced by something else. I don't know how the network expects
>it to build an audience when it's not shown on a regular basis...

I know, right?

(I actually thought that was what it was when I was a kid - the world's most irregular TV show. Always wondered what it was about.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm trying something a little different with Weapon of Choice, so we'll see how it goes. It was originally going to be a mini (representing a "normal" Lensmen: The Brave and the Bold episode), but it became apparent in fairly short order that it was going to end up being too long and complicated for that to work. By then I'd already gotten a fair way into developing it, and converting it back to plain text would have been a hassle, particularly since one of the presentation tricks I'm employing in it involves using bordered, colored <div>s to represent those narration boxes in the corners of comic panels.

So what I'm going to do is keep developing it in the DCF environment, and then when it's finished, put it through the same HTML conversion process I developed for the Mini-Omnibus collections and the web version of Top Gear: Road Film (With Fighting). As clunky as that is, it beats trying to maintain a narrative flow while engaging in full-dress HTML markup (which is friggin' impossible, at least for me).

If that works (which is not a given), and the result is bearable, it may point the way to a new way of developing content, since - alas - the times have by now left my beloved, universally compatible, no-hassles-for-me plain ASCII presentation far, far behind. I've tried to avoid going HTML for well over a decade at this point - I still hate the way it displays paragraphs - but when the most traffic your board sees in months centers around people trying to convert your output for their toys of choice, well, there's your sign, as my fitness instructor is wont to say. Besides, one of the legs of my stance on ASCII has always been its universality. If it's lost that, it's lost it, and I can deplore that all I want, but deploring it doesn't change it.

Mind you, even if the Weapon of Choice experiment does lead to a new standard, you're still on your own with the back catalog. The hell I'm going back and converting all that lot. I can pretty much guarantee I'm never going to have that much free time. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I've tried to avoid going HTML for well over a decade at this
>point - I still hate the way it displays paragraphs

I apologize if you already know this, but it sounds like you don't. It's possible to duplicate your usual ASCII paragraph style in HTML with only a tiny bit of a stylesheet: put this anywhere in the document (inside <head> preferred), and you're done.

<style>
p {
margin: 0;
max-width: 30em;
text-indent: 3em;
}
<style>

Change the lengths as suits, natch. Other useful things you might want to throw in there are: "font-family: monospace;" gets you a fixed-width font, and "line-height: 0.99;" will tighten up the spacing between lines (conversely, use a number larger than 1 to spread it out a bit more).

>>I've tried to avoid going HTML for well over a decade at this
>>point - I still hate the way it displays paragraphs
>
>I apologize if you already know this, but it sounds like you don't.
>It's possible to duplicate your usual ASCII paragraph style in HTML
>with only a tiny bit of a stylesheet

In the, what, 14 or 15 years I've been intermittently (at times very intermittently, I admit) wrestling with this problem, people have often said "oh, you can use a stylesheet for that," and never once before now have any of those people bothered to elucidate the point further. So thanks for that.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That certainly seems less than helpful of those people, considering how many CSS properties there are and how many of them have non-obvious names.

One more piece of unsolicited advice and then I'll stop: you might find Markdown helpful for writing bulk text more or less as you're used to, and then converting to HTML for publication. Its input format is not quite the same as what you usually put up, but it's quite similar.

>That certainly seems less than helpful of those people, considering
>how many CSS properties there are and how many of them have
>non-obvious names.

Yeah, I guess they figured I could take a course or something. To learn how to do one thing.

It probably bears pointing out that, by and large, these are the same sort of people who respond to complaints that one is having an annoying time renaming a bunch of files by saying breezily, "Just write a perl script." :)

>One more piece of unsolicited advice and then I'll stop: you might
>find >href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/";]Markdown
>helpful for writing bulk text more or less as you're used to, and then
>converting to HTML for publication. Its input format is not quite the
>same as what you usually put up, but it's quite similar.

Hmm, I may have to poke at that a bit later. A cursory skim of the first page shows it plugging neatly into a bunch of different things I don't use and not the thing I do. This happens fairly often in my world. :) It does look handy, though.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>That certainly seems less than helpful of those people, considering
>>how many CSS properties there are and how many of them have
>>non-obvious names.
>
>Yeah, I guess they figured I could take a course or something. To
>learn how to do one thing.

You could browse through the W3C Schools CSS tutorial. It's got all the basics laid out, and there's a neat little widget where you can edit the code of an example and see the results immediately, for those people who learn best by tinkering with things.

>>Yeah, I guess they figured I could take a course or something. To
>>learn how to do one thing.
>
>You could browse through the W3C Schools CSS tutorial.

Yeah, but as I see Gryphon's point, he's not trying to learn CSS. He just wants to accomplish a specific task.

"My 'Check Engine' light is on." "Well, the community college has an auto repair curriculum, you could take a few classes..." :)

>>>Yeah, I guess they figured I could take a course or something. To
>>>learn how to do one thing.
>>
>>You could browse through the W3C Schools CSS tutorial.
>
>Yeah, but as I see Gryphon's point, he's not trying to learn
>CSS. He just wants to accomplish a specific task.

I think the idea is to jump into the middle of the tutorial to learn that one thing.

>"My 'Check Engine' light is on." "Well, the community college has an
>auto repair curriculum, you could take a few classes..." :)

More like: "The community college has an auto repair curriculum and you can drop in on the lecture on that exact topic."

>>>Yeah, I guess they figured I could take a course or something. To
>>>learn how to do one thing.
>>
>>You could browse through the W3C Schools CSS tutorial.
>
>Yeah, but as I see Gryphon's point, he's not trying to learn
>CSS. He just wants to accomplish a specific task.
>
>"My 'Check Engine' light is on." "Well, the community college has an
>auto repair curriculum, you could take a few classes..." :)

It's more like "your new car comes with a manual, you could page through it so you have a better idea of what stuff means".

For anyone who is going to be putting a lot of things online and wants them to look in a specific way, a little CSS knowledge (at the very least, "where can I find how this thing I want to change is named") will save a *lot* of time. It's like "using a FTP client" versus "moving the physical HD between your desktop and server box as needed".

> <style>
> p {
> margin: 0;
> max-width: 30em;
> text-indent: 3em;
> }
> <style>

Having completed principal construction and HTML conversion on Weapon of Choice last night, I spent a while experimenting with this suggestion, and while I got it to work, I made the dismaying discovery that formatting the piece as I thought I wanted it actually makes everything worse. I think that's because of the sheer width of display available. With a maximized browser on an even modest widescreen display, a lot of paragraphs don't extend far enough to wrap, which, with the initial indent, makes the whole thing look like a wall-o-text that's all mysteriously indented to the right rather than a series of grafs indented at the beginning. The max-width attribute counteracts that, but then (unless you mess with the size of the browser window itself), anything that is centered, such as credits and song cues, winds up looking like it's floating in a sea of whitespace far off to the right of the text column, which is... not optimal in a lot of ways.

I'm sure this is, in turn, reparable with more attention to the protocols of stylesheeting, but to be perfectly frank I cannot be arsed; if I wanted to deal with that kind of thing I'd have stayed in IT. (Or, as the great physicist Enrico Fermi is reputed to have said to a younger colleague who was asking him about the dizzying profusion of sub-subatomic particles that was emerging in the early quantum mechanics era, "Young man, if I could learn the names of all these particles, I would have become a botanist.")

So thank you kindly, and this may bear further investigation in the future, but for this particular piece, I'm prepared to be content with what I've got. It would never pass any sort of code validation, I'm sure - almost everything I've done in it, presentation-wise, is supposed to be Done With CSS these days instead of the way I've done it - but it looks fine from a reasonable distance, and that's really all I give a damn about nowadays.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That makes a fair bit of sense.

Would it be useful to you if I took what you have (once it's posted), monkeyed with it, and sent it back to you "done properly"? I think I know how to fix the centered-text problem, and this is the sort of thing I do when I'm too tired to do anything else, so it's no real trouble for me.

This intrigues me, having seen fanfiction.net completely lose my formatting on any number of occaisions. I'd like to see what you can do with a sample.

I don't feel comfortable messing with Gryphon's formatting without his OK, and I don't know beans about what fanfiction.net does to submissions, but if you want to PM me some of your stuff I'll look at it.

>I don't feel comfortable messing with Gryphon's formatting without his
>OK

At this point I feel like Uecker in Major League. "Ah, what the hell, kid, nobody's listening anyway." :)

So yeah, I mean, you might as well give it a shot if you want. Worst case I just won't be able to use it and we're no worse off than we are now, except for your time. Be an interesting experiment anyway.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Heh. OK. Might be a couple days before I get around to anything.

It worked very well on my iphone between and during feedings of my newborn son. So don't sell yourself short. There's probably a solution to the problem that just needs better crowd sourcing from someone way younger than us*.

cheers,
t.

*if memory serves me right, Gryphon is about 2 years older than I am.

Trigger Argee
Manon, Maccadon, Orado, etc.
Denton, never leave home without it.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - HST

Youth doesn't necessarily imply intelligence or computer savviness. For instance, I am nineteen. That is all.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

I'm sorry, ma'am, me and my friends'll get off your lawn now...

>Youth doesn't necessarily imply intelligence or computer savviness.
>For instance, I am nineteen. That is all.
>
>I'm sorry, ma'am, me and my friends'll get off your lawn
>now...

Just means you have that much more time to learn that much more from standing on us old cane wavers shoulders. :D

You're probably right... still, it worries me that I can't code worth a damn and I have an unfortunate disposition toward Walking Techbane status (I went to a call centre once and magnetized the entire building. To this day I haven't been able to work out how), which is a problem considering all the lab equipment I have to work with.

The eternal dilemma. Should I have read English, or should I keep at this and get a job afterwards? Decisions, decisions...

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

LAST EDITED ON Mar-01-12 AT 04:11 PM (EST)
 
Don't sell yourself short. Walking Techbane happens to be an incredibly valuable character trait for a career in software or electronic hardware QA.

>Don't sell yourself short. Walking Techbane happens to be an
>incredibly valuable character trait for a career in software or
>electronic hardware QA.

Indeed...

"Are we sure we fixed it?"

"well, get Mikey in here. He can break ANYTHING"

>Just means you have that much more time to learn that much more from
>standing on us old cane wavers shoulders. :D

If I have gweeped further it is by IRCing on the shoulders of giants.

Eheheh... sorry about that, man. I actually -enjoy- the ASCII format you use for publishing, which probably makes me part of a small minority among the younger readers here ('younger' being quite objective, as I'm pushing 30). Kinda sucks that today's toys hate it so much, really.

I can't code to save my life, so the thing where someone says 'Oh, all you have to do is write a script in X language!' bugs me too. (Hell, I write what little HTML I use in Notepad. Who does that anymore?)

I think I had a point in mind when I started this comment, but it's long since escaped my grasp. I know I, as well as many others, check the board on at least a bi-weekly basis for new content, whether in the form of new threads or a new mini. Don't let it get you down that there's a slump on, I guess is what I'm saying. Maybe. Let me get back to you after this headache passes.

>(Hell, I write what little HTML I use in Notepad. Who does that anymore?)
>
Well, I'd say that I do, but I don't use Windows unless I absolutely have to. I do all my HTML (and PHP) in vim, which is both more and less advanced than notepad at the same time (and for the record, I do it in a terminal window, no Xvim for me).

offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

LAST EDITED ON Feb-24-12 AT 11:49 PM (EST)
 
>>(Hell, I write what little HTML I use in Notepad. Who does that anymore?)
>>
>Well, I'd say that I do, but I don't use Windows unless I absolutely
>have to. I do all my HTML (and PHP) in vim, which is both more and
>less advanced than notepad at the same time (and for the record, I do
>it in a terminal window, no Xvim for me).

And a real nerd uses ed. Can we drop this?

--
-Pasha ("Only on alt.sysadmin.recovery could a DSW be won by the smallest and least useful")
What was that feeling again?
Oh yes.
-Rage-

>>>(Hell, I write what little HTML I use in Notepad. Who does that anymore?)
>>>
>>Well, I'd say that I do, but I don't use Windows unless I absolutely
>>have to. I do all my HTML (and PHP) in vim, which is both more and
>>less advanced than notepad at the same time (and for the record, I do
>>it in a terminal window, no Xvim for me).
>
>And a real nerd uses ed. Can we drop this?

uphill, both ways, 15 inches of snow, etc. etc.

--G.
that's the way it was and we pretend we liked it because it gives us an obscure sense of moral superiority
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>>>>(Hell, I write what little HTML I use in Notepad. Who does that anymore?)
>>>>
>>>Well, I'd say that I do, but I don't use Windows unless I absolutely
>>>have to. I do all my HTML (and PHP) in vim, which is both more and
>>>less advanced than notepad at the same time (and for the record, I do
>>>it in a terminal window, no Xvim for me).
>>
>>And a real nerd uses ed. Can we drop this?
>
>uphill, both ways, 15 inches of snow, etc. etc.
>
>--G.
>that's the way it was and we pretend we liked it
>because it gives us an obscure sense of moral
>superiority
>-><-
>Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
>Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
>zgryphon at that email service Google has
>Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Amen.

>
>uphill, both ways, 15 inches of snow, etc. etc.
>

Right. I call upon the words of Frank Hayes:

When I was a boy, our Nintendo
was carved from an old Apple tree.
And we used garden hose to connect it
to our steam-powered color TV.

But it still beat that ancient Atari
'cause I almost went blind, don't ya know
Playing Breakout and Pong on a video game
Hooked up to the radio.

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even Three-tran
And the PC was only a toy
And we did our computing by gaslight
When I was a boy.

Joe Bethancourt performing "When I Was a Boy."

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

DAMN right.

If Gryphon is the Batman of LTBatB, who's the Outrageous! Aquaman? Marty?

“They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid piece of harness. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot; and went on.”
-- Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington

>If Gryphon is the Batman of LTBatB, who's the Outrageous! Aquaman?
>Marty?

Prince Vultan of Thanagar, I should think.

--G.
DIIIIIIIIIIVE
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.