Incredible Greg: The one thousand dollar trap

Incredible Greg

Last week I had this idea for a parody video, unfortunately basically everything that could have gone wrong with the design process did go wrong. The sound files from the voice acting wouldn’t load into flash, so I had to animate blindly and then cut it together in a video editor.

All of the animations i made for each line were 2-3 times faster than the line it’s self, so I had to do a lot of re-using of animations to make it fit together, then my video editor decided to go extra weird on me and started inserting frames and transitions in between movements and in the middle of scenes in the final render that were not in the timeline.

By the end of the weekend, I was only really able to get most of the bugging out. I might decide to redo it from scratch later if I can get the sound files to work, but I’ll probably just make a far improved episode 2. That is.. if people actually like the idea anyway.

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Corruption in the distribution industry

I think paying more and more attention to the level of corruption surrounding us has started to get me a bit depressed; as its difficult to focus on my more entertaining topics when I see big businesses that should be fading into non existence because we no longer need them fighting to stop progress instead of adapting to embrace our new technologies.

So, lets go ahead and get into this, lets talk about copyright holders. Entitlement is a major buzz word when talking about the piracy problem, and companies love to talk about how much money they are losing due to piracy. Can you lose money you never had though? When you compare modern piracy to theft, you lose a major difference; which is that when you steal from a store, a person, or sea bound transport vessel what you take is lost by the original owner, and there is a tangible loss.

When you download a song, game, or piece of software, the company does not get any money from you, but they also do not lose any assets. This does not make piracy a victimless crime, but our so called victims are less the ragged traumatized victims of a carriage robbery, and more like lords trying to squeeze out as much money from their subjects as possible, and are upset that they aren’t getting more.

Lets look at the idea of Entitlement though real quick, as this is something used as a word weapon against pirates. Basically, the argument goes that people nowadays feel entitled to get everything for free, and it is hurting the publishing companies because they lose a ton of money from not getting as many sales. it sounds reasonable enough, and if publishers weren’t actively putting a choke hold on both customers and artists alike, I’d probably agree. the problem is; they ARE putting both customers and artists into a choke hold to force us to play by their increasingly out of date rules.

In a free market, is it really overly self entitled to expect photoshop to be cheap or free when it’s got competition like Gimp, and Paint.net that offer their product for free? Or, is it overly self entitled to expect people to pay several hundred dollars for a product that has multiple competitors who charge nothing for their product.

Is it self entitled to want to buy something once and own it forever? Or is it entitled to expect someone to pay for the same product several times? Recently, my iPhone rebelled against me when i tried to update it, and forced me to delete half of the songs and apps that I had purchased, which later I discovered was because those songs and products had been removed from the iTunes store and could no longer be verified as being owned by me. I don’t even buy music anymore because I refuse to purchase something that the distributor could literally take back from me and say “if you want it back, you have to buy it again”

I think distributors have lately started to notice that these aggressive measures against piracy are not working. In fact, they have probably caused a significant increase in piracy due to people preferring the pirated version of items that do not have all the inconvenient protection software installed in them. Which brings me to the last item for today: piracy laws.

As we enter into an age where not only does the internet exist; but it goes at speeds where even large files can be easily distributed to large numbers of people, distributors are looking more and more like they may be out of a job. Services exist now in many places where you can, without giving up your rights, distribute games, videos, music, and software, and profit from it. In this kind of market, there is no need for uncreative companies who’s sole purpose is to horde the rights to as many intellectual properties as possible in order to exploit them for money.

Why would anybody NEED to sign over the rights to songs they wrote and sing themselves to a massive music company, when they could risk free, post their songs to youtube with revenue sharing, and have a link to their song on iTunes and the Android store.

What happens to these companies when people like me no longer watch their channels on TV, or buy their music because its cheaper and more entertaining to watch videos people post on youtube. What happens to these companies when nobody signs away their rights to them because they have a safer alternative? They die. That is what is why laws like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA are being pushed so hard. They know that if they cannot force sites that allow us to be creative and entertain ourselves while making money ourselves to shut down, there will soon come a point in time where these companies will no longer need to exist at all.

That’s what we are fighting; we are fighting a bunch of millionaires and billionaires who’s empires are founded on the idea that they are the only way to get your product to the masses. Each of these industries are built upon exploiting the fact that there WAS no way to become famous, or rich off of your creative talent unless you signed away everything to them. Without that to exploit, they cannot function, and that is why in their death throws they are willing to do anything; even destroy the functionality of the internet it’s self so that they can reclaim their domination over us.

I want to be an entertainer, and all this gloom and doom probably isn’t helping me reach that goal but hopefully if I get this off my chest it’ll free me up to come up with some better stuff.

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Review: yurbuds ironlock earbuds.

A bit ago, I got some earbuds so I could listen to the radio on my iphone. These advertised a ‘twist lock’ feature that apparently results in them not falling out, even under stress. Then shows pictures of people doing various highly athletic activities, implying that the earbuds do not mess around.

So, I tried them out. It kind of hurt to wear them at first. Probably because they jammed stiff rubber deep into your ear canal to help hold them in place. That you had to twist around to fit properly into your ear.

They broke on the first day. I was walking slowly, and the cord caught on something stationary, and they were yanked straight out of my ears and one of the earbuds stopped working. I kept using them though because one bud worked and i didn’t have any other way to listen to my music.

They stopped hurting to wear after a few days; but I think that is because they actually caused my ears to deform, as they look exactly the same as they did the first day but now they do not need to be twisted to go into my ears without resistance.

So, yeah, painful to wear, clearly not durable, and they force your ears to deform while wearing them. I’d say it’d be a good idea to save your money and just go with something else.

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Getting closer

Getting a bit closer to a full base body now. The feet I kind of hate still, as I can’t seem to quite get them to look like feet. On the hands the thumb still bothers me but they look a lot more like hands now.

Once I have those touched up I can start on the head. Sadly, the long weekend is now over, so I’ll be limited to the time after work to work on it.

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Blender practice some more

Made some more progress on the model so far this weekend; I thought for sure I had submitted this post yesterday, but apparently I had not.

First of all; I’d like to clarify that just because I haven’t made a Tear specific post in a while that does not mean I’ve ‘abandoned’ it. It is still my main project, though in order to give it the polish that it deserves I am practicing a good bit on my artistic skills rather than simply tossing whatever crud I manage to toss out into the character pages and claim its progress.

As for the model I began work on yesterday, I’ve managed to get the easiest part out of the way; by which I mean the body, arms and legs, leaving me with the significantly more complex hands, feet, and head to work on. Then I get to figure out how exactly I’m supposed to texture this thing properly.

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Depressing innit

So, CAD is holding a contest for the most horribly bad headset. I don’t have much to work with, but I decided that makes for the perfect entry material.

So, I grew out a stubble, donned my top hat, and started wrapping my head in speakers and microphone wires. This is the result.

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Blender Practice

Working on my 3D modeling some more. Trying to go back and forth between my drawing and modeling in my practice so that I can get a stronger idea of how the body fits together.

At the moment I’m working on making a body that is as close to anatomically correct as possible. Previously I’d tried to make them simpler in order to make posing and animating easier, but that resulted in the models deforming badly on top of not really looking so good either.

Spent a few hours today on this model; and will be continuing work on it as the long weekend continues.

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Dream Journal 5

Was tired pretty early last night, and ended up going to bed at about 7, fell asleep probably about 8, and got up at 6. so, that’s roughly 10 hours, and this dream took up all ten of them.

Oddly enough there isn’t 10 hours worth of writing since a lot of it was uneventful, though the uneventfulness of those time periods were interesting as far as dreams go.

It started off in a sort of recurring location in my dreams; there are three places that seem to appear in my dreams frequently; weather the dream simply takes place in them or the dream is about wandering in the place.

In this case; it took place in ‘The Mall’ The location is sort of like a strange mall that has only one main hall; but the stores and locations are completely different depending on which direction I am walking. The two end points are fairly stable; on one end is a two story department store, the bottom floor is mainly clothing, and the upper floor is furniture. The other end is an airport.

This dream took place in the department store, and started with me and a very large group of people who were all in some sort of ‘self improvement’ program. ‘Dream knowledge’ tells me very little to start with other than that, and the person apparently in charge tells us that we need to change into new outfits.

I hesitate to call them uniforms because aside from being ‘dress cloths’ they were not all the same, there were different color shirts, some with ties, and some without, and so on. We apparently were expected to change on the spot, without going to changing rooms, which on some level struck me as unusual.

There was a girl next to me as I was picking a shirt, she was already changing, commenting to me about that it felt strange changing shirts in public. I struggled to come up with something to say, and I’m not sure what I ended up saying. I picked a green shirt, as Green is my favorite color.

As I was pulling the shirt over my head an unusual thing happened; I saw orange fabric, with green paint stains on it. I have in real life an orange shirt with green stains and when I finished pulling on the shirt, I ‘knew’ I was now wearing my other shirt under this one, and it felt like something I should keep secret.

The dream gets a bit fuzzy at this point, which is one of only two ‘transitions’ in the dream. The next thing I knew, I was in some grassy area, and I now had the ability to change my view from ‘normal’ perspective to a ‘map’ view.

I now had the knowledge that we were all split up into groups of two and had to ‘survive’ out here. I looked around and found my partner; the only non-human in the dream. He was a Skeleton. An unusual Skeleton, I don’t quite know what it’s head was, but it appeared to be a good bit larger than a human skull, with a much larger, and elongated jaw.

He didn’t talk much, and we walked through the field. I had the strange knowledge despite not being told that each group was fighting each other for an unknown reason, in addition to the dangers of the land. I had a strong desire to find that girl quickly and join up with her before something bad happened.

I spent several hours walking through a mostly empty grassy plain before finally reaching the next important event; we approached a roadside fortress; built to gate off the road as though to stop carriages and the such from passing, inside were medieval soldiers who quite apparently did not like us one bit. As they began to fire at us, the skeleton charged in, flying with his toes barely off the ground, he left my view rather quickly, and I could hear the sounds of battle for a short while before he appeared at the top of the fortress and glided back down to meet me.

We crossed the fortress and I saw the girl, she was alone, but then things began to grow fuzzy, and I found myself back in the department store, the number of people were a fair bit smaller now.

The man in charge began to divide us into 4 groups without any real explanation as to what this was for. At first I tried to inch closer to the girl, but as I noticed he was cycling between each group as he pointed to each person I realized standing directly next to her would only guarantee that we would not end up in the same group.

Eventually we were halfway sorted out, when he seemed to get tired of counting, and just sent chunks of the remaining group into each of the groups, luckly, we did end up going to the same group. we walked through the hallway towards our next destination.

There was a simi-transition here as we entered the room, now I was on a stage with several other people. The detail in this room was incredible for a dream, I was paying rather close attention, there was an ‘audience’ that consisted of most of our group on one side, and the ‘stage’ was covered in short plastic grass like carpet such as minigolf turf. In one place along the stage was a sort of colored treadmill built into the floor so that aside from it moving, it blended in with the rest of the stage.

The contest was now that each set of people on stage took turns testing thier courage by reaching into a randomly selected box of animals, to pick one up and carry it along the treadmill against the direction it was moving in order to place it into a box on the other side. When it got to my turn, the box I had to pick from was full of lobsters with their claws free. For some reason in the dream I could not tell if they were lobsters or scorpions, though they looked exactly like lobsters, and so I asked first “Are these lobsters or scorpions? Because if it’s the later, I’ll have to refuse.”

He replied that they were lobsters, so I reached in to grab one, suddenly the one i was about to grab lept from the box and ran towards the audience. I followed it as it ran under a couch in the front row. I lifted the couch and climbed under to try to find it when something happened that though there was no sound, in the dream I recognised it as a noise. I got back up and set the couch down and looked around to find that everybody was gone, except

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Still better than Hartman

Today, I was at walmart shopping, when I happened to notice someone working there that I recognized. A bit over a year and a half ago, I was working for a place called Hartman, and that person, nicknamed ‘Gravy’ was a coworker.

I waved to him, and he asked me where I’m working now, and I told him ‘the sewer plant’ and his reply was a cheerful ‘better than Hartman huh?’ to which I had to agree.

Hartman is a small chain of stores that are basically lumber yards in southeastern Texas, and when I worked for them, they were starting up on the rebar business. They violated quite a few laws however, such as taking away our breaks, despite working us 10 hours a day, and keeping water far away from the work site; I actually had to go across the street from where I was working to get to the nearest source of water; often a 5 minute walk.

As well, one of my coworkers there was incredibly dangerous, I could go on for days about all the ways he hurt me on a daily basis. I kept working there only because the economy was so bad, I was afraid reporting them or quitting would result in being unemployed with no benefits. Luckily, after an incident where I got into an argument with the dangerous coworker because he injured me, they fired me.

It was an unlawful termination. Which meant that I still was entitled to unemployment pay. I was thankful to be out of that workplace then, and seeing Gravy in a good mood about working at wal-mart reminded me of just how terrible some lesser known workplaces can be.

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The Misadventures of Minecraft Bob: Pistons and Trolls

Had an interesting idea for a video yesterday, and spent pretty much half my day building a set to record it in. Then a sheep blew it up. No joke. After another hour of repairs, I finally finished off the video in Windows movie maker because my new computer doesn’t have a good video editor installed yet and I haven’t found a good one yet.

So here it is: Minecraft Bob

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