thespians: a program to waste your time

 

what is it?

This is a program which will act out plays on IRC. For an example of its output, see this scene from Macbeth... uhh, I mean, "the Scottish Play". Bet you never thought you'd see the day when IRC was actually educational!

 

for god's sake, why?

So sue me, I was bored.

 

what do I need?

First and foremost, a Perl interpreter. If you've already got Perl, then go grab the POE and POE::Component::IRC modules off of CPAN. Once you've got all the prerequisites, you can grab a tarball of the source here: thespians-1.3.tar.gz. Note that the plays will look their best on a reasonably uncrowded IRC server; one of my most amusing bugs was caused by another person named "duncan" on IRC while I was testing Macbeth!

 

where can I get plays?

I have a couple works converted into play files here; if you convert any more yourself, please send it to me so I can post it here. The details of the rather simple play file format can be found in the script's README file. There's lots of good raw material to be found at Project Gutenberg.

 

 

dennis taylor
dennis@funkplanet.com
February 5, 2001