But much later I had an epiphany that it was a more 'Its not them, its me' thing. I was kind of a shit as a kid. I wasn't in a bad crowd, violent, or doing anything criminal, but I largely had my own priorities of art, video games, and books and I willfully ignored everything else (basically never doing any school work). There was a lot of yelling (on my part) and calling them shitty things that I really regret.
I was probably the only kid in existence that my parents actually had to stop from reading. I would reguarly stay up to 4-5 in the morning reading in the closet (so they couldn't see the light) and then just sleep in class at school. At one point they had to literally saw their way through the door because I had a book I really wanted to finish and I had secured the door with a ton of twine, and rope. My dad actually took off the hinges previous to the saw, and I had secured the door so well it stayed exactly in place.
In an attempt to curb me playing video games they tried:
1. Passwords on the OS - I figured out a fatal windows 95 security flaw that allowed me to bipass it
2. BIOS password - I discovered taking the battery out of the motherboard wiped the password
3. Taking the mouse - learned to play many games with just keyboard
4. Taking the keyboard - bought my own keyboard and kept it in my backpack
5. Bought locks that fit over power cords - Found my own cords. When those were confiscated, I found and stole their key while they were doing yardwork, had got the key copied.
6. And the final thing... they just took the entire monitor with them to work. Giant fucking 20 lb CRT that they removed everyday. Couldn't do much about that... except then I just started borrowing a friend's N64 everyday
It goddamn took a mountain of will to get me to do anything other than what I wanted to do. I hugely respect their restraint.
zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Wow, these are crazy stories, the worst I had was my dad was the constant prankster. His favorite prank was when I was walking home, the house was on the corner and there was a lilac tree which made it so you could ambush your kids when they walked around it, and he owned a snowblower in Colorado. Winter time got so bad I had to walk across the street and then when I saw it was clear cross over, less I get buried in snow. Summer he would get me with the hose which wasn't as bad.
Wasser that is crazy. It's cool that you can look back with some perspective, I know I work with a lot of people that never quite grew out of that (though they are thankfully less ingenious). I was like, the easiest kid to parent. Super respectful of authority (too much so probably).
More Mom stories, to show that she wasn't entirely a fun-sucker:
I still wonder if it's because she'd had like, a half glass of wine that night, but I remember being amazed when my Mom let me watch Jurassic Park when I was 8 years old. She'd even seen it in theaters with my Dad (and a running family joke later on would center around his alleged 3ft vertical in-theater reaction to the "Surprise! That's not Sam Jackson, THAT'S SAM JACKSON'S SEVERED ARM OH SHIT A RAPTOR" scene), so she had to have known what I was in for, gore-wise. But, since I guess she loved my Dad's reaction so much, she kind of whitewashed the rest of the movie in her head.
When my uncle Keith (then, about 21 or 22, he's 10 years younger than my Mom, and was always the 'cool' uncle when we were young) visited and brought his VHS copy, my Mom suspiciously okayed it (despite its PG-13 rating), and we prepared popcorn and all settled in to watch. Now the movie begins with a pretty tense scene between Sam Neill and some random shitty kid about a Velociraptor claw that gets dark, but that's it. From then until the catastrophe, the movie is pretty tame, and SO GREAT for kids. Cool-guy Jeff Goldblum? Check. DNA cartoon? Awesome. FRIGGIN DINOSAURS? Yes. I'm sold on this movie. It is among the coolest things I have ever seen at that point. Shit goes down, it's all intense, and that arm scene is coming up. At the exact time of the jump scare in the movie, my Mom SHAKES the recliner I'm sitting in, I jump fucking 6ft in the air, do some gymnast shit off the back of the chair, over my Mom, up the stairs, SLAM the door to my room, clothes OFF, under BED, I'm done. for. the night. I don't know how everyone else reacted to that scene, but I could hear her laughing through, I think, two walls and a floor to my reaction. I think that's the only time she's antagonized me in any way, outside of like, board games. I imagine after she metabolized that half glass of wine, she felt very very badly for that. Even now, she only tells the story about my Dad's jump in the theater and we all laugh about it, and then she looks at me apologetically.
I also remember being traumatized at 9 (with my brothers, 3, and 12) by the Robocop scene, in which a man melting from toxic waste gets hit by a car and pretty much just explodes (my Dad was treating us while Mom was visiting her parents -- he scrambled to shut the movie off when he realized what was about to happen but was 5 seconds too late). And I guess also in Predator when Jesse Ventura gets shot straight through the chest, and when Carl Weathers gets his arm shot off (this one I watched at a sleepover somewhere else. Probably about 7). Oh and DEFINITELY in Thir13en Ghosts during that scene that is that whole movie.
Wasser! I was also an all-night reader who was routinely closet-checked for hidden lamps and extension cords.
I was sort of similarly willful as well, actually getting me to do homework was more stressful than the homework itself.
I was occasionally grounded for being a dumbass, but usually I deserved it. I vaguely remember there was a time when I dyed my hair at home when I wasn't supposed to, the day of an important project where I was the organizer in charge and I both HAD TO BE THERE and HAD TO LOOK AWESOME AND COOL because it was a punk show and I had gotten a lot of attention for it because it was a benefit for a local girls' charity. I wasn't allowed to dye my hair at home at the time, because messy teenager, etc, so I was required to get it done at the salon and pay the cost of that, etc. And I had basically stayed up alllll night and drop-clothed the entire bathroom so that I could stealth-mode touch up the color. I probably would have COMPLETELY gotten away with it if I had left the house a half hour earlier but my dad was just getting up as I was getting ready to take off, and he grounded me on the spot, but I weaseled out of it by basically reminding him that he was super proud of how I had put together this whole thing by myself and how I had to be there and as soon as I got home I could be as grounded as they wanted, whatever
And then I had an awesome day and made like 500 bucks for the charity on top of everything else and my dad was impressed enough that I think he forgot to be mad (and I also didn't spill anything because I literally wrapped the entire bathroom in plastic so there wasn't much residual evidence to remind him to be mad I guess.)
My parents were mostly cool after they got divorced. My stepdad was terrible but eventually my mum figured out he was trash. It took me getting into a pretty extreme argument with him for her to get over being scared of him and just call the cops already, though
I dunno. There's a lot of stuff I don't remember in great detail, olol frontal lobe injury
But much later I had an epiphany that it was a more 'Its not them, its me' thing. I was kind of a shit as a kid. I wasn't in a bad crowd, violent, or doing anything criminal, but I largely had my own priorities of art, video games, and books and I willfully ignored everything else (basically never doing any school work). There was a lot of yelling (on my part) and calling them shitty things that I really regret.
I was probably the only kid in existence that my parents actually had to stop from reading. I would reguarly stay up to 4-5 in the morning reading in the closet (so they couldn't see the light) and then just sleep in class at school. At one point they had to literally saw their way through the door because I had a book I really wanted to finish and I had secured the door with a ton of twine, and rope. My dad actually took off the hinges previous to the saw, and I had secured the door so well it stayed exactly in place.
In an attempt to curb me playing video games they tried:
1. Passwords on the OS - I figured out a fatal windows 95 security flaw that allowed me to bipass it
2. BIOS password - I discovered taking the battery out of the motherboard wiped the password
3. Taking the mouse - learned to play many games with just keyboard
4. Taking the keyboard - bought my own keyboard and kept it in my backpack
5. Bought locks that fit over power cords - Found my own cords. When those were confiscated, I found and stole their key while they were doing yardwork, had got the key copied.
6. And the final thing... they just took the entire monitor with them to work. Giant fucking 20 lb CRT that they removed everyday. Couldn't do much about that... except then I just started borrowing a friend's N64 everyday
It goddamn took a mountain of will to get me to do anything other than what I wanted to do. I hugely respect their restraint.
I read a lot as a kid to escape the crap always going on at the house, my grandmother brought be all the books she finished and she read everything from TSR and TOR fantasy junk to high art Voltaire. I started working around 13 and spent all my money early on on getting a veritible library of paperbacks. Pretty much hundreds by time I was nearing college. After Colombine my mom decided that my novels were going to turn me into a serial killer and so she gathered all of my books (Star Wars, generic Fantasy, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and a good dozen other things from high school courses, things my grandmother gave me, and things I spent hundreds of bucks of my part time job buying) and threw them into the trash.
When my grandmother (her mom) found out she drove the long 5 hours over from her place and reamed out my mom and made her inventory the books she got rid of and replace them.
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
My mom is almost always awesome, she's just in that subset of people that think D&D leads to Tom Hanks jumping of the World Trade Center and that violent movies cause you to sleepwalk.
@Wassermelone Man, That's all insane. I too could be a shit head but not to the same level, just because I was doing less against my parents will. I was a pretty calm kid, luckily my parents were pretty supportive of the art, and aside from math I had pretty okay grades. The math they sorta recognized was a cognitive lacking and not just apathy, though it was a bit of both.
We only really has some fights because all of my friends were boys, and they were constantly worried I was, I guess, having the most sex possible. They were completely wrong, all of my friends were dudes because my interests were world of warcraft and fire.
I feel like I have a pretty normal relationship with my folks, compared to some of you guys.
Same. Very little drama. The worst it ever gets is like 'Your brother never calls or responds to my texts,' to which I usually reply 'Well, he's in college mom,' and then I sort of just hope that he figures out that family is important and that he should keep in better touch (which he is certainly doing better at).
Wasser, it sounds like you should have turned out as some sort of government art spy (I guess video game artist is pretty understandable too haha).
My older brother got in so much trouble I was genuinely terrified of my mother through most of high school. So I was mostly a good little boy. I did do the late night reading thing, but I basically never got caught because I spent most of my childhood sneaking around the house so as to avoid my mom (not joking). It more or less trained me to be a little ninja. My brothers and I created blueprints of our house, and used to create paths/plans on the printed blueprints of how to sneak down to the basement without getting caught so we could get some extra video game time in without my mom knowing we were down there. We knew where to step to avoid every creak created by the floor in that house, a skill which has oddly transferred to adulthood. A grown, 32 year old man avoiding creaks in the wood floor of a house is a funny sight to see I'm sure.
Really though my mom was pretty great, overprotective but pretty awesome. Sounds like a good majority of us were huge bookworms though. I used to stay in the car for two to three hours after arriving home from the bookstore, completely engrossed in those books. Mainly Redwall, damn I loved that series. :P
A site called WallPart.com is stealing artists work and selling prints illegally and without giving credit or royalties. There is a Change.org petition (if that's your thing) - HERE.
Several old pieces I posted on these forums have shown up there for sale, so I am sure a few of you are at risk as well.
A site called WallPart.com is stealing artists work and selling prints illegally and without giving credit or royalties. There is a Change.org petition (if that's your thing) - HERE.
Several old pieces I posted on these forums have shown up there for sale, so I am sure a few of you are at risk as well.
1. That petition site is especially useless for sites outside the US (like that one)
2. As mentioned in their "about" page (and can be verified with a few random searches) it seems they're just using search engines to show the results, which seem to not always even be art
3. They are showing images that are readily available online through any search engine
4. They are not claiming ownership or that anybody else produced the art
5. This is no different than somebody finding a crappy 72dpi image posted online and trying to print it out (which they will soon learn is a sadness)
6. I'm on my phone, not trying to be rude with numbering
7. I have no problem at all with this site
@NightDragon - The problem isn't that they are showing people's work, it's that they are illegally selling the prints. True, the prints are not going to be high quality but it is still ethically very wrong.
Just arrived in ny yesterday, everyone's yelling all the time here lol. And the cops actually do talk like in the movies, pretty great. Went to an art book and zine fair in Bushwick, complete with weird avant garde singing 'all of us, we're collaborating right now!' haha, pretty sweet, the complete bohemian experience.
Awesome, duder. I used to live in Bushwick, but that was 6 or 7 years ago. Very neat part of the city, imo. One of the places which never really lost its industrial roots.
@NightDragon - The problem isn't that they are showing people's work, it's that they are illegally selling the prints. True, the prints are not going to be high quality but it is still ethically very wrong.
I guess what I'm asking though is how is this any different than somebody printing out something they find on the internet themselves? This site seems more like a print service, but they're offering "anything you find in Google search" exclusively. Honestly it seems like a really bad business model to me.
+1
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
And if you really want that gone you would need to file a lawsuit with their host from a nation they are legally taxable to, not a petition.
I guess it's not all that different, but I don't advocate people going on Deviant Art and printing out whatever they like either. I know if there is an artist I admire I will pay for their prints to support the work they do.
Also, most copy shops I've dealt with won't print anything they even suspect is a copyrighted image. Of course some slip through.
I still think this site is shady as hell, but I also respect your opinion, @NightDragon. I would be interested to hear you elaborate on your thoughts. How do you prevent plagerism of your work? What tips do you have for artists posting online?
You kind of have to accept that putting anything on public display will make it easier to 'pirate.' Cost of doing business. Best thing you can do is make work that is uniquely yours, makes it harder for people to pass it off as their own to any but the most casual observer.
Yeah- I don't like it, and I think the business in question is dodgy and I don't like the idea of it, and it probably should be sued, especially if they are advertising their services with unlicensed work instead of just saying "send us a .jpg, we'll print it out"- but I'm not sure how much good prosecuting it would ultimately do, as long as there are no lack of personal printers and print shops that anyone can go and use to do the same thing, as ND said.
Luckily for myself, I get paid for my work as part of my job, so I don't really worry about this stuff. I've already been paid as much as I ever expect to get paid by the time anyone in the public sees it.
Dealing with making money from the internet directly seems like a total pain, because of issues like this.
I would assume that being successful in an internet art business is going to be more about doing one or more of the following
A) Getting your primary revenue from a companies/clients commissioning you for work directly. Using easily pirateable works (ie: .jpgs on the internet) more as advertising for things that are harder to copy/aren't freely available otherwise (books, toys, shirts, plushies, signed merch, personal massages by the artist, etc.).
C) Getting advertising revenue on your site.
D) Using the free work as advertising for your Patreon fund/Kickstarter campaign. (I can't believe that the Questionable Content guy makes almost $10000 a month on Patreon alone- but I don't know how many years of doing free work it took before he'd worked off the sunk costs/actually generated positive revenue.)
It's similar to a free-to-play games model- you're going to have to give away a lot for free, to reach the handful of people that are going to lay down serious cash- rather than everyone on the internet laying out just a little bit of money a piece. Offering prints of things that are freely available and making money from that is a nice bonus, but I can't imagine that relying on that alone for revenue is going to be all that financially viable, if you're hoping to make a livable wage.
I'm not saying it's fair- I too would like to see more people doing work get paid for that work directly- but that's just seems to be how it is.
According to their contact info they're in Sydney, so ... you want me to get some people to pay them a visit?
ahaha
"so's I got woid from this cat you guys been liftin' artwoik what don't belong to yas... you want maybe I should fix ya face?"
[LARGE THUG fixes ART THIEF's face]
"Tynic sez hello"
If they were using this service to actually gain something from web-resolution artwork (like a Facebook browser game), then I'd have a problem with it. If they listed artwork as their own when it wasn't, I'd have a problem with it.
If somebody wants to print out low resolution prints of my artwork anywhere, it doesn't seem like a huge threat to me because the quality is going to be such garbage that I can't imagine it would be worth it for a buyer. If somebody wants a nice, high resolution print and not a 300-pixel image blown up to print size, then they can contact the artist and get that.
Because this site deals exclusively in prints, and only of images it finds in search engines, and doesn't claim ownership of any of it, I don't really understand how it's a problem, honestly. It can't possibly compete with a real print at high resolution.
Tl;Dr : this just doesn't seem like a threat to my work at all, or really anybody's. If you're afraid of people printing out your low res images, I wouldn't put your work online at all. Honestly though, I feel like there are other ways to steal digital artwork that are LEAGUES beyond that site in how damaging it may be. That site just feels like "I saw a image online that I want to print on my home computer, but instead I'm going to pay $5 for it to be printed for me, and it will look awful regardless."
Awhile back I asked for light-reading suggestions since I'd run out of Dresden Files books to read.
I don't think I read all the suggestions I got, but I think I tried one from everyone that suggested one? My thoughts on what I read:
Legion by Brandon Sanderson- probably the favorite out of the ones that were suggested. Also just finished another of his books (Steelheart) on the suggestion of a friend, which I also dug. Picked up the second Legion novella and the second in the Steelheart series, so I'll probably move onto whatever else he's got after I get through those. (Although the same friend had also recommended one of his books on the strength of 'It's got a really intricately plotted magic system with a lot of complex rules!', which to me sounds like the dullest fucking thing, so maybe I'll try to hold off on that particular book.)
Neutron Star by Larry Niven- Liked it, didn't love it.
Jonathon Strange and Mr.Norell- I don't remember if this was recommended on here or someone was just talking about it on Facebook, but I liked this a lot as well, even if it takes probably a little too much time to get the ball rolling on the plot.
Gridlinked by Neal Asher- It had some neat ideas, but I had a hard time connecting with a main character who is basically a sociopath. I know there are plot reasons for this, but still.
Jack Reacher #1- Similar to my reaction to the movie- it was alright and all, but again, I have a hard time connecting with a main character is just a hyper-competent badass who is just simply better at everything than everyone else. It'd probably make for a better story if told from the point of view of the not-so-clever villains, as they get picked off one by one by this mysterious Mr.SuperBadass like he's a horror movie monster.
Also a side note on the last two, I always find myself baffled by the trope that the ladies are just jonesing to immediately hop into bed with the sorts of dudes that emotionlessly kill people on the regular. I would think these vaguely mysterious, slab-chested, charmless masters of marksmanship, hand to hand combat, infiltration, etc. would regularly strike out at bars when faced with the competition of say, an assistant manager of a local credit union whose major talent is being able to belt out surprisingly good karaoke renditions of Adele songs while drunk.
yeah, they're male power fantasies. Both the last two are written by straight guys, basically.
Uh yeah, I get that.
But even the go-to example of this trope, James Bond (the movies, I'm not that familiar with the books)- at least usually they write him telling some jokes (even if they are dumb and terrible) or at least being minimally charming/playful in some way, if just to say, "HEY AUDIENCE! THIS MAN IS A HUMAN BEING MEETING THE MINIMUM STANDARD BAR FOR HUMAN INTERACTION!", before the film boards the submarine sportscar headed for PG-13 Bangtown.
When movies/books don't even bother with that much, I wind up assuming the woman has just seduced this guy so she can stab him in the throat with a letter opener later on- and when that doesn't happen, I wonder if I skipped over a bunch of stuff on accident. I wind up too confused by the narrative issues to actually engage with the scene on its intended level of stupid, superficial titillation.
Sorry, I was agreeing with you that the trope makes no sense and is destructive to suspension of disbelief, and was trying to say that I can only assume it's because the guys who wrote the character have their head up their ass about what's actually attractive (as opposed to 'badass').
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Now you guys have me thinking over my frustration over how a love interest in a Bond movie will just up and die.
"Bond, I love you!"
"I love you so dearly as well!"
"Let us run away from this life of violen--oh, no, I am dead!"
"I must stare moodily for a moment now to show my true grief."
You'd think after the sixth or seventh time, maybe Bond would wonder "Is it me? I wonder if its me?"
I finished the 'Wheel of Time' last summer (Sanderson did a great job ending it), and that threw me on a Sanderson kick. 'Mistborn' is fun, and ramps up in quality of writing by the third book, kind of a good primer to his weird magic systems. It's not like reading a textbook, you kind of learn the stuff piecemeal throughout the series. To justify it, he really does take those rules and set up some really cool battle scenes. So, you know. It's cool. I also read the first two books in his 'Way of Kings' series, and they're very good too. It is a lot of dumb fantasy bullshit, but the characters are compelling enough to look past the setting.
@m3nace Look at the Statue of Liberty through one of those pay-a-quarter binocular things. Contemplate freedom. It's neat up close, but the line often isn't worth it.
Posts
But much later I had an epiphany that it was a more 'Its not them, its me' thing. I was kind of a shit as a kid. I wasn't in a bad crowd, violent, or doing anything criminal, but I largely had my own priorities of art, video games, and books and I willfully ignored everything else (basically never doing any school work). There was a lot of yelling (on my part) and calling them shitty things that I really regret.
I was probably the only kid in existence that my parents actually had to stop from reading. I would reguarly stay up to 4-5 in the morning reading in the closet (so they couldn't see the light) and then just sleep in class at school. At one point they had to literally saw their way through the door because I had a book I really wanted to finish and I had secured the door with a ton of twine, and rope. My dad actually took off the hinges previous to the saw, and I had secured the door so well it stayed exactly in place.
In an attempt to curb me playing video games they tried:
1. Passwords on the OS - I figured out a fatal windows 95 security flaw that allowed me to bipass it
2. BIOS password - I discovered taking the battery out of the motherboard wiped the password
3. Taking the mouse - learned to play many games with just keyboard
4. Taking the keyboard - bought my own keyboard and kept it in my backpack
5. Bought locks that fit over power cords - Found my own cords. When those were confiscated, I found and stole their key while they were doing yardwork, had got the key copied.
6. And the final thing... they just took the entire monitor with them to work. Giant fucking 20 lb CRT that they removed everyday. Couldn't do much about that... except then I just started borrowing a friend's N64 everyday
It goddamn took a mountain of will to get me to do anything other than what I wanted to do. I hugely respect their restraint.
More Mom stories, to show that she wasn't entirely a fun-sucker:
I still wonder if it's because she'd had like, a half glass of wine that night, but I remember being amazed when my Mom let me watch Jurassic Park when I was 8 years old. She'd even seen it in theaters with my Dad (and a running family joke later on would center around his alleged 3ft vertical in-theater reaction to the "Surprise! That's not Sam Jackson, THAT'S SAM JACKSON'S SEVERED ARM OH SHIT A RAPTOR" scene), so she had to have known what I was in for, gore-wise. But, since I guess she loved my Dad's reaction so much, she kind of whitewashed the rest of the movie in her head.
When my uncle Keith (then, about 21 or 22, he's 10 years younger than my Mom, and was always the 'cool' uncle when we were young) visited and brought his VHS copy, my Mom suspiciously okayed it (despite its PG-13 rating), and we prepared popcorn and all settled in to watch. Now the movie begins with a pretty tense scene between Sam Neill and some random shitty kid about a Velociraptor claw that gets dark, but that's it. From then until the catastrophe, the movie is pretty tame, and SO GREAT for kids. Cool-guy Jeff Goldblum? Check. DNA cartoon? Awesome. FRIGGIN DINOSAURS? Yes. I'm sold on this movie. It is among the coolest things I have ever seen at that point. Shit goes down, it's all intense, and that arm scene is coming up. At the exact time of the jump scare in the movie, my Mom SHAKES the recliner I'm sitting in, I jump fucking 6ft in the air, do some gymnast shit off the back of the chair, over my Mom, up the stairs, SLAM the door to my room, clothes OFF, under BED, I'm done. for. the night. I don't know how everyone else reacted to that scene, but I could hear her laughing through, I think, two walls and a floor to my reaction. I think that's the only time she's antagonized me in any way, outside of like, board games. I imagine after she metabolized that half glass of wine, she felt very very badly for that. Even now, she only tells the story about my Dad's jump in the theater and we all laugh about it, and then she looks at me apologetically.
I also remember being traumatized at 9 (with my brothers, 3, and 12) by the Robocop scene, in which a man melting from toxic waste gets hit by a car and pretty much just explodes (my Dad was treating us while Mom was visiting her parents -- he scrambled to shut the movie off when he realized what was about to happen but was 5 seconds too late). And I guess also in Predator when Jesse Ventura gets shot straight through the chest, and when Carl Weathers gets his arm shot off (this one I watched at a sleepover somewhere else. Probably about 7). Oh and DEFINITELY in Thir13en Ghosts during that scene that is that whole movie.
I was sort of similarly willful as well, actually getting me to do homework was more stressful than the homework itself.
I was occasionally grounded for being a dumbass, but usually I deserved it. I vaguely remember there was a time when I dyed my hair at home when I wasn't supposed to, the day of an important project where I was the organizer in charge and I both HAD TO BE THERE and HAD TO LOOK AWESOME AND COOL because it was a punk show and I had gotten a lot of attention for it because it was a benefit for a local girls' charity. I wasn't allowed to dye my hair at home at the time, because messy teenager, etc, so I was required to get it done at the salon and pay the cost of that, etc. And I had basically stayed up alllll night and drop-clothed the entire bathroom so that I could stealth-mode touch up the color. I probably would have COMPLETELY gotten away with it if I had left the house a half hour earlier but my dad was just getting up as I was getting ready to take off, and he grounded me on the spot, but I weaseled out of it by basically reminding him that he was super proud of how I had put together this whole thing by myself and how I had to be there and as soon as I got home I could be as grounded as they wanted, whatever
And then I had an awesome day and made like 500 bucks for the charity on top of everything else and my dad was impressed enough that I think he forgot to be mad (and I also didn't spill anything because I literally wrapped the entire bathroom in plastic so there wasn't much residual evidence to remind him to be mad I guess.)
My parents were mostly cool after they got divorced. My stepdad was terrible but eventually my mum figured out he was trash. It took me getting into a pretty extreme argument with him for her to get over being scared of him and just call the cops already, though
I dunno. There's a lot of stuff I don't remember in great detail, olol frontal lobe injury
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
Now I live on my own I never have to clean the kitchen!! Mwhahahahaha!
(PS don't go in my kitchen, its horrifying).
I read a lot as a kid to escape the crap always going on at the house, my grandmother brought be all the books she finished and she read everything from TSR and TOR fantasy junk to high art Voltaire. I started working around 13 and spent all my money early on on getting a veritible library of paperbacks. Pretty much hundreds by time I was nearing college. After Colombine my mom decided that my novels were going to turn me into a serial killer and so she gathered all of my books (Star Wars, generic Fantasy, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and a good dozen other things from high school courses, things my grandmother gave me, and things I spent hundreds of bucks of my part time job buying) and threw them into the trash.
When my grandmother (her mom) found out she drove the long 5 hours over from her place and reamed out my mom and made her inventory the books she got rid of and replace them.
My grandmother is pretty boss, though.
Just so we're clear
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
I blame most of it on Dr. Oz.
Momdrama like "drama caused by mom; drama is shitty" not "your mom is shitty and there was drama"
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
We only really has some fights because all of my friends were boys, and they were constantly worried I was, I guess, having the most sex possible. They were completely wrong, all of my friends were dudes because my interests were world of warcraft and fire.
I feel like I have a pretty normal relationship with my folks, compared to some of you guys.
Easy peasy.
~Added to guest list for next lan & bbq~
My older brother got in so much trouble I was genuinely terrified of my mother through most of high school. So I was mostly a good little boy. I did do the late night reading thing, but I basically never got caught because I spent most of my childhood sneaking around the house so as to avoid my mom (not joking). It more or less trained me to be a little ninja. My brothers and I created blueprints of our house, and used to create paths/plans on the printed blueprints of how to sneak down to the basement without getting caught so we could get some extra video game time in without my mom knowing we were down there. We knew where to step to avoid every creak created by the floor in that house, a skill which has oddly transferred to adulthood. A grown, 32 year old man avoiding creaks in the wood floor of a house is a funny sight to see I'm sure.
Really though my mom was pretty great, overprotective but pretty awesome. Sounds like a good majority of us were huge bookworms though. I used to stay in the car for two to three hours after arriving home from the bookstore, completely engrossed in those books. Mainly Redwall, damn I loved that series. :P
My Portfolio Site
He's two and a half years older than I am.
A site called WallPart.com is stealing artists work and selling prints illegally and without giving credit or royalties. There is a Change.org petition (if that's your thing) - HERE.
Several old pieces I posted on these forums have shown up there for sale, so I am sure a few of you are at risk as well.
1. That petition site is especially useless for sites outside the US (like that one)
2. As mentioned in their "about" page (and can be verified with a few random searches) it seems they're just using search engines to show the results, which seem to not always even be art
3. They are showing images that are readily available online through any search engine
4. They are not claiming ownership or that anybody else produced the art
5. This is no different than somebody finding a crappy 72dpi image posted online and trying to print it out (which they will soon learn is a sadness)
6. I'm on my phone, not trying to be rude with numbering
7. I have no problem at all with this site
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
I guess what I'm asking though is how is this any different than somebody printing out something they find on the internet themselves? This site seems more like a print service, but they're offering "anything you find in Google search" exclusively. Honestly it seems like a really bad business model to me.
Also, most copy shops I've dealt with won't print anything they even suspect is a copyrighted image. Of course some slip through.
I still think this site is shady as hell, but I also respect your opinion, @NightDragon. I would be interested to hear you elaborate on your thoughts. How do you prevent plagerism of your work? What tips do you have for artists posting online?
Luckily for myself, I get paid for my work as part of my job, so I don't really worry about this stuff. I've already been paid as much as I ever expect to get paid by the time anyone in the public sees it.
Dealing with making money from the internet directly seems like a total pain, because of issues like this.
I would assume that being successful in an internet art business is going to be more about doing one or more of the following
A) Getting your primary revenue from a companies/clients commissioning you for work directly.
C) Getting advertising revenue on your site.
D) Using the free work as advertising for your Patreon fund/Kickstarter campaign. (I can't believe that the Questionable Content guy makes almost $10000 a month on Patreon alone- but I don't know how many years of doing free work it took before he'd worked off the sunk costs/actually generated positive revenue.)
It's similar to a free-to-play games model- you're going to have to give away a lot for free, to reach the handful of people that are going to lay down serious cash- rather than everyone on the internet laying out just a little bit of money a piece. Offering prints of things that are freely available and making money from that is a nice bonus, but I can't imagine that relying on that alone for revenue is going to be all that financially viable, if you're hoping to make a livable wage.
I'm not saying it's fair- I too would like to see more people doing work get paid for that work directly- but that's just seems to be how it is.
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ahaha
"so's I got woid from this cat you guys been liftin' artwoik what don't belong to yas... you want maybe I should fix ya face?"
[LARGE THUG fixes ART THIEF's face]
"Tynic sez hello"
If somebody wants to print out low resolution prints of my artwork anywhere, it doesn't seem like a huge threat to me because the quality is going to be such garbage that I can't imagine it would be worth it for a buyer. If somebody wants a nice, high resolution print and not a 300-pixel image blown up to print size, then they can contact the artist and get that.
Because this site deals exclusively in prints, and only of images it finds in search engines, and doesn't claim ownership of any of it, I don't really understand how it's a problem, honestly. It can't possibly compete with a real print at high resolution.
Tl;Dr : this just doesn't seem like a threat to my work at all, or really anybody's. If you're afraid of people printing out your low res images, I wouldn't put your work online at all. Honestly though, I feel like there are other ways to steal digital artwork that are LEAGUES beyond that site in how damaging it may be. That site just feels like "I saw a image online that I want to print on my home computer, but instead I'm going to pay $5 for it to be printed for me, and it will look awful regardless."
I don't think I read all the suggestions I got, but I think I tried one from everyone that suggested one? My thoughts on what I read:
Legion by Brandon Sanderson- probably the favorite out of the ones that were suggested. Also just finished another of his books (Steelheart) on the suggestion of a friend, which I also dug. Picked up the second Legion novella and the second in the Steelheart series, so I'll probably move onto whatever else he's got after I get through those. (Although the same friend had also recommended one of his books on the strength of 'It's got a really intricately plotted magic system with a lot of complex rules!', which to me sounds like the dullest fucking thing, so maybe I'll try to hold off on that particular book.)
Neutron Star by Larry Niven- Liked it, didn't love it.
Jonathon Strange and Mr.Norell- I don't remember if this was recommended on here or someone was just talking about it on Facebook, but I liked this a lot as well, even if it takes probably a little too much time to get the ball rolling on the plot.
Gridlinked by Neal Asher- It had some neat ideas, but I had a hard time connecting with a main character who is basically a sociopath. I know there are plot reasons for this, but still.
Jack Reacher #1- Similar to my reaction to the movie- it was alright and all, but again, I have a hard time connecting with a main character is just a hyper-competent badass who is just simply better at everything than everyone else. It'd probably make for a better story if told from the point of view of the not-so-clever villains, as they get picked off one by one by this mysterious Mr.SuperBadass like he's a horror movie monster.
Also a side note on the last two, I always find myself baffled by the trope that the ladies are just jonesing to immediately hop into bed with the sorts of dudes that emotionlessly kill people on the regular. I would think these vaguely mysterious, slab-chested, charmless masters of marksmanship, hand to hand combat, infiltration, etc. would regularly strike out at bars when faced with the competition of say, an assistant manager of a local credit union whose major talent is being able to belt out surprisingly good karaoke renditions of Adele songs while drunk.
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Uh yeah, I get that.
But even the go-to example of this trope, James Bond (the movies, I'm not that familiar with the books)- at least usually they write him telling some jokes (even if they are dumb and terrible) or at least being minimally charming/playful in some way, if just to say, "HEY AUDIENCE! THIS MAN IS A HUMAN BEING MEETING THE MINIMUM STANDARD BAR FOR HUMAN INTERACTION!", before the film boards the submarine sportscar headed for PG-13 Bangtown.
When movies/books don't even bother with that much, I wind up assuming the woman has just seduced this guy so she can stab him in the throat with a letter opener later on- and when that doesn't happen, I wonder if I skipped over a bunch of stuff on accident. I wind up too confused by the narrative issues to actually engage with the scene on its intended level of stupid, superficial titillation.
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"Bond, I love you!"
"I love you so dearly as well!"
"Let us run away from this life of violen--oh, no, I am dead!"
"I must stare moodily for a moment now to show my true grief."
You'd think after the sixth or seventh time, maybe Bond would wonder "Is it me? I wonder if its me?"
I finished the 'Wheel of Time' last summer (Sanderson did a great job ending it), and that threw me on a Sanderson kick. 'Mistborn' is fun, and ramps up in quality of writing by the third book, kind of a good primer to his weird magic systems. It's not like reading a textbook, you kind of learn the stuff piecemeal throughout the series. To justify it, he really does take those rules and set up some really cool battle scenes. So, you know. It's cool. I also read the first two books in his 'Way of Kings' series, and they're very good too. It is a lot of dumb fantasy bullshit, but the characters are compelling enough to look past the setting.
@m3nace Look at the Statue of Liberty through one of those pay-a-quarter binocular things. Contemplate freedom. It's neat up close, but the line often isn't worth it.