Recently we discussed the potential KickStarter has for shaking things up and bypassing normal gatekeepers and FTC issues.

Well, they have issues of their own.

According to PopSci (link via Rand Simberg) Kickstarter recently made a small, quite specific, change to their terms of service. one that RETROACTIVELY removed the stretch prizes from an already funded project.

The project, to create bio-luminescent plants, received $484,013 of a $65,000  goal by the time funding closed and was going swimmingly until it attracted the ire of some...I dunno...luddites or something who, on May 31, started an online petition to get Kickstarter to block the project. Kickstarter knuckled under on July 1.

This is bigger than depriving the projects $40.00 backers of their glowing leeks...this is an ex post facto decision breaching a contracts in response to an internet petition.

Which brings us to Indiegogo which is another outfit with a similar buisness model that few people had heard of before Kickstarter decided to spurn the faint green light of and embrace the darkness of anti GM hysteria....and break contracts.

So lets hear it for Indiegogo...at least at the moment they don't seem to be opposed in principal to biotech startups.

^{...and all that that implies.}

Kickstarter does good within what appear to be self imposed limits. Beyond those limits it's good to know that there is competition.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 232 words, total size 2 kb.

Bill Whittle, whose videos I link to frequently, does a very interesting podcast called The Stratosphere Lounge in which he takes questions and holds forth on a wide range of eclectic topics ranging from film to space travel to politics to history. He builds his shows around questions submitted via Facebook in a brief window before the podcast.

Well this weeks show included a question from a viewer about anime. Mr. Whittle expounded for a few minutes on why anime is not his cup of tea. This disquisition however, quickly dovetailed into glowing praise for someone who does not share his opinion on the medium. According to Mr Whittle, someone named 'Steven Den Beste' is brilliant, insightful, inspiring and ALWAYS RIGHT. Mr. Whittle spent several minutes talking about how important Mr. Den Beste's USS Clueless was in the early days of the blogosphere and what a joy it is to read the  editorials Steven still occasionally does.  After this genuinely heartfelt tribute, Whittle directed his anime attuned listeners to Mr. Den Beste's "Anime Manga...HENTAI..That's the word I'm looking for.. Hentai blog Chizumatic"

^{....because Steven Den Beste is just the cat's meow and if you're into that hentai stuff Chizumatic is where to find it!}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:37 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 261 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Heh, I wonder if SDB will have anything to say about the acknowledgement of his hentai blog...

Posted by: Siergen at Sat Aug 10 16:24:03 2013 (Ao4Kw)

2 The Stratosphere Lounge is one of the few things that might entice me to set up enough shell stuff to create a Facebook account.

I can't remember where I went first when I started following blogs, but Eject^3 was a big one early on.  It's a shame what it has turned into through neglect. (Tens of thousands of SEO "comments")

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Aug 10 19:34:23 2013 (TJ7ih)

3 That's a bit embarassing... (blush)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sat Aug 10 20:28:08 2013 (+rSRq)

4 Back in those early days, someone said that Bill Whittle was Captain Kirk and SDB was Mister Spock.

Posted by: muon at Sun Aug 11 01:19:50 2013 (jFJid)

5 I always remembered how he referred to visiting the old blog was like going under the Krell Mind Machine.

(I downloaded the archive once, but I never went completely through it.)

Posted by: Mauser at Sun Aug 11 06:34:02 2013 (TJ7ih)

6 Apparently my Grammar skills are weak at 4:30 in the morning.

Posted by: Mauser at Sun Aug 11 06:34:55 2013 (TJ7ih)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 17 words, total size 1 kb.

I had no idea that by not pursuing a law degree I was condemning myself to mugglehood.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 263 words, total size 2 kb.

For example: What is a loaded gun?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 11 words, total size 1 kb.

The ad for the last installment of Yamato 2199 is by orders of magnitude far the shortest of them all.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 54 words, total size 1 kb.

Via Paterrico comes a fascinating piece by Ken White over at POPEHAT who has a very long, informative and downright creepy piece on his (and others) dealings with a particularly nasty internet stalker whose attentions he attracted when he did pro-bono work for a gentleman on the stalkers hate list.

He leaves no sense of what values he promotes, only of what groups and individuals he hates. There's only one circumstance when you get a sense that he's enjoying what he does, that he has a craft or a calling. That's when he's describing someone being raped, murdered, or otherwise abused, or when he's pursuing the families of someone he hates.

This has led to trouble.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 212 words, total size 2 kb.

^{Art...indisputable art by Tomioka Jiro}

I have a friend who does art. He used to be a professional animator and he's done a bit of small press work in comics. He's been doing art in various capacities for 30 odd years and has a wide range of interests.

He also haets himself some Miku Miku Dance.

I mean anything involving MMD or Poser will get under his skin and if applied for more than a few minutes will send him into a white hot rage rage. It's rather bizarre, its like his IQ drops 35 points and until the offending media is removed all he can say is "Duuhh..I hate dat stufff..." Now this is not a rational response and would seem to be a matter of personal preference and pig-headedness but he recently made an interesting argument when I pointed out that he'd seemed to like The Incredibles.

Well he does like Pixar films...mostly. His argument is that the MMD videos and such aren't actually art because unlike the big studio productions they're just using someone else's creativity.  The person doing an MMD video on YouTube in his eyes isn't doing much more than posting a paint by numbers painting and calling it his. The programer has done all the art.

Now, as it happens, I'm tinkering with MMD right now, but I'm not making much progress because, I'm not artistically inclined and doing that on a Mac is clunky. With MMD one is manipulating these wire frame models and even at the most basic level choosing ones choreography. However the facial expressions in particular ARE all built into the program and were put there by the programers as are (I'm told) some basic movements). It's my understanding though, that MMD can be used to produce things like this....

I'm unsure of the provenance of these .gifs (which I nicked from 4-Chan) except that they seem to be from some Touhou fanfic. I understand that one can download Touhou "skins" for MMD wireframes now (fans made those available some years ago) However, even if the creators of this did use off the shelf " paper dolls" for their character designs there is the matter of the choreography and the subtitles which imply writing a script. Of course this is Touhou so it's fanfic anyway. However the potential seems to be there and is certainly present in the professional versions of Poser to apply ones own skins to the products frames. Such additions would require artistic ability (and being 3d would be akin to rendering a sculpture), but the objection of my friend is that those using this medium are using someone else's art.

My feeling is that this is akin to using Legos or perhaps a paintbrush. I'm of the opinion that even MMD can teach aspiring animators about computer animation, choreography and editing, which in the computer age are quite different skills from what they used to be. However, I don't do art, my figure drawing makes Randall Munro* look like Da Vinci so this is most definitely a layman's perspective. I'm really not sure how much ones brush needs to stray outside the numbers before ones effort becomes art.

I'm pretty sure that this piece done with Poser qualifies though

...but at what point on the spectrum between that piece of magic and simply having Lady Hatsune make a leek face it stops being analogous to stickers on ones Trapper Keeper...well I'm not qualified to answer that.

_{*Of course his humor certainly IS art.}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:14 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 591 words, total size 4 kb.

1

The person doing an MMD video on YouTube in his eyes isn't doing much more than posting a paint by numbers painting and calling it his. The programer has done all the art.

The same way Fender and Gibson did all the art and Mark Knopfler just played notes that were already there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Fri Aug 9 06:51:17 2013 (PiXy!)

2 If you produce fine, handcrafted, heirloom-quality furniture, you probably have a low opinion of Ikea. But for a lot of people, Ikea is the difference between nothing and making do with milk cartons.

Or, if we're going to talk about paintbrushes... I use a Kolinsky sable brush from W&N, because it's a really good brush (quite a bit better than the painter, if I'm going to be honest), and the few extra bucks it costs isn't going to break my bank. It's nice having a brush that can hold a point that well. There are also artificial fiber paintbrushes made for the three-for-a-dollar crowd. There are people who get fantastic results with the former, to be sure - but there are also people who can take the three-for-a-dollar paintbrushes and do amazing things with them, because the tool isn't the talent, and it isn't the vision.

Sure, if you're a professional-level animator, you're not going to like tools that let people bodge together their own animation. Professional sound guys scoffed at software that let you do your own mixes on a home PC... and it turned out that a lot of people were pretty good at mixing without being a "professional" sound guy. Heck, for that matter, I'm sure that plenty of vocalists aren't too fond of Vocaloid.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Fri Aug 9 21:39:20 2013 (pWQz4)

3 At around 1:55 in the video, she appears to be firing the gun by cycling the charging lever on the bolt.  Reminds me of a gunslinger firing a revolver by fanning the hammer, although I've never heard of a rifle fired via the bolt lever.

Posted by: RickC at Fri Aug 9 22:28:04 2013 (WQ6Vb)

4 @Avatar comment#2:
I think Vocaloid is a better argument for my friends point of view than MMD. The tone, pitch, and everything else is actually done by someone (or something) else. That being said, editing and songwriting are each definitely arts in their own right.

One thing that (I think) set my friend off is the ease of tracing with the computer. He was in awe of how much better some people were on the computer than on paper. I suspect that this generally has two causes.
1: the person is just much more comfortable in the computer medium (I'd wager that this is very common today given the amount of time people spend on it).

2: They're doing vectors.

This latter has turned out to be the case quite often in his recent experience.

As for MMD, given the sheer ammount of stuff pre-programmed into even the most basic version, I think my friends argument is not without some merit at the most basic levels of competency. I tend to think that his argument breaks down rapidly once one moves out of the orientation phase.

Of course some of this is just crumudgeonism on his part. but given the complexities of the tech, asking at what point a work becomes art and particularly ones own art strikes me as not entirely unreasonable. However, while I'm inclined toward your and Pixy's point of view on this, not being an artist at all makes me wonder. I mean look at the amount of clip art, embedded videos and such I use here.....though of course no one would call the blog "art".

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 10 00:17:21 2013 (F7DdT)

5 @ Rick C comment#3:
I'm unfamiliar with bolt actions in practice, however one can do something similar with a pump action weapon if one cycles it very hard and holds down the trigger. Note too that it has been mentioned in the series that she built the weapon herself so chambering a round and closing the bolt might automatically fire it.

Also:

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 10 00:25:40 2013 (F7DdT)

6 I've been curious about playing with MMD, but at the time, it seems like people had to patch it to get english or something.  Of course, at one point I was going to dabble with Daz 3d (don't bother).  And I used to futz around with POV-Ray, but nothing ever came close to some of the amazing images out there.

I just don't really have the commitment to achieve skill with these things, which kind of shoots down the idea that skill isn't required.  (Although DAZ probably does, since it's basically a paper-doll system where more talented artists sell content for you to add to the program.  It can't really create its own.)

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Aug 10 04:04:20 2013 (TJ7ih)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

As Steven reminds us in the comments of a previous post, the Japanese, earlier today, launched the latest and largest of their 'Destroyers'. We've discussed this nomenclature issue recently. However, it's important to remember that a nations warships are not just tools to be used in desperate times, they are symbols that can send messages.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 12:41 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 105 words, total size 1 kb.

As I post this, it's a bit more than an hour before episode 5 of Stella-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch airs on Crunchyroll. I note this is almost a WEEK after most all the cool kids  have seen it.

I've been judiciously avoiding spoilers, but here's not much point in blogging this one.

UPDATE: OK. For those of you who've already seen this.....

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:08 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 230 words, total size 2 kb.

They need a different container....



....this is NOT toothpaste.

Also: "Blargh...Ptooey! Ptooey!"

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 12:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Heh.  Nicely positioned on my monitor so I had to scroll down to see the punchline.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Aug 4 21:29:23 2013 (PiXy!)

2 Well, if you didn't sit on your niece, you might not need the cream.

Posted by: Mauser at Tue Aug 6 02:28:42 2013 (TJ7ih)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

While gathering data for Pixy on a particularly pernicious spammer I think I learned something.

^{" I think this is wrong and probably offensive."}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 08:06 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 59 words, total size 1 kb.

UPDATE:
Ah.
Kickstarter widgets only work for Pixies.

Anyhoo, after looking long and hard at next semesters finances, I just donated to a rural library project and sent a cool C to support Little Witch Academias 2.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:23 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 123 words, total size 1 kb.

Given that it is a group blog by a bunch of lawyers, I was surprised to learn the extent to which the terms of service at the Volokh Conspiracy are much shorter and straightforward than most.

And yet......

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:38 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

While still not up to the level of its premiere, episode 3 of RWBY has recovered quite a bit from # 2, though slapstick visual 'cheats' don't work as well in this medium.

This is definitely a cliche' buffet and it has some technical issues, but it's amusing me. This episode was all dialog and the voice work held its own and remained pretty engaging.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:09 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 72 words, total size 1 kb.

Moments after putting up the previous post I was sent this:

  Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

I’m scared. And not of the right things.

Read both posts in full.

Michelle Catalano, who once had a blog called A Small Victory was one of those people who inspired me to start blogging a decade ago. She's gone on to write for Forbes and Boing Boing...and now she seems to be on a watch list.

...because we're apparently living in a panopticon...OK at least we're blogging in one.

****************
UPDATE: This is not quite as creepy as it seemed earlier today. The initial tip came from a previous employer rather than Google. However, do note in the Atlantic piece that the LE types seem to think that getting info based on search history is unremarkable and they follow such leads ' about100 times a week'.
******************
But wait...
There's more. However while no less creepy it's actually demonstrably partisan so as per policy it goes below the fold.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 462 words, total size 5 kb.

Is this creepy?

Wait.

You'll need context....allow me to explain......

Last night Instapundit linked to an Amazon.com page for 'Zombie Apocalypse Supplies'. OK This was silly, so I sent the link to Wonderduck in part to let him know that Snowflake Village is overrun by zombjas...but that is not germane to the matter at hand.

Anyway, a bit later, he and I exchanged multiple IMs trying to figure out what a compression bag was and speculating about the 5 gallon tub 'o meals which advertised 300 odd servings but  gave not the slightest indication what they were servings of...or how over 300 'satisfying meals' would fit in a 5 gallon pail. Anyway after sending each other links to various amusing zombie survivalist inanities, we logged off shortly thereafter.

Which brings us to this screencap.....



...and this one....




All of a sudden the Amazon affiliated blogs I'm visiting are very interested in selling me tubs o' food and stuff.  So I ask my readers. Especially those who did not spend 20 minutes last night snarking on the zombie apocalypse page....Is this just the Amazon putsch of the moment or are they really tracking us that close? What are YOU seeing on Amazon affiliated sites?

If this turns out not to be creepy and you are feeling cheated by the lack of creepiness, then rest assured gentle reader there is still creepiness to be had....
more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:26 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 261 words, total size 2 kb.

His blog brings all the boys to his yard.
Of course having put it in those terms...I'd best get off his lawn before he comes at me with a Chen-saw.

^{Twin Tailed Touhou-ism is by Omikoshi2}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 12:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.

....but I really had to get that post off the top spot.

Also, I always did wonder about this as a kid.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:15 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Maybe he's wading through water up to his armpits...

Posted by: Siergen at Tue Jul 30 16:07:13 2013 (Ao4Kw)

2 Or he's about to perforate someone with his bayonet.

Posted by: David at Tue Jul 30 20:26:28 2013 (vyRm+)

3 I see no bayonet.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Jul 30 23:19:26 2013 (F7DdT)

4 Once upon a time, that particular pose was used to indicate "The enemy is thataway...". Seriously. You were supposed to stand there with your rifle raised over your head, pointing it at the enemy, so that the rest of your unit would know where they were.

For proof, see about half-way down this page, taken from the old Visual Signals FM:

http://www.hardscrabblefarm.com/vn/visual-signals.html

That was the WWII to the early seventies version. You'll also see it with both hands upraised, weapon upside down, as a variant. After that period, someone got some common sense, and went with the one pictured in Fig. 2-42 on this page:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/accp/in0541/ch2.htm

It's a weird little thing, but sometimes you needed to be able to signal everyone else that the enemy was spotted, and which direction they were in. Presumably, the enemy hadn't seen you yet, because if they did, they were probably shooting at you, and you were shooting back, which would tend to obviate the entire idea.

That picture you have up there? That's because a bunch of the new kids have never seen the old-school manuals or training materials, and think they know what the hell they're talking about.

Posted by: Kirk at Wed Jul 31 02:55:52 2013 (gKTMc)

5 Found the one with both hands...

http://www.hardscrabblefarm.com/images/ww2/handbook/hand_signals_2.gif

Posted by: Kirk at Wed Jul 31 03:09:40 2013 (gKTMc)

6 Well then.
Now we know.



Now all we need is lasers.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Jul 31 12:09:42 2013 (F7DdT)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Via Scott Lowther.
I have no words...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 29 words, total size 1 kb.