MT Archive overhaul

looky

If you’re sick to death of reading about this stuff, just skip this article. I’m updating the GhostHouse site so it’s based on MT.
Summary:
I went with the “one individual archive per entry” model and generated the content for every kind of article in every archived article page. Then I split the contents into DIV entities and wrote CSS to only show the appropriate content for that page.

  • First we have to Future-proof MT.
    This also hides the implementation of individual archives from the casual viewer. So far I just changed everything to an “index.html” (one file per directory) and didn’t complete the rest of the conversions.
  • Make a monster template for the “individual archive” pages containing the HTML for an article of every type of category.
  • Specify the CSS for a given page based on the category name, in addition to the “General” CSS file.
  • For the general CSS, strip out all the design-type elements and move them into the individual category CSS
  • In the CSS for each category, make the inappropriate entities (HTML which appears in only articles which are not in this category) invisible
  • for the crew pages, generate (as a template) a .htaccess file which specifies by name every crew article
  • also nazi all the “link only” pages. Thus, we generate them, but no one will ever see them
  • since the “crew hub” really is more like an announcement page, we need an archive of that… but if we use a vanilla monthly archive it will show the things on the main site as well. So, we make a monthly archive template which only shows the “crew-only” content, including the links.
  • We don’t really need monthly main-site pages- since entries are not updated on a timely basis, it would be meaningless. Instead, we make a big archive of all the “In Production” and “Now Showing” movies, as index page templates.
  • We need two calendar pages- the main site’s “Screening Calendar” and the crew-only “Production Calendar”

Star Blazers

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When I was shopping for Halloween stuff I was at Goodwill, and saw a DVD of the first 6 episodes of
“Star Blazers.” Star Blazers! Of course I had to buy it.

I was watching it this morning… there is some seriously nationalistic imagery in this cartoon. In Star Blazers, Earth has been under constant assault from another world, Gamilon, which is full of violent barbarians. The Gamilon have used atomic weapons on Earth… they have demanded the unconditional surrender of Earth. Earth has sworn to fight to the last man. Just as humanity is about to lose, they decide to resurrect an old battleship- significantly, the Battleship Yamato, which I believe was the largest in the Japanese Imperial Fleet in WWII, and named after a famous general. “Star Blazers” was originally called “Space Battleship Yamato” in Japan…

So, like, damn. The future is basically “what would have happened to Japan if they (we) never surrendered.” Apparently Japan would have been reduced to rubble, and then aliens would have given the Imperial Army a secret weapon which would have taken a year to work. Yeah.

Not quite as scary as Godzilla vs King Ghidora, where the people from the future are from a earth that is an utopia because Japan has bought the world.

Now all I need is Captain Harlock. I love that guy.

For more info check out
All Things Yamato.

  • Voyage to Iscandar (series, aka “Star Blazers”)
  • Saraba Yamato (movie)
  • Yamato II (white comet) (series)
  • Yamato: New Journey/Voyage (movie?)
  • Be Forever Yamato (movie?)

  • Yamato III (series)
  • Final Yamato (series?)
  • Yamato 2520

Halloween Pieces

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Party went well. We had around 50 guests, which is less than I had hoped, but everyone had a great time. We had a margarita machine- one of those frozen drink machines which we had adapted to make margaritas. All the TVs in the house were wired together to play zombie movies, which I thought was really cool.

Most of the guests dressed in costumes. Brookie came dressed as Frida Kahlo as she appers in her dia de los muertos self-portrait, and her date Todd was Roy (one half of Siegfried & Roy), complete with silk pajamas and a white tiger attached to his neck. Saxby was a really scary-looking wolf with a paper-mache head, and Brian and Anisa came dressed in German regalia. There was a Winnie the Pooh, and a sexy schoolgirl, and Michael Constant had a giant skull head which was a trip. Matt Young was a pirate ninja, which was really funny- he was dressed all in black with a three-cornered hat, had an eyepatch, a hook, and a set of nunchucks. Aarrrh!

It’s about 1 pm and I’m only now remembering all the stuff I left over there. CDs, a fog machine, rented zombie DVDs… I hope that’s it.

The best thing about Friday night parties is you have two days to recuperate. It feels like Sunday. Then again, every day is like Sunday.

The best thing about Friday night parties is you have two days to recuperate. It feels like Sunday. Then again, every day is like Sunday.

Unclench!

looky

48 Hour Film Project: We started at 7pm on Friday and worked until 7pm Sunday. But actually we had been preparing for it for a several weeks previously, getting actors, lining up gear… and since it started on a weekday, I had already put in a full day at work.

So really the marathon for me started Friday morning. When we turned in our thing on Sunday, suddenly I felt myself relaxing- it was a euphoric feeling, like finishing the last final in the semester when I was in college.

I realised that the only thing keeping me awake was stress, and the last time I felt free of a total panic was Thursday night. I also remembered on Thursday night trying to sleep extra hard, because I didn’t expect to get any rest until Sunday night.

And it worked out. Again, as in school, I felt fine after about 3 or 4 hours of sleep. And, just as in school, the second I was done I started to get sick.

So, to recap, my jedi training from Cal served me well.

Now that it’s done, I can spend more time getting a quality product out, and then comes the really fun part- promotion. That’s when you get to mention your project to everyone even vaguely related to film, and self-aggrandise as much as possible. Hey, they would do it to you! I’m going to try to get this thing played just about everywhere.

The best thing about this kind of project is that since we spent almost no money on it, we don’t have to worry about trying to get money back on it- we can show it for free, we can bundle it with other stuff, the list is endless. Fun stuff.