Chris

Idle Thumbs 247: The Clone Progenitors

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I was surprised to hear that Jake didn't have a PC capable of running The Witness, since my three year old off-the-shelf laptop more than meets the minimum system requirements. Is it that you actually can't play The Witness or that you want to play that game with all the graphics set to max?

 

Jake hasn't played video games since 1785

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Hey guys, I'm the reader who made the http://schnapple.com/thumbs/ site mentioned in this week's Reader Mail. Amusingly, it took me a few days to get to where I could finish listening to the episode so I didn't even realize they were using it (or had seen it) until Friday. 

 

I've gone in and added the requested feature to have it jump to Wednesday (by default). I've also tweaked the viewport so it's easier to read on a phone (probably the easiest way to get to it during a recording).

 

And as I mentioned in the email, I've gone ahead and put the code on GitHub at https://github.com/tomkidd/ThumbsOpeningScript

 

It's not really all that complicated (yet) but if anyone wants to see it or contribute or whatnot there you go. I've already had captbaritone on Twitter asking about it so there it is. Note that it's been a while since I've done much web development so the way I'm achieving this might be hilariously naive. 

 

Enjoy.

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On the subject of fan works and copyrights, here is something I remembered and I wished to share, I just had to dig in my "like" list on twitter to find the right quotes:

 

But before, just quicky explanation, in Japan you do have the doujin, which is somewhat. really keep at a simple level, indie scene, with amateur authors (and a few profissionals too) which do self publishing, many doujin are derivative works  but many are original ones - they do all kinds of stuff, mangas, novels, music, games, figures, ect... its a very big thing in Japan (and very particular to Japan too) with a huge market. The curious part is that, despite people might selling derivative work, people kind don´t bother with it as you might expect.

 

Deb Aoki, which is a comic/manga artist on twitter was talking about this months ago, that what she said about. Note: I just removed the person´s handles, the figure she said have asked, is I think, a Japanese editor (or something like that), this are direct quotes from twitter.

 

"i asked him why the JP comix biz turns a blind eye to the huge sales of fan art comics/doujinshi....

he said that many comics pros, editors and creators alike, cut their teeth/hone their skills, built audiences w/ doujinshi

so they see the value of doujinshi in two aspects: 1) that it helps young creators learn how to make/sell comics, and...

& 2) they recognize that fans who love a series enough to make fan comix are usually big consumers of official manga & goods"

 

Note 1: some manga authors did started as doujin authors.

Note 2: As a amatuer artist myself, the first point is very true, fan art (in balance with original works) can help you a lot to improve skills, try new stuff and even gain some visibility.

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Perhaps I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the question asker about the Toby Fox ban was referring more to fan art selling tons of prints at comic cons or maybe places like Society 6 or Etsy rather than people just selling merch because it's not available anywhere else. There's a big culture of people who consider it "fair use" to draw whatever character in their style and resell prints because that's what sells, not original works. It's an easy way to profit off the popularity of someone elses work and it happens so often it's really hard to go after them much like Bill Watterson. Large companies have a much stronger arm to stop this, like a big Batman purge on Society 6 a while back, but indie creators are usually demonized or are powerless if they don't like this sort of thing. Personally this thing bugs me, but it was a major shit storm last we talked about this in whatever thread. I hear some cons have started cracking down on this, but I don't know, I don't really go to cons. You definitely can no longer sell prints of copyrighted work on Deviant Art anymore. Some people do sell a great amount of prints the more popular an artist is so there is that to think about. It's also easier than ever to just get these printed by third party companies who really don't give a fuck about copyright law until a megacorporation says something.

 

But looking around on various comments about Toby Fox's wants here, I see a lot of people have just went ahead and respected his wishes. I think that's probably the most important thing here, as some creators are okay with it and some aren't. I really wish fan artists would just look up what the creator feels about this ahead of time or e-mail them directly as usually indie types are good at answering mail.

 

I remember a case where Steve Purcell seemed pretty upset on his Facebook by one of those fly by night 24 hour t-shirt sale sites where people submit tons of copyrighted work, with someone's basic rip off of the cover of the first Surfin' the Highway book rendering the characters with Mad Max garb. Can't really put in a take down notice by the time the shirts are done selling in that case. I suppose Sam and Max is not really indie but Steve Purcell does own the copyright.

 

Also I know Mike Mignola is big on cracking down on Hellboy prints, especially because he's big on selling prints from his webstore himself and he also owns the copyright. He does however allow one on one commissions with one print or painting sold or whatever. Looking up Toby Fox, his policy is actually exactly the same.

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I was surprised to hear that Jake didn't have a PC capable of running The Witness, since my three year old off-the-shelf laptop more than meets the minimum system requirements. Is it that you actually can't play The Witness or that you want to play that game with all the graphics set to max?

I crumbled and started playing on my PC. It's fine! I wish I could get slightly better framerate, and could turn things up more, but I also honestly don't really notice with this game. Also I like The Witness a ton.

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Chris, you are a terrible, horrid rascal.  I was listening to this episode on headphones at night, skulking around quietly so as not to wake anyone else in the house, when that music came in under the bridge discussion, and something about the way you mixed it in made me sure it was coming directly from my phone or some other source besides the headphones.  I had a terrible moment of, "Oh crap!  What did I do?  Where's that music coming from?" before I realized what was going on, and even then I had to take off the headphones to be sure.

 

I assume that was a callback to your experience of mistaking the Churchill soundtrack for NPR background music?  Well played.

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Tfw your family is diabetic because you work 3 jobs to support them and only have the time and money to pick up McDonald's in between shifts and then you lose one of your jobs to a pair of robotic arms

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Chris, you are a terrible, horrid rascal.  I was listening to this episode on headphones at night, skulking around quietly so as not to wake anyone else in the house, when that music came in under the bridge discussion, and something about the way you mixed it in made me sure it was coming directly from my phone or some other source besides the headphones.  I had a terrible moment of, "Oh crap!  What did I do?  Where's that music coming from?" before I realized what was going on, and even then I had to take off the headphones to be sure.

 

I assume that was a callback to your experience of mistaking the Churchill soundtrack for NPR background music?  Well played.

 

Ha, I had that exact same reaction!

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Oh man, Whiz Burger. If i had listened to this cast earlier, i might have been eating a burger from there while listening (got a burger from there on Saturday). It's like 2 blocks from my apartment so whenever i want a fast food style burger I go there. They have good seasoned waffle fries too. 

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Chris, you are a terrible, horrid rascal.  I was listening to this episode on headphones at night, skulking around quietly so as not to wake anyone else in the house, when that music came in under the bridge discussion, and something about the way you mixed it in made me sure it was coming directly from my phone or some other source besides the headphones.  I had a terrible moment of, "Oh crap!  What did I do?  Where's that music coming from?" before I realized what was going on, and even then I had to take off the headphones to be sure.

 

I assume that was a callback to your experience of mistaking the Churchill soundtrack for NPR background music?  Well played.

 

Hah, same here! I had to turn off the podcast to make sure the music wasn't coming from somewhere else.

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After seeing a couple of "My cat is interested in the Witness" tweets and hearing the discussion about how there's no player body/hands in the game, this vision immediately appeared in my brain.


post-26597-0-38216600-1454428821.gif

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I have a hot Whiz Burger tip which is that you should definitely order either the mango or banana milkshake. They use real fruit for those, and they are the best during one of the (rare) hot San Francisco summer/fall days.

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It's The Country's Best Yogurt because I lived in a town that had that subtitle underneath it (I'm 34) when it first came. It was also next to a Fay's Drugs, which also no longer exists. I had no idea TCBY was still kicking around. 

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I was listening to the podcast while playing Salt for the first time, so as intended, I pretty much got the reverse of Chris' experience and mistook podcast audio for game audio. The only sounds in the game until this point were effects, but the jazzy tune kicked in during a calm moment I had on a tropical island in between sailing around and honestly fit pretty well (I almost wish this was actually in the game now). Also, it was just low key enough that I expected it might be diegetic and coming from a source somewhere nearby.

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I enjoyed this episode a lot.

Thanks for pointing out Reality-on-the-Norm. I'm looking into it now.

I just recently started using MIT's Scratch game-development tool and one of the really neat things about it is that everything made with the engine has an MIT license. The interface of the online-editor encourages remixing each other's games and automatically makes a genealogy of how the remixes branch. It also includes a lot of default art and sound assets that create a sense of sharing and familiarity in most of the individual results. As someone who has an interest in making games for fun with a community, it seems like a pretty sweet place to hang out.

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