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Linux Enhances Shakespeare
marXian writes "Opening in Norwich UK this week and subsequently visiting Cambridge is makb3th from theatre company pirateutopia.org. The show is very much Linux-powered using aalib, XDirectFB, VLC and more to set the piece (an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth) on an off-shore data haven." Allright, pick your jaw up off the floor ;)
Double Double... AMD, Intel are in trouble, Chipset burn and servers bubble.... With apologies to Big Willie!
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
"Life is a tale told by an idiot, who but struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is gone - unless he is a 19yr old Finnish Computer Science student, in which case he achieves immortality"
"tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, Linux World Domination is all I see before me"
No way!
Public domain!
non?
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
YASA (Yet Another Shakespeare adaptation)?
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
If ((2*B) OR (NOT(2*B))){
answer="yes";
}
else{
answer="no";
}
printf(be);
>a.out
>yes
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
The show is very much Linux-powered using aalib, XDirectFB, VLC and more
Come on now, don't you know all the cool geeks are using less these days?
Bitchslapped. Neat.
MacHomer. An excerpt from the 'About' page:
This one-man vocal spectacular features over 50 voices from TV's favourite dysfunctional family in a hilarious performance of Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy! Starring 'Homer Simpson' as Macbeth and 'Marge' as Lady Macbeth (in a script which remains 85% Shakespeare), MacHomer is hysterically funny and amazing to watch.
A friend of mine saw MacHomer in the DC area and though it was great; apparently the voices are quite accurate.
Oops - sorry: Linux! Linux! Linux!
(Don't want to be off-topic. D'oh.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Grrr... This is a very bad ripoff of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette. It should have been: Linus oh Linus. Wherefore art thou linus? The question in Romeo and Juliette is Not the question -where- Romeo is, but -why- his name is Romeo. This being due to the fact that his sirname was that of the archrivals of Juliette's family. 1. Quote good 2. Rip quote 3. ....
4. Profit!!!
BUT, it doesn't work if you get the quote wrong.
Shakespeare is dead! Netcraft confirms!
Go re-read your Shakespeare. The "to be or not to be" quote is from Hamlet, not from MacBeth.
This just in - the US Congress today extended copyright protection back to "three business days before the Earth coalesced from the formless void", so the laywer representing the descendants of the Bard will be calling on these IP pirates and terrorists this afternoon with the mother of all cease-and-desist orders.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I bet it's best when presented in its original Klingon.
The new iMacBeth, broght to you by MacOnLinux.
In stylish blood red colors.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
It's straight up public domain, with no strings attached. Not abandonware, certainly, because there's no copyright on it.
Ever wonder what theater these days would be like if Shakespeare's plays were protected under copyright by a control-minded estate like that of Kurt Cobain? I imagine the content would stay truer to the originals, but I'm a big fan of the creative and nutty derivative works Shakespeare has inspired over the years.
Ok, I'll give it a shot:
-+-+-+-+
SEYTON: The server, my lord, is dead!
MACBETH: It should have died hereafter;
There would have been bandwidth for such requests.
Page after page after page
Creeps in this petty pace from client to client
To the last tag of a slashdotted site,
and all our access logs have lighted admins
to way to budget denials. Out, out router activity light!
The web's but a dancing banner ad, a poor merchandiser
that struts and frets his hour upon the screen
and then is heard no more: it is an offer
made by an idiot, full of grandiose promises,
signifying nothing.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
"Could someone translate that to English for us?"
:)
You mean *from* English poetry into American prose, right?
I can see it now:
Yo! What's wit dis damn spot?
KFG
I've always liked to quote the following when people ask me what software development is like:
"...we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor..."
--Macbeth, Act I, Scene VII
sorry if this is going offtopic. but reading about this reminded me of a paper I read a few years back... It was about a computer program that parsed the full text of shakespears lifes work and then could predict the probability that a play or part of a play was infact not written by shakespeare. The program was used to independantly prove a hypothisis long held by scholars about some of the sonnets. Can't seem to find this interesting topic anyware on google - anyone remember it?
Probably the tech was bought up by the CIA and classified - could be being used to verify identities of known persons in transcripts of discussions intelligence intercepts in bagdad right now.
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
All the www's a stage,
And all the web designers and database admins merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one programmer in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the n00b,
Drooling and clicking on his brother's comp.
And then the whining freshman, with his pirated WinXP
And shining new imac, lugging his laptop
Unwillingly to class. And then the coder,
Cursing like furnace, with a woeful sigh
On the night of the deadline. Then a hacker,
Full of strange perl scripts and bearded like RMS,
Jealous in GNU/honor, sudden and quick in attacking M$,
Seeking the wizard reputation
Even in the economic downturn. And then the guru,
In fair round belly with long flowing hair,
With eyes severe and beard uncut,
Full of wise one-liners and modern programming paradigms;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful PDP11 code, well saved, now obsolete
On his rusting i686; and his quick nerdy keystrokes,
Falling again toward newbie typing speeds, null pointers
And unmatched parentheses in his code. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans keyboard, sans monitor, sans processor, sans everything.
Didn't get it? Read Shakespeare's original
now, ive only been on /. for 6 mos or so, but i would imagine that that topic pic had to be made expecially for this story... how many times does theater come up on /.?
i sell illegal drugs
... instead a millon monkeys on typewriters to reproduce all shakespeare books, all they need are penguins.
Use C, or not use C, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The flags and warnings of a rude compiler,
Or to take arms against a sea of errors,
And by debugging, fix them? To code, to hack,
No more; and by a hack to say we end
The type-check and the thousand other checks
Pascal is heir to, 'tis a compilation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To code, to hack;
To hack! perchance to test: ay, there's the rub;
For in that hacker's bliss what bugs may come,
When we have written out this awful code,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes development of such long life.
My notes credit this gem to Wes Munsil.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
RSS was kicked out of opening night for complaining that it wasn't called "GNU/MacBeth"
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Now, Slashdot may have some trouble since they have now used the name without the performance so if you read that a fire destroyed all the computers in the
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
This actual play premiered in my school (Thurston Community College) just outside Bury St. Edmunds. Everyone in the audience (drama students aged 13-18) thought the play was awful, the acting abysmal and the scene where some dodgy old man started making love to an ugly woman on stage terrible. If you're thinking of seeing makb3th (or as we like to pronounce mak-be-three-ith) then think again, it was not a good version of the original macbeth.
Having said that, pretty cool that something in my area got slashdotted, never thought I would see the day! \o/
Looks ambitious, and is a great context for adapting Macbeth.
That said, Macbeth is my most favorite of the Bard's plays, and also the play of his that I've acted in 3 productions of... I know the material rather well, you could say.
One of the charms of The Scottish Play is its inherent level of accessibility to just about anyone. The Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll (well, witchy, at any rate) factor. The core characters are tragically flawed at a very base level -- human nature: pride, jealousy, lust, ambition, greed and trust. If acted and directed well, the language acts as less of a barrier for entry to this play than many of Shakespeare's works.
Judging by the creative direction choices made in the *cough* "trailer*, production sketches, etc. -- it seems that they're purposefully trying to make it as 1337 and "insider" as possible. Problem is, they really don't seem to get the 1337 part. So, you have a bit of a catch-22. The viewer has to be both 1) very familiar with Macbeth to get the in-joke and 2) a 31337 h4x0r to get the context. Or completely fucked up.
The short of it: if the same creative team is responsible for the production as was responsible for the most abhorrent piece of flash drivel I've seen in a year, I'd sooner volunteer for a full upper GI exploratory than sit through 2 hours of that kind of pain.
That's not to say that tech and Shakespeare can't mate well. Apple has a feature about another version of Macbeth done in the same spirit -- but much less... well... full of itself?
Definitely worth a look if the fusion of tech and theatre intrigues you.