Dixon's Forum

Mainly because I couldn’t follow through on the Activity I had started and last week whirled by so quick I can’t tell one day from the next.

Couldn’t follow through on presenting the script for a play I wrote long ago, when files were floppy DOS, up to 64K (sixty-four kilobytes), so even a one-act play like mine was spread across five files, written on a PC-Write, a text editor (not word processor) so the formatting and printer control codes are non-printing characters embedded right in the script.    I preferred the text editors over the early word processors because they gave you more control.    That was worth learning how to use the nonprinting control characters.

But modern word processors treat them as text and print them anyway.    I set out to strip the text editor control codes and combine all five primitive files into a single modern one, in preparation for putting the play on the webpage.

Now that there’s PowerPoint it would be a lot easier to produce but as written it calls for slide projector images to appear on one or more screens on the Image Side of the stage:    enhancements representing memories related to the dialogue, which is acted out on the stage’s Dialogue Side.

There are also dynamic enhancements to the dialogue.    A modern production might project short videos, but as written, the screens act as curtains for sets having live actors portray the memories.

There are several instructions for the notation conventions for the lighting effects, image transitions, sound effects, and like when the actor on the Dialogue Side and the actor of the memory on the Image Side say the same line in duet, stuff like that.

I try to avoid reading this play because it always puts me on edge; there are instances of violence against children.    So after it was modernly formatted in a single .docx file, I just couldn’t do it all over again fitting it to webpageism.

That, plus the webpage project is kind of losing its charm, my vision of contact with the outside world not coming to fruition, but it’s still my own fault for blowing off the SEO choring.    So I have to stick to it until the SEO is up to snuff.

But meanwhile I’m changing procedure, just to spice things up a little:    instead of trying to prepare a whole activity and dump it all on the Web every Sunday or two, and then missing the deadline and skipping a week, this time I’m publishing the new Home Page now, before I even start of the Weekly Activity Post.    Then I will complete it little-by-little hopefully early during the week.

Click here    to take a look at the Directory of Weekly Activities So Far, and here       for its home page. 

Next Week:   Not the play.    Not ready for that yet,    I’m in the mood to take some more pictures, but maybe I’ll find something easier.  I’ll still be putting the Directory together for part of the week, too.