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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Squiggly_P
That's kinda how I felt about Signs when the posters and stuff first started showing up
"Oh, Mr. Sixth Sense and Unbreakable is gonna make a movie about aliens? Sweet!"
Signs was ok, but it wasn't nearly a Close Encounters.
Good recording session, guys. That was fun.
I also think he was talking about intermission episodes, cause he's going to transcribe them himself. Like... by hand...
That's a hell of a lot of work, by the way, and I salute you're dedication to your friend.
I liked the "Blockbuster Bubble" episode quite a lot.
The "Film School! Film School?" one is also really interesting.
All of the episodes are fun or interesting for some reason, though often it's cause they veer into some tangent for a minute and it's hilarious, or they start talking about something that has little to do with the subject at hand, but is still worth talking about.
The piracy / fair use episode is also a good listen, but it's an hour long and I dunno if you feel like transcribing something of that length.
I'd be a dick and take copyright lapse back to what it was before they extended it the first time, which was something like 20 or 25 years plus one extension (that you had to enable if you were the creator), making copyright last a total of about 50 years if you took the extension, but only 25 if you didn't. This would mean that stuff from as late as the 80's would be entering the public domain right now if there were no extensions in place, and stuff from the 50's if there were an extension on those works.
That seems much more fair to me for both the creator and the culture that was shaped by those works.
Or maybe we could come up with some other way of looking at copyright altogether. Maybe there should only be the sort of modern copyright we have now for 25 years, and after that the rights to a work lapse into a lesser form of copyright that's more akin to a CC non-commercial license that would allow people to freely use that material so long as they weren't making money off it and attributing it to it's original author, etc. Let's say that lasts for another 25 years. Then it becomes public domain material.
As someone who works in the DVD manufacturing / distributing industry, I can guarantee that the weak link in the chain is places like where I work. We often start manufacturing the discs a couple months before they get released, or some other plant will make the discs and ship them to us. There are a lot of holes in the process and a lot of people touching those discs.
It's funny, really. There were a couple of security guards at my plant that got arrested because they were taking advantage of their position and getting movies out themselves. They weren't just getting out a copy so they could rip it, tho, these guys were stealing whole cases of movies to sell apparently. That was three or four years ago, tho, and you better believe that heads rolled and security at that place became unbelievable for some time after that.
I'm surprised they don't require a retinal scan to use the bathroom at this point.
Anyway, whoever heard of a book being pirated until they became digitilised? I've no idea why all these organisations aren't going after the manufacturers of the tools that enable piracy in the first place.
Books were pirated when the printing press was invented. That's actually one of the reasons copyright laws were originally passed. One guy would publish a book and everyone else with a printing press would reproduce that book and sell a bucketload of them. You could spend a year writing a book, get it published and then have that book sell a billion copies and you'd never seen a dime of it because it was a dozen other publishers besides the one you made a deal with selling all the copies. Further, most publishers weren't going out and buying new manuscripts, they were just copying other publishers' stuff. The publishers that were going out and buying new manuscripts were getting fucked over hardcore because they had less money to print copies because they were spending that money on new content AND printing costs while their competitors were just copying their books and printing a lot more of them, thus selling more, thus making more money and able to print more and more and more.
Regardless of whether or not you think it's stealing, it's still illegal and illegal for a reason. Making up reasons why copyright is dumb, regardless of how logical those arguments might be, doesn't make it any less legal to violate copyright. We as a society have all agreed upon the idea that creators should be able to control their work and allowed them copyrights to their work. You could try to get that changed, but you'd have an impossibly difficult battle trying to convince most creators that they shouldn't have copyright.
In fact, if you were to just yank copyright out right now and let anyone copy and sell anything they wanted to, you'd probably see something more horrifying to you than evil copyright laws: You'd see corporations taking every indie film, book, play, song, etc they could get their hands on and marketing and selling those things and keeping every penny of it for themselves. They'd sell coffee table books full of photos and artwork they pulled off flickr, you'd see popular web series show up on DVDs in stores, you'd see companies rebranding every decent piece of software out there. None of the money would go to the people who made the stuff, and you know people would still be buying it. They'd drive every little guy out of business.
Corporations would have even more power than they do now, because the independent creators out there would no longer have any means of making a living by being creative. We'd all have to take regular jobs so we could pay the bills and maybe - if we could afford it - keep doing our creative stuff as a hobby. But would you release anything of worth that you made at that point? Knowing full well that as soon as you upload it anywhere or show it off that some corporation with a buttload of money would be able to just take it, rebrand it and sell it as their own, without giving you even credit, let alone money?
Piracy may not have much of an effect on huge corporations like EA, Blizzard, Universal Studios or Warner Bros - at least not right now - but it has pretty drastic effects on smaller publishers and self-published guys. There's pretty well-documented statistics from a number of indie devs who have collected data on how people are playing their game.
2DBoy released a game called World of Goo a few years ago and had a sale that allowed you to pay anything you wanted. In one week they sold 58,000 copies of the game, and about 16,000 of those went for $0.01. Another 16,000 sold for less than $2.00. That in itself is a bit of a sad statistic, but at least those people paid for the game, right? A little while later they revealed that through collecting data on how many different ip's were connecting to their servers at any given time and how many copies they'd sold, they estimated that their game had about a 90% piracy rate. Meaning that for every legit, bought game on their servers, there were 9 that had been pirated. If those people had paid even just one penny to the devs, they would have made an extra $5,000, and that's just in the first week. If those people had paid one dollar each, the devs would have made half a million dollars. And I'm just basing that on the one week of sales. I'm assuming that the number of sales when they released that statistic would have increased quite a bit.
The guys who made super meat boy have estimated similarly high piracy rates for their game, though not quite that high. Thing is, neither of these devs really give a shit because they know adding DRM to their game would just be a waste of time, and that piracy can lead to sales via popularity.
But the idea that piracy is some small statistic is quite wrong. There have been larger games with similar piracy rates. Quake 3 Arena was majorly pirated as well, at about two pirated copies to every legit copy on most servers. The reason they even started looking at the statistics for that one was because they noticed that the number of people who were playing the game at one time was higher than the number of copies of the game they had actually sold. That game sold in the millions, and there were at least twice as many millions of pirated copies.
Piracy has obvious effect on music. Back in 2000 or 2001 a couple of stores released some statistics that showed something like 60% drop in singles sales and 20% or so in album sales. Some of this might have been made up for in online sales via Amazon or sites like that, but I don't think mp3 sales had become a thing at that point, so it would have just been CD sales I think. I think Napster is the most likely cause of that sort of drop, tho. I feel pretty confident in assuming that there are kids out there now who have never paid a flat dime for a song in their lives.
And while movie studios are making a lot of money right now, ticket sales are dropping. I would not be surprised to learn that overall DVD sales have dropped by a significant number as well. 10-20% from five or ten years ago would not surprise me at all. I'm just taking a wild stab at that based on the spread of broadband over the last decade and the crazy growth in popularity of torrents. I would also not be surprised to learn that the piracy rate for DVD's is similar to that of games, though maybe not as high as it must be now for music.
The real problem is that the generation of kids out there right now are pretty much hard wired to torrent whatever the hell they want as a first option. The idea of actually buying software, movies, music or games is completely foreign to some of them. They're too young to get jobs, tho, so they don't have the sort of cash to drop on whatever they want. Right now the amount of money being lost isn't all that significant in most cases because that generation of kids hasn't reached the 'bread & butter' age where they have a bunch of disposable income to spend on going to shitty blockbusters and buying crappy pop music and generic shooter video games and all that other stuff that's marketed to the 16-25 crowd of people.
Wait ten years and compare sales statistics for 2012 and 2022.
OK, my thoughts.
SOPA will not make this gif:
a site-shuttering offense because the main purpose of the site isn't to distribute animated gifs from movies. It's a film commentary site that has practically no relevant infringement going on, aside from a couple of gifs. I guess you could make an argument that because the gifs are actually built into the board that there's some infringement going on, but the bill requires that the site's main reason for existing be to illegally distribute, enable the distribution of, etc, copyrighted material. A couple gag gifs are safe.
Anyway, the point is, it's not THAT that's the problem. It's the lack of due process. If you guys were, say, distributing the commentary tracks ripped from the movies themselves, then they could shut you down because that would be a primary use of the site. "But you can already do that with current legislation, so what's different?" you ask. Well, the difference is that with SOPA they don't have to send you a cease & desist letter telling you to shape up or they'll sue you. With this they can file some documents and get a court order to have your site's domain revoked, get you delisted from google, etc. Now you have to prove you're not violating copyright before you can get your site put back online, and even if you could prove it, it would damage you immensely in terms of lost revenue, lost traffic, lower ranking on google and who knows how well screwing with DNS / nameservers will go. You are now guilty until proven innocent based entirely on one-sided evidence provided by whoever's making the complaint.
Or if you have a blog on some site where people can make their own blog like tumblr or blogger and one of those blogs is targeted. The bill could get all of blogger, including your blog, shut down rather than that specific blog because it's all hosted under one domain.
The bill does define the sort of site that can be shut down with the bill. It's not that vague. There are vagueness problems in terms of what constitutes a website vs a user's created page or section of that website. Something like Flickr could be in trouble if there are tons of users with their own separate pages or blogs all being listed under one larger domain. That's not really defined in the bill and it's an issue because one persons entire blog or page on a site may be devoted entirely to distributing copyrighted content and thus may fall under the bill's definition of what exactly an 'infringing website' is. But this site and forum are safe, as are most sites and forums, because the objective of this site isn't to illegally distribute copyrighted content.
That said, SOPA does suck, it just sucks mainly due to the lack of any sort of due process and the fact that the bill seems to have been written under the idea that websites were still operated the same way they were back in the late 90's. There's not much in there in terms of user-uploaded content, and the lack of definition is what people are worried about.
But if you're flickr or youtube and you have systems set up where copyrighted content can be reported and you clearly state that you don't allow that sort of thing, and you don't market yourself as such, then I don't think the bill could be used to have your site shut down. It's the "I don't think..." part that's in need of fixing.
The lack of due process and the way it may screw up the technical functioning of the internet as a whole is the real issue I have with the bill.
A couple decades ago he could have had his way with hollywood and hollywood would have bent over with a smile and a happy tune to whistle. That was before he sat on his ass for 8 years and then decided to make three very expensive bad movies. But even those movies made a money.
Frankly, all of his movies tend to make a bucketload of money, and both Lucas and the studios know this. The studios didn't turn down Red Tails because they didn't think it would fly, they probably didn't want to deal with Lucas and his army of yes men.
And as for the Star Wars shit, Lucas totally has the right to go back and change the movies. They're his movies, after all. But even if the previous, un-fucked-with versions were terrible, you should still preserve them. You should still have them around so the 'fixed' versions can be appreciated that much more. People should be able to see the original theatrical versions of the Star Wars films, and I mean the real theatrical versions, not the remastered ones. Have the original theatrical versions that are rough around the edges out there. If you don't see that stuff, then you can't appreciate how much better some of the cleaned up scenes look in the later revisions.
Show someone the final cut of Blade Runner and they'll probably like it OK. Show them the original theatrical version first, tho, and they'll think the final cut was some kind of gift from the gods. It's the same with the old film "Warriors of the Wind" compared to "Nausicaa", or the originally released version(s) of "The Thief and the Cobbler" compared to the Re-Cobbled Edition. Having the crappy old versions allows us to appreciate the improved versions.
Or in this case, having the originals around would allow these youngsters to see just how good Star Wars was before there were CGI dinosaurs and slapstick stormtroopers doing stuff in the background.
Do you have an official fan club I can join? With laminated membership cards and everything?
Seriously, tho, this is really good. You should keep doing this.
Prometheus
Dark Knight Rises
Chronicle
Skyfall
Hobbit
Lincoln
That makes me want to know more about how that all came about. Did the guy actually kill her, or was it a "World's Best Dad" thing, where she OD's and he decided to make it look like suicide instead.
Unfortunately, the cops are totally gonna know she didn't write that letter if they find anything else she'd written.
I like this a lot.
I think the best thing about the show is the fact that you don't see the main villain until the third season, and they devote a LOT of the show to fleshing out the antagonists. Zuko and Iro are both really detailed characters and their relationship is really complex. There's an episode about halfway through the second season that has several little vignettes dealing with a few different characters individually, and the segment that focuses on Iro is one of the best things they ever did on the show. I honestly got a bit choked up at the end of that segment. The third season also has some of the darkest themes I've ever seen in a kid's show. There are some real moral dilemmas going on toward the end. Let's just say that they pretty fully explore the implications of being able to manipulate the elements.
If you've not seen the show, it's really quite good. I remember the first time I tried watching it was back when it was still on TV. Someone had posted a lot of the series to youtube, so I gave the first episode a shot. Stopped about ten minutes into it and said "nope, not my bag".
Then I got netflix and netflix kept telling me how much I'd like the show, so I said, "Fine, Netflix, I'll watch the god damn show just so you'll stop dumping it at the top of my "suggestions" page.
I think it's one of the better animated kid's shows ever done. It took me a few episodes to see the potential. There's a weak episode here and there, but the series overall is solid.
Some of it is really good. Like most things, 95% of it is really really bad.
Appa was a character in the show. He's only on screen for about 5 minutes of the movie, and he's just an animal. The little flying dude is only in a few shots of the movie as well. One of those things where he'd fly into the frame and I'd suddenly remember "oh yeah, they did put him in there, didn't they?" and then he'd vanish for a half hour and I'd forget all over again.
Also, if you write a movie with a child actor in the lead, don't write in any scenes where that kid screams. And don't shove the camera up his nose every five minutes.
I'm rewatching airbender right now just to recollect the movie better. The commentary for this flick is gonna be amazing. There's just so much wrong with it. The only thing that isn't utterly fucked up is the costume designs, and that's kinda iffy.
Also really excited about Unforgiven. I wasn't sure that was gonna make it. Kinda bummed out that Citizen Kane didn't make the list, but even though I like that movie a lot I'm not sure if it's something that can be talked about for it's entire running length. You'd probably have to talk about Welles' entire career or something.
lol, I wasn't expecting the title card to actually say "Italian Spiderman".
OK, there's a program called "litestep" that is a shell replacement for windows. I used to use it for years, but since I've gone from XP to Win 7 I haven't really kept up with it. It's still developed, tho. This will pretty well disguise windows, aside from the startup/shutdown screens. I'm not really sure if it works with the newest windows... XP was the last I used it on...
http://litestep.info/
You can find themes for it on Deviantart. Most of the old shell theme sites have fallen off the web.
http://browse.deviantart.com/customizat … p/?order=9
You might also need Windowblinds to disguise the actual windows as well.
You will, of course, have to then talk to the guys who made the themes if you want to use them in your movie, but I imagine most of them would think it was pretty cool. Alternatively you could make your own theme. The theming system in Litestep is pretty easy. Might be an option, at least.
Not sure about how to do that with a phone, tho.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doo
Everyone's favorite adventuring archeologist finds himself inadvertently caught up in a local squabble between a group of villagers and a neighboring prince over the stench emanating from the prince's palace. Indy decides to investigate.
This thread makes me think about how I've wasted the last five years of my life.
Wiseau was being completely serious with that movie. After it became an ironic cult comedy he went through a period of denial where he attacked anyone making fun of his movie and threatened lawsuits and sent out take-down notices and all that. I guess someone told him that he was making way more money off the movie now that it's known for being terrible and funny, so he has since tried to turn that into his schtick. Making bad, awkward stuff in the hopes that it will be as funny as the room. But it's not nearly as funny when he's trying to do that. The stuff he does now feels like bad parody of the acting in The Room. The show that he has now, The Tommy Wi-Show, actually feels really mean-spirited to me, like the guys writing and directing it are deliberately trying to get people to laugh at him because everyone thinks he's a moron. It made me feel really dirty when I watched the first episode, and I never went back to it. Their whole idea was "people think Tommy Wiseau's a retard, so let's cut together little episodes full of his weird eccentricities so people can laugh at what a retard he is".
It really feels to me like their laughing at someone with a mental disability, and people have been eating it up. It makes my blood run cold.
musagi (free) + edirol orchestral + mouse. I didn't actually use a keyboard, as I can't play nearly as well as you 
I dunno if you can even buy edirol's stuff anymore, tho. They got bought out by Roland and it appears they no longer sell their products, only support them. At the time I bought it it was on sale for about $100, but that was about 5 years ago. It's not the best, but it's fun to dick around with.
Musagi is a blast to play with, tho. It's a really fun app to work with.
http://drpetter.se/project_musagi.html
That's the main project page for it, but the guy who made it went on to make 'sculptris' which is an awesome freeware sculpting tool which was so awesome that he got hired by Z-Logic, so now he mostly just does that. He released the source for Musagi and another guy kinda adds to it off and on in his spare time. Rumor has it that the guy is working up his own version of what will eventually be called "Musagi 2", but I dunno. His version of Musagi is available on the forums over here:
http://drpetter.proboards.com/index.cgi … hread=1103
No install, you just extract it and run.
Save often, as even his considerably more stable version is prone to the occasional random crash.
I worked up the first 30 seconds or so with some samples cause I was bored and wanted to hear it as the strings it was meant to be. I added a bit of flute in there, too, for shits and giggles. No drums cause I don't have good drum bits that would fit this.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1927416/Rats%20 … lhouse.mp3
1. Unforgiven
2. The Last Airbender
3. The Dark Knight
4. Citizen Kane
5. Kick Ass
6. Transformers 3
After I spent months literally demanding the rest of the panel see it, and then to have everyone agree to put it on the big six contender list... I do and do for you kids, and this is the thanks I get?
The rest of the panel hadn't seen it!? For shame...
Unforgiven is one of my all-time favorite films and my vote was in no way influenced by Trey's campaign. Honest.
well, maybe a little bit...
The car kicking scene in Transformers 3 was worth the price of admission for me.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Squiggly_P
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