Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
Cassini-Huygens: Multimedia-Images
I’m posting this with the very-very-beta-release of Flock. So far I’m in the ‘meh’ camp, but I need to test rather more and see if I can tell what’s intentional and what’s just plain unfinished – it’d be rather mean to complain about stuff too early, except constructively. The Cassini photo’s stunning, however.
I’ve often suggested that television is surprisingly free of jargon. This position is somewhat hard to maintain when faced with exchanges thus:
“Where’s my tone gone?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sending tone to the racks relay, but I can’t find it. Where’s it gone?”
“What’s it routed to?”
“The DS, SP, Digi, DV and SX decks. Everything but the D3.”
“Try the other Digi?”
“Nahhhhh Oh! I know! It’s that weird 440Hz for the M&Es, not 1K”
“Oh that’s what the hum is! Who the hell uses 440?”
“Read the delivery spec sheet.”
(does so) “Gaaaaaah!”
Why are Fridays never simple?
Clock details confirmed? Check. Audio sync? Check. M&E tracks in place? Check. Tone and alternate tone? Check. Presenter captions? Check. End rollers? Check. Textless elements? Check.
DigiBeta tape loaded for 16:9 archive master? Check. BetaSX backing tape loaded? Check. DS Nitris suite primed for 14:9 letterbox transmission master render? Check. MiniDV tape loaded for internal archive? Check.
Run it.
First problem found – four seconds in. Bollocks.
There’s a production going off in London that I’ve been meaning to look up – actually, there are two, but that’s another matter. Turns out an old mate of mine is doing it, which is great and all but actually I’m a bit jealous. At least, I was, until I spoke to him. Turns out he needs help on the thing, and while the money’s a bit crock and the job title might be a step backwards in some respects, for historical reasons I’d leap at the chance to do the gig.
Only, another old chum is also in the running for it. And, me being me, I gave her a hugely positive reference, since I think she’s wonderful.
My mum will ruddy throttle me when she finds out. And yes, she does read this blog. Come to think of it, I might ruddy throttle me, when it sinks in. Still – no decisions made yet. We’ll see what happens.
On paper – or at least, on the schedule – we deliver all thirteen programmes today. T’ch, yeah, right. All I actually have to send off is the first six shows, and… well… we’ll get there. Somehow. Right now we’ve about seven shows dubbed and mixed, and the entire series is conformed (that is, the pictures are back to their reasonably-pristine original form rather than the looking-through-a-sheet-of-mud offline placeholders). But still, we have to:
What’s a little weird is that… er… we haven’t actually had chance to watch any of the shows since last week. So we’ve little real idea if we’ve used too much music, too little, how it changes the pace of the shows, and so on. Walter the editor and I have just been staring at each other, trying to work out how brave we’re feeling. Have we time to watch them before we’ve passed the point of no return?
“Nah, just play it out.”
We’d only want to change things, after all.
There should be a word for the poignant ennui one feels on discovering that one’s coffee is, in fact, empty, despite one’s expectations of there being a mouthful left in the cup.
Billings are the 30-word blurbs about TV shows that show up in listings – newspapers, magazines, even the Radio Times. Technically, the page editor writes the billings, but they have to have something to go on. So along with delivering the final final please-make-this-final programme tape, paperwork so the musicians get paid, paperwork so transmission control know how long the show is, more paperwork to verify that the paperwork has been completed, and yet more paperwork to attest that the electronic copies of the paperwork have been completed and filed… one also has to deliver little blurbs about each show.
Which means that somebody has to write the blurbs.
Which means I’ve been sitting in the back of the edit suite all day trying to write 13×30 words. You’d think it’d be easy, but noooo. Editors want vim, they want style, they want teasing. They want alliteration and puns. And they also want repetition, since it’s basically the same thing that runs for each show – only, I know, since I’ve been doing this for years, that only about six words of what I write will ever be printed anywhere.
The whole exercise is as close-to-pointless-whilst-actually-being-demonstrably-necessary as I can conceive, and for that reason and the repetitiveness I find it astonishingly boring. I’d rather wash up. I’d rather clean the bath. I’d rather sit and feed tapes into an online suite. I’d rather do practically anything besides writing billings. But today I hit a new nadir of displacement.
Today, I caught myself avoiding writing billings by – and I’m wincing as I confess this – checking my junk email folder for messages that shouldn’t have been filtered there. That is, I preferred to read junk mail.
Sheesh.
(incidentally: sorting by subject works surprisingly well for sifting through very large volumes of mail. Delete all the multiple duplicates and you have far less to skim through)
“You’re listening to BBC Radio Two. We’re discussing Saddam Hussein – send us your texts and emails on whether he should be tried or just locked up, locked up or suffer the death penalty. Meanwhile, here’s Elkie Brooks.”
What?!
Deletetheweb.com started out as a jolly gag. Back in November 2001, while working on the first series of Science Shack – and, indeed, whilst sitting in the Cardigan Arms – Damien and I thought it might be an amusing jape to build a website which offered to ‘delete the entire world-wide web’, presented you with ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons, then if you were foolish enough to pick the former it would proffer up a progress bar for 14 trillion files. We bought the domain that afternoon, and I slapped it on my shiny new Dreamhost service plan.
Of course we never got around to writing the site and Deletetheweb sat idle, waiting for me to work out what to do with it. Until March, 2003, when Jules was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
300 miles away and feeling somewhat helpless, I had some bizarre inkling that maybe, just maybe, it might be easier for Alan and Jules to relate their experiences in public, once, rather than to individuals, many times. So I installed Movable Type at deletetheweb.com/jules, threw Alan the keys, and left it at that.
What developed over the next 14 months was a moving tribute to Jules and her astonishing stubbornness, to Alan’s dedication, and to their joint bravery. It’s an everyday tale of struggling against the odds and, ultimately, losing. Alan’s writings, however, stand as a defiant testimony, eulogy, and inspiration. I never, for a moment, thought a weblog would have such an impact, and I feel honoured to have played a small part in the story, however much I wish it had turned out differently.
Along the way, Deletetheweb picked up other residents, more people with stories to tell or simply an urge to experiment. Some have persevered and blog almost daily, some post sporadically, some have drifted off – it’s been a pleasure to read them all. Worth singling out are the original Damien, who turned an initially-dodgy photoblog into a plaudit-winning exhibition of mobile phone photographic art, and John, whose Unstuck Diaries I’ve never understood but in which I’ve continuously found amusement, inspiration, and beauty.
Today, a reminder arrived exhorting me to renew deletetheweb.com’s registration, which was due to expire in a few weeks’ time. Did I bother? Of course I did, and without hesitation. Hosting the site has brought me much pleasure over the last four years. I think it’s worth a modest gamble on the next.
Jules, Alan, Mark, Mija, Simon, John, Vinay (now moved to his own server), Kevin, Jack, Luke, Adam, Damien, Damien (again), Greg, Jim, Colin, Richard, Allan, Giles – thank you all.
Wondering how to rip DVDs on your Mac? That is; do you want to copy the (encrypted) movie off a disc so you can back it up to your hard drive, carry it around on your phone, or just plain watch it because – say – somebody just gave you a boxed set of The Twilight Zone only it’s region 1 not 2 so you can’t play it?
You need this HowTo guide from Marc Pilgrim. Mighty fine.