But Wolf was always very careful with his guns; he made sure never to turn the safety off or put any ammunition in them unless they were pointed downrange, and that no other animals were standing near the big tree stump. He always locked up his guns in a great big secure closet in his den, and never, ever shared the key with any other animal. He also made sure to never, ever, ever unlock his gun closet if he were feeling angry or upset, or if he’d eaten any magical mushrooms less than four hours prior.

One day, Wolf decided he wanted to buy the most awesome new gun he’d ever seen. It was a high-powered rifle which could fire 800 rounds per minute in fully-automatic mode, and could take magazines with 60 whole rounds inside them. This gun was epically badass, and Wolf knew he’d enjoy having it very much. But because it was so ridiculously badass and awesome, Wolf realized that he would need to get permission from Owl, the leader of the Magical Forest.

So Wolf went to Owl’s tree, and called up to her. “Owl, oh Owl!” he howled, “I have a question for you!”

Owl came out of her tree, and gazed down upon Wolf with her wise eyes. “Hello there, Wolf,” she said. “What is it that I can do for you?”

“Well,” said Wolf, “as you know, I’ve been a very responsible firearm owner for a long time, so I was hoping you’d give me the okay to buy this totally freaking awesome gun I found out about.” He told Owl about the rifle, and how absolutely ass-kickingly amazing it was. Owl nodded patiently as Wolf waxed poetic, his tail wagging left and right with excitement.

But as Wolf was geeking out about the rifle’s recoil-dampening corkscrew barrel design, Bat landed on a nearby tree and screeched in interruption. She’d been listening in as Wolf spoke, and was absolutely appalled by the idea.

“Are you out of your mind?” Bat screamed. “That sounds like the most dangerous thing ever! It could kill us all! Nobody should be allowed to have that horrible thing!”

“But Bat,” protested Wolf, “I’m very responsible. I’ve always made sure never to hurt anyone with my guns!” But before he could finish speaking, Squirrel scurried up onto the branch of another tree and bellowed back at Bat.

“You’re a freedom-hating fascist, lady!” yelled Squirrel, glaring at Bat with fire in his eyes. “We animals have the right to own guns, and if you say otherwise, you’re not a real Magical Forest-dweller!”

“Oh, please,” sneered Bat, rolling her eyes. “That right was laid out over 65 million years ago by a bunch of dinosaurs. We’ve evolved since then!”

“How dare you speak ill of our Founding Lizards?” shot back Squirrel. To Owl, he cried, “Don’t listen to her! She’s one of them immigrants from the Scientifically-Explainable Caves! This Forest was founded on the idea that everybody, and I mean everybody, could have as big a gun as they damn well pleased, and nobody could get in their way! Nobody!”

“But what about the Column Pine Massacre?” sneered Bat, a smug, superior smirk on her face. “A couple of crazy badgers shot up a school with big evil guns, so we need to ban all guns so that nobody ever dies again!”

Their argument was growing louder. All the animals in the Magical Forest began to hear, and came to watch.

“Oh, come on, Bat,” reasoned Wolf, “you know me! I’m not crazy like those badgers! I know how to handle firearms safely!”

“I understand,” said Bat, with feigned empathy, “but if you have the right to own guns, then we’d have to let all the crazy animals have them too.”

“The right to bear arms,” shouted Squirrel, “is absolute! It shall not be abridged!”

“No, no no no,” sighed Wolf, “that’s not what I’m saying! I don’t wanna give guns to crazy animals! I just want to be able to have this awesome rifle!”

“Oh, yeah, that’s another thing,” snarked Bat. “What possible use could you have for something that shoots a billion bullets every second, other than to kill everybody?”

“The right to bear arms is absolute!” shouted Squirrel once again.

“Hey, can I answer the question?” growled Wolf. “I do target shooting. It’s a hobby. My family’s been doing it for generations.”

“You mean this big, scary, evil machine is for you to use as a toy?” screeched Bat, flinching in horror.

“Well, I guess,” muttered Wolf, lowering his ears, “but I won’t hurt anyone with it.”

“That’s crazy!” snapped Bat. “No one should have guns! You never know who’s crazy until they kill us all!”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Wolf.

“Well, if all the kids at Column Pine had guns,” offered Squirrel, “they’d have just shot them badger bastards first!”

“Okay, what?” balked Wolf. “Oh my god, you’re both insane.”

Bat and Squirrel paid him no mind, and yammered at one another on and on and on with no end. The various bystanding animals began to join into the debate, each one picking one of the two crazy, extremist sides, completely ignoring common sense. Wolf tucked his tail between his legs and sighed. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt or killed, he just wanted to be able to have his awesome badass rifle. He didn’t think things had to be so complicated, but he just didn’t know what to say.

At last, Owl finally spoke up. “Enough!” she hooted, ruffling her feathers. The animals all went quiet. Wolf looked up at her, wagging his tail cautiously.

“Bat,” Owl said, “your concerns about the safety of the Magical Forest are valid.” Bat folded her wings and smiled haughtily at this, and stuck her tongue out at Squirrel. Squirrel gritted his teeth and shook his fist.

“But Squirrel,” continued Owl, “your concerns about the liberty and freedom of animals are also valid.” Squirrel chittered happily and flipped Bat off, as she looked on in disbelief.

“Stop this childishness,” scolded Owl. “Both of you are right in your own way. We must ensure that responsible animals are able to enjoy their pastimes — even if we do not agree with them — so long as they harm no one. We should allow the upstanding members of our community to own and use their firearms, but recognize the fact that firearms are dangerous pieces of machinery, and should not be given to animals who are unfit to wield them.”

The animals pondered this decision, and soon, they all nodded in agreement.

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Squirrel to Bat. “Crazy animals shouldn’t be trusted with guns.”

“And perhaps you’re right,” said Bat to Squirrel. “Responsible animals have every right to use guns safely.”

“So does this mean I can buy my super awesome badass rifle?” asked Wolf, tail bouncing up and down.

“You may,” said Owl.

“Sweet,” said Wolf.

And so Wolf bought his badass rifle, and impressed Bat and Squirrel immensely with his ability to bullseye sixteen apples that were lined up along the great big tree stump in two seconds flat. And they all lived happily ever after.

I’m the one with the yellow pants.

Often with these videos I run into editor’s block. There’s always one point where I just can’t figure out the right clip to match the song, and it stalls me. Then I stop and decide to come back to it later. And despite how much I really want to get it done, “later” sometimes means months later.

But it’s here now, so…

You can also watch it on YouTube if you’re on an Android phone or iPhone, but only because you can’t watch Vimeo on those. Seriously, only click that link out of necessity. If I catch anyone watching this on YouTube because they actually prefer it over Vimeo, I will smack them in the face with the Internet. No joke. I will literally pick up the Internet and hit someone with it.

So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with [wikipedia]Young Earth creationism[/wikipedia] in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of [wikipedia]Usenet[/wikipedia] (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.

One of the major cornerstones of furry interest is the visual artwork. Artists draw and paint all sorts of anthropomorphic animal characters, and many of the popular ones make good money selling prints of their work at conventions. The same goes for comic book creators and, more recently, novel authors. While these works sell to adoring fans, much of them are also freely available to view online. But the real money, especially for less universally known artists, is in the sales of commissions. Another cornerstone of furry interest is the “fursona,” an animal character to represent oneself. Many furries would like pictures of “themselves,” and pay artists to do this for them. Once the commissions are finished, the commissioner and artist display them prominently all over the Internet.

Deconstruct this market, and an interesting theory emerges. Artists create works on their own time, and this attracts fans. Many of these fans buy physical copies of the art to show their support. Some others have an idea for a particular work of art they’d like to see produced, and commission the artist to do so. Once this artwork is finished, it is displayed both for the pleasure of the commissioner and everyone else who wants to see it.

These ideas can be scaled up and applied to many other situations. Musicians are having a lot of success with using recordings to attract fans who’ll support their work and come to concerts, and some are doing pretty well with taking commissions. That’s hardly surprising, as Mozart and Beethoven worked in a similar fashion. But it’s not such a stretch to see narrative and interactive media succeeding in a similar fashion. How many times have people in the world thought, “I wish someone would make a movie about [this]“, or “I wish there was a video game where you could [do this]“? Films and games are often larger projects than the budget of a single fan can finance, but Gabe Newell of Valve already thinks a bunch of interested fans could fund a game.

It’s not clear if that would work in our current understanding of the world. Would large projects like films and video games still be able to make a profit if they were funded by fans and then released into the wild, depending on the goodwill of more fans to pay for them after the fact?

To be honest, I hope not. I really hope that the financial implications of producing artwork changes so radically that it no longer makes sense for business to be involved. That’s not to say I hope artists will be unable to support themselves; after all, there’s a big difference in making a living and making a profit. As evidenced by most of what comes out of Hollywood and the LA music industry, “content creators” motivated by profit are generally hacks. Artists motivated by living — the world around them, their lives inspiring their art — are the ones who actually produce things that are worthwhile.

That’s what one sees in these artists who draw animal people. They love and care about what they do, and the money is a side benefit. Few of them get particularly rich from what they do, but that doesn’t matter. It’s this kind of situation that reminds me, file-sharing is not killing music, movies, video games, or anything. It’s killing the artistic cancer that is the copyright industry.

In other words, if you’re not going to draw pictures, write music, make movies, or develop games because there’s no money in it, good. You have the wrong attitude.

This, of course, will result in another musical video mashup that will draw the attention of lots of people and get an attempted takedown from YouTube by the Copyright Mafia. Like this one from last year:

I’ll hopefully be able to confuse the Content ID robots this time around, and perhaps have an even more clear-cut case of fair use, by mixing a few different songs together, altering some of their tempos and pitches at various points and resampling and inverting and slershkergerber. That’s totally a word. Shakespeare said it. In his sleep. Once.

Every day, I’ll attempt to do some kind of short writeup. It’ll probably amount to summarizing whatever I tweeted that day, though. If you’d like to keep track of my Anthrocon experience up-to-the-minute, just search for tweets from @XerxesQados tagged #AC09. Or click the link in the previous sentence if you’re lazy.

See you there, if you’re going, and reading this, and stuff.

A legislative aide to Sen. Jane Orie, a former prosecutor who has championed state legislation to safeguard children, was fired Friday after the Attorney General’s Office charged him with sexually propositioning a child online and suggesting the two dress up as animals and have sex.

Alan David Berlin, 40, who was paid $57,340 a year to do legislative services for Orie, used the Internet screen name “alan_panda_bear” and propositioned the 15-year-old boy several times this month, Attorney General Tom Corbett said.
[...]
In profiles posted on Internet sites used for networking among furries, or people who dress as animals, Berlin identified himself as Alan The Panda with interests in baking, board games, classical music, fine dining, movies, travel, wine — and diapers. The cartoon panda on his Pounced.org page wears a diaper.
[...]
Berlin proposed traveling to the boy’s home in Harrisburg to have sex with him in the backyard while his parents slept inside, Corbett said, and requested nude photos of the teen. He suggested a meeting between the child and another adult, and offered to secure a hotel room if he could take pictures of the sex acts, Corbett said.

The boy’s parents became concerned when they discovered sexually graphic messages on their son’s computer and contacted investigators with the Child Predator Unit, which began an investigation on Tuesday.

Well, this means a few things. First, the man is either sick or incredibly stupid not to know that sex with 15-year-olds is not a good idea. Probably both. Second, that kid is either sick or just incredibly desperate to not liberally apply his instant messenger’s “block” button as soon as a 40-year-old man asks him to take his pants off. Third, the requirement that Pounced members be 18 or older is obviously not doing anything, though it’s not like that wasn’t obvious to anyone with a working knowledge of teenagers on the Internet.

It hits close to my heart when I see this kind of awful thing happen to the type of kid I can relate to. I was a 15-year-old furry once, and met the most fun and awesome people on the face of the earth through the furry community. One of the aspects I enjoyed is that, in general, sexuality isn’t taboo to furries like it inexplicably is to most of America. Should someone like Mr. Berlin exploit that sex-is-not-evil-and-actually-quite-nice sort of vibe and prey on inexperienced teenagers, the result can obviously be undesirable.

Or perhaps Mr. Berlin genuinely is a furry, and isn’t just interested in anthropomorphism for sexual reasons. That does not change the fact that he asked a 15-year-old boy for sex. Whether they’d be wearing fursuits or vampire regalia or Star Trek costumes or nothing but cross pendants around their necks, the man is sick. And that kid should know better, but it’s mostly the pedophile’s fault.

Gratuitous picture of Matthew Ebel's FACE.

I’d heard of Mr. Ebel before, having encountered a song he did back in 2001 called “In the MUCK” (MP3). It’s about how the real world is annoying, so let’s all turn ourselves into furry animals because that’s more fun (specifically on FurryMUCK, but subtly enough so that people who have never heard of or joined it can relate to the song. I loved the song, but for some ridiculous reason I’d never bothered to do more research into him. Until now.

Despite being active in the furry community as an osprey (you see, even though ospreys have feathers, we still say they’re “furries” with “fursonas,” because “featheries” wouldn’t imply the same group, and “anthropomorphic animal enthusiasts” is too long, and oh whatever), most of Ebel’s music isn’t as overtly animalistic, but that’s probably a good thing because having to throw in an obligatory animal reference in every song would get old. All of it is just as catchy and awesome, with a style that’s like Jonathan Coulton meets Dangerous Kid and hints of Banooba; comparing him to a signed artist would be so corporate and anti-indie of me, as well as less accurate, but let’s say Jack’s Mannequin with some Ben Folds-y wit if you insist. And he’s awesome.

I got his latest album, Goodbye Planet Earth, which mixes in a good deal of electronic stuff and Hitchhiker’s Guide references. The second track, “I Just Want To Fall In Love” (MP3) is ridiculously catchy and will not get out of my head. Gahhhh. =D

He’s also taken a page from Jonathan Coulton and written a song based on one of Valve‘s games (although his effort wasn’t actually commissioned by Valve for use during their end credits), a Team Fortress 2-inspired song called “I Blame The Spy”. As of this writing, unfortunately, the full version of the song is only available to people who subscribe to his premium music. Kind of an odd decision given that he could get several zillion new fans if video game blogs pointed towards it, something they’d be more likely to do if the whole song were free. Matthew, I know you’ll read this eventually because you follow me on Twitter, so fix that.

But all in all, you want Matthew Ebel in your ears. He gives very good aural pleasure.

For a larger display size, see the film’s official page.

I don’t have much to say about this, as I feel it speaks for itself. I should mention, though, that once I figured out the best workflow, this film took an average of under one hour of work per second of finished animation. It’s 268 seconds, and I completed all the art, animation, and sound editing in less than a week. Granted, about 36 hours of that work happened consecutively; I totally would have done stuff like eat and go to sleep if it wasn’t due at 6 PM yesterday (it was a project for my Editing class). Nonetheless, a 3600:1 ratio of work vs. finished footage is, I’m willing to bet, significantly lower than mainstream hyper-expensive Hollywood productions, and would probably be feasible for a high quality film if only I was working with someone who was good at drawing. I’m not implying that I created a Pixar-quality film, but it’s technically on par with Dragon Ball Z, if not artistically.

Also, Kyle Gabler is awesome for letting me use his music in this. He originally composed the three songs spliced into this for World of Goo, which is way up there with Grim Fandango and Portal on my short list of Games You Should Play Before You Die But Preferably Right Now. So after watching this movie, go get World of Goo. Here are fifteen links to the exact same page at which you can do this.