John August

Rave

All-new MySpace beta

Follow Up, Rant, Rave

I now fully regret my earlier [ambivalence](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/myambivalence) about MySpace. As it turns out, the site is only lame when you have 600 or 700 friends. Having crossed the magic threshold of [1,000 MySpace pals](http://myspace.com/johnaugust), I truly understand what all the fuss is about.

The difference is [MySpace Advanced](http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=disallowed), and you can only access it when you have more than 1,000 friends. It’s beta, and I guess I clicked on some sort of non-disclosure button when I accepted. But it’s too great a secret to keep to myself.

Here are just some of the improvements you get with MySpace Advanced:

* __Full CSS styling.__ No longer do you have to hide formatting in weird text boxes.

* __AJAX-y goodness.__ You can delete rogue comments in-place, or drag-and-drop elements on the page.

* __HTML tag destroyers.__ Not only can you turn off HTML graphics in comments, you can automatically delete any comment that tries to use them.

* __Lameness filters.__ Sick of people leaving ASCII graphics as comments? Just click the checkbox and they’re history.

* __Smarter ads.__ Even though it says “gay” in your “orientation” field, the system knows you might be interested in something other than a shirtless guy for Gay.com.

* __Education screening.__ The system parses every message, comment and profile blurb a user writes, generating an estimated education level for the user. I have my threshold set to “College Grad,” which effectively silences the stupid people.You can also set a top education limit, good for shutting out snarky screenwriters.

The new version is terrific. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.

Even with a thousand so-called friends, the system is just as lame and frustrating as it was when it was just me and [Tom](http://myspace.com/tom).By the way, has anyone else noticed that “Tom” has formatting errors on his page, and _he’s the freakin’ spokesperson?_ Check his “Movies” section. So, this is my way of saying goodbye to MySpace in all its craptastic-ness. See ya. Wouldn’t want to be ya.

Trusting your audience

Rave, Television, Words on the page

Spoiler Warning: If you have “Heroes” sitting on your TiVo, watch it first.
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Last night’s “Heroes” did something I wish more shows would try: they trusted their audience to fill in missing scenes.

If you’ll recall, near the start of the episode, bad guy Sylar escaped, locking Claire’s Faux-Daddy in his cell. Sylar then went to Claire’s house, to chit-chat with Mom and await Claire’s return — presumably so he could eat her brain. Growing bored, The Man of Endless Eyebrows eventually revealed his menace and got all telekinevil.

Something had to happen, or Mrs. Bennett would certainly end up dead. But the options were few. Claire was off visiting Trailer Park Mom in Kermit, Faux-Daddy was locked in the cell, and Hiro was trapped in a thunderously dull subplot about his father.

So it was a genuine surprise when Faux-Daddy showed up, guns blazing. A few steps behind him, we saw the not-really-mute Haitian Guy who works for him, and realized, “Aha!”

Simply by putting Haitian Guy in the room, the writers were able to omit the seemingly obligatory scene in which Haitian Guy finds Faux Daddy, frees Faux Daddy, and nods silently as Faux Daddy shouts that, “We have to get to my house, now!” As television viewers, we’re sophisticated enough to figure out what we missed — and therefore, not really miss it. But too rarely do shows really trust us to make these logic leaps.

My kudos to the hard-working writing staff for not writing that scene. (Or, if they did, kudos to the editors for omitting it.) I almost guarantee they got a network note saying it was unclear how Faux Daddy got out, but one benefit of being the hottest new show on television is the ability to ignore notes.

Best editors

Awards, Projects, Rave, The Nines

In this morning’s Oscar nominations, I was delighted (but not surprised) to see Doug Crise and Stephen Mirrione nominated for Babel. Stephen Mirrione cut Go, and Doug Crise followed up his work on Babel with a little movie called The Nines.

Huge congrats to both of them.

I heart WriteRoom

Projects, Rave, Software, Sundance, The Nines

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the production notes for The Nines. The document will end up being about 20 pages, detailing the backstory of how the movie got made, from inspiration through editing, along with everyone’s bios. It’s part of the press kit for the film, helping the journalists at Sundance remember who the hell was in the movie they saw three days ago.

Ultimately, we’ll end up formatting the notes in Word or Pages, but for raw text I lean heavily on TextMate, which is what I use for all of the writing for the site. It’s unbelievably powerful, if occasionally maddening.To wit: If you use command-z “Undo” to fix something you shouldn’t have deleted, TextMate will replace it one letter at a time, undoing each backspace rather than the whole chunk. Apparently, the software creator feels strongly that this is the logically correct behavior, and while I disagree, I fully respect his decision to say, “because that’s how I want it!” I have TextMate set to automagically generate a lot of the formating markup, and the tag-wrapping feature can’t be beat. But on a lark, I decided to try a new application for writing the production notes: WriteRoom.

It’s deliberately, refreshingly bare-bones and retro. When you open a window, it takes over your entire screen, including the menu bar. All you see is the words, complete with a blinking cursor. Perhaps nostalgic for my years writing on an old Atari, I’ve chosen a dark blue background with almost-white 18 pt. Courier. Give me a kneeling chair and a dot-matrix printer and I’m in junior high again.

Other writing applications are picking up this full-screen meme — honestly, it’s hard to figure out why it took so long. Apple’s Pro apps (Final Cut Pro, Aperture) have had no qualms grabbing every available pixel of real estate, although they don’t completely banish the common interface elements. (Except for Shake, which also requires a blood sacrifice to Ba’al.)

The big-screen treatment is the digital equivalent of closing the kitchen door when company comes over: Never mind the mess in the sink, let’s have a nice dinner.

WriteRoom 2.0 is in beta, but there’s nothing spectacularly different or better than plain old 1.0. Either version is worth checking out.

As for the inevitable question: Could I write a script with it?

Yes, no, maybe.

I’ve actually had conversations with two gurus of web markup about creating a simplified screenplay markup that could be imported into “real” screenwriting applications like Final Draft. WriteRoom and its ilk support tabs and external scripts, so it’s conceivable to build a system like ollieman’s screenwriting with TextMate bundle.

But for now, I have an actual paid rewrite to be doing, and it’s a Final Draft job. Sigh.