A World of Speculation

Memories of long-ago inspiration

When I went to check the lyrics of Desiderata for a game at Ship of Fools, I thought it would be gaggingly sweet, embarrassing. I expected it to be like watching Billy Jack again or reading my high-school poetry–a reminder of how earnestly vapid I was as a...

Trademark police

Adobe’s lawyers hold a sheaf of papers against a cracking dam in this page listing the “Thou Shalt Nots” of Adobe Photoshop: Adobe Systems Incorporated Terms of Use My favorite, which sums up the entire page is this one: Trademarks must never be used...

Faces

This site, SIMONHOEGSBERG.COM, has a series of 56 faces photographed walking along Edgeware Road, Marble Arch, London. The limited narrative on the site makes it sound as if the photos were taken at random. Perhaps they were. If so, then the selection shows genius....

Scene analysis using Story

My next Story exercise (more about the short story I was working on yesterday): doing an in-depth analysis of the scene structure. I found that the story falls into three discrete scenes, focusing on the three levels of antagonism I talked about yesterday. Ask who...

Antagonism in Story

More applications of Story Today’s great revelation from Robert McKee: The principle of antagonism. Take a story value, any story value, e.g. Justice. What’s its opposite (he calls it the contradictory)? Injustice. Now think, it’s possible to have a...

A musical note

Congratulations to Cappella Romana on its $36,000 grant to fund three recordings. One is the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in English, scheduled for release next Christmas. For Christmas 2005 is Divine Liturgy and choral motets by Peter Michaelides. The third is music by...