Living in the Shadows: Special Projects, Extra Karma points for LITS PCs Options

[WinterRat1]

We LitS GMs are perpetually overworked :D So if any LitS player has the willingness and the time to help out, we have a few open – and very diverse – LitS projects for you!

Each project post will include a basic description and a contact name. Some projects are ongoing: please do not apply to help with any of those if you do not think you can commit to them for at least a few months. We also ask that you complete at least one project before committing to more than one project at a time. Please note also that if a week passes without any word from you to your contact prior to project completion, we will remove you from the project, and it will be re-opened for others.

If you are interested in taking on any of these projects, post your intention in this thread and let the listed contact know by PM. If you are accepted, the contact will post that acceptance in this thread, and the project will be listed as “closed”. If you are not interested in anything you see currently, keep checking. We will be adding to and revising this list regularly.

Oh, did I mention that completing any of these projects will earn you extra karma? :D Your contact will post the bonus karma in the LitS OOC thread on the Sunday following project completion (or, in the case of ongoing projects, on the Sunday following each project interval).

[WinterRat1]

OPEN PROJECTS

1. NPC database assistant (2004). Contact bandit50
2. Location database assistant (2004). Contact bandit50
3. NPC database assistant (2005+): contact bandit50. ONGOING
4. Location database assistant (2005+). Contact bandit50. ONGOING
5. Creating and maintaining an LitS stock market. Contact WinterRat1. ONGOING
6. The Socialite entertainment digests. Contact Sedna. ONGOING *CLOSED*

[WinterRat1]

PROJECT #1

We are looking for one person to help bandit50 with cataloguing PCs and NPCs mentioned in posts dating through the end of 2004 in the Living in the Shadows IC, Shadowland, and Salvation threads.

Contact: bandit50
Karma bonus: 10 points at completion of project


PROJECT #2

We are also looking for one person to help bandit50 with cataloguing major locations in the same threads and over the same time period.

Contact: bandit50
Karma bonus: 10 points at completion of project


These two projects will involve much sheer grunt work in digging up specific post urls. You have been warned.

[WinterRat1]

PROJECT #3
*This is an ongoing project*

We are looking for one person to help bandit50 with cataloguing PCs and NPCs appearing in posts dated January 01, 2005 and later in the Living in the Shadows IC and Shadowland threads.

Contact: bandit50
Karma bonus: 2 points per completed page


PROJECT #4
*This is an ongoing project*

We are also looking for one person to help bandit50 with cataloguing major locations in these same threads, starting with posts dated January 01, 2005.

Contact: bandit50
Karma bonus: 2 points per completed page

[WinterRat1]

PROJECT #5
*This is an ongoing project*

We are looking for an economics-minded person to create and maintain a realistic stock market for the LitS Seattle-verse. The general idea is to add realism and create a sense of cause/effect to the aftermath of some runs. The current suggested model would give each corp a rating (per Corporate Download), multipled by a “profitability index” with an approximate range of 0.5 to 10.0 (rare!) in each of several different fields to give an overall rating, but if you have a better idea, go for it!

Like the LitS Seattle-verse, this stock market should begin on January 1, 2063, and thereafter be updated once a week, as well as after the completion of each run.

Some real-world research will be required.

Contact: WinterRat
Karma bonus: 5 points for setting up the initial structure; 1 point per stock market update

[WinterRat1]

PROJECT #6 *CLOSED*
*This is an ongoing project*

We are looking for one person to write brief entertainment digests in the person of Socialite, summarising the entertainment options available in the various nightclubs of the Seattle area. Digests don’t need to cover every nightclub in Seattle, but they should always include the major ones (even if only to say that there’s nothing on besides canned music).

At a minimum ”Socialite” should write one digest each and every (in-game) Friday and Saturday morning at around 0830 – the linked one is for the Friday of that week – but if you want to make them (in-game) daily, go for it!

Contact: Sedna
Karma bonus: 1 point per digest

[Mister Juan]

Main Website Update:
For some reason, the free webhosting company which supported the current LitS site has downsized all its accounts, scrapping, in the process, the LitS pages. Have no worries, the site hasn't disappeared. It's just not on the internet anymore.

In the next few days, I will be trying out a few other free webspace and different plans. I'm also beginning to think that an actual .com might be an interesting investment, one which I am ready to make all by myself (most "small business" plans cost about 70US$/year).

[Mister Juan]

Main Site Update:
So, after the last site completely crashed down, here's the new one. I'll update it as soon as possible.

[Mister Juan]

Main Site Update:
-All current stories, including the new players, should be up to date and mostly formatted. If you have pictures you would like to be uploaded to your PC's respective page, please do send them.

-Next on the list in all the "Inactive PC" pages.

-Compilation of Shadowland's post should then follow, with the "relaunch" of that part of the LitS Project.

-The NPC directory is still open and ongoing. If anyone already has list/data, please, do send them. I will eventually get around to doing it myself, but it's a pretty big task.

-The Location directory: I should also start going through posts to list it up, but I could really use a hand for this one.

-Still hunting for the best deal in dot com registry and hosting. It should be finalized before the end of August.

[Mister Juan]

Main Site Update:

-Everyone's stories should now be up to date.

-All inactive PC's stories have now been completed.

[WinterRat1]

Mister Juan -

When I click on the link you provided above, none of the links on that page lead anywhere. Have you changed/updated the web address since you posted that? If so, could you repost the most recent version of the LITS site?

And I know I'm one of the guilty parties with respects to NPCs/locations. I will be working on getting that to you after I clear the queue of everything above it...:(

[DireRadiant]

http://litsproject.50webs.com/Living_In_Th...Index_Page.html

Thsi link works for me, however many of the character stories are linked as follows. "href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Jean/My%20Documents/LITS/Character/Scrapheap/Scrapheapmain.html"" which references a local file not on my machine, most probably only on Mister Juan's.

They probably should be href="Character/Scrapheap/Scrapheapmain.html"

[Mister Juan]

Oh right. I forgot to fix those. Stupid linking thingy ;)

I'll get right to it.

[Mister Juan]

Alright. It's all fixed now.
Thanks for pointing that out.

[Mister Juan]

LitS Webiste and Databases
Since we are bringing the whole project back to life (not that it was ever dead in any ways), I am going to start working again not only on the LitS site, but all the databases (NPCs, Locations, etc...)

As for the website itself, we can take two routes:
1- An actual website, with a nice little URL and shiny graphics. A cool presentation, SR mood, etc...
2- Forgo all the esthetics for something a little more barebones... like a Wiki.

Personally, I don't mind going either way. Both can easily be done, and neither require more effort or work than the other one. I just want everyone's input.

[Sedna]

Because I'd lost it myself a time or two, here is the current Living in the Shadows Wikispaces url.

We also have access to significant independent webspace and own an url associated with that webspace (http://www.livingintheshadows.org // direct link to shadowland with splash page). The wiki increasingly has the substance of what we need (thanks Mister Juan!), but structure and style still need work: it's a bit of a limited framework to work within. Slowly, we're working to integrate substance with style.

Myself, I'd eventually like the full-function webpage. But I'm happy we have the wiki reference functions active.

[Sedna]

The LitS book project

After a casual mention on the current LitS OOC thread less than a month ago, this project has now leaped full-fledged into existence.

The structure is a series of volumes, between 130 and 200 8 1/2 x 11 pages (but averaging around 170, or around the size of an average SR sourcebook), integrating storylines and Shadowland communications for each and every group of PCs active in LitS. The time covered by a single volume ranges from four to ten days. Groups of PCs can range from just one person (the first Cosmo volume) to as many as a dozen (the beginning of LitS), but the average is around four.

These won't be PDF'ed. Rather, I'm laying them out completely for print purposes, and then sending out the actual printed volumes as each one is completed to everyone who is willing to pay for a copy. Current cost estimates run between $20 and $30 per volume, depending on such specifics as number of colour pages and type of paper and binding.

What we need -- desperately -- are high quality pictures: not only people but also locations and even mood shots. Almost every single Internet picture we have is ~70 dpi, web-standard: but for print we need a bare minimum of 300 dpi, 600 preferred, and higher even better. Sources beyond the Internet could include created images or even scanned-in images from (gasp!) actual books. The location of the Cosmo volume is Los Angeles, so we need LA-based images as well as many Seattle ones. The current items being actively hunted for are the Casablanca poster and screenshots from the film, especially from the final airport parting.

I did find this map of Seattle. (It can also be found in the Resources section of the webspace linked in the previous post.) It has been suggested that major LitS locations, such as Zeyda's "headquarters", ;) could be "thumbtacked" onto this map to make a truly unique image.

What we also need are "flavour" graphics: everything from small pieces of clipart to advertisements.

I have now finished doing the initial compiling for what I think could become the complete first volume. It's actually the second by starting time, and I'll number it accordingly, but I arrived at a point that has the feeling of utter completeness and even leaves a small prologue for the next volume.

The current raw text at 8 pt Palatino Linotype, before pictures and other bells and whistles, comes in at 105 pages -- a bit light for a volume (about 160 pages), but doable: guesstimating ~130/140 pages after all is said and done, possibly more if people prefer the double-columned style I'll show you tomorrow. (Note that this doesn't mean 30-40 pages of pictures. However, I'd like to have between five and ten full-colour pages per volume if at all possible, including one city map per volume.) The next break point after that is almost a hundred raw text pages later, before any additions.

So: decision time.

Do we want to have the first Cosmo volume the shortest of the series, to make an artificial break at a specific page range, or to make it by quite a bit the longest?

Glossy paper throughout, linen (think of it as heavier bond with a bit of texture), or glossy paper for the full-colour picture layouts only?

And finally: should I take choice snippets from the OOC, in and around the time when that specific part of the greater storyline was being created: and pull them together into small appendices, say three or four pages at the end of each volume?

[Sedna]

Oh, and apart from the Cosmo volume length question, these decisions are intended to stand for every volume. I wasn't clear on that.


Edit: more samples to choose from will be up by midnight PST on the 29th, ie. a few hours after my current work deadline. It's another all-nighter, yay!

[Sedna]

Took quite a bit longer to finish with the domino-effect move than I expected: and will still be working on this for at least another couple of weeks. Plus, I have a dial-up connection, and -- oh irony! -- had to keep the phone line free for (among other things) the telephone company to finish dealing with the old apartment and office lines.

Fortunately, working through this text doesn't require me to be online -- or, really, all that much awake. ;) Equally fortunately, I've found that I won't need text pre-formatted into logical "volume" size after all. I have almost a thousand pages of text first-pass edited at this point: six volumes nearing completion, one that actually has reached a story break-point.

At this point the major delay is two-fold. There's quite a few storylines that are almost (but not quite) to logical story break-points, but only one that is actually complete. While LitS awaits the return of WinterRat, it seems ... no one wants to continue forward?

The second point of delay is pictures, lots and lots of high-quality pictures and maps. Whatever you have, for your character or storyline or on others, I want. :) Note, however, the higher resolution needed for print as opposed to web.

My e-mail address is talia_invierno@yahoo.com .

Finally, a question wrt level of editing. Whenever possible, I've tried to keep it light and minimal, fixing grammar and spelling but only where it was appropriate to do so, combining some posts to make for an easier flow. I've standardised the way thought processes flow in posts, fonts, and spelling into American versions. Mostly, I've frequently changed name for pronoun or changed the order of phrases so that we don't have a constant succession of "[my PC] did this": necessary in multi-character post-by-post, quite a bit less so in printed text involving only a few PCs. Below is an example of one of the strongest changes I've made, and to that degree only in four places:

[Sedna]

New graphic needed: tarot Knight of Swords. Resolution high as always for this project, but size flexible.

Thank you! :)

[Vegas]

Sedna,

So you're in the loop too... my computer basically bit the big one the other day and got shipped back to TN 2 days ago with no return ETA.

I am basically dead in the water when it comes to image searching (since I shouldn't be doing it from work, or being on DSF for that matter :P) for the time being.

I am hoping to have the machine back within a week, or a replacement if they can't fix the problem. *crosses fingers* Images from my end are going to have to wait...

I mentioned to WR in passing my concern about copyright issues using images scavenged from the web. Can anyone ease them further?

TIA!
-V

[Konsaki]

Knight 1
Knight 2

[Sedna]

Thanks, Konsaki -- I'll see how well print quality works for those.

I'll add your computer to the mourning pile, Vegas. (Yikes, it's been a bad year for computers.) I'm just grateful this one is still adequate to the current task ... though I really wish pdf/adobe hadn't been bought out, my computer is really noticing the change in code.

Re copyright: we aren't doing this for profit, just a very small circulation, limited to the point where it can safely be considered "personal use". That clears up a lot of stuff right there.

We aren't seeking original paintings or professional photographs (most of which will be watermarked to this effect), unless they're our own and we're willing to let them be used for this purpose. An exception might be many celebrity photographs. Often they're the ones they themselves send out in press kits and to fans, so I'm considering them open season.

We should be able to find equivalents to such images as the BMWs and rosaries of previous storylines without complication.

City maps are generally open season so long as they are for personal use: this qualifies. (I'm thinking of using the hard-core one I've linked to the livingintheshadows.org website: resources -- unless someone has something better?) Of course we also have many of our own tactical maps and building layouts: we made them, we can use them.

The Casablanca poster might fall under the "fifty year" copyright rule. The film itself won't: but publicity stills and excerpts are usually permitted for reviews and personal use.

Mostly, we're looking for images and even simple clipart which give illustrative tone. I'm also thinking that a fair number of those images we can scan or alter ourselves ... you'll see what I mean, when I post a proposed cover. SR-specific corporate logos, advertisements, Photoshop!

* * *

I've run into my first major editing change. I'd only considered it to this extent because the original player was here being temp-"played" by his GM (WinterRat), and I think I've caught his taciturn tone a bit better. Here is the original. Below is how I've changed it, to try to keep it in the same tone as the player himself established earlier in the same thread (and see also the first page). What do you think?

* * *

“Hold that thought. Man needs a moment to get hisself situated.� Tin Star pulls up a chair beside them, gesturing easily to the waitress – who’d started slightly at the sight of his Stetson, boots, and flannel shirt – and had her get him a glass of water and an assorted plate he’d no real intention of eating. Usually he’d pass altogether – food is food and biz is biz – but in a place like this, not ordering would gain him attention aplenty, and not of the kind he’d intended. He smiled, tipped his hat in Alleycat’s direction. He’d not even recognized her initially, wouldn’t have joined her if it hadn’t been for recognizing Blaze instantly. Girl had some interesting resources.

[Sedna]

Volume Sample the Second: first chapter (still with my layout notes) + title page + cast + glossary. Take those notes out, add appropriate clipart etc in their place, and this is pretty much the way the layout will look. I'm open to suggestions, especially for making this particular intro more "festive" without making it either light-hearted or "busy".

(Konsaki: your name has been added to picture credits. I'm anticipating contributions from Mr. Juan and Vegas ... yes?)

Edit: forgot to add a different version for Shadowland. This last is the current structure for all SL correspondence. The difference is how the datestamps are done. The basic intent of both is that the timestamp for any message by the original article poster matches the timestamp when the article was posted. In the previous version, that was the only timestamp seen; while in this version, it's possible to tell who is almost always hovering on-line (and thus answers within a minute or two), and which comments drift by a day or two later (not in this example, but it does happen later).

Front cover draft, courtesy of Neophyte Overlord: this will be universal across all the volumes. Bottom subtitle is to be lowered, possibly top title to be raised slightly, exact shades of blue yet to be worked out (weekend project). Feedback?

You'll see places where clipart or advertising is suggested. I specifically need a banner ad for Club Abraxis (Matrix club), a small 1" or 1 1/2" square ad for Miner's Landing, and a small tower ad, say 3" tall, for the Auburn Mall (flexible on this one). I'd also like many, many other pieces of clipart or advertising, in various sizes.

Two specific people-type pictures requested:

1. Female in sun-greeting pose, standing or kneeling, but the arms should be raised.
2. Blaze and Margaret sitting together at a restaurant table. (This one will also create the tone of Miner's Landing.)

Finally, a challenge:

For each volume, I'd like to have a special "group photo" of the characters involved in that volume, which would be placed opposite the cast list. I have more detailed descriptions for some PCs than for others: and mostly what I do have for these PCs is what is in the text. (I wasn't a GM, then.) I understand this is your special area of expertise, Mr. Juan. (Note: hold off on Alleycat until I send you more text ... although you could do worse than use a Kiera Knightly type for a template.) WinterRat: we're going to need your old e-mail files for most of this.

[Mister Juan]