All posts by tim

Mediawiki Playwrighting Extension

Programming

When I worked on Empty Bowl I wrote some playwrighting extensions for MediaWiki. This lets you write scripts quite easily. You get easy revisioning and diffs. The scripts look something like this:

Seth 
The girl is not the problem. This house- I won't marry.

Laurel enters

Laurel 
Sure you will Seth.

And when you view or print them they look like this:

Seth

The girl is not the problem. This house- I won’t marry.

(Laurel enters)

Laurel

Sure you will Seth.
Act I
Scene I
Character Name
Stage Direction on its own line
Inline Stage Direction within a line

I have no plans to keep developing this, but I’m open to writing a couple more plugins if anyone wants them. I’m open to farming it out to some source control system if anyone else would like to keep developing.

Download Mediawiki Playwrighting Extension

Obama and Transparency

Politics

So this meme has come up a lot recently in my life, and I’m trying to figure out where it comes from. There seems to be a Republican meme that the Obama administration is incredibly opaque. This is obviously completely false unless we’re comparing his administration to the administration he was describing while campaigning.

Is Texas really a Blue State?

Politics

You know Texas has been lauded a lot as a new model for how to run a state. California (and Democratically run) is the old way and Texas (and Republican run) is the new way. Rick Perry certainly is quick to point this out.

But when you look at what’s really going on, about the best thing you can say for the state legislature and governor is that they stay out of the cities’ way. They’ve kept tax rates low which has allowed cities to raise more taxes. And past that they don’t interfere very much.

When you look at the power house cities in Texas, they’re all run by Democrats. Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston all have Democratic mayors. And those are really the cities that are being looked at when they talk about Texas as a great place to live and do business. The rest of Texas is poor, uneducated, and propped up by moving money out of the urban areas to help pay for the rural ones. They are a massive financial liability for the state. The places that don’t work are overwhelmingly Republican and run by Republicans.

There are Republican suburbs, but those are all simply leaching off of the good Democratic policy. They get the roads, the public transportation, and the business infrastructure paid for by the cities, and they can spend all their money on education.

So perhaps Texas is actually a Democratic triumph in spite of Republican inefficiencies. It looks that way from where I’m sitting.

Christiantiy and the old Snip-snip

Ramblings

So, my friends and I talk a lot more about circumcision these days. Probably talked about it more in the past 3 years than in the previous 29 of my life. It came up at a party the other day and how parents are having to fight grandparents over not circumcising their boys, on religious grounds. These are Christian grand parents. Growing up in “bible believing” churches I was very aware of this schism. Circumcision is viewed as being done for religious reasons. Which is fine if you’re Muslim or Jewish, but there is a lot of space spent talking about Circumcision in the New Testament. A lot more than any of your hot button topics like homosexuality, abortion, or pre-marital sex. So much time is spent talking about it, that you might get the idea that Paul is obsessed with penises (just saying).

Ok, so first let’s start with Genesis 17:11:

You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.

This is where most Christians are going to begin and end their discussion of Circumcision. Of course they’ve felt free to reject a host of other “barbaric” traditions that occur in the first few books of the bible, so it’s odd they’ve kept this one. God obviously didn’t want much intermarrying and this was a great way to ensure that you were serious before you got to marry some hot jewish chick. Old testament God was pretty anti-gentile.

So in Romans 2, Paul starts talking about this. He starts off just discussing what he feels circumcision means. If one is used to born-again analogies he’s basically saying you don’t need to be crawl back inside mom and literally be born again. Just believing and changing your life will do:

25Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. 26If those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? 27The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the<sup class="footnote" value="[c]”>[c] written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.

28A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. 29No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.

Then in First Corinthians:

1 Corinthians 7:19

Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts.

Then in Galatians 2 we have fear of circumcised Christians:

12Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.

And here’s one that requires a lot of um… creativity to read “literally” and still advocate circumcision. Well I guess you can advocate it in Paul’s eyes as long as you go back to stoning adulterers:

2Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. 3Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. 4You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. 5But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. 6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Here again in Collossians:

11In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature,<sup class="footnote" value="[a]”>[a] not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ,

Here in Titus, pointing out again that the circumcision group were actually the Christians who didn’t really believe and were trying to destroy the church:

Titus 1:10

For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group.

And that’s not even all of the mentions. It’s incessant. So please, next time you’re talking to a Christian who’s planning on getting their kid circumcised for relgious reasons, point them towards the Bible. Let them come up with a more valid reason, like germaphobia, or making it more unpleasant to masturbate.

And I know some people are going to come up with the extremely creative answer that they want to show their fealty to God in the bodies of their Children, and Paul was just referring to adult males not needing to get circumcised to be Christians, but please – you’re just making stuff up to justify your beliefs.

Oh and don’t try the “it prevents AIDS” defense, unless you already have an appointment to get your daughter the HPV vaccine. Remember abstinence is the answer.

H1N1 Vaccines and Government Inefficiencies

Politics

I’ve started seeing a lot of people complaining about their inability to get the H1N1 Vaccine for themselves, their kids, and their pet cockatiel Roy. I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about the government munging this. And how the government isn’t making enough vaccines.

First off people, the government isn’t making the vaccines. It’s a company called Novartis. This is one of those private partnerships that Republicans like to talk so much about. Those partnerships that are far superior to anything the government could do. So here we are. This is (supposedly) better than the government can do. So quit your whining. Or not. Just direct it appropriately.

Novartis is delivering lots and lots of vaccines. The problem is that it’s not going to deliver vaccines for everyone who wants one. Why? Because they only have so much manufacturing capacity. And there’s no value to them of having extra H1N1 vaccine after flu season is over. They’ve done the math and exactly the number of doses that they’re making is what makes sense for them. A certain number of deaths is ok in their fiscal plan to not overbuild vaccines or manufacturing capacity.

So why isn’t the federal government that concerned? Because so far the deaths are pretty much on target with any other bad flu season. So realistically everything’s working the way it’s supposed to.

But it makes me concerned, and we should use this public outrage to do something. Does it really make sense to outsource vaccines? Isn’t this one of those things like having a military where the federal government should just have factories on standby ready to make vaccines for every American?

If we translated our vaccine policy to the military it would be like outsourcing the military, and having the private company decide that really it only made fiscal sense to have resources available to protect about 10% of the United States. The rest would probably get captured, probably some of the states would raise militias that could fight the invaders off, the wealthy would hire private security firms but we’d just accept that there would be some substantial loss of life and territory. A politician trying to sell that would have to be nuts.

And yet that’s basically our national vaccine policy. Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t use private labs to develop vaccines. I think that part of the equation is working well. We should just set it up where we pay some large chunk of royalties to the company that comes up with a viable vaccine and then the US government produces it. If anything it would get more players in the market as scientists could work on developing vaccines without having to have a massive manufacturing capability to build out what they produce. Essentially the US government pays for the development of open-source vaccines to use a software analogy.

Because frankly flu vaccines are small potatoes. It’s debatable if they really work at all (since what goes in each year is just best guess). What happens when we really need a vaccine to some new disease, that’s killing more than a percentage of a percentage? And we can only provide vaccines to 10% of Americans? It seems like we’ve outsourced a pretty important part of our national security.

On Ticket Prices

Ramblings

So, I don’t mention this enough on this blog, but currently in addition to writing plays and running a theater company I have a small internet startup called BuyPlayTix. One of the things I’m really trying to do with the software is start to build a way to analyze your audience and budget the way a for-profit business would. Granted, I’m no where near where I want to be with this, but the small amount I’ve built has provided some useful results.

The one thing that works is our BoxOffice software and Box Office reports. You enter all you ticket sales into the Box Office and you can look at some aggregate statistics in the report. I know this sounds ridiculously basic, but I would contend that most theater companies in Austin do not know what their average audience size is, or what percentage of tickets they sell at what price points.

On our last show, like many companies, we needed to come up with a ticket price. We’d already created a budget, which is based on historical averages and what we know things cost. Julie does a fantastic job with this and we’re never off by more than 10%. But when it came time to decide on a ticket price we just said $15. I guess because that seems fair? Or something. Market rate? Out of curiosity I decided to go back and look at our average size. I took our average paid tickets multipled by 15 and realized we couldn’t pay our rent if we charged $15 per seat. So we went with $18. And we had our standard house size, so we didn’t loose large numbers of our audience due to the cost increase. And we made our money back.

Which brings me to my main point. One of the main things that I’ve been reading are people complaining about not being able to make a living off of the arts. But how exactly are we supposed to do that if we’re just making up ticket prices that seem fair? How do we arrive at fair? The large regional theaters in town charge $30/ticket. Which is double what we think is fair. And you know what the kicker is? They’re heavily subsidized. So you’re really competing with a company that should be charging $60-100 per ticket. No wonder we’re having trouble competing. We’re pretending we can do the same amount of work for 1/4 of the pay.

I think we need to start committing to fair ticket prices, and knowing what that is. In version 4.0 of BuyPlayTix I’m going to have the ability to manually enter BoxOffice data for people who still take tickets the traditional way. I think it’ll be really interesting to see what ticket prices do if companies actually know what they have to charge to make money.

I think Pay-What-You can nights can provide for people who can’t afford high ticket prices, and we’re not doing anyone a favor by offering ridiculously cheap tickets to people who can afford to see touring musicals.

Google Wave

Ramblings

I’m looking at google wave, and wondering if it’s ability to record changes to a document and comments on it over time, might not be a great way to write a play with constant dramaturgy.

The editor seems a bit rudimentary, but I’ve already customized mediawiki to make playwrighting easy, so this might be doable.

Deer. Seriously.

Ramblings

So, we crested the hill near our house and were shocked to see this in our front yard:

Uh, yeah. Two deer. Just hanging out. Julie was pretty freaked out. I often turn a corner while running and happen upon a deer, so I’m a bit more used to them. But these were pretty big ones for the city:

Sorry for the dark pictures, but it was night.

Some Brief Writeups

Watching Theater

Theater

“There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom” UT Department of Theater and Dance – saw this last night. Well done show. One of those shows for 5th graders that really resonates no matter what your age. Like the kids movies from your youth that they don’t make anymore. It treats the kids in the play seriously and parallels their troubles with bullying with the adults in the play. There are some truly cringe-worthy scenes coming from parents where you just want to run up on stage and protect the kids.

The dramaturgy at the end of the show should be seen by anyone who has ever done a talk-back (and really anyone involved in producing theater). It was focused, funny, engaged the audience and ended at a set time. Really great work.

As with most UT performances their were some weak performances, but not from any of the kids or adult leads. And there were puppets which always make me happy. This is a dark horse to check out. I get burned out watching so much theater and this one really kept me engaged the whole way through.

Tickets (careful, they have no show tomorrow night due to the football game)

“The Collection” Hyde Park Theater – If you want to see this one you should probably get your tickets within the next few minutes. They’re pretty much sold out. And for good reason. The story revolves around marital infidelity. Or not. There are Kafka-esque phone calls and strangers showing up at the door. And yet it’s a great comedy. Joey Hood and Ken Webster are great. My only problem with the show is that I wasn’t sure at the end whether infidelity had occurred, and probably more importantly I wasn’t 100% convinced the actors knew. But all in all it was a concise, hilarious, and intriguing night of theater.

Tickets

“The Jungle” Trouble Puppet – Trouble Puppet’s production last year of “Frankenstein” was my favorite show of the year, so I had very high hopes for their production of “The Jungle”. By and large the puppetry was flawless. Trouble Puppet mixes puppetry styles, but it’s mainly Bunraku. In this case it was seamless. The puppeteers were dressed like the puppets as factory workers and renacted some of the puppets tasks in real life which really made it seem like their was no real barrier between the two. That said I felt like it didn’t have as much of the horror as Frankenstein (which seems odd considering the source material). Also, it felt like it was simply reaffirming the audiences views. It’s hard to find someone now who doesn’t feel like turn-of-the-century factory conditions were horrific. Their production of Frankenstein put a fantastic feminist spin on the story, and I would have liked to seen the same thing here. That said, it will probably still be one of my favorite plays this year. Can’t wait to see Connor Hopkins do the puppets for “Evil Dead: The Musical”!

Closed

Restaurants

Zoe’s Kitchen (arboretum area) – Had a Pimento Cheese Sandwich, Fresh Pasta Salad with Basil, Izzi Soda, and Chocolate Chip Cookie. My entree was free due to a promotion they’re running right now. The place was fresh, but not excessively healthy. The bread was toasted in some sort of oil. The pasta salad was a bit bland and dry. That said, for restaurants South of 183 and West of MoPac this is one of the best. Probably only beat out for me by the Hub.

Woodland (south congress) – Had two of their cocktails which were both fantastic. The Socu was nice and cucumbery (which is one of my favorite flavors in cocktails). It was not sweet and the cayenne did a great job of getting the scent of the drink into your nose (can you tell I don’t write food reviews). I can’t figure out what my second drink was anymore. For mains I had the woodland veggie burger. It is beet based, which was suprisingly tastey, but about 3/4 of the way through the burger I was done with the taste. The cocktails were good, but it didn’t inspire me to want to go back and try the rest of the menu.

La Reyna (south first) – great margaritas, and they have super tender ribs that fall off the bone and you can roll into a taco. Our new favorite Mexican place.

East Side Show Room (east 6th) – worth the trip just to see how built up East 6th has become. The drinks were good, but both Julie and my food were exceedingly simple. Mine tasted like beef that had come out of a crock pot, and Julie’s was merely good. Our chatucherie plate was like something out of a commercial making fun of gourmet food. It was a regular sized app plate with one tiny slice of pate, a tiny dollop of some sort of mouse, and various other tiny things. There was far more white showing than there was food. All in all, we were underwhelmed. We might go back for cocktails, but we were not inspired to try the food again.

Frank (Colorado and 4th) – tasty hot dogs. They have specialty sausages made daily. Definitely one of the food bargains in downtown Austin and just a really satisfying lunch. Kid friendly for well behaved children. They have Maine Root root beer on draft which makes them probably the closest to my vision of heaven that’s possible. I’ve had a sausage stuffed with portobellos and shallots, and one topped with daikon and they were both perfectly balanced dogs. Highly recommended. We’ve already been twice.

Taverna (2nd street) – pretty decent italian. Julie got a really tasty pizza covered with fresh veggies and I got a risotto. It was good, but at the end of the day it was a risotto. I don’t understand the fetishization of that dish, I wanted to try it somewhere upscale to see if I could figure it out. It was good, and it was nice to sit on the sidewalk and people watch, but I think we’ll probably stick with Primizie as our favorite Italian restaurant in Austin.

Uh… what’s for dinner?

Recipes

Kind of freaking out over here. Apparently Conde Nast is shuttering Gourmet Magazine. This is bad. That’s the magazine I use for recipes for everything. How am I supposed to keep cooking? You going to teach me to cook without recipes Conde Nast?

And what about my grandmother? She’s been passive-aggressively insulting Julie and me year after year by sending Julie a subscription to Gourmet and me a subscription to Smithsonian. I’ve cooked her Christmas dinner for the past two years. From recipes out of Gourmet. I have no clue what she’s going to do.

Or what I’m going to do. I might need to buy some paper cookbooks.