Ross Scott

Well I can only answer some things due to contract reasons, but I'd say it's unlikely I'll break from Machinima.com for several reasons: 1. I get a lot more views through them than I would on my own. I have a direct comparison of this. When I was working at Machinima.com I had to rush out the trailer to The Tunnel before it was ready, so it doesn't have sound effects, uses stock Half-Life music, etc. I ended up getting sound effects and custom music a couple hours later and released the modified one the next day and still link to that one from the site here. You can see for yourself the view difference: Machinima.com version (as of time of post, 242k views): Fixed version (as of time of post, 42k views): Machinima.com is almost certainly the reason I have as many viewers as I do today, so they would have to do something really bad for me to want to split from them. 2. I do receive some money from them. I can't disclose how much, but if you earn minimum wage, you likely face similar economic restraints as I do. If my viewcount was reduced some 80% by being independent, I would have to work full time at some hell job again, which would mean less time for the videos. My main motivation isn't financial however, there are some movies I want to make regardless of what's happening. If things ever got really bad, I might put out an SOS to viewers to see if anyone wanted me to continue making videos in exchange for room and board. 3. In my entire experience with Machinima.com, I haven't seen anyone act outright malicious about anything. While I disagree with them on some things (like cancelling ), I see them mostly as just being very business driven and continually experimenting to earn more money. I think this is a common scenario with many studios. Production companies are typically interested foremost in what earns the most amount of money. Directors (or me anyway) are interested in what creates the best possible experience for the viewer. So it's a clashing value system at work, but I have about as much creative control with them as I would on my own anyway. 4. Machinima as a medium is a bastard child of copyright law and would merrily be sued into oblivion by some companies (or legislative acts) given the chance. Machinima.com has a lot of business relationships with game companies and Youtube, so they're the 800 pound gorilla to hide behind any potential legal problems, whereas taking down an independent's video is unfortunately not very hard these days. Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage any discussion on this, just giving some more food for thought on it.

Well except for one or two exceptions, to me the acting didn't feel like B movie acting so much as how real people actually act. Co-workers making lame jokes at work with a shoddy delivery? That's what REAL co-workers do!

Well for me, to call a game the greatest is what leaves a bigger impact on you than any other game you've played. If I had to pick one, I'd probably go with Silent Hill 2. It may be only average or above average in terms of gameplay, but in terms of atmosphere, writing, themes, and thought-provoking content, I think it's incredible and makes it one of the most memorable games I've played. Here's the other 4 I'd have: System Shock 2 Deus Ex Sanitarium Puzzle Agent (may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found its content fantastic) Runner-ups: First half of Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy Phantasmagoria 2 (people tend to have polarized views on this one) Still Life Legacy of Kain series

Hey everyone, I've had a bit of a setback as I lost power for a few days because my landlord decided it would be cool to not pay the power bills even though I give him cash on time every month. I'm convinced he has a mistress in Copenhagen, so maybe he needed the money in advance for that. Anyway, I have power back now and will continue working on stuff. I'll be working on Freeman's Mind this month and making more (but slow) progress on the movie project. I'm thinking it may be unrealistic that the movie will be finished this year, but I hope to get a lot of it done regardless. I tend to be perpetually behind on the things I'm working on, but I thought I might add some democracy to the process. While I will be continuing to work on videos, I wanted to see if people had a clear preference for other things I can be working on. I've put up a poll above, let me know what you would like to see happen next (besides more videos of course). [poll id=5]

I can't look at any episode without seeing stuff I think should have been omitted or done better, in some cases it's painful. It's probably just as well that I've made them though, because I hope to avoid any and all shortcomings that CP has when I do the movie project. Here's some ratings I would give them (when only competing against themselves): Best Directed: The Tunnel Best Action: On A Rail Best Ending: Halloween Safety Best General Audience Episode: Morning Patrol Best Dialogue Sequence: Shadow of A Doubt

I thought the video was funny and showed a nice contrast, I'm championing Michael Jackson's music. Good and bad music can make or break a movie. In general no music means having a more serious tone than having it.

Let's say I resent all taxes, and I feel like if I save the Earth I will still be taxed and I don't want to bother with separating everyone that I think will fleece me or not. Let's also assume I could use the tractor beam to transfer all of my possessions onto the station with me and come back to earth after a few years after the ecosystem recovered and humanity was dead. What I'm hearing is that it wouldn't be immoral to let the entire human race die (except for the select few thousand picked in your sci-fi solution, which I consider a valid option for this scenario) because I disagree with the policies of society that does take away SOME of my property, regardless of how little or much that actually is. I would consider this extremely immoral and argue no one's degree of wealth or extent of property should be placed higher than the lives of billions of people. You see property and life as inseparable, but I think this scenario shows that they're clearly not. In one scenario, people steal my tractor beam and deflect the asteroid. I am deprived of my tractor beam, I have to keep paying taxes, my rights are violated, but I get to keep everything else, and billions of people live. In another scenario, NONE of my rights are violated and I get to keep ALL of my property, and billions of people die. How can you say the two are inseparable when the outcome is so drastically different? Even if I fire the beam, I would have to keep paying taxes. If property and life are so connected, by your logic shouldn't the outcomes be the same? Anyway, I am curious about your answer, but I don't think it's worth debating much past this, I've concluded our views are too radically different. You see rights in absolutes and consider property rights one of the most important ones there is. This allows for no compromise on your end. The message I'm getting from you over and over is that the outcome of a situation is irrelevant if people's rights are being violated on any level, no matter how small. I generally don't see rights and morals as absolutes and think they're highly dependent on the situation. I don't see property rights as the most important value to uphold, but rather maximizing adequate living conditions and quality of life for the greatest number of people (within limits) in a way that's not completely unsustainable and still allows for greater material success (also within limits) for people who work and / or contribute to society than those who don't. I think the only common ground we have for OWS is neither of us like crony capitalism, which is one of the protest points. Anyway, if you think I'm missing something here, feel free to let me know.

Yes, demo smoother is partially broken, however your particular problem sounds like you're doing something incorrectly. Here's a quick test off the top of my head: 1. Type in the number of ticks in the fields (from 1 or 0 to whatever number the demo it ends at) 2. Hit reload / revert some combination of these a couple times until it loads 3. In Drive mode, float around somewhere you want the to be 4. Go to to a low number tick, like 5 in demo smoother (not in the demo itself, that won't matter) 5. Make a keyframe 6. float somewhere else you want to be in drive mode, say tick 500, it doesn't matter, just a few seconds away at least 7. Make another keyframe 8. Press Process / Splines origin, then Process / splines angles all (I think, this is from memory) 9. Turn drive mode off and play the sequence back in demosmoother. If it looks like it remotely works, press SAVE and try playing back the new demo. Your description sounds like you might be getting your tick numbers wrong or doing something wrong on #8, but it's hard to tell.

Thanks, I'll take a look at this sometime. It might be a taste of things to come in the United States.

Bill: I was hoping for thumbnails instead of the spoiler thing, but wasn't sure how to do that. I've changed it to spoilers, but if any moderators want to edit my post to make thumbnails, go ahead. Rarity: It's from Fortress Forever, which came out literally a week before TF2. It's modeled much more after Team Fortress Classic than TF2. I enjoyed TFC / FF a lot more than TF2; TF2 always felt to me like the pacing and action was way tamer. Anyway, the 1.0 release of FF was utterly fantastic and I recorded a bunch of demos from it. Later a bunch of the original devs quit and the some new ones stepped in that I think were either power tripping and/or incompetent. They changed the mechanics which left the game balance in a completely broken state for about 3 years (despite many protests from players). Today, it's been fixed again, but not before driving away 90-95% of their playerbase. I consider it a once great game that got turned into a mess because of awful leadership decisions from people who didn't even create the original game.

Here's some I have lying around

Gold which would also be from Earth. I think the only exportable resource you would have on the moon that wouldn't be something sent BACK to Earth would be moon rock.

Well I can't say this soundtrack is my kind of preference, but music does have a big impact on videos: y-0oabmQueQ

The difference is colonies in the past had a lot of native resources to work with. This would be more akin to sending colonies to the Sahara Desert or Antarctica. Unless you want to trade for sand or ice, and at a really high price, there's not any reason to go there on an economic incentive.

I think there might be some misunderstanding. What I meant was "really dangerous ones as possible." We can't spot more than a fraction of all the ones coming towards us, however it makes sense to look for as many as possible for that 0.00001% chance of finding a devastating one we could potentially deflect in time if it was spotted. Besides spotting "as many as possible" isn't impossible, it's possible. If you can only spot 3 out out of 10,000, that's as "many as possible." If you use more resources and can spot 50 out of 10,000, that's still "as many as possible." Are we really at maximum capacity for the number of dangerous asteroids we could spot even if we had more people / equipment devoted to it? Well I think a more apt comparison would be whether it would be better to work on making a flying machine or hunting for food for the village. Yes, one is more introverted, but it's a lot more practical. Plus, we basically know what's in our solar system. We could probably get additional minerals or gases if we developed our space program enough, but there's not a whole lot out there that's of much practical value to us. To really make space a new frontier for us, I see at least one of two things having to occur first: 1. Build some massive biosphere ship that could be sent into deep space that generations could live on. This would require so many resources and cooperation though that I don't see anything like this being possible within our current civilization. We were threatening to nuke ourselves to extinction just 40 years ago. 2. Make some magic physics breakthrough allowing us to travel as or faster than light. Assuming this is even possible (which it might not be), this is something that we could figure out on Earth first. Until then, I see space exploration as very interesting, but kind of like trying to cross the Atlantic using only man-powered flying machines. That's an excellent question and I see an answer to this happening WAY before our space travel gets much more developed. I think what will eventually happen is we'll either see a repeating cycle of growth and collapse or eventually move towards a system that doesn't depend on perpetual growth to be successful.

I'll clarify it. Forget the missile technology. Let's say it's tractor beam technology. If we had detected the asteroid earlier, we could have deflected it earlier, but we didn't. Now, it's so close I am currently the only person with the technology capable of deflecting this asteroid. I'm also a billionaire and already have my own personal space station I can live on for the rest of my life. As for why I have it, let's say I invented it. As for what I use it for, I've only done experiments with it, I don't use it for much else. I see this question to be the same as the calabar bean question, just on a larger scale. This isn't the lifeboat question, because I have options. I can CHOOSE to use the tractor beam technology and save all of humanity from the asteroid. However, I can also CHOOSE not to and live out my life merrily on the space station. So, am I being unethical if I choose not to deflect the asteroid and decide to live upon the space station instead? If someone tries to take my tractor beam by force to deflect it themselves, are they being unethical for doing so, as it is my property? You say you can only see rights in terms of absolutes and don't see any middle ground, so I'm trying to take this to an extreme. The way I see it, either you potentially see an individual's property rights as more important than the survival of the human race (yourself excluded), or you don't truly see things in absolutes, like you say. I could be mistaken, but every other argument you made in your post hinges on seeing things only in absolutes, no compromise. In other words, the end outcome doesn't matter to you if you feel a person's property rights have been infringed on ANY level. So with the space station question I'm trying to establish if that's really true.

Yeah this is really at the core as to why I think some piracy is necessary. I saw a comment about this on slashdot: " ">Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that. This is what the real problem is with current copyright law. Stuff that would go to the public domain is simply locked up, never to be seen again.There is no balance anymore between the right to culture and the right to earn a living. The right to culture has been obliterated. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain.The powers that be are now stealing from the public, far more so than they are losing to "piracy." " I consider laws to allow media that at least some people are interested in to willingly die to be immoral. I think these are most at risk by bills like this because the more obscure something is, the more likely there is to be only one remaining source of it. And as others have said, for mainstream piracy, this may as well be called the "Stop Napster" bill.

I can usually go for about 10 - 20 minutes of shouting, then I only need a few hours to recover, unless I haven't done it in several weeks. This is a mostly accurate portrayal of what my lungpower is like: O8hwI-1xzo0 I promise the wait on the next one will be shorter, plus I agree with the frustration. This is actually a motivating element of me wanting to do an actual movie. The wait will be even longer, but the payoff will be much larger I think. Like imagine if instead of Half-Life 2: Episode 3, Valve just went and released an all-out Half-Life 3 after another year, it's the same kind of mentality.

It's rare to see such a perfect reply like this.

Not under any circumstance, but I would say most, yes. I consider it a sliding scale of how much harm the loss of your sandwich causes you. If you have plenty of food and he is starving, then I think he has a moral right to your sandwich. If you yourself are also starving, I think he has no right to your sandwich, you're on equal ground. It can get more complicated than this, but if it's a matter of small inconvenience to you, versus life and death for him, he has more right to the sandwich. Some human beings are very irrational, some are very rational. Many change back and forth depending on their mood. Say an asteroid is coming to wipe out all life on earth. I'm the only one with missile technology who can properly deflect it in time. I refuse to launch it, because I think others don't deserve my technology and I can survive on my own private space base away from Earth, so I'm going to let everyone else die except for 3 of my friends. Am I being rational? If other people seize my missile by force, do they have any right to do so? Well say I'm working full-time in fast food earning 18k a year, living in frugally in a hellhole apartment and barely have any money leftover each month. Do you think I should pay the same 20% of my income as someone who makes 10 million per year from investing in a good company, and spends all day playing golf? You talk about fairness, but I don't see how a system like that is "fair" to the working poor. That 20% could mean the difference between heating my apartment during the winter or not. Well you keep saying "punishes", that's why. I don't necessarily see taxes as punishment. I see them as sort of a service charge for living in a state where I have police, roads, sidewalks, water, public education, etc. However, what I do consider to be punishment is any sort of system or policy that ends up making life more difficult for people who are STRUGGLING to have their basic needs met. If I'm earning 18k a year and raising taxes on me means I'll have to starve or else go homeless, I consider that to be causing suffering. I think that's COMPLETELY different than if I'm earning 10 million a year and raising taxes means I can't buy a decomissioned jet fighter. That's not causing suffering, that's causing inconvenience and limitations on my wealth. I think this is just your perception and I consider these kinds of questions irrelevant. If somebody is donating billions to help a lot of people, that's fucking great! Who cares if he's acting entitled, the end result helps a lot of people! Alternately, the only "praise" I know of for people struggling are news media fluff pieces, which don't mean anything. I consider these kinds of arguments to be tangents. I mainly just care about end results, not perception or how people act in the process. I didn't quite follow your whole argument here, but I can answer this. A loss in wealth is more moral than a gain if it leads to people being able to survive or meet basic needs, regardless of how fair it is. There's going to be unfairness in any system. It's not fair that some people are born into trust funds and other are born as crack babies. It's not fair that some people receive excellent education and others are practically in a public school penal system. Maintaining those advantages and disadvantages via rights isn't FAIR either. I don't know of any system that's completely FAIR. However, a society with enough resources can make sure EVERYONE has their basic needs met and have a much better shot of living a fulfilling life, but only if it wants to. It can just as easily allow half its population to die prematurely from poor living conditions and have a lower lifespan, while allowing the absolute richest to be 10% richer. Is the latter scenario really the greater good?

No, that's not really what I said. It depends on the scale. On a macro-level, I'm literally incapabale of fixing this problem on my own. My sandwich won't help millions of starving people. On a micro-scale (me finding some guy starving in the woods), I think it IS immoral to eat when he clearly need the food more than I do AND I know I won't starve either. However, I do NOT think doing nothing about the problem is necessary, like you say. Again, if there was some magic fund to feed EVERYONE who needed the help and took away a certain percentage of my income (along with everyone else's who could afford it), I would absolutely be in favor of that. Minor redistribution of wealth to help people from starving to death I consider a good thing. See this is actually one of the big arguments made by the OWS crowd. Almost the top earners don't get the majority of their income through wages, but rather through dividends earnings. This is taxed a lot lower (15%) than the majority of tax brackets. So why should someone who earns 30k a year be paying more percentage-wise in taxes than someone earning 30 million?Also would you agree that if you have 30k a year, giving up say, 20% of your income affects you life more drastically than if you have 30 million or 300k? Since when is being successful financially an indicator of virtue? It's no indicator of how kind, helpful, productive, or beneficial to society they are. Also if you're only earning 15k year and trying to survive, do these people really need additional punishment? So is "dry ice." The two words individually combined don't make sense, but as a whole, they mean a separate concept. To clarify, here's a definiton off wikipedia: "Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate" In layman's terms, this means that if you're not earning wages, you're screwed. I don't see that as a desirable system. If you're in a situation where you can't work, I think ideally you shouldn't have to worry about whether you'll have enough money for food, medical care, not being homeless, etc. I mean tell me this, what's the problem in having a system where if you're not working, you're still guaranteed a certain baseline existence by the society you live in. You can have a dwelling that's yours, food, water, access to healthcare, etc. Nothing luxurious, just adequate. If you DO work, you can earn income to spend on whatever you want, like luxury items and services, a TV, a car, a better home, the ability to save money to start your own business, etc. Yes, some of your income would be taken away to fund the basic services for everyone, but by the same token, you're also guaranteeing yourself (along with everyone else) a safety net in case you ever do find yourself in unfortunate circumstances. Why is this system worse than one where a person who can't earn enough wages will end up homeless?

I plan on playing this once I upgrade, though I'll probably use mods. I like the idea of a survival setting where it's more in your interest to avoid hordes of zombies rather than try and mow down every one you can find.

For everyone worried about spoilers, don't be. If people don't want spoilers, they can watch the episode before reading comments about it, I see it more as a common sense issue.

Would YOU pick up something that just killed two people who were holding it? If yes, you might want to watch this clip: dCeD2gF9jUo