Ross Scott

No, I don't want to do that. I could maybe do some personalized stuff for donators, but not deny access to extra things. Well I do plan to set up t-shirt sales later, though that's on my ever-growing "to do" list. That sounds like a good idea. I might do that, although keeping track of the individual contributions online could be problematic time-wise unless I could automate it somehow. Donator tags is a good idea, although I may again need some automation system to show who has donated what. Also while I'm sure there's a correlation, just because a person donates more money doesn't make them the most dedicated necessarily. Somebody could never donate anything, but if he's watching the videos 10 years from now, that's great too. I hope so, that's my primary goal with this. I want to do extra things for donators, but ultimately I'd rather just make more videos. It may come down to a question of time management. I do plan to try to thank everyone via email however, but I'm still behind on the regular emails as well. That's an important point, I don't want to alienate people who aren't donating. Help with the subtitles is definitely appreciated. Suggestions for the site layout and graphic design is also appreciated. Other roles I usually make an announcement on when I need them however. Also if anyone is a soundtrack junkie, definitely check out my music organization thread. I plan to have other things people can help out on in the future as well. Even if somebody doesn't contribute anything money or time-wise, that's fine, I'm happy people are watching the videos. That's easy to remedy, but I've never heard that before. I've seen lots of software developers release everything for free, but accept donations as well. Could you link to where this is speficially stated legally or via Paypal policy or something?

Yeah this is one of my all-time favorites. I actually have the soundtrack CD that was included with a game guide (I bought the guide exclusively for the CD at the time), however the mixing quality in my opinion isn't quite as strong overall as a high quality conversion from the MOD files used for the game.

Qwk: I've tried this software in the past before. It was a step in the right direction, though not a cure-all method. I think I could organize a lot of my own music, but a less rigid system than folders is more preferable, I agree. My end goal is still just to select a general mood or style and not have to put any thought into it after that.

This is why I don't run things as a democracy.

Well the site has now been set up to accept donations. The link is at the top of the page where you can donate money if you feel so inclined and/or read my thoughts regarding donations in general. I'd like to stress that I added this at the repeated requests of some of the viewers. I'll continue making videos as long as I'm able to and I'll never hold them "hostage" in exchange for more money. If you never donate anything, that's fine; you'll keep getting videos. If NOBODY donates anything, that's fine; I'll keep making videos. I'm happy to have as many people interested in watching the videos as I do. One thing I would like viewer feedback from is I'd like to do something extra for people who donate if possible, but I'm not sure what sort of things people would like. If you have ideas of little things donators might appreciate, go ahead and post them in the forums.

I was thinking of this scene at the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMU6xqHdvGU&NR=1

Download 672x384 WMV (95MB) Here's the next Freeman's Mind episode after a delay of me moving, doing April Fool's Day videos, trying to get the website/forums fixed, and getting a good recording setup. You can expect them to come out at a faster pace now, especially since the series has been neglected for a while. I can't record at all hours of the day at my new location however, but I should have regular blocks of time when I can get recording done for it. I think this episode came out pretty well and contains a line I thought of before I started doing the first episode. I'll keep updating the progress on future episodes so you can see how far along things are. EDIT: For some reason the video was darkened by Machinima.com on Youtube. I don't know why this is, but the downloadable copy should have the correct lighting values, it's as it appears in the game.

Looks like a pretty solid paper, I'll go ahead and sticky it. I can't really find fault with anything in here. I have heard a lot of different stories on natural gas however since there have been some HUGE discoveries since about 2009, so it's hard to say how that will play out. If you don't get an A then something is wrong with your professor.

I have a new audio interview with "Caboos15" available on his Youtube channel. He originally contacted me months ago, but I delayed him because I wanted to finish The Tunnel first before doing any PR stuff. He's conducted many interviews with other machinima makers and makes some machinima himself. He's also the sneakiest interviewer I've talked to. Once or twice he would tell me he was going to ask a question, I would get confused, thinking he was asking the question, I would answer the question, then he explained afterwards he hadn't asked the question yet. It felt like kind of a Zen exercise. Anyway, here's the interview: It's not my best interview since I think I stammered a bit, but that's also a good example of why I do multiple takes when recording lines for videos. More news and videos coming soon.

I'm fine with it if the mods are willing to sort out all the old topics once the new section is created.

Awesome. There will be a delay before I post them as the official ones, but since I haven't had many offers for Hungarian, there's a good chance these will become the official ones.

This is great. I'll let it have a little more time in the forums before I try and post them as the official ones for Russian.

Wow, that's great. I would prefer to get the subtitles up on the official Youtube videos however. While I'll wait a little longer, if it seems that no one else will be reviewing your subtitles, I'll go ahead and make yours the official ones. I would rather have translations that may not be 100% accurate, than none at all.

I remember seeing that in SimCity 2000. I didn't realize it was anywhere near doable. I looked at the story and did a quick search on google. Your article is dated Feb 13, 2008 and mentions soon the USGS will release a report regarding the amount of oil. Well I think this is that report: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911 They're saying it's closer to 3.5 - 4.3 billion and it's questionable how much of that is really recoverable. Even at 4.3 billion barrels, that's a little under 7 months' worth of oil based on the USA's current rate of consumption. So that's good news, but not a fundamental game-changer. As for wave and methane power, I'm less concerned about actual electricity production, since the majority of oil isn't used for that anyway. Not really. It certainly has for the United States, but globally, it's only gone up and up until about 2005. Global DISCOVERY tapered off in the 60s however. Politics and economics off course have affected supply and prices through history of course, but that's more of an artificial limitation. It's POSSIBLE we could make some miracle breakthrough here, but right now there isn't enough farmland on the entire earth to produce enough ethanol to replace our current consumption of oil. Not across the board, though for many products there are alternatives. This is an area where the market adjusting to the demand argument has some merit. Oil has a lot of unique properties to it, however most of oil is used for fuel anyway. If that stopped, we would have enough oil for plastics and many other industrial applications for a ridicluously long time.

trankzen: I advise against using VLC for subtitles, it doesn't seem to handle them properly, especially with overlapping lines. Also, cwook's transcription is correct for that line.

I emailed a couple offers in Polish on the email list, we'll see what happens.

This is great. It's possible yours might be even better than some of the ones that overlap, though I believe all the wording is correct for the current "official" ones. I'll probably wait for someone to look over these and post any possible corrections. In general my policy on subtitles will be to let them sit here for other people to look at for a while and see if any revisions get made. After a certain length of time I'll go over them myself and put them on the site and Youtube.

I think it will take a little while for things to really get moving, but I really think this will grow in time. The subtitles section of the website will receive an overhaul at some point as well to better accommodate the larger volume of subtitles. I almost view the subtitles like card collecting, I want to get as many as possible. In addition to this post and new section, I sent out emails to everyone I could dig up from old emails from people who have offered to create or have created subtitles for the show at some point. It came out to 115 different people, so hopefully that will help kick-start more subtitle development.

Well the website and forum is now running on the new host, so let's hope nothing melts down again. In the meantime, I THINK the forum is stable enough now to have a post about the new subtitle section. I meant to have this done a long time ago, but it's only just now that some of the major problems with the forum and hosting have been ironed out (I hope). Subtitles are probably the most major area I've completely failed to manage properly because I've gotten bogged down with organizing and reviewing everything. It's not that I don't care about them, quite the opposite. I want to get as many subtitles up as possible and I hope to someday have Accursed Farms videos be the most-translated machinima videos out there. However, I also want to have some standards for them as well. Having a forum section devoted to subtitles solves a LOT of problems involved with me managing subtitles in the past: 1. You won't have to wait on me to approve subtitles in order to see them. This is a good thing, since if I get busy with work or whatever, I often don't have time to manage subtitles. While the first subtitles that go up in the forums may not be the most accurate, if some people can't hear or understand English very well, then subtitles that are only 80% accurate are far better than none at all. While it's still going to be a slow process for me approving "official" subtitles hosted on the site, from now on, you can always go to the forums and see the most recent user-submitted subtitles as they're created. 2. This will lead to more accurate and polished subtitles overall. Moving subtitle development to the forums means they'll effectively be "crowdsourced." Instead of just myself and maybe one or two other people looking at them, everyone can view the subtitles and suggest revisions to them. In short, everyone can now be an editor, for better or worse. 3. I don't have to decide who works on what now. A problem I used to face a lot trying to manage the subtitles is I would receive multiple offers from people offering to transcribe or translate the episodes and I would have no clue as to who the best person to pick was. Now, you guys get to decide. If someone rushes out subtitles for an episode that are thoroughly flawed, that won't last long against someone who takes a little longer and does a much better job. I plan to let all future subtitles "cook" in the forums for a little while before approving any more official ones, so hopefully any errors can be ironed out. This goes double for foreign languages since I can't judge how accurate a translation might be, but other people who speak the language can. 4. This frees up some more time for me. I do think it's necessary for me to personally review all the English subtitles for accuracy, because my annunciation isn't always the best. Sometimes people think I say "and" instead of "then" or "if" instead of "is," etc. I'll be the ultimate authority on the correct words being spoken in the videos. Beyond that, I think it will work better if viewers proofread everything else. Proper punctuation, formatting, spelling, timing, etc. are all things that can be better handled by viewers. Even the "official" subtitles that are currently up on the site could probably use some help. So if you spot problems with ANY subtitles, now you can submit your corrections in the forums and eventually they'll get reviewed and hopefully approved. I think everyone would prefer I spent more time making new videos than editing subtitles. Right now the subtitles section of the forums have been launched with sub-forums for every language that I remember receiving offers for. This will make things easier organization-wise. New languages can be added as people volunteer to translate them. If your language isn't listed, just post your subtitles in "Other Languages" for now and if there are enough posts it will get its own section later on. You are welcome to chat in your native language in the different forum sections as that will likely make communication easier. * * * Be sure to check out the guidelines for submitting subtitles listed in the forums as this will expedite your submissions getting approved. * * * Anyway, I encourage people who are interested to submit or edit subtitles in the forums. The process will be a bit chaotic, but I think eventually it will all get sorted out. There are some 40-50 videos made and many new ones coming this year. I'd like as many people to be able to enjoy them as possible and subtitles will go a long way towards making that happen.

These were submitted to me by John Evans and cleaned up some by Luis Loaiza. I haven't really reviewed these yet since I noticed a problem right away. There's no distinction between Freeman speaking and the intercom speaking. This is a real problem for people who are hearing impaired, since it would make the video very confusing to follow then. My original idea was to have the intercom be in italics and Freeman be regular text, but I'm not sure that will work if the subtitles get submitted on Youtube. If someone wants to test subtitle italics on Youtube as an experiment, please post the results here. Otherwise, another method should be used to distinguish the speakers, like brackets or a colon: [intercom] Good morning, and welcome to the or Intercom: Good morning, and welcome to the After these get cleaned up some more, I'll review it to see if it has all the correct words.

This was submitted to me by Seán Mayle. I've corrected (I think) all the correct word usage, but it may still have a few punctuation errors and could maybe have the timing and formatting refined. Feel free to look over and post any modifications here.

These subtitles were submitted to be by "Hira Rox" and are a good example of subtitles that are about 95% accurate, but could use some cleanup. I only skimmed through these a bit. Some of the words aren't completely accurate, there are some minor formatting annoyances (no doublespaces, lack of spaces after ellipses, unnecessary italics of whole lines, etc.) and basically just needs someone to edit it. The majority of the work has already been done for anyone wanting to take a look at this and clean it up. For everyone just wanting subtitles for this episode, these are perfectly good "alpha" subtitles.