Ross Scott

The meetups are now over! My thanks to everyone who came and sorry to everyone else who was too scattered globally to come. This meetup ended up being a lot like the North one, with the exception of us being stopped by the police on the way there: Something about how you're NOT supposed to fire roman candles at other cars while the vehicle is moving. Anyway, I think everyone who didn't collapse from heat exhaustion had a pretty good time. Here are the results of the revised poll! The results were pretty close to what I was expecting after the first poll (including the would-be time travellers). What I didn't expect were a few people to meet us completely by coincidence! The other thing I didn't expect is that out of the fans that said "yes", one of them was MacGyver! He still remembered a lot from the show and taught me how to make a polygraph using tweezers, a battery, plastic wrap, and some string.

He's also the voice of the Shadow Man and cameraman in the Civil Protection videos. He's also a friend of mine and Craig's. I hope to eventually get him some juicier roles than the ones he's had so far, he can definitely do voice acting.

Good news everyone! A friend of mine has an AKG D88 S and I tested it out and it sounds great. He's willing to sell it to me for not too much. With this mic I think I'll still need a pre-amp, but it's such a relief to find one that I know will sound like what I need. I got it, I was referring to Chuck's sample, he sent me a new one. Sorry for the confusion. Would you recommend the pre-amp that you're using?

I was hoping for an isolated sound file, it's not as helpful for me hearing stuff that's been processed and mixed in with everything else. Again, I'm trying to get a feel for different mics seeing what they sound like when a person is absolutely being as loud as possible into them.

The next meetup is coming up soon, the details below are pretty similar to the North one: ITINERARY: Date: August 4th Location: Carowinds – Charlotte, NC / SC 9:00am - 10:45 Meet at Shoney's restaurant, which is very close to Carowinds Link to Google Maps I'll be inside having breakfast or outside in the parking lot. T-shirts and prints will be available for sale outside (though they'll be for sale all day). We should have higher quality ones this time, including Civil Protection ones. If you don't want to pay for the cost of the amusement park, you can stop by during this time for free. 11:00 - 11:30 Arrive at Carowinds, Meet outside the south gate (not the north one). Here's a picture from google maps: WARNING: There is a $15 parking fee inside Carowinds because they're jackals. You might want to try to park somewhere else and carpool with people. 11:30 – 2:00 Enter Carowinds, go on rides. If you still need a ticket, here’s the info to get a discount on it if you buy one online: Price: $41 for August 4th if you use this link to purchase tickets. ($36 + $5 BS "processing" fee.) 2:00 - 2:30 Meet at the Carolina Skytower structure (should be the tallest structure in sight) in case more latercomers arrive or people get lost. We'll probably eat after this. 5:00 - 5:30 Meet again at the Carolina Skytower structure. ~10:15pm (as park closes) Meet outside south gate again. - - - Like the last meet, things will be pretty informal. I'll answer questions, sign things, you can stick with me while I go on rides, split off and do your own thing, whatever you want. If you hang around, be prepared to have an answer for what you would do with an island if you were rich enough to buy your own. HOW TO FIND ME: I'll be wearing a bright lime green t-shirt to remain as visible as I can. If you come late, you're welcome to track me down "Where's Waldo?" style. Here's a picture of me from the last meetup: Once again, if you're colorblind, you should probably arrive on time. If you don't see me, look for a large man wearing a Freeman's Mind t-shirt, he'll know what to do. Hope to see more people at the meet!

My hair looks like a rag mop in the funnel cake picture. I think the 90 degree weather with 100% humidity didn't help that. The others look pretty good.

I will soon, I just need to figure out where we'll be ahead of time. As for the tickets, the link to buy them at the reduced price is still the same, just check the link at the top of this news post.

Actually one viewer sent me this in an email after an exchange I had with him about what I'm after. It's making me think a dynamic mic might make more sense afterall: " Lets look at what you need: intensity of my shouting - Condensers (like a Rode NT1-A) are best here, they pick up all the little things in a voice more accurately than dynamics creating a more believable tone to a voice. Dynamics usually pick up the average sound and getting rid of the rest, so for stuff like voice acting you need to over do it (think like theatre) for it to pick up the little subtleties but can then sound too "plastic" (think like theatre again). Dynamics are also designed for very loud signals so depending on the microphone, shouting won't sound like shouting that much from the mic since it can record volcanoes exploding which is much louder than a voice. doesn't volume clip - Dynamics win here, they can pick up pretty much everything without clipping... be aware that the microphone won't clip but the other stuff in your chain may due to the loud sounds (look at previous email for more explanation). Condensers are much less predictable and each one contains a rating of how loud they can go before they clip the microphone. doesn't pick up much else in the room - Dynamics like the one you have and the SM58 are best here, since they are designed to only pick up sound after a certain loudness (a whisper, but not the cat running in the other room), dynamics also only work best from anything under 3 ft and can't pick up sound that well out of that range unless its louder than a normal conversation (so not much sound bouncing off your walls will get back into the microphone). Condensers are electrically powered and pick up every quiet noise as well as loud ones, so that means unless your room sounds good your going to hear all the little echo bounces. " Picking up every little noise is not something that will help me. I'll definitely listen to any samples people send me before making any judgments though.

Hey, I've gotten a lot of suggestions on the mics, still trying to figure out what's a good match for me. For everyone recommending a particular mic, would you mind making a recording of yourself shouting something as loud as you can? Hearing is believing, so if I hear a really intense shout coming from your mic setup, that's a pretty good recommendation for me. You can email me directly if you want ([email protected]).

I've owned both in the past and I currently like Nvidia better, but only because they have more robust options with regards to Antialiasing. They're kind of hidden away and sometimes you have to hunt down the info, but there are plenty of games out there you can get real AA on with a Nvidia card, but not a AMD one. If that situation ever changes in the future, I could easily jump ships again.

I'd say that system is fine, it just needs a dedicated graphics card if you want to do real gaming on it. Also find out what power supply you have, since it may not be designed to handle the load a GPU would add.

*** ONE MORE MEETUP ON AUGUST 4TH! *** Well the first meetup is over and went well. I got to meet several fans and have some intense fun at the park. I learned some things about myself too, specifically that I can mostly stay in control when it appears that I'm falling to my death. The people that came were all great; I feel like if there was a zombie apocalypse, then the group we had would be very functional and survive. All in all it was a lot of fun and I'm glad I had the meet. Really my only complaint about the meetup is that the numbers were a little short of what was projected in the earlier poll: Now the second meetup hasn't happened yet, so the results of this are still inconclusive. It could be that 1300 of you are coming to the south meetup, that would be great. If that happens, then I won't understand why the Confederate states lost the Civil War. If the second meetup turns out like the first however, we can make some interesting conclusions: -If internet people say they are interested in attending something, over 99% of them will not actually attend. -If an internet person says "maybe" they will attend something, there is a 100% chance they will not attend it. I don't want to pass judgment too quickly about internet people however, maybe some people got scared off after seeing my picture, or some of you weren't able to make parole afterall. In light of this, I'm launching a new poll to see what we can expect: [poll id=7]

Yeah, I'll sign whatever.

Hey everyone, this is just a quick post for the people attending the Accursed Farms North meetup. The nice way of saying this is things have gone less than optimal with the t-shirts and the final quality is what you would expect more of a rushed Chinese counterfeit copy. There will only be the Freeman's Mind logo of shirts for sale, I vetoed producing the Civil Protection logo after seeing how the FM ones came out. Anyway, I felt like I had to make a quick announcement about this, otherwise I would feel like a con man. My apologies to everyone on this. The good news is we'll have nice high quality prints for sale that I can sign!

Also I found this on the tax thing: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/05/03/do-lower-taxes-create-jobs-lets-look-at-the-states I think this is a pretty fair analysis, since they do the breakdown by state, and show a statistical plot of the results. They also look into some explanations for the states that don't follow the pattern necessarily.

Well here's how I look at it. I think a certain amount of defense is necessary, I think going into Afghanistan after 9-11 was prudent. I think going into Iraq ands just hanging there for years was a big waste of time, money, and lives, whether we're getting tanks out of it or not. When it comes to welfare, I agree that we shouldn't just be handing money to people on welfare. Not everyone, but SOME of the people who are in poverty may have made poor life decisions that got them there in first place. So those are NOT the people who you should just hand money to. I think what would make more sense would be to use the welfare money to provide basic public housing and actual food and supplies to maintain a certain safety net for people. I don't think the services provided should be a desirable way to live, but I think letting the poor simply fend for themselves in the street is even worse. As for what you're getting, if the money is being spent properly, you're getting people who don't have to go homeless or starve, especially children. Simply ignoring that element of society doesn't help society as a whole, it can drag a lot of it down. The argument "well there will always be poor people" I don't think cuts it, because we're always going to have crime too, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't spend money on police. Regardless, I think we're probably both in agreement that tax money shouldn't be spent on bullshit, which is probably where the majority of it currently goes.

Well I guess my point is, I like to be as efficient as I can about animation. Yes, good animation you have to do a lot of stuff step by step and there's no way around that. However once you've done a certain amount of work, if you have good software, you can automate and take shortcuts on a good chunk too. I think SFM takes some of that away and you have more lost time compared to doing animation in 3rd party software like softimage + an engine that supports more animation features. And yeah, the 1080 problem seems to have been fixed. Also it turns out shadows on added objects to your map (including characters not from the player recorder) don't work unless the light source is dynamic. So that means if your character is standing out in broad daylight, he's not going to be casting a shadow. You can even see this in the tutorial videos where the guy adds the pyro and wheelbarrow. Also after spending some time with it, it seems like it is DEFINITELY less capable than Faceposer for gesture manipulation as well. I'm almost ready to declare SFM a bizarre yin-yang against the Source SDK. Does the Source SDK do some things poorly? SFM does a great job of that! Is the Source SDK good for other things? SFM is missing those options entirely! Right now I think about the only thing they're equally good at is facial manipulation.

There's a lot to discuss on this thread, I'll keep my stuff to bullet points: -The debt is owed to anyone who loans money. As someone mentioned, we owe a lot to China. Anytime someone buys a government bond, the government owes that bearer money. People owe money to banks every time they give a loan or any organization involving interest. -There are currently . -This stuff is bigger than Obama, McCain, or Bush. While presidents have influenced how this plays out, I currently think our political system won't allow the kind of radical change needed to fix this. There's a quote before "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." I think that kind of sums up the root problem. -I think McCain's campaign platforms were very similar to Bush's, so I don't understand why things would have gotten better staying the course on that. At the very least that probably would have meant the same amount of spending in Iraq, probably more. -I think Obama made a gambit to try and recover the economy which probably helped things in the short term, but set things up to collapse even harder in the long term. -The republicans are just as guilty of overspending as the democrats, if not moreso. The major tax cuts happened under Bush. The bailout happened under Bush (though continued by Obama). There are trends of what each party is more likely to spend on however. Republicans traditionally spend more on military spending and tax breaks, and democrats normally spend more on health care, social services, etc. -While I've heard the THEORY of why lowering taxes on upper income people can help the economy / average person, I haven't heard any EVIDENCE of this. I mean Bush brought our taxes down incredibly low and the economy hasn't exactly prospered with him. Also our taxes are lower than ever, but if you compare us to the 80s or 50s, the average wages for upper income earners has gotten MUCH better (someone posted a video to this), whereas the wages for average workers has actually DECLINED when taking inflation into account. When big companies are raking in profits, smart ones invest regardless of the tax rate. Most companies try to maximize profit in any way they can. So if their tax rate is low, but they can still afford to outsource jobs at a much lower cost than domestic ones, they'll often do so. I consider this argument invalid unless someone can provide a historical example with a direct correlation of how things got better economically for the working or middle class by LOWERING taxes on top income earners. -I agree that we're likely headed towards hyper inflation (I've heard estimates by some economists put it by 2020) for a variety of reasons and the 08 recession was nothing compared to what we likely have ahead. This is probably the simplest and most accurate explanation you'll find on this.

No, I probably should, I'm sure that would fix the default recording volume and possibly the hiss level. Would that affect the actual sound of the recording however? I amplify the recording after making it. What a few people emailing haven't understood is it's not the volume that's the issue, it's the way it SOUNDS. Your voice simply sounds different if you're talking in a loud voice vs. shouting. I really have no idea what's being affected there though.

Sorry, I don't keep the raw footage once I'm done with the video, I would have run out of hard drive space a long time ago if I did. At least you have the MKV copies to work with now, which are higher quality than the WMV ones.

It sounds like it might be one of those references that isn't one. I think that happened in Morning Patrol, where some people thought Dave's comments on mind control were a reference to some show I had never seen. In my case it's been a frigging heat wave the past couple weeks and I don't have air conditioning where my computer is. It's given me some situational awareness of what Freeman might be going through.