News

So this one feels overdue considering how many things I've added recently. But there's a lot that's been added recently. I guess the big one for this update is going to be themes. The themes are allow you to spin off, which is what a lot of people are constantly doing, to spin off a series from, say, The X-Men to, you know, what if The X-Men were directed by Quentin Tarantino? Or perhaps, you know, what if Superman was directed by Wes Anderson using only actors who were famous in 1994? That was actually, I don't know, a lot more work than I expected it to be when I started on it. So the odds that I nailed it on the first try are pretty slim, but again, as always, let me know if anything's gone wrong there.

So the other big feature in this release is universes. niverses has been live for a week or so now the idea is that we can use it to collate the things that belong together. So Marvel properties can be collated into a Marvel universe, DC properties into a DC universe, etc. the way I see it is anything that can be grouped into a verse probably should be, at some point. It doesn't have to necessarily just be comic book things, though they are the obvious use case. I'm currently reading Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris series which is technically just a series, and I don't know anyone that would call it a whole universe, but you know, I'm gonna put it into a universe when I cast it. I think that grouping is useful. I'm pretty hype for the universes feature, tbh.

Otherwise it's mostly been polish and clean up and that sort of thing. There's still a ton to do and as we layer on new features that means that some things change, some things get pushed around, etc. Things are still pretty fluid, and I'm actually hoping they'll settle a bit after these features get in and tested.

Oh, I also moved this from being hosted in my basement to being on a real server. It's a cheap (as in cost, not as in quality) server, but it moves the codebase closer to the (remote) database I was already using because I don't trust myself to reliably back databases up, so things should be quite a bit snappier than they used to be.

You can cast a single role at a time now without having to add the whole series.

This was always where I wanted to end up, but I couldn't start here. All the structural stuff had to come first: titles, series, roles, the whole call sheet. Not because the structure is the fun part, but because a one-off pick has to land somewhere, IMO. If you say Idris Elba should play Batman, that pick needs a Batman to attach to, and that Batman needs to sit inside something bigger, or it's just a comment with extra steps.

So now there are two ways in - If you're the kind of person who wants the order, you can still build the series, add every role, and make sense out of the whole thing. If you're not, you can drop a single pick and walk away. The difference is that the single pick isn't stranded. It feeds the bigger casting, and the bigger casting gives it somewhere to live. Both sides get something out of the other one.

I have no idea whether this works, or whether it makes sense to anyone but me. That's usually how it goes. It made sense at 2am, which is a low bar.

Anyways, go play with it, and as always, let me know if I broke anything.

Comments are here.

You can comment on a casting, and you can comment on any single role inside one. Both are threaded, so you can argue with one specific person instead of shouting into the same box as everybody else.

I went back and forth on where these should live. The obvious answer was one big discussion on each character page, so that every Storm argument on the site lands in the same place. I didn't do that. The conversations worth having are the ones between people actually building a cast together, and those belong on that person's casting, not in a common room. So the character page now shows you where those conversations are happening instead of hosting its own. Start it with your friends, let strangers find it later.

The casting page got rebuilt around that idea. Real header, the poster where it belongs, and a strip up top that tells you how much of the call sheet is actually cast instead of making you count. There's a rail that keeps the favorite button and the open roles in front of you the whole way down the page. Cards are the default view now, because the faces are the entire point and I'm not sure why they ever weren't.

You can also like a whole casting now, not only the picks inside it. While I was in there I found that the series page had been showing the wrong number under the word "hearts" for a while. It was adding up votes on individual picks instead of counting likes on the casting itself. Two different numbers, one word, nobody noticed. Fixed.

Profiles got some attention too. The "titles cast" grid was quietly listing titles you had *submitted* rather than castings you had *made*, which are not the same thing and haven't been for a long time. It lists your actual castings now, and each one links to your version instead of dumping you on the shared title page. There's a comment history in there as well, because sooner or later everybody wants to find the thing they said three weeks ago.

More soon. Tell me what's broken on the contact page.

We've been working hard on this for a long time. Longer than we'd like to admit.

At some point every rewrite hits the same fork in the road: keep polishing and delay, delay, delay, or ship something and accept that it won't be perfect. We picked the second one.

So, this is not perfect. There are rough edges, missing features, and things that will change. We know. We'd rather have it in your hands and fix it in the open than keep it hidden while we chase a version that never quite arrives.

99.999% of the email I've been getting has been from marketing spammers. Up to 100 emails a day from people who want me to know that they can get my site to the top of every search engine result. This isn't that big a bother, but if you sent me a REAL email in that time, I probably didn't see it. My sincere apologies. I've blocked some of the spammers, and I've added a notifiation system that lets me know when contacts come in so I can *actually* hear from people about things. So, anyway, thanks for being here. Tell me what's broken over on the contact page.

Life can really screw you up if you let it.

It's been a long time since an update was posted here, and that's because it's been a long time since this was developed at all.

The company I was working for ran out of money because they were on the venture capital treadmill, and AI took over the VC mindshare while the bottom fell out of everything else.

So I did what people do, and I joined some friends to build an AI startup. I won't bore you with the details of that except to say that nobody else has done what we were doing, and I still think that what we were doing is a very necessary addition to the AI ecosphere, but we couldn't convince VCs that OpenAI and Anthropic weren't about to release it any minute now. (They haven't yet)

Anyway, in that time I've changed languages a few times, and now I'm rewriting this in golang as a way to better learn golang. That won't mean much to you except that it means that there will be updates.

I’ve gotten a ton of comments and feedback on the site. I haven’t marketed it at all and frankly, haven’t even told anyone that it was online. Regardless, there are a couple-hundred users and I’ve gotten dozens of contact messages that I was not expecting. This is wildly unexpected, but just as much amazing.

Anyway, I promised good news – the good news is that I’m working on the site, and that it isn’t abandonware. I’m looking through the featureset and I’ll be working through them somewhat systematically. This news page now works, and it’s a new feature I built today.

The bad news – “News” is a really dumb feature, and most of you probably won’t even know that it’s been updated. So there will need to be more important features built, which I’ll get to, I promise. The main thing that needs to get done is the core mechanic of the system – I thought originally that I needed one instance of a title, but from the feedback I’m getting, that seems wrong. There’s going to be a major massage coming for titles there that will make it a lot more usable by a lot more people, but without being too messy for the site’s contents.

Anyway, I’ll update more soon, and hopefully have a feature worth writing about.

You’re probably wondering what’s going on here.

That makes sense. You’re smart, and this website… well… we’ll be kind, and suggest that it isn’t smart YET.

It’s a work in progress. It’ll be finished. I promise.

I’ll post something smarter here when the time comes, but there are a few important features that need to be developed before I can say that this is ‘launched.’

For the time being, feel free to register, to use it, and to provide me as much feedback as you’d like to. (Even negative feedback is welcome!)

Otherwise, here are those features I was referring to – I am aiming for them to be finished soon.

The ability to follow other users

An activity feed that lets you know what is happening

Comments / Forums / indieweb-style chats

The ability to vote on role images so that highest voted images can ‘win’ a casting

A transactional mail server that allows me to email you notifications

Social auth

Some user/profile features. Specifically, the ability to supply an avatar and bio and stuff.

The ability to browse titles / roles more easily

An actual news section / blog / something