Ok, so I haven’t been around much for the last week or so.  That’s because I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my latest project!  I call it Blank Verse, and it’s inspired by a post from just about a year ago, come to think of it.  I probably could have planned to roll that out exactly on the 1 year date.  Oh well.

Of course, when I say “finishing touches” I really mean “Convince myself that any bugs left are not the end of the world, and nobody at all is going to see it if I never hit that Launch button.”  In particular please forgive the coarseness of the design, I’ve got no skills in that area and have been trying to figure out how to improve.

I released the game early to email subscribers so some of you may have already seen it, either there or on Twitter/Facebook as people began sharing their games.  What I’d really like, and maybe some of you can help me out, is for people to hit that Contact button on the game and tell me what worked, what didn’t, what you’d like to see improved.  Anybody can take the game for a spin once and declare it “Meh.”  I want to know what it’ll take to make you want to play it a dozen times and tell all your friends about it on Facebook.

I dig the technology used to create this interactive timeline of Shakespeare’s life, first spotted on Reddit.com.  It’s clearly not done (lots of “Fill in story info here” template content), but it’s a good start!  I wonder if there can be a wide variety of content in the story cards, like links to YouTube videos?

I mentioned quickly on Twitter Friday (? is that the right order of those words ?) that my 95yr old grandmother was on her deathbed.  This was not an unexpected thing, she has lived in a nursing home for the last 4 years and has been on the decline.  This weekend was just a sharper turn.

“To me, fair Friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed
Such seems your beauty still.”  This one might be a little unusual to recite over your 95yr old grandmother, but I still like the point.  We all know that old age will eventually come.  But it’s up to us to decide how we deal with it.

Straight from longtime Shakespeare Geek contributor David Blixt comes the disappointing (and highly surprising) news that his beloved Michigan Shakespeare Festival has fallen on hard financial times:

The Michigan Shakespeare Festival has issued an urgent plea for aid from its friends and donors as a result of an unexpected shortfall in financial support from several key sources. The call came from Bart Williams, managing director, who described the crisis. “With so much momentum going into this coming season, it is distressing now find several funding sources we had counted on did not come through.” Williams described the budget shortfall as in the “mid five figures,” and that emergency measures were needed to fill this gap within the next few weeks. Without additional funds, the season might be shortened or cancelled altogether.

This is no struggling group trying to keep their head about water.  The MSF has been alive and thriving for quite some time, and boasts the likes of Shakespearean gods like Dame Judi Dench and Stacey Keach among  those who have endorsed their work.

Please check out the links and help spread the word.  Thanks!