The Arden Shakespeare series, the next month, CYIADA update

24 May 2007

Officially what I’ll be trying to acquire when I buy Shakespeare from now on. I have their The Winter’s Tale title, and it is nothing less than spectacular. It even includes as an Appendix the complete text of Pandosto. The Triumph of Time. (the primary source text for Shakespeare’s play). Pages 181-225 are devoted to this text alone… very cool. I do wonder if they do the same with texts such as Rosalynde as appropriate, or if this particular edition’s editor was feeling particularly benevolent!

Either way… highly recommended editions.

Also to acquire when next book shopping: Alice in Wonderland, for some opium-fuelled holiday reading. And perhaps Hitchhiker’s Guide to see if I can endure it nine years from when I last tried… less likely fuelled by opium, but from all reports it sounds bizarre enough to warrant suspicion of the involvement of some other mind-altering substances!

Holiday reading = after June 22nd, whereupon my last exam occurs. Then, off to lead on a study camp (perhaps time for reading? I can justify Alice as being in support of the HSC English ‘journeys’ core!) for a week, three days back home in Sydney (undoubtedly to be insanely busy) before going away to New Zealand from the 4th to 16th of July. My how time flies. I may or may not be at university in an equal capacity next semester due to a whole bunch of things, primarily related to its perceived importance and myriad other opportunities that are cropping up all over the place. It would be, for example, nice to have some money in exchange for funny hours in the form of more work (which I think I prefer to regular and boring hours) and not have to pursue useless assessments (I speak of one particular subject that has copped flak on this blog over the past few months) around this.

The CYIADA thing is progressing nicely. Michael came on board about a month ago as chief code monkey, which has been nice coz I’ve been spending a bit more guilt-free time in Photoshop. There is a two-fold reason for that, first of which being I don’t feel like I need to try and prototype anything on my own, and the other is that now he’s developing stuff, there’s an imminent need for front-end to make this thing saleable! We’re close to landing on a new name that doesn’t sound like something you’d use to gas people with.

There’s a meeting tomorrow arvo wherein we will speak of many things (except perhaps for shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and kings), involving a progress update, an extensive argument about names and inclusiveness, prayer, another argument about launch dates and where/how it’s going to be hosted, who’s providing SMS, how much money we’re planning on losing and for how long, how we’re going to promote it, open sourcing things we write, and lots lots more.

I should really update the CYIADA project blog, too, but we haven’t got staggeringly good readership over there anyway (well, not compared to here, though perhaps more after Southern Cross’ coverage – at the end of that article, which is effectively buried online, though less so in print… ironically we need online readers far more than print ones!) so hopefully that will wait until we settle on a new name (and associated domain name acquisitions take place).

Oh and in unrelated news, my camera turned up. It wasn’t in Selo’s car. This is a good and a bad thing… good because I have no money to spend on a still camera right now, bad because I have no reason to buy a new one even if I did :P It’s still got another six months of life left in it I think, though it’s looking pretty abused. Still takes decent pictures. I’m so happy with its performance over the last two and a half years (link goes to first photos I took with it), seriously. I will struggle to make up my mind when it dies about what kind of camera to get… a larger SLR would be more useful for production stuff and night time things, but this is so portable… I don’t know.

And there is a decent sized blog update.

Now, I should stop procrastinating and prepare to kick off some fairly pressing freelance work when I get back from uni tonight! Uni assessments, also, are proving to be rather worthy of procrastination. Ahhhh… I keep remembering “one more thing” to write about: 28 Weeks Later proved to be a seriously scary zombie flick. Saw it with Ben and Tori last night. Was ultimate year 10 flashbacks, only with added alcohol and late nights without concerned parentals! We went to Pizza Hut all you can eat afterwards… its so disgusting but such good fun :P

As for the movie… it’s quite messy. But it was spectacularly produced… I need to re-watch the first one, but I’m pretty sure it was much more in-your-face suspenseful. It sets up for a third film at the end, which vaguely irritates me, but… well, rumours have it that it’ll be capped at a trilogy only. And this was a really good sequel, so I don’t think it’ll matter too much. Wikipedia has full spoiler detail for 28 Weeks Later… See the film first instead if you can normally handle that sort of thing.