[Hopperxx] yay hopper

[Jim Andrews]

Great story, Darrel.

I see you have  several book about Flash/Director.

Were you in touch with the tech writer(s) who worked on Director? Who 
were they?

ja

On 2025-07-11 9:32 a.m., Darrel Plant wrote:
> I take no credit/blame for the cover of the Shockwave book. I don’t know the entire story behind it, but I landed there project back during the Shockwave beta test in 1995. I was at the office on New Year’s Eve, occasionally refreshing the web page that was the discussion list for the beta group (I guess nobody managing the beta program at Macromedia at the time knew how to set up an email listserv) and I saw a note from someone saying they were an author agent looking for someone who could crank out a book. I’d never written anything approaching book length, and I wasn’t exactly a professional-level multimedia developer—I’d just come out of the prepress business, knew a bit about computer graphics programs, and had played with Director enough to have weaseled my way into a class teaching it at Portland State University Extension School, but I’d never shipped a project with it. But they were desperate enough that I had a contract a couple weeks later. I think they’d had the book on the schedule and sold to stores (common practice in the biz) but the authors had been pulled off to do a more important project and they still needed someone to fill the pages. There was already a team in place tracking down examples for the appendices and making the CD-ROM, and they had the cover design done (which I didn’t see until later). But they needed the book in ten weeks, and they’d give me a bonus if I managed to do it in eight. Didn’t get the bonus, but I did manage finish in ten, basically trying every command in Shockwave Lingo and figuring out tutorials on how to make it do something useful. It was still early days in the Internet stuff; a lot of it was a big mystery to me. Fortunately, I’d set up a web server in my office on a Mac.
>
> I was supposed to write a sequel to the Shockwave book, but by then, Macromedia had bought and shifted much of their focus to Flash, so they asked me to just expand the dictionary I’d done to all of Lingo, which turned into a nightmare book called The Lingo Programmer’s Reference that took a LOT longer than it should have. Then as it was coming out, the publisher was bought out and the sales staff started fleeing like rats, and more than a quarter-century later I still get statements telling me I haven’t earned back the advance!
>
> The woman who played Vampira was from Astoria, a small city about 90 miles from Portland. And Cassandra Petersen/Elvira lives part-time here in Portland these days.
>
> Best,
>
> Darrel
>
>> On Jul 10, 2025, at 7:47 PM, Jim Andrews <jim at vispo.com> wrote:
>>
>> I searched for your Shockwave book, Darrel. I got a good look at the cover from an ebay listing. I like the cover a lot. It's got Frankenstein and assorted other movie ghouls, including, er, Addams Family members (?) on the cover. Morbidly cinematic. Your book is the Svengoolie of Director books, Darrel. That much is clear. "Thrills! Chills! CD-ROM!" I watch Svengoolie, by the way. Big fan.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>          Darrel Plant    phone: 503-490-1388   dplant at moshplant.com
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>   "Geriatech: Someone who's been around technology as long as me." -- Darrel Plant
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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