Ross Scott

Download 848x480 MKV (93MB) At long last, here's the next episode of Freeman's Mind. This episode got delayed for dozens of reasons, none of them especially interesting. It mostly has to do with me attempting too many things at once. I'll try and get more FM episodes out as soon as I can. People who are very familiar with Half-Life may notice this episode doesn't play out how the game normally does. Normally, there's a sequence you have to initiate before the game will progress, but here, it's already happening by the time Freeman shows up to it. You can blame this on Half-Life: Source. All I did was load a saved game I had, and the events played out as you see them, every time I tried. I wasn't able to find a workaround for this, but I don't think it really matters in this case anyway.

I haven't watched this video, but I'm familiar with this experiment. Well you can chalk me up as partially evil then; I'm pretty sure I'd zap the guys and laugh at hearing the yelps (at lower voltages anyway). However I'd stop right up to the point where the test subjects were saying to stop the shocks or else where I thought the voltage was too dangerous to their health. I really can't see any authority figure making me go farther than that though, short of putting a gun to my head. EDIT: I watched some snippets of the video, I think my evil cutoff point is around 120 volts.

Well, I think as a nation we have more immediate problems facing us than space travel. We're becoming barely competent enough to manage our own country; last year we not only threatened to shut down the government, but also came way too close to defaulting on the national debt, which would have rapidly accelerated a global economic depression. We have more than enough resources to fund space travel for a long time, it's just a matter of distribution and what our government sees as a priority for allocating funds. The War in Iraq alone could have funded quite a bit of additional efforts in the space program. Space travel is the sort of thing that is ultimately necessary for the survival of humanity and a great thing to strive for, but it's also the sort of thing we could put off for a million years and still have plenty of time to do something. I personally would like to see a LOT more resources devoted to spotting as many incoming asteroids as possible. I see something like that as the best insurance policy for humanity we can have.

This video explains almost every single concern I have over the state of society and civilization and its sustainability. To top it off, the whole thing is animated. To the best of my knowledge, all the information in here is completely accurate (though I was confused by one statement on how much of the sun we use). It starts off talking about oil, but later goes into other energy and resources and general, plus food production and long term economic viability. I feel like it covers almost every topic that threatens modern civilization. I really recommend watching it. It is 35 minutes though, I watched it over the span of a couple days while I was eating: VOMWzjrRiBg

That's really surprising, I've never heard of a company offering so many of their products for free like that without an insane catch. I guess I'll have to grab Daz Studio and look at it.

Would be nice if they added guides for antialiasing for 3D games. I've had to look up a lot of obscure stuff getting it working on making games.

Wanted to make some clarifications. Calling nuclear power plants clean is kind of a dichotomy. In most practices, it's quite clean, but it has the potential to be the dirtiest power imaginable. By far the biggest potential safety threat to modern nuclear reactors is waste disposal. The problem with radioactive waste from reactors is that it's extremely dangerous exposed and the half-life is so long in practical terms it never goes away. So sure, you can have complete confidence in the waste's future 10 years from now, but 50? 100? 10,000? I guess it won't matter since we'll all be dead, but there's at least some potential risk, especially in regions that may be less stable. Nuclear energy isn't an end-all solution, but I'll take it over no energy production easily.

This may be my favorite game of the last 5 years or so. Here's an easy distinction between puzzle games and adventure games. Puzzle games have JUST puzzles. As soon as you finish one, you move to the next. They often have almost no story, but not always . Adventure games let you move around, look at things, interact in different ways, and almost always have a storyline to it. It all depends on your preference, for me, Myst is the Halo of adventure games. It's alright, but I never got why some people were so fanatical about it. It had good atmosphere, but was relatively light on story compared to most adventure games out there. For that time period I enjoyed The Journeyman Project a lot more.

Actually I forgot, I have played through Chrono Trigger because I know someone who's practically based his identity around the game. It's pretty good, though in general I'm not a big fan of jRPGs.

I generally can't stand RPGs with turn-based combat. It slows things down too much for me and feels more like a chore. I either like all-out combat or else none at all (like graphic adventure games). The only turn-based ones I've gotten through have been Fallout 1 because the game was so good in every other aspect it made up for it. My favorites: Gothic Diablo Dungeon Siege Played, but haven't finished: Final Fantasy 6 (I completely gave up when the big dramatic scene looked like fisher price dolls bumping against a wall, falling down, then repeating) Revenant (definitely plan to finish) Planescape: Torment (plan to finish) Hard To Be A God (will probably finish, interesting story) Drakensang: The Dark Eye (combat was turn-based-ish, fantastic visuals, very generic writing) Plan to play once I upgrade: Risen Gothic 4 Divinity 2 Two Worlds 2 Nehrim Mod

Well okay, but if you accept that list, then you can't ignore the others. I'm not sure he would accept all of these: - - - Article 24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Article 26. (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. Article 29. (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. - - - 25 in particular is saying a right to food, clothing, housing, medical care. Those all require the labor and resources of others if you can't provide for them yourself. I don't think he would agree that people have a RIGHT to those for that exact reason. Unless I've misunderstood him, he would say that it's invalid because making it a right would violate the rights of the people providing those things.

Sound editing is usually handled by someone else these days, that means someone else is working on the episode. I've been fixing some issues the new flyby had. As for the dialogue, it can take a while. I basically write it, record it multiple times, then edit it down all in one take. I know it seems unfathomable, but if I'm getting 2 or more minutes recorded and edited for an episode in a day, that's not bad for me. For Episode 41 or 42 I'm thinking I'll try and completely document how much time goes into each step to see how long it actually takes.

It's mainly me just saying the lines not as well or cutting off abruptly. FM is pretty sterile and robotic as far as the recording, there's almost nothing that would be that entertaining for outtakes. Civil Protection has some from recording that I've kept for Craig, Fred, and myself. I plan on releasing those once there are some more updates to the website.

Yes, AFTER. I think if the Industrial Revolution continued without labor laws and rights for workers, it might not have changed much. I think there's some misunderstanding. I agree with you. I DON'T think its the descendants fault for the poor's problems nor is it their fault. What I'm saying is, it erodes the concept of a person's right to property for me when it's the direct result of property acquired through immoral means. Yes, the descendant of a slave is still free to earn money, but if they were illiterate for generations, then discriminated against through a good portion of the 20th century, that puts them at a big disadvantage in becoming prosperous compared to someone from a wealthy or middle-class background. I'm not saying affirmative action is the answer, what I'm saying is the "every man for himself" mentality doesn't resolve that problem. It's like having a race where one runner gets to run in professional sports shoes and has a personal coach + training, and the other person gets to run barefoot with one foot tied behind his back. No, he doesn't need all the advantages the other person has, but it would be a better race if you at least untie his foot and get him a pair of shoes. See, I put the right to life ABOVE property rights, like in the belladonna berry example. You seem to think they're the same, though I think that logic is flawed. Afterall, you can live without property, but you can't have property without your life. As for property rights being a human right, I doublechecked in the dictionary as to the definition: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human%20rights They're saying rights that fundamentally belong to ALL persons. To me (and the dictionary), that's not property rights. Take a prisoner who has been locked up. He has no right to property, he could be very dangerous with whatever you give him and he's being punished. However, he has a right not to be tortured, has a right to have food and water, and other basic needs met. Not providing him THOSE rights most of humanity would consider to be inhumane, even for prisoners. You're saying property rights are a basic human right. What about highly dangerous criminals or mental patients? Should they be allowed to possess property when the only thing they'll do with it is hurt themselves or others? Because a HUMAN right means ALL people are entitled to it. Actually I'm not, I'm saying it's society's responsibility, so to some degree it's then everyone's (within their means). The rich have a lot more means than everyone else so they get more attention. See this isn't how I'm interpreting it at all, which I think is part of what leads to our disagreement. What I see the OWS movement being about is that SOMETHING is wrong with our system. The rich getting richer while everyone else gets poorer is a SYMPTOM of this. Wealth level isn't important in itself, but not having a system that provides basic needs for its citizens and can allow for wage slavery IS. To make it muddier, SOME of the rich ARE responsible for this, but certainly not all, or even the majority. Like if you're paying lobbyists to railroad a special interest clause in your bill that ensures your company is getting preferential government treatment, then yes, you're a big part of the problem. However, the fact that this is happening on such a large scale now means maybe there are bigger problems with our whole system. I personally think our government's now largely corrupt and not really doing its job of representing the people's interest. Government is supposed to be the power to stand against the elite, because it's a representative democracy. If it's just another tool OF the elite, then that leaves a lot of people kind of screwed and not knowing what to do about it. The OWS movement I think is just sort of an existential manifestation of that, because people don't know what to do. Anyway, that's my interpretation of the LEGITIMATE claims of OWS. Obviously if some guy is protesting because he majored in Classical Literature then is shocked when he can only get a job working at a coffee shop, that doesn't mean too much.

My favorite FPSs: System Shock 2 Deus Ex Strife Painkiller series (haven't played redemption) Serious Sam series (haven't played 3 yet) Unreal Tournament 2004 SiN series Half-Life (though doing the videos may have taken some of the fun out of it) I also think Unreal had fantastic music and atmosphere, but I found the gameplay pretty so-so FPSs I plan on playing: System Shock with mouse aiming mod Realms of The Haunting CyberMage: Darklight Awakening After I upgrade my videocard: Bulletstorm Crysis Singularity Hard Reset The Ball

I don't think this is a good measure of prosperity. India is a good modern day example of a nation that has extreme poverty, but an incredible population. Infant mortality rates are generally a much better indicator of how prosperous a society is. Also I'm not saying capitalism is 100% evil and detrimental, I'm saying I think unchecked capitalism fails to address some serious societal problems and can create some serious problems that wouldn't exist otherwise. Okay, I have two questions related to this. You're saying what right do people have to make claims on the rich. Part of my question, is what right do people have to be rich in the first place? Say a person is born into a rich family that has been rich for generations. Also say the family originally got rich from slave labor back in the 1700s and 1800s and since then members of the family have used their advantages to invest in companies to remain rich. I think we would both agree that using slaves isn't considered right, but the wealth exists today as a result of their work. So this family may work hard at business (or it may not and simply reap from investing), but it also had advantages from slavery that the vast majority of people have not. Why does this family have a "right" to retain their wealth, when descendents of slaves were at a disadvantage for generations and could be working just as hard or not harder than the wealthy families who acquired their wealth by clearly unjust means? By that reasoning what "right" do most Americans have to be here, when most of our conquest is the result of bloodshed or betrayal against Native Americans, Mexicans, and other European colonies? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should try to undo history and correct all wrongs, it's endlessly complex and a fool's errand; but at the same time, I feel like by placing so much emphasis on the individual's property rights, a sometimes very unjust history has to be taken into account. From a philosophical perspective, it can be seen as affirming the actions of ancestors, no matter how wrong they might be. Holding the value of property rights above all else I feel is a way of maintaining a status quo for those that come from wealthy backgrounds and intentionally leaving things more difficult for those who are not as fortunate REGARDLESS of how hard they works or what their ability is. In fact I saw a related demotivator to this recently: So anyway, sorry it's so long-winded, but that's essentially my first question. Why should we promote a system that determines your fortune in life often as much or even moreso by your birth than by your work ethic or abilities? It's of course not 100% dictated that way, like it was during feudal times, but it's still quite a real factor. Here's my second question (again, sorry about the length). Aside from the bailouts, you think the OWS people are being unfair towards the rich in who they're blaming. I am in agreement that I think their grievances should be more directed towards government. Anyway, let's take a hypothetical situation. Pretend government in the USA became extremely small and reduced taxes further, offered far less services, definitely didn't have bailouts and more or less let the free market do what it wanted. Just as hypothetical, let's say that for whatever reason, it doesn't even matter, the class divide got far worse. The upper 1% now got substantially richer, the middle class almost didn't exist, and the working class got much poorer, more comparable to what 3rd world countries have. Finally, let's say private charities existed much in the same capacity they did now. Helping many, but only had the resources to deal with a fraction of the people who were suffering. Everyone who was interested in helping was doing so to the maximum capacity they were willing or able to help with. In this hypothetical scenario, what would you propose as being the solution to improving the quality of life for the 90% or more in the working class, living like peasants? Would this even be a concern from your perspective in this scenario?

No, unfortunately that ended up not happening due to a lot of reasons. I'm currently waiting on some audio tracks before the episode can be finished.

I'll be happy to say this for the record: "If you hate me, I don't want you as my fan." Your whole post reads like you're either trolling or else you're disrespectful and ignorant. Yes, my time estimations often suck, but I've also produced six FM episodes in a month before. If you're not trolling, you should understand that your attitude makes me not care if you're upset or not. I'm not in the habit of stressing out over the opinions of people who are behaving like spoiled children (regardless whatever your actual age is). The fact that you interpreted your original post as respectful convinces me there's not going to be any rational dialogue with you. This administration does not negotiate with terrorists. For everyone who is curious about what's happening though, I really did think I was going to be able to get 2+ episodes done, but a lot of stuff came up. A lot of what has sucked up my time has been personal life drama crap that I'm actively trying to minimize. On top of that, my lead sound editor completely disappeared on me for over a week, I'm having engine bugs with recording the new flyby intro for the episode, and I've received pressure from the mod team for Opposing Force 2 to do voice acting for them. While I've even encouraged them to try and find someone else, they've been insistent and I do owe them some for them putting me in touch with people for assistance on the last CP episode. Because almost all my work now relies to some degree on other people helping, I am considering never giving time estimates again, no matter how confident I am that something will be done on time. I'm actually pretty comfortable when people think I'm dead and not doing anything. I'm also considering fully documenting exactly how much time one episode of Freeman's Mind actually takes, maybe for 41 or 42, it would be interesting, since I'm not quite certain myself.

You're right in that the setting would be repetitive, though I don't think the gameplay would be, I can think of hundreds of different things you could do to cause problems in an office in a game. It would likely take a ridiculous amount of programming. There would have to be a lot of cutscenes, things like board meetings, private conversations between managers, etc. to keep the story aspect interesting. There wouldn't be specific objectives for you to do. If you did nothing, work would go on as usual, no change. Changes would only occur based on things you've done. It would almost be the player's responsibility to make it non-repetitive. Getting half your department fired, thus it gets relocated due to a smaller staff size, sabotaging the bathroom so employees have to travel to different floors to use it, starting a trash fire that spreads, so part of the floor ends up getting sealed off, there would be lots of ways to keep it going.

Well it's rumoured that the Xbox 720 will only be getting a Radeon HD6670. Lol. Someone might want to make a separate thread on that, I saw one source saying it would be a 7000 series chip. Oh I think you'll like #2. As for the hardware deathmatch idea, that's literally small enough one person or a small team could do on their own. I think the key to making it fun would be to not hold back on the variety of weapons and have endless options. If you started crafting capabilities with duct tape, you could have endless possibilities. Another idea I forgot was basically expanding upon the map "de_jeepathon2k" for Counter-Strike, it some of the most fun I've ever had in the game: 8. Have Counter-strike style combat, but with drive-bys. Both sides start off next to a vehicle and everyone hops in. One person drives and everyone else rides along cruising for the enemy to open fire on them. People could get out of the vehicle at any time, but then obviously move much slower on foot. It would be best set in a suburban setting, having random civilians running away once the gunfire starts would be a nice touch too. Maybe make the teams be rival gangs, or maybe a variant of gangs v. the police, something like that. It sounds simple, but I found it insanely fun when playing with the most basic of graphics back in the day. It was hilarious seeing people ride on the hood or back of the car just to get a ride, seeing dysfunctional people fight over who was driver, watching people fall off the car from lag or bumps, and seeing people panic when you shot their driver, so the car would coast to a stop with the entire team in it.

I already played it. My opinion was that I thought the first half was fantastic and the second half was just kind of dumb and got worse from there. I think the turning point for me was when the game switched from having a very down-to-earth setting and situations combined with increasingly eroding reality to doing supernatural Matrix-style kung fu moves versus the entire police force. No, but I remember seeing this article a few months ago and assumed Fortnite was part of the line-up: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/315610/epic-confirms-work-on-5-new-games-and-unreal-engine-4/ Epic has a history of essentially saying "screw PCs" with the release of the last generation of consoles, and now they're saying "PCs are where it's at" since the hardware limitations are becoming more apparent on consoles. My guess is they'll go back to "screw PCs" again as soon as the next console generation comes out, but hopefully they'll make some good games in the meantime. Regardless, I'm quite encouraged by the Fornite trailer.

1. Some sort of FPS / RTS / MMO hybrid where there's constant fighting, but a large emphasis on building bases. You could go out and around the world to collect resources, then use them to fortify bases and outposts and build all kinds of structures to better defend them. Balance would be achieved because the more outposts you control, the more spread out your troops would be. You COULD actually destroy the enemy base in theory, in which case, they would all turn to guerilla warfare and have advantages like being able to disguise themselves as friendly enemy troops until they could bring down the enemy base from within. If you wanted to widen the scale of the game, you could control small AI squads along with your character. Experienced players could maybe have 6 AI people, very experienced strategists could maybe have have as many as 50 AI people to command along with them. 2. (can't discuss since I'm going to turn the concept into a movie) 3. Maybe a game where you work as an office employee at a soulless company and your goal is to cause as much chaos and problems as possible without getting caught or fired. Might work as a strategy game or else stealth action one. Goals would involve getting co-workers or managers blamed for things, outright sabotage masked as accidental, just causing a lot of problems covertly. Timing your actions with coincidences caused by other employees would get you bonus points. You win the game when your company goes out of business. 4. Basic deathmatch game that takes place in a giant hardware store. The only weapons you have are things you can pick up off shelves. PVC pipe, screwdrivers, gloves + circular saw blades, etc. 5. Something similar to what The Crossing was going to be, where one person plays as the "hero" character, and everyone else plays as your generic bad guy trying to bring him down (but with much worse stats). Once you die, you respawn as another bad guy farther back. 6. Story driven suspense game where reality begins breaking down slowly day by day for the main ordinary character, contemporary setting. 7. General zombie "hold-out" game where zombies are relentlessly attacking a cabin or house or something and you have to survive as long as possible (I think I'll get my fix of this between Project Zomboid and Fortnite though).

Well to buck the trend on that, while I think Ron Paul seems to be a very honest and sincere politician, I can't really agree with some of his policies. I think he would likely reduce a lot of corruption in government, but I also think he would erode what meager a safety net we already have. Usually areas where the conservative side are kind of weak on are energy policies, education, environmental protection, and having a social safety net for people (including stuff like health care). Best I can tell, Ron Paul's answer to most of these issues is just to let the states handle it. That feels kind of like a cop-out and bad news for states that have legitimate needs, but a lot less resources to work with. Don't interpret this to mean that I think our federal government is great and wonderful and has no problems, but there are some problems that are much bigger than any one state can handle and need to be addressed at the federal level. I also think our whole system is maybe slowly collapsing like the Roman Empire, but that's a separate issue.

I think right now we're way into Malthus territory, it just hasn't caught up with us yet. There's a strong correlation between the first oil well drilling and when global population began to start increasing exponentially. I've heard estimates that without oil, globally we can only support about 1 billion people. I think with modern technology and agricultural knowledge we could get more out of that, maybe 2-3 billion. Also oil won't disappear overnight, but once global production starts declining, I think it's going to become more and more difficult to feed even the 7 billion we already have. Modern farming depends heavily on oil both for cultivating and distribution. The higher the cost of that gets, the less farmers can produce and the more local their distribution will be. This is highly speculative, but if predictions about oil production declining in 2015 (hopefully not as early as 2013), then I think you could start seeing an actual reversal in population growth by maybe 2025.