Ross Scott

Sure, in fact, I was going to add an option like that to the donate page, but haven't gotten to it yet. I'll try and dig up the bitcoin wallet info I have. It all helps, I live at a level where I not only think in dollars, but also in zlotys, which are about a third of the cost. Food costs around 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of the USA. I can get a leg of chicken with the thigh from a deli for about $1.33 here. It's complicated! I've had a chance to test it out now. Mine absolutely looks better for the same amount of frames, but Srcdemo2 can scale to a high degree and move the load off the hard drive and onto the CPU. What's going on here is srcdemo2 does the "dumb" frame blending, which I showed in the ghosting video, but can do it any framerate. In theory, this means you need an infinite framerate in order to have perfect motion blur. My method works off the data, then takes a guess at the motion vectors for the final step, taking a bit of a leap of faith. The less frames it has, the more soupy it looks, but you don't get that double-image you see in the srcdemo2 shots. In practical terms, src2demo might still be worth it, but it will take a VERY high framerate to compete with my method (I think mine at 180 looks better than theirs at 900fps). I plan to push it higher before I make any final decisions. At least it supports .PNG compression, that helps me no matter what. Ha, well you could always mail it, though that depends on trust with the Postal service. I could also take a check and have my parents deposit it in the USA actually. I thought I would make the $500 mark within 24 hours and was expecting it to dwindle past that, but kept my fingers crossed anyway. It's far exceeded that, this is going to save me. I may NOT have a free slot actually, I already have a sound card and another RAID card and my videocard takes two slots. I wish I could trade in my PCI slots for more PCI express. As for the RAID 0 route, I really am reconsidering it, but I'd like to see more "real world" testing. Where hard drives completely fail me is when they get hung up something and things stutter. Even making this video, parts of it stuttered so horribly in editing, some shots I really couldn't see until after rendering. It's not just write time, but also random access as well. Anyway, if you know of any comprehensive testing with RAID 0, let me know. I'm still kind of in shock over it, I hate putting burden on fans like this, but it is saving me. It's in limbo, I have had zero luck contacting Valve. I may post on that later.

Wow, today has been sensory overload for me. I'm the last person to criticize people for NOT donating. In fact my favorite fans are ones that keep checking back after a while and will be looking forward to videos I'm making years from now, whether they pay a cent or not. I only care about money to the degree of keeping myself afloat, beyond that I just want to make more videos. Guys, I'm happy for anything, it all counts to me. That's actually MORE true of hard drives as I understand it, but I will be flushing the files pretty regularly after recording. Also I read some brands are better about keeping speeds up near max capacity than others. I plan to treat the SSD like it could fail at any time and have backup plans for anything that's CRUCIAL to keep (like demo files, voice recordings, editing projects, etc.). If I have the demo I can always re-record the video. I'm intentionally keeping it open as I still haven't decided. It's more like I have 50 things I want to do, but only time for a couple. I promise to get to the end of HL regardless however. I may do it this year anyway, but I PROMISE to do it if I hit 12k. It absolutely will degrade, but degraded, it's still likely to be faster than hard drives. It could last me a decade even with heavy use. Also writing NON-STOP to a SSD will NOT kill it in a few months. Many SSDs will just randomly die out of the blue because of the controller card. In other words, SSDs can die out of nowhere (warranties are important), but it didn't die BECAUSE you wrote to a lot in a few months, that would take years. As for 4 drives in RAID 0, jesus, I might need a specialty motherboard for that. Many people informed me of this. All I can say is if this works as advertised, this would have made the entire thing irrelevant, I never heard of it before. I'll definitely look into it. I don't have after effects, so no, I haven't. My experience was a framerate lower than 180 led to "soupy" results. Total fucking silence. I almost made a news post about this wondering about suggestions about what I can try next. I've sent multiple emails to Valve with no response and put posts in relevant forums with no answer either.

Well here's a video people may not have been expecting. It's part a send-me-money video, part behind-the-scenes of Freeman's Mind. Either way, I tried to make it entertaining. If you've ever been curious about some of what's involved in making an episode, you might enjoy watching this. The short version is this explains some of the obstacles to making the series HD and why more money will overcome them: DONATE HERE! Now the bad news is the next FM episode is NOT ready yet, however it is partially done. I'll re-record it in HD and get it out ASAP if this fundraiser goes well. In all honesty, I probably would have been done with the episode by now if I never made this video, but the "why isn't the resolution higher?" comments finally got to me, so by delaying the next episode and making this instead, it could be increasing the video quality on all future episodes. On a personal note, ever since Machinima.com prevented me from releasing videos for months at the same time my pay dropped over 80%, this past year or so has been like a marathon for me trying to get my income stable again. I'm still crawling my way back towards sustainability and have been involved with a LOT of different projects to earn more income. I'm doing everything I possibly can to try and stabilize things and hope to do so sometime this year, but any extra money you donate will be GREATLY appreciated. A big part of the reason I haven't bought this part myself is I've never been able to justify it; all donation money over the past year has gone directly to food and rent. By making this video, it FORCES me to buy the part and increase the resolution to the show. Anyway, because a lot of my time is divided up these days, I can say that for now, more money likely WILL increase the release rate of both Freeman's Mind and RGD since it will free up time I would be spending working on other things. As an extra "thank you", I've also updated all the downloadable copies for Freeman's Mind, and I'm going to try my best to reply to all the emails I've received over the past months, something I've been neglecting a lot (again). If you haven't gotten a reply from me, it's very likely you will over the next week. And if you don't donate, I'm still glad to have you all as fans and will keep making more videos no matter what. I throw out a lot of information in this video, so I can only imagine the comments I'll get from people telling me I'm wrong about everything, but here are some questions / comments I'm anticipating: Q: Why aren't you using Kickstarter or Indiegogo? A: Those fundraisers typically require many prize levels that would take a lot of time to fulfill. It's not that I don't want to give people prizes, but I'd rather not spend weeks mailing things when I could be making more videos instead. Q: Are there any prizes? A: Maybe! I will send an email of thanks to everyone who donates. Also I'm willing to give any prizes that don't require me to act like a business and take tons of time to deliver. I am willing to record a line for anyone who's donated $10 or more, just email me about it. Also, I was considering releasing all the isolated voice files for all the Freeman's Mind episodes if people are interested in that. If you have ideas about something else you'd like to see, let me know. Q: You don't need a SSD! You need a capture card or use Shadowplay then play back the demos in slow motion! A: For adding in motion blur, that wouldn't actually help save me any time, plus it would still be susceptible to potential dropped frames if there was some sort of hard drive stutter. Q: You don't need a SSD! Your CPU is too slow! A: While a faster CPU would speed up the motion blur processing some, none of the cores ever get maxed during recording, there's plenty of overhead. The hard drive speed is the bottleneck. Q: Will you be updating all the old episodes to HD? A: Unfortunately, no. I no longer have the old demos and project files necessary to do so. I never would have gotten rid of them if I expected FM to be as popular as it became. Q: What about the Game Dungeon? A: Due to voting results, I plan to focus mostly on FM for the near future, but I have a LOT of RGD episodes planned. This part will remove all barriers for recording in RGD also, so I'll be able to cover potentially any game after this, not just older ones (though I still plan to keep doing those too). Q: Do you eat only beans? A: No, but beans + onions have a good cost-to-flavor / nutrition ratio. - - - ADHD version: Send money to Ross if you want to see Freeman's Mind in HD! Or send money because you can, Ross can use it! New FM coming this month, maybe in HD! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

something Freeman-related is coming very soon

Yeah yeah, everybody seems to think this takes 20 minutes to make, but the reality is a little different. RGD is just another experiment that I can produce more quickly than Freeman's Mind. What I really want to do is make a full length machinima movie, but the time required for that is massive and people tend to get pissed the longer I work on a project. All I'll say is you probably don't believe me, but I think I have the capacity to make something better than Freeman's Mind, and better than all my other videos. You might be surprised how much food and rent money can get in the way of other things. While his tone could use improvement, I'll leave this open for now. If there's no sign of progress, you can relock it.

While they could be related, the video I linked to proves that REAL views are being cut also. The reason being is the guy set up a link where more people clicked on the link to his website, coming from Youtube, than Youtube reported as viewing the actual video. If you're confused by this, that's because what I'm describing is impossible in reality. Since that's what YT is reporting though, the only conclusion to draw is that YT isn't reporting all the views. Stuff like the like-to-view ratio and statistically improbable events are circumstantial evidence, the website results however, are direct evidence. I can't say WHY Youtube is doing this, just that they are.

Oh okay, I misunderstood. I'd even say you won't see THAT much of a performance upgrade for upgrading the CPU / RAM in gaming, unless it's a RTS, uses lots of physics, or is specifically multi-core. 4GB of system RAM is fine as long as you're not running anything else big at the same time as your games. BTG is right though, the 1GB of VRAM is probably your biggest bottleneck towards gaming performance more than anything. That's part of the card however, so you can't exactly upgrade that without getting a new card and it sounds like you have an okay midrange one as it is. The main thing that will impact is how high the texture resolution you use is, and your non-shader-AA performance. Also if you do like AA on the cheap, you might want to look into the "FXAA injector" rather than the MLAA that AMD includes. I don't know if this is still the case, but FXAA has traditionally had better performance than MLAA. Also BTG, you mentioned SMAA, I have mixed feelings about that. While it DOES give a sharper pictures on edges it handles than other shader-based AA methods I've seen, I think it creates more of a contrast effect also, because it draws my eye to the parts that it misses, making them stand out more for me. FXAA tends to be a tad blurrier and more inclusive than SMAA, which for me personally makes the problem areas a little less noticeable, but it's a personal preference thing.

Well out of all the old games to pick, it was Crysis on very high settings, which is about the most punishing benchmark you can possibly get from the time (Crysis is still more stressful on a system than many modern games). It was also done on Vista 64 bit, so it could definitely address more than 2GB. As for what you're describing, that's true, but again, that comes back to the GPU. You WILL see a performance difference if you're loading so many textures that it spills over past the VRAM, but at that load, the performance is likely to drop more dramatically elsewhere without a lot of GPU muscle anyway and would show much more performance for the dollar from having a card with a larger buffer rather than worrying about the RAM. I don't know man, I just feel like a lot of the arguments you're making for gaming seem more like fine-tuning performance on an already performing system rather than primary considerations. By that I mean what you're saying is correct, but if you're on a budget, it's sort of the last step to be worrying about, since you have rapidly diminishing returns on performance for the dollar compared to the GPU. Stuff like memory controllers, RAM speeds, CPU power (with a few exceptions mentioned), you worry about AFTER you have the beefiest GPU you can handle. Otherwise, you might have a more rounded-out system going your way, but you'll have lower FPS in games.

Unless I'm missing something important here, no, not really. I found benchmarks on it actually: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1782/amd_phenom_ii_ddr2_vs_ddr3_performance/index.html There is a little bit of difference, but nothing close to the 15fps you're claiming, it's basically the 2fps difference sheridan is talking about. Granted, that's on an older CPU, but it's the RAM that's being tested. RAM really isn't the bottleneck for the majority of programs, especially games. Yeah, a GPU is pretty much the across-the-board performance gain for gaming, outweighing the benefits of a faster CPU and RAM in all but extreme cases. In any event, the money you put into a GPU is generally going to get you much more performance than the money upgrading a CPU (unless it's VERY dated or underpowered). There are exceptions, RTSs in particular, games that have a bunch of physics done on the CPU, a few multi-threaded games can show benefits from more CPU muscle, but by and large the bottleneck is the GPU. This could change in the future however, as the latest gen consoles are focusing on lots of threads, so that may trickle down to the PC side as well. I've read Battlefield 4 is one of the very few games that will really use all the cores you throw at it and actually does put a lot of the load back on the CPU, something that hasn't been the case for a long time.

That example I think is more grey. I see Obamacare as both helpful AND harmful to people, depending on what bracket a person is in. What I see as clear-cut evil is our system that rewards health insurance companies for denying coverage to people that need it at the same time they take in massive profits. That's literally profiting on the misery and death of people who need their help. Collectively, they spent about 500 million on lobbying in 2012. With Obamacare, Obama clearly compromised heavily with these forces, so that makes him "not good" at least. As for him being evil, his actions seem to deviate from what he says a lot. I can't really say if he's evil or not, his intentions seem totally unclear to me. I mostly see him as a conduit for larger forces at work. I've thought many times that we should just rename the USA to "Crazyland" and it would make us far more consistent. You can point to Christianity as a source of morality, but in the USA, things get surreal. My favorite example of this was at the republican presidential candidate debates where Ron Paul was for suggesting we abide by "the Golden Rule." So in other words, you have a demographic of people who are largely Christian booing somebody for quoting a central theme from Christianity.

I doubt that's the case. Ad block just means the view doesn't count towards any ad revenue, if it actually meant views didn't show up, this would have been a massive issue long before now. They never told me, I never got a reply email, but they fixed it, 4-5 days after release.

No, I'm ahead of you on this unfortunately. Blip supports re-uploading media to the same URL created, so I did that, no luck, same problem. As for the settings, these are the exact same settings I've used for the last 50+ episodes uploaded to blip, so that's a dead end there too (and I'm already using 441.khz for the audio). I think something changed on blip's end. I'll look into it some more later.

Unless you're talking on a super-meta level, I have to disagree with this. I mean in the big picture, we're a speck of life the universe probably doesn't care about, so yeah, anything that happens, isn't good or evil in any sense that matters. On the planet Earth however, there's plenty of things that can be defined as good or evil in almost any context. For example, if I go around kidnapping people and chopping their hands off because I want to decorate my fence with them and I don't care about their pain, well, there's not really any defense of an action like that. I tend to get defensive when people say there is NO good or evil because that moral ambiguity is the sort of thing sociopaths purposefully exploit. For their purposes, it only benefits them for people to believe there is no evil as that provides more of a tolerance for actions that are clearly evil. There are grey areas to be sure, but to deny it entirely I think only works in a cosmic sense. A rock doesn't have good or evil, but people do. I like this example. I think besides how intentional something is, responsibility is also an issue. Taken at face value, assuming the politician couldn't have predicted these consequences, the politician is not immediately evil, even if the consequences of his actions ARE. The "test of evil" in this scenario is what the politician does AFTER learning the outcome of his actions. Politicians are in a position of power, which carries responsibility behind it. If the politician later realizes what he has done is harming people and tries to rectify it, then he's not evil, he's just flawed / ignorant. If he realizes what he's done, feels bad about it, does nothing to remedy it, but will never pursue action like that again without more careful research, then I'd say he's still not evil, but not good either. If he ignores the negative consequences and feels no remorse about his actions and / or CONTINUES to do further actions like that, then yeah, I'd say evil. Unintentionally committing an act that causes evil doesn't make the person evil, but not caring about the consequences of those actions does.

Absolutely, I sent it to my family also. It has almost a million views, it needs more like 100 million.

Maybe, although I really hate the idea of holding the episodes hostage for money. Believe it or not, exploiting my fanbase for income is NOT one of my goals (unless they're loaded). They have a de facto monopoly on video streaming, I thought I read before it's about 70% of all free streaming video. Makes it hard for alternatives. Old Google is very different from modern Google. I recommend reading #1 of this article to get a better picture of what's happening. Yeah it makes no damn sense. Like Windows 8, there are quantifiable flaws with their new design. "Inbox" used to take ONE click and ONE page load. Now it takes FOUR of each. To turn off annotations, that used to take 1 click, now it takes 2. Increasing the resolution used to take 2 clicks, now it takes 3. What this says to me is one of the largest companies in the world can freely ignore fundamentals of good UI design. It must be maddening to people who have degrees in that sort of thing. Thanks, glad to see you got Ettore Majorana right. BTW no one can disprove he wasn't killed by ninjas at sea.

This is sort of an offshoot of another thread that got derailed, but in general, I think big money controls most of America nowadays. Not everyone may agree with me, but I recently saw a video that I feel like REALLY illustrates it in the news, check this out: TM8L7bdwVaA The first thing I want to point out is that this is from a variety of stations, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, etc., so this transcends "liberal" or "conservative" media and extends to basically any mainstream televised news. For me, it's refreshing to see proof of this. I feel like when big money controls the mainstream news, it influences the entire country. This also means that stories that are critical of big money's influenced are largely repressed, with the only sources of getting them being on more "fringe" sources or some international news. Anyway, I recommend sharing this video with anyone who believes we have "balanced" news in the USA, to me this video says it all.

Here's what I know about that: -I've been told by Machinima.com in the past they don't count towards monetization -Machinima.com has also flat out lied to me before on payouts, saying my old CPM cost them money (I make more money PER VIEW on my own than I did at Machinima, so for them to be telling the truth, my channel would have to be worth more to advertisers than theirs), they also said views on videos older than 3 months don't monetize at all (again, this is a lie, if somebody watches FM #4, that helps me just as much), so it's hard to know the truth from what they've said -I've been told by technical people some of them count on some platforms towards monetization, others don't -I've NEVER heard of mobile views not counting at ALL, like you're a ghost that was never there. So if 10 people watch a video on an iPhone, it should still show 10 views, but those views might not count toward any income.

WHO KNOWS what is going on inside their heads. Cramming Google+ down everyone's throats was an intentional dick move, but screwing up YT's interface HARD in the process? That doesn't seem like something conducive to good business even if seems deliberate as hell. You're right though, this could just as easily be hurting them and they don't care? I don't frigging know. I guess having it uploaded for 6 hours means "it isn't quite ready yet" It's been so long since I played it, I actually didn't remember that as part of the plot to OF, I mainly remember the monster at the end. I just figured it's sort of a logical next step given the extent of the problem and location.

Blip.tv link (download will be up later I swear) Here's another episode that got delayed more than I wanted, but I'm still making them. This is coming out on Valentine's Day, but it's just a coincidence, I didn't plan it like that. This episode isn't especially related to Valentine's Day unless you find ninjas and shotguns romantic. I think this episode came out pretty well, it actually took longer due to bugs with HL: Source's demo recording, but I was able to eventually work around them. On another note, I wanted to try and introduce some democracy to what I work on next and see how it goes. I've start on episode 55, but after that, I haven't decided what video I should do next, so you can vote on it below: [poll id=10] In reality, it's more of a competition between Freeman's Mind and Ross's Game Dungeon, but I just wanted to see how big the divide is. While I haven't given up on it, I can't realistically do another animated video at this time since that will delay everything else too much and I need to keep my income going. This goes double since it's now a CONFIRMED conspiracy that Youtube isn't counting all views and I guess is just pocketing the money instead. I've suspected something like this ever since I saw some statistically improbable things happen in December, but that link above has actual proof in it. I'm sure Google's stance on this is that it's just a bug they need to fix. An enormous, and insanely profitable bug. So, while I plan to go with the majority rule, if Youtube siphons off enough views from FM so they're both equal, I may just do more RGD instead, since I can produce it faster and it's a little more fun for me to make. More videos coming! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

BTGbullseye: I really think our terminology is getting mixed up. When you say "left wing", what do you mean? Because I see it as kind of a spectrum leading from mild to extreme: modern Democrats = very mild left wing, more left on social issues, not really left wing at all in economic issues now, or in words only People with socialist leanings = (Chris Hedges, Bernie Sanders) more "traditional" left wing, but considered radical nowadays People with communist leanings = extreme left wing, not very realistic in my opinion Anarchists = extremist left wing, Noam Chomsky is actually a flavor of this So when you say "extreme left wing" or "radical left" that automatically excludes all democrats in my mind. Something like the Green Party could be considered more radical or extreme left wing. I disagree when you say they're about hoarding power, they're more about trying to level the playing field.

Your last sentence comes across like hyperbole man. I largely see voices like Limbaugh and Hannity as PART of the big money, they're some of the channels for it on the right wing side. Are they calling for prosecution and penalties of illegal by the banks? Do they speak out against unfair tax avoidance of large corporations (like Google, General Electric, Exxon, Apple, etc. all paying single digit or less in taxes?). What is their solution for people in poverty? Do they speak out against CORPORATE welfare (for instance? How would they solve the current problems we have? From what I know of Hannity and Limbaugh, their stances are a lot of the noise that gets in the way of more serious debate. I mean I even found a link of him defending Super PACS, which I see as a signficant step towards moving power away from the average voter towards big money. To give them credit though, I did some research and noticed he DOES speak out against quantitative easing, so kudos for that, although I think that's incorrect framing QE as a liberal issue, many liberals hate QE also, just apparently not the Obama administration. This is kind of what I mean about the "noise" however. The way QE is being used I think is highly irresponsible, but the thing is both Obama AND Romney were in favor of maintaining the status quo with the federal reserve. So calling it "liberal" or "conservative" I think is intellectually dishonest and is just playing people against each other. An issue like that is essentially independent of both sides, since again, I think both republicans and democrats are more or less at the call of big money. Plus, the second part of your sentence says to me either you were just speaking off the cuff, or else you may be ignorant of the actual extremist left. I think this could be terminology however. I want to be clear, if we're not talking social issues, I don't consider any of the Obama administration or even most of modern day democrats to be the radical left. I see them as highly centrist, in some categories more right wing than Republican candidates of the past. When I hear "radical left" I'm thinking of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, etc. I can guarantee all of those people very much wish to remedy our current situation and have been trying their best for years. Bernie Sanders (an independent) where he's essentially mocking them by saying sarcastically (and loudly to them) how our Congress is acting like our most important priority above all else, is tax cuts for billionaires. Anyway, you may not agree with all of their stances or routes to a solution, but I think saying the extremist left doesn't want to do anything about our situation is totally false. I think the MAJORITY of people want to change the situation, but there is so much misinformation and obfuscation that it's unlikely to happen without drastic actions. I may as well piss everybody off equally, but I think Obama has given lip service towards more fairer economic opportunities and little else. Looking at JUST his economic history, I don't see a world of difference between him and Bush. I can't know what goes on his head, but personally I think he's largely a puppet and doesn't have anything approaching realistic solutions for our most serious problems. He can give a good speech and say he'll do something, but in terms of what he's actually done or his current plans are, I think they're piecemeal at best, regressive at worst. Some may blame an obstructionist congress for holding him up, but I think that's a cop out. If a president TRULY gave a damn, he would implore more of the American people directly, explain what he wants to do, how he plans to do it, and get legislation so simple made that anyone trying to spin it off towards the interest of big money would look corrupt as hell. You CAN shine a light on corruption if you really want to, and the president has one of the most powerful offices in America. Then again, if he actually DID do that, he might get assassinated, so again, it's hard for me to know what's going on in his head, but I think holding up Obama as a model of what the left-wing wants in terms of economic policy is a farce.

Well besides it being easier to just manufacture more USB ports rather than USB ports AND PS/2 connectors, part of the reason those were phased out is because there's more power going through a PS/2 connector and in rare cases could actually damage the motherboard if ever unplugged while active (though I haven't really heard of those situations since the 90s). Actually the PS/2 does offer a minor advantage for keyboards as it means more keys can be pressed at once (look up "n key rollover") if you want to know more about that.

I agree, for me personally, a lot of social issues in politics I think of more as noise than anything else. I think the most important issues are ones that affect BILLIONS of people, not small factions. Since the USA has the world reserve currency, our economic issues really do have that kind of impact. I would disagree, I think America is dominated by big money. In 2013, over 3 billion dollars were spent on lobbying. We have more millionaires in congress than any point in history. I've read that since the recession, 95% of our economic gains have gone towards the upper 1%. Our system is essentially rigged to snuff out third parties. In my opinion, that's not democracy. I've read before that nowadays we essentially have the one-party system, the party of business, with two different factions. I mean our answer to the 2008 financial crisis was to essentially bail people out, slap on the wrist penalties for most companies, nobody went to jail, and no serious legislation was passed to prevent the same thing from happening all over again. HSBC was found guilty of laundering money (and CONTINUING to do so) for Al-Qaeda, the Mexican cartel, and many other criminal organizations, yet the only penalty was a fine of 5 weeks of profit for them. No one went to jail over that and the justice department even came out and said it was afraid to press harsher penalties for fear of damaging the economy. It's essentially an admission that large banks are above the law. I think neither the left nor right establishments are seriously going to challenge this order, because they're also being funded by it. The only people who are serious about wanting to stop corruption in our system are essentially radicals now, as the mainstream just accepts it and debates things like social issues instead.