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henry-atkins-the-3rd-place · 7 years

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Favourite Artists

This is also part of my Summer homework.

Um... Do YouTube Animators count as Artists? Actually, the fact they’re on YouTube makes no difference to if their work was in a cinema.

As a lover of cartoons, the crazy and the weird, I found my favourite place on the Internet!

NewGrounds!

...

Oh... and, YouTube too, I guess...

Lots of animators don’t get enough credit from YouTube because of their algorithim which basically rewards any one channel that uploads content like a never ending money printer.

It’s a shame because there are amazing animators on the internet who only the fans seem to be supporting. Animators like:

SexuaLobster

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawWaOXZtk

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_hBoDz_Qp8

This animator has... questionable taste but that’s what i love about him. His absurd ideas on screen is alot better to me than someone who holds back to make only safe videos. Sometimes his videos do come across as inventive like one of his earlier and my favourite animation of his, ‘Central Bwankers’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DdfLtOrBPU

This is a nutshell video about how bankers seem to be working for themselves rather than being fair. Watching it will fill you in.

A similar video is on the channel ‘FlashGitz’ which I will also be showing in this post further down below.

Weebl’s Stuff

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMqIWmFkXvU

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoLA_BQ4tU

In his first first animation on the channel he described his content as not being random but absurd.

Yes.

Cartoons and songs galore with sketches on the side. This British animator doesn’t stop surprising me with the crazy and dumb stuff they come up with. I can’t give you a theme since it rarely becomes consistent other than the general weirdness that follows his videos wherever he goes.

Vrahno

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NvnHykvjoQ

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDRn0vEJko0&t=37s

I agree. That’s a big jump between a childs attempt at stopanimation with action figures to a multi-layered 3D animation of Godzilla monsters fighting.

This is only part of a much larger scene he’s working on with more monsters in the works which I’m very much looking forward to.

I much prefer 2D animation but 3D animation has a place in my heart when people use it to an effective extent. I even enjoy his twist on the characters from the Godzilla franchise making them have more personality. In fact I can’t remember which Godzilla movie it was but the monsters had voices and spoke to eachother through speechbubbles. I don’t think it carried over into the dub but the communication between the monsters was still there and it passed the occassional nod to each other. Vrahno, however expands on this concept in an amazing way that turns these classic monsters into actual characters!

He does some Bionicle stuff too which isn’t too bad but by nerdiness for Godzilla makes me biased.

Slamacow

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx2pCu5WWL4

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsk7uZI4_NI

Yes. He Is a Minecraft animation channel. But i think his animations stand out.

It’s well above the level of the cheap minecraft animation I see in Minecraft Music videos and at the beginning of multiple channels. Believe it or not but Slamacow’s Minecraft animations have Effort!

As an example of why I like Slamacows animation so much I want to do a comparison test. I’m not going to put an image of one of his animations next to a minecraft music video clip or a minecraft intro clip. I’m putting it next to an image from the official Minecraft Story Mode game! tell me which one looks better. Be honest.

Slamacow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGiSgPP-8mc

Minecraft Story Mode:

The point I’m trying to get at is are the mouths. My god, the mouths!

I get that much like in the lego movie, they wanted all the characters to look like exactly how it would work in real life. McSM’s logic is everything must be squares though. It’s not the skins moving but the entire heads of the characters grow extra squares when they exclaim and every mouth movement makes Mr.Game and Watch have smoother frames per second.

Slamacow may have bendier and curved animation but unlike other LEGO digital animation where it did the same thing, Minecraft is a computer game so since it’s clearly seperate from reality, bending seams more natural. LEGO doesn’t bend at all because its rel and more tangeable version is plastic and everybody knows this so bendy LEGO animations look unnatural.

The LEGO movie made sense making sure that everything animated realistically in a way that even the fans will think it makes sense. Minecraft Story Mode animated all of its characters similar to the actual game but took some liberties which is fine. The face is where I draw the line. The LEGO made the 2D printed faces animated which makes sense. The Minecraft Story Mode could have done the same thing but with pixels which is also fine but instead they made cubic caves they call mouths which looks disgusting to me.

I... think I should probably stop ranting and move on.

ThunderHumor

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bqNAcRlQ6o

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBg4Km4r5Xk

To be fair, alot of this guys stuff doesn’t have a massive amount of substance except for a special few which lead me to this channel in the first place.

i.e. Minecraft Misadventures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ugwz1nEm_Q

This is a short series currently consisting of 4 episodes. Again, not much substance but of course it’s a strange take on the blocky series none the less.

I’m... starting to see a pattern with the stuff i watch. Hopefully that changes soon.

Robert Benfer

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyyS14eyrn4

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GANql36pBSQ

Only one long running series on Roberts channel is the reason I always visit his channel. And it’s ended.

Klay World is a grim, stupid yet somehow loveable show about clay people. And that’s all you need to know.

Have a look. It’s comedy is just slapstick and silly noises with smoothly animated and simple designed clay characters. I’ve seen plenty of videos explaining how a silent or simple designed main character in a videogame makes it easy to identify with. the clay people in Klay World are almost identicle other than the occassional prop or a different coloured clay. This is also similar to how Nostalgia Critic (also YouTube) described Goofy in his video ‘Is Goofy secretly a Badass?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__b8p02SYPo

The last episode he looks at is a classic episode of a whole stadium of classic Goofy characters yelling, beating each other up and being rowdy adults like how classic Goofy was portrayed as. He described the Goofy clones appearing in the episode as ‘not Goofy’ since each character was designed differently but was of the same species and age as Goofy. This meant they could be as violent as they wanted and couldn’t tarnish the official Goofy character since every person throwing a punch, biting and kicking another was similar but not the same. The same goes with the Klay World characters. Some characters have names but everyone else is violent cannonfodder. There to explode, get sliced or shot by another.

Sr Pelo

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD-VbCWzWto

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igfJIZayiy8

Disclaimer: If you watch any of Sr Pelo’s videos, be prepared since alot of his videos include Ear Rape Screeches, Screams and Manic Laughter! You have been warned.

Sr Pelo... is an odd one. He’s the one friend you might have who might not say much or have much to contribute to a conversation without making stupid/silly noises. This is not a jab at him. I think he’s funny.

He’s over the top to every degree. He does some impressions too (discluding his screaming).

I think his designs are a tad like mine. Cartoony but just underdesigned and simple enough to classify and practically an animated doodle.

Zeurel

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR35EkkB_p4

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5Q9hqH9lI

Her videos are short and I really mean short. As in they range from 0.03-7:23 to my knowledge. Believe me, they’re usually just over a minute or under a minute long.

Each short is expressive but to be honest, I like her work but the length of each upload restricts it. Some of her videos are longer and really show that her longer videos can leave a larger impact than... this...

SUDDENLY...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwc8W2NTHwI

For example, these are some of my favourites that are much longer.

Drawn Together~: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX0APeh8e1Q

Robo Western HD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ln9XobU6oc

Yes, it’s not a long list but then again there aren’t alot of long animations she’s done or alot of animations on this channel at all.

RageNineteen

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cszgvxuJkM

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W7mx9mvXfg

British and hilarious. he rarely animates over Game Grumps or other audio like his latest animation. The rest of his videos are shorts or full-length cartoons and occasionally live sketches of either random or comedic sketches like Monty Python.

There is a particular series of videos he’s done that I can’t help but rewatch. A documentary on different subjects called L.I.A.R.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dmIgYEjGh8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiDzG2WmrmY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWLOmVLPEJ0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhcn8Wn95mA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4PAleIlYbs

Not to mention the Action Bunnies Series which is a bunny version of the ASDF Movies in Tomska’s channel. I have purposefully discluded Tomska from this list because apparently he doesn’t animate his own stuff as mentioned in one of his Blogs when he didn’t pay the original animators of the first ASDF Movie. He still makes great sketches though.

RubberNinja

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgoSRjWWVho

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSpZgKBjwmg

RubberNinja, better known nowadays as “Goddammit Ross” on the super-popular gaming channel family known as Game Grumps used to animate before playing video games, being a sadist to his friends and drawing on the Game Grumps show, Doodle Doods.

Ironically one of my cartoon characters I drew for fun years ago was also called Doodle Dude. not likely I’ll be bringing that back anytime soon.

There’s not alot of animations on his channel. Neither do many of them have a story to tell. It’s mainly just random humour which I like but I prefer the other stuff he’s helped with on Game Grumps and in the music done by the band one of the Game Grumps members is part of ‘Ninja Sex Party’ and the short series of video game songs, ‘StarBomb’.

Piemations

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_04xi7ddh8

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX3CY4XQZ5g

Piemations is funny and can clearly write funny sketches with clear punchlines and setups as well as being good at random humor as well.

Alot of his stuff is based off video games and in some cases, movies, so alot of his humor will also be in-jokes about the game and characters which might catch others offguard.

Apart from that he’s a great comedian whose got a clear animating style and a very clear progression in how his animation with virtualy no changes in his designs have gotten better.

As an example he re-animated his first animation that was a half minute joke about the Spy from the popular Valve Steam game, ‘Team Fortress 2′, AKA ‘TF2′.

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX3CY4XQZ5g

Re-animated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaeFLz0Eu6E

PikaPetey Animations

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-WFmq9hE9c

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y8DQa9H3Cw

Pika has a short library of animations which are either Pikachu themed or My Little Pony. Some of the videos are for conventions, some are for fun.

Unfortunatley only five videos on this channel are finished and has a any substance or jokes rather:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esbthhiFglQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YHA3EwXhFY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmvwOYw4oz0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9btOIfDrKn8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVnJq4QXgFA

I really like Pika’s sense of humour but it’s sad to see it spread to thinly like this.

TwistedGrimTV

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfzbCg3sdco

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rrK0xPzpvo

TwistedGrim is Grim. Well, not really all the time. It’s more or less themed grim. Like how years ago there weren’t horror games like we know them that are almost just like the movies. There were Halloween themed games. Normal games with scary aesthetics but not scary gameplay like Alien Isolation does.

It’s funny, still, and reminds me of Zeurels work from earlier. It has a similar artstyle and comedy but devels only a pinky toe into the Grim theme the channels named after.

Actually, not many of the videos on the channel are Grim or even Grim themed at all! The latest videos are Overwatch animations while probably 35-40% of the videos are remotley Grim related.

Pixlpit

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7pGdKTw0mU

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8PI6FWc-1Q

Yet another 3D animator with an original style.

I like to make the correlation between Funko Pop figures and PixlPit’s models that he uses for his animations since they all have almost exactly the same style if it wasn’t for the defining features they are given.

I described the horrendous mouths of the characters in Minecraft Story Mode as “every mouth movement makes Mr.Game and Watch have smoother frames per second.”. Some of the movements in PixlPit’s animation is similar except alot of the movements are smooth at times too. An interesting blend.

I mentioned earlier that PixlPit’s characters are almost all clones of each other other than their defining features and I compared them to Funko Pop figures but I noticed while browsing YouTube that there is an animator who has character designs that look practically identical to Funko Pops figures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3B4fMC_71A&t=29s

Seanzoz

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7LZGy5QlvI

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajMzpiyZ4GA

If I recall, the method used in Seanzoz’s animations is basically like stick figures with detailed limbs. Not drawn characters but files containing limb and hand sprites to be moved but connected to other sprites. Like a puppet. This method is albeit, a bit lazy since a prime example I remember it being used in main stream media is Johnny Test on Cartoon Network (and was awful), but the difference here is Seanzoz makes highly detailed sprites for each characters as well as design backgrounds and foregrounds that are also highly detailed.

It’s as if someone got the Mona Lisa (or some other painting that has time and effort put into it) and did the same thing by moving her arms, hands and head on pivots.

The comedy is very much there as well but all the videos he makes is a parody off a TV show or video game.

What’s nice is he makes long videos with well-written comedy in them and a consistent rate of quality. What’s annoying is he isn’t the only one who does this making him not as unique as I’d hoped he would.

The channel ‘How it should have ended’ Makes animations in the exact same fashion as well as the exact same style of comedy as well. as in everything is they do is what Seanzoz does too.

Vivziepop

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGW7aE14m7o

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLqtHTXyPZs

To be frank, I love her drawing style. It looks amazing. No doubt. Annoyingly she doesn’t animate often anymore. She mostly just does speed art now. For others who draw only it might be nice but I prefer seeing someone whose talented enough to take art and make it move naturally without a loss in quality. That takes skill. Vivziepop has animated alot before. As proof she made a music video of Kesha’s ‘Die Young’ and it’s fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKNuZovuSw

But that’s nothing less to her credit. Her art style is sharp and unique as well as eye catching. The same goes for her animating skills. As unfortunate as it is that she doesn’t animate often, she still knows her stuff.

Screwits

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1stb_ILUa0

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItOPzuIRLVI

9 videos in total. All animations... What a track record...

Screwits art style is very similar to the artstyle you’ll find on NewGrounds.com. The outlines are thick, black lines, they rarely have shading and the comedy varies from random/stupid humour to more teenage humour with swearing and sex jokes.

You know, after describing his animation and NewGrounds animation like this I now realise how much of a lie Screwits’ YouTube logo is. It’s shaded, it has a variation of other colours that pop out and look alike to Vivziepop’s colour pallete. Nothing about it reflects his animation style at all.

I mean. I do like his comedy and animation but it somehow seems... under-developed. Another YouTuber and Animator on NewGrounds is EgoRaptor (who will also appear later on this list) who has developed his skills amazingly to the point that you can see that even his art style changes between cartoons. but I’ll be talking more about that later.

Tithinian

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXDzmhl-7bM

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOzJWZNI97U

Tithinian has an odd method of animating that... there is no animating sometimes. Well... what I mean is that sometimes there are fluent moments where things move and of course mouths move smoothly as well but sometimes for those slower moments he has an image of what the character would look like and not change from that until the character emotes again. The transition between those frames would be instant but the character would always bounce a little by being stretched before looking normal again. I’ve seen alot on animators on YouTube do this. Especially for the Game Grumps animated videos which Tithinian also falls into the catergory of for the most part.

Don’t see what I mean? Here’s an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIEkjsCZ7jU

Pay very close attention to all the characters and keep in mind how I described them. You’ll see what I mean. It’s only Semi-Animated.

But despite that, I think it’s always interesting to watch all of his videos just for the designs he gives all the characters. Especially when the characters yell, scream or get angry. It’s like just letting me or him do what they will with a notepad and pen which usually leads to these expressive, exaggerated and mostly crude drawings of the characters. It’s a whole gallery!

Pegbarians

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4P88lLxYxQ

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMEn1OfEGo4

Pegbarians is... an odd channel to describe. They make animations but they seem... boringish... Let me explain.

When I think of main stream animations, I think of Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks and their sensible and believable worlds. I use ‘sensible’ in the most broadest of terms. Despite how they’ve made worlds of talking cars, singing cats and adventures of ogres and donkeys, they have a consistent and realistic atmosphere. Nothing is just random and nothing happens to take away from a current moment of drama.

When I think about the Internets animation from animators outside of the main stream, I list all the different animators that also appear on this list. They’re crazy, insane, creative and literally anything could happen!

However, there is a third place to look. Advertising.

I’m talking about 3D models of low rendering,

High quality 3D animation

and 2D animation commonly found on the internet as well.

This kind of animation is too similar to what Pegbarians do which makes them feel more... manufactured than creative.

I enjoy their content but the plan style with a lack of outlines or expressive imagery just makes it look like what’s actually meant to be an animation that advertisers would want their brand represented by rather than another animator or another comedy sketch writer who can freely speak their mind even if it includes swears. Like they designed themselves to be semi-enjoyable for the public and just safe enough for ad revenue to be at its best.

Moleman

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdupAtbg6Es

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqU7qktIruc

It’s odd why there was such a change in art style and medium in a span of only 10 videos but they’re all good videos.

There’s the 3D model videos that either look like digital muppets or have mouths like sock puppets, and there’s simple 2D animation.

I have no complaints. Although the majority of her videos are just game grumps animations, they still prove to be funny, intresting in design and even gets across her unique style that I look at and immediatley know as, Moleman’s.

MattyBurrito MB

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8amyRgcL80

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q3QtKShCQI

This is a yes and no kind of channel. His comedy is great, his animation and art style are great as well but somehow I can’t shake the feeling that he could be doing better... wait... I know what it is now!

Most of the time there’s a lack in movement other than the odd moment. Oh My God. He’s Tithinian! Just less expressive and absurd with his drawings.

Yup. That pretty much sums him up. He needs to add more animation than he already is or make his art style more interesting. I... feel like I’m making unessecary demands.

NotePaddle

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIPDlJRZwEY

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9UPwSrYVlY

Now this is what I’m talking about! Cartoony visuals with expressive designs, bright colours and proper comedy to boot even though it’s mostly slapstick and silent other than the odd speech bubble!

it’s what I love about cartoons to begin with. The ability to take anything in existance and give it a remarkable twist to shift anything about it like its character and design as well as invent something entirely new! Animation and drawing as well as all mediums of art is meant as an escapism from reality. That fact alone is why I hate soap operas on TV or in animation. Real life can be sad and depressing which is the entire reason we turn to the screen or pages of a book. Having that new world reflect that sadness and depression back at us is redundent unless it offers us something more to think about or look at.

NotePaddle hits the nail right on the head for me.

Joe

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDijRDj_8BY

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2APuxubWSmE

Ukino Joe (or Joe as he calls himself now) is exactly what I described as what I think animation on the internet is like by nature. Random, weird and creative as well as expressive.

Joe has a show right now in collaboration with Danielle Kogan called ’Great the show’.

There’s no pattern or rhyme or reason to his content. It’s meant to be random and strange but strangley tame at the same time. It usually shifts from art style to art style every so often while still adhering to the customary ‘Joe’ style.

Im not even a Panda

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH3VJ25waJM

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8ezJzVl4V4

Another Game Grumps animation channel. As much as I enjoy the Game Grumps and their comedy, I think YouTube may be a little oversaturated with the GGAnimators. I’m fine with alot of them because they sometimes take the audio and change the entire situation of it from its original recording. Like this one. The audio came from their gameplay of Resident Evil but they changed the context in the animation to take place in ‘The Legend of Zelda: WindWaker’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3B4fMC_71A&t=64s

Surprisingly this is the same animation I described as having the near law suit design to Funko Pop’s figures.

There are other GGAnimators who just put a fun spin on their animation that makes it even more fun to look at than just animating 2 people in a living room in front of a TV with a games controller in their hands.

InEaP’s animations are a little underwhelming but still get a somewhat good animation across. So they’re neither creative or expressive unfortunatley. It’s sort of an iconic design since the majority of their animations use a thin brush tool on the outline but then again that’s not very defining in the grand scheme of things.

Martina McKenzie

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=561zkbseprY

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rjjlFzrCME

The early stuff she’s done isn’t very interesting but the later stuff (more specifically the Undertale animations) are greatly animated, written and pop out like a cartoon you’d expect would be designed. With bright colours and thick black lines. I’ve already gone over this diatribe so I’ll be moving on.

Forrestfire101

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbOYPQ1So_c&t=64s

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JbauUAjuSA

This was the first animation channel I watched and enjoyed about... 12 years ago probably. He has been doing LEGO animation for a long time now and I say he’s practically innovative. While other channel have simple LEGO animation with barely any natural movements, FF101 was green screening bricks to make minifigures jump and fly instead of hanging them from string or using translucent LEGO stick pieces. That and he draws mouths moving on each frame using... probably MS paint. Primetive but effective. In fact I think there was an entire video dedicated to it on his second channel, ForrestFire1001.

...

Okay. Apparently it doesn’t exist anymore or I just can’t find it. I specifically remember he showed off his bendy tripod thing in it. However I did find this short SFX breakdown video he made which is just as useful in this context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqztgE50sz8

Hot Diggedy Demon

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w2cFhiobko

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSagkXsX8YA

Max’s videos have a clear theme. Crude humour with hints of self-actualisation and realisation of the depressing and inevitable end of our lives as well as not turning its head from the existance of the blemishes on the face of humanity. And it’s hilarious.

He knows how to be satirical. He knows how to create a scenario that would seem cruel or sad but he knows most of all how to make fun of it. He’s wacky and cartoony with the edge that will take you off guard. Sometimes even impulsive but definitely reminds you that the world and our lives can or will be shit awful but it enlightens everyone to enjoy it anyway despite that grueling fact.

He’s surprisingly good at translating his designs from 2D to 3D as well.

As I’m also a drawing coneseiur who prefers drawing by hand, I’ve tried myself to translate my drawing style to 3D. It’s, NOT, easy. But somehow Max pulled it off in his recent series, Brain Dump. A surprisingly intelligent but equally as immature as you’d expect from his humour as he analysis movies, TV and other... stuff.

Eddsworld

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxtRL1tclds

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdNRqOMaH68

Starting on NewGrounds and even made a short for the BBC Comedy channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eahA3dB-eqQ

This is all I think of when I think about British cartoons now because of how much it reflects Britain throgh its classic slapstick, writing and cultural references.

God rest his soul when the original animator, Edd Gould, died of Cancer. He was even half way animating part 1 of a 2 parter animation before he died. So I suppose he died how he lived. Doing what he loved. Animating.

In his name, his friends continued his legacy by finishing his work and ending the series before handing the rights back over to Edds family. It couldn’t have been done without the help from the fans who supported them.

This is pretty much the most interesting animator on the internet to me because of its story. In Edds life and in Edds wacky world he put so much effort into.

aMAX Animations

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIasEKIH2XI

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11jy0LfIpiI

I could swear that all of his animations are made in MS Paint.

Alot of his stuff is either Game Grumps or Vinesauce animated content. What’s different is that even though his drawings are realistic and relate to the story at hand, it still has a charm to it. He adds the necessary details and adds unecessary details that really brings together the scene brilliantly! Some great examples was the reflection of Joels childhood friend gone sociopath in his eyes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9kDJyk5H_I

The snow storm foreground at a bus stop in Sweden:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8wYdg7mKtc&t=553s

And the flashing of red and white from the computer screen lighting up the diml classroom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7lBwWayhVE

It’s fantastic and somehow he did it in probably MS Paint. By far the best animator in terms of setting the scene.

Don’t hug me .I’m scared

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbL-NSkXnl8

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hIKKYv_3Ic

Okay. This channel isn’t exclusivley animation. Instead it’s... actually, I’m not sure.

It has some animation in both stopmotion and 3D but it’s mostly puppets and disturbing imagery. Not really something to go into though without preparation.

It’s a twist on the Muppets and Sesame Street and gives a brilliant commentary on TV productions capatilising off childrens programs and what-not. Definitley something to look into but personally I prefer the Film Theory channels take on it.

Harry Partridge

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krRFlzwnw3U

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0cZY7ef_mk

Who here remembers the old Disney movies.

Aristocats

Cinderella

Beauty and the Beast

The Fox and the Hound

Lady and the Tramp

The cartoony yet realistic hand drawn movies. The main stream classic stuff.

Harry Partridge is the Internet version. How amazing is that?! His animation is the most amazing quality I’ve ever seen on YouTube since it looks just like something Disney could do but in Flash. It’s ridiculous!

Egoraptor

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAioZzuhOQg

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77_4n7CeiHA

Egoraptor is one of those defining animators on YouTube who started on NewGrounds. Over the years he’s evolved over time and along with it his comedy and art style. But especially his art style. A good way to illustrate this is this short fan animation that presents some of his art styles in one shot by morphing Dan on screen between them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8ycDu-mMXg

It’s not long but it makes some sense.

Alan Becker

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhikdD6Hf2M

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxM1cnphLpw

To me this is one of the most impressive channel in terms of technicality. His most famous series ‘Animator Vs.’ features a stick figure gone rogue and the computers user has to combat this combatant collection of lines from destroying his computer using the computer itself and even other stick figures. There are other episodes that don’t feature the user and instead the stick figures finding other programs and websites to play with that still leads to even more trouble. Overall it’s animated amazingly and creativley since it uses everything about the PC that you can think of to the animations advantage.

FlashGitz

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFnFKu9QqoA

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSxQnZ3TM8

FlashGitz is expressive in more than one way. Through their animation they have expressive visuals (of course). But they’re more expressive through their writing. The first video they uploaded was of their view on what GameWorkshop (The company responsible for the Warhammer franchise) are thinking at the board meetings. This video is to ‘express’ how the community felt from their perspective about the excessivly high price of their plastic models which were often given game breaking statistics in the game.

Another video they made expressed what they thought feminists and social rights activists were to them stereotypically thanks to the bad apples ruining the bunch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XARMbTEGVDk

The same for being Politically Correct:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg0D1PpgCXs

Aaand the unreliability of online information and the boredom of using conventional means of information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqqQT-CcTsU

Not to mention the console wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqucCVzP-Og

And many more... Not to mention some random stuff and sketches.

OneyNG

Latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1RpLoLyi6c

First: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qutm9kaCV8

Much like his first video, this is indeed a random channel. The epitome of silly. He makes structured videos in many cases but somehow still manages to let it slide down the slippery slope of silly without end. It’s odd. It’s perculier. But most of all it’s him.

I agree that him in real life would probably be like watching one of his cartoons. Stupid but funny to the better people of the internet... probably.

I... like him. Don’t judge my standards please.

I feel like in the beginning I wasn’t clear about what my standards are to begin with but I’ve slowly revealed it bit by bit within this post. Let me give you a clear picture then.

What I love about animation, drawing and art in general is the ability to... well, I think Seto Kaiba from the recent Yu*Gi*Oh! movie does it justice.

It’s true. It upsets me when people use it not to create but to make something boring. Usually to point at a real world problem that you just know will depress you. This medium should be used to express yourself, represent something amazing. Indulge in the escapism it allows you and make sure to spend that time wisely to make an imprint that’s unforgettable. However you can do both at the same time. Be creative and depressing.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

This is a perfect example of an art medium changing the world amazingly through a creative and imaginative story but still sends out a message and a point on how the working class suffer the most as well as the children that connected to the lords and ladies and changed society as they knew it.

However a skeleton in a pile of rubbish and a cardboard box marked ‘Home’ will not... It’s just depressing...

I should also point out what’s most important to me in art. An art style. I didn’t take GCSE Art for a reason. They’d force me to do realistic images and glue stuff to paper and the like. Not my idea of fun in my opinion. I enjoy all these animators because of their unique styles. They bring so much to their viewers through the eyes and minds of their fantastic worlds and how they perseve reality through them in their own wacky ways. And that’s what I love.

P.S. NewGrounds isn’t really my favourite place. It was just a joke. It’s still good but YouTube is easier to use since having flash isn’t a must.

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topworldhistory · 5 years

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Edison's genius was improving on others' technologies and making them more practical for the general public.

Thomas Edison applied for his first patent in 1868, when he was just 21 years old. The famous inventor’s first brainchild was for a device that recorded legislative votes. That was just the start of a career in which he would obtain 1,093 U.S. patents, in addition to another 500 to 600 applications that he either didn’t finish or were rejected. But Edison’s greatest invention may have been developing a new process for coming up with inventions.

“When Edison raised enormous capital, built a laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., and hired a staff of several dozen, each with distinct talents, he pioneered what became the modern corporate research and development process,” explains Ernest Freeberg, a historian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and author of The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America.

“He considered it an invention factory, one that would produce surprising new products at a regular rate.”

In many cases, Edison’s genius was taking a new technology that someone else had pioneered and developing a superior way of doing the same thing. “An invention not only has to work fairly well, but it has to be something that the market wants and can afford to buy. Edison understood that as well as anyone in his day,” says Freeberg.

Below are some of Edison’s most significant inventions.

Automatic Telegraph

Thomas Edison pictured operating a telegraph machine.

While Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph in the 1830s and 1840s made it possible for the first time to communicate over long distances, the device had its drawbacks. An operator had to listen to incoming dots and dashes in Morse code, which slowed messages to a speed of 25 to 40 words per minute. A British system for automatically printing code in ink on paper only achieved 120 words tops.

Between 1870 and 1874, Edison developed a vastly superior system, in which a telegraph receiver utilized a metal stylus to mark chemically-treated paper, which then could be run through a typewriter-like device. It was capable of recording up to 1,000 words a minute, which made it possible to send long messages quickly.

Carbon Telephone Transmitter

Cross-section of Edison's lamp-black button telephone transmitter.

It was Alexander Graham Bell who patented the telephone in 1876. But Edison, with his knack for building upon others’ innovations, found a way to improve Bell’s transmitter, which was limited in how far apart phones could be by weak electrical current. Edison got the idea of using a battery to provide current on the phone line and to control its strength by using carbon to vary the resistance. To do that, he designed a transmitter in which a small piece of lampblack (a black carbon made from soot) was placed behind the diaphragm. When someone spoke into the phone, the sound waves moved the diaphragm, and the pressure on the lampblack changed. Edison later replaced the lampblack with granules made from coal—a basic design that was used until the 1980s.

The Light Bulb

Edison's filament lamp, with a glass bulb containing a partial vacuum.

Contrary to popular belief, Edison didn’t actually invent the incandescent light bulb. But he invented and marketed a design that was the first to be long-lasting enough to be practical for widespread use.

“Edison was one of a half dozen who were putting the elements of a viable lighting system together in those years, and since Edison was late to the race, he benefited from all his predecessors and rivals,” Freeberg explains.

In the late 1870s, Edison designed a vacuum bulb, in which a metal filament could be heated to create light. One night, after absent-mindedly rolling between his fingers a piece of lampblack, the material he used in his telephone receiver, he got the idea for switching to a carbonized filament. After initially using carbonized cardboard, he began experimenting with other materials, and eventually settled upon bamboo, which possessed long fibers that made it more durable. Eventually, the combination of bamboo filaments and an improved vacuum pump that removed air more effectively enabled Edison to increase the lifetime of bulbs to approximately 1,200 hours.

Phonograph

Thomas Edison pictured with his phonograph.

While developing his telephone transmitter, Edison got the idea of creating a machine that could record and play back telephone messages. That notion led him to imagine being able to record not just voices, but music and other sounds, by using sound to vibrate a diaphragm and push a stylus that made indentations on a cylinder covered with wax paper that was being turned by a crank.

In late 1877, he got a machinist to build the device, using tin foil instead of wax, and Edison recorded the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The following year, he was granted a patent for the design, which also included a lighter needle to find the groves and transmit vibrations to a second diaphragm, which recreated the person’s voice.

Edison’s phonograph created a sensation and helped enhance his reputation as a great inventor. Eventually, he began to market and sell the machines and cylinder records, reverting again to using wax. But by the early 1900s, the Victor Talking Machine Company’s phonographs that played discs surpassed Edison’s cylinder phonographs in popularity. Even though cylinders produced better-quality sound, the early discs had a big advantage in that they could fit four minutes of music, compared to the two minutes that could fit on a cylinder.

Movie Camera and Viewer

A Kinetograph camera, 1912.

In the late 1880s, Edison supervised his lab’s development of a technology “that does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” Most of the work on the Kinetograph, an early movie camera, and the Kinetoscope, a single-person peephole movie viewer, was actually performed by Edison’s employee William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson. Movies became a big industry and Edison’s camera and viewer were quickly replaced by innovations such as the Lumière Cinématographe, a combination camera, printer and projector that allowed audiences to watch a film together. But Edison adjusted and his company became a thriving early movie studio, churning out scores of silent films between the 1890s and 1918, when it shut down production.

Alkaline Storage Battery

When the automobile was developed in the late 1800s, electric vehicles were more popular than those equipped with gasoline-burning internal combustion engines. But early electric cars had a big drawback—the batteries they used were heavy and tended to leak acid, which corroded the cars’ interiors.

Edison decided to take on the challenge of inventing a lighter, more dependable and more powerful battery. After conducting extensive research and the embarrassing flop of an early design, Edison came up with a reliable alkaline battery, and in 1910 began production of it. His work, however, was soon overshadowed by Henry Ford’s development of the inexpensive Model T car that ran on an internal combustion engine. Nevertheless, Edison’s storage battery was used in mining lamps, trains and submarines and turned into the most successful product of Edison’s later career.

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/2TE0gXm March 06, 2020 at 09:51PM

#Worldhistory

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businessweekme · 6 years

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Can This Man Make His Video Gaming Team a $1bn Business?

How Jack Etienne plans to turn his video gaming team into a $1bn business.

Jack Etienne had reinvented himself. He’d gone from an eager photocopier salesman with an obsessive evening-and-weekends video game habit to the chief executive officer at a professional video-game-playing company that generates millions of dollars a year in sponsorships. In 2017, he committed more than $30 million in investment funds buying a spot in two of the world’s top esports leagues, where pro video gamers compete in front of huge audiences. Now those Silicon Valley investors expect him to turn his team, Cloud9, into a global entertainment business. So, this April, searching for clues as to how he might do that, Etienne flew to New Orleans to experience WrestleMania 34.

He watched the wrestling, but he also wanted to see how the executives guided advertisers through this strange world. One afternoon, Etienne took his seat at the WWE’s Business Partner Summit. There, a wrestler named Elias strummed a guitar and performed an ode to brands. In fewer than two minutes, Elias name-checked KFC, Snickers, YouTube, Snapchat, Mattel, Old Spice, NBC, Sony and China’s PPTV. It was a sales master class. Etienne saw that the WWE knew how to hold advertisers’ hands, inculcating them in the appeal of their crazy characters under the guise of a business update. The WWE had figured out how to turn fake wrestling into a business worth $6.1 billion.

Like the WWE did with professional wrestling decades ago, Etienne is fighting to convince major companies that his oddball fan base has just as much money to spend as other sports lovers. If the WWE could persuade rich guys that young men watching other men perform dramatized violence was a good investment, so could Etienne.

There are early signs of Cloud9’s promise. Last year, Etienne convinced the WWE, along with some of the technology world’s top investors, that video game competitions were worth their money. Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, and Craft Ventures wrote him the biggest checks, with more funds coming in from former Facebook Inc. executive Chamath Palihapitiya and Reddit Inc. co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Altogether they poured $28 million into Cloud9, the team Etienne founded in 2013 by buying a group of League of Legends players out of their contracts for less than $20,000.

Cloud9, C9 for short, is the most popular esports team in North America, according to Nielsen Esports, a market research group. The team, based in Santa Monica, California, has hundreds of wins playing more than a dozen video games. Cloud9 has a roster of more than 70 players, many of them living in team-owned dormitory-style housing, earning anywhere from a few thousand dollars a week to hundreds of thousands a year playing video games professionally.

Can Etienne be the first person to turn his team into a $1 billion business? “There is no founder like Jack in all of esports,” said Brian Singerman, who led Founders Fund’s investment in Cloud9. “He’s the type of person people like to work for and play for. And he just works like crazy and loves what he does.”

But there are many hurdles ahead for Etienne. For one, there’s the money: He spent millions to buy his way into a select group of teams that can compete in the top gaming tournaments, and there’s no guarantee it’ll recoup that cost. Cloud9 and other teams are working together with game developers to secure lucrative distribution rights for online streaming and television. Cloud9 is also working to land valuable marketing deals. There’s also the pressing challenge of making esports easier to watch so people besides hardcore gamers can understand what’s going on. In addition to all that, Etienne couldn’t stop worrying about Sneaky.

People have been playing video games competitively since the invention of the arcade in the early 1970s. In the late 1990s, the strategy game StarCraft and the shooter Counter-Strike were mainstays at neighborhood LAN (local area network) parties. Friends lugged their desktop computers over to whoever’s parents had the nicest house and battled it out in the early morning hours. As the internet sped up, video games moved online. In 2004, the science-fiction shooting game Halo 2 and the fantasy game World of Warcraft revolutionized what it looked like to play video games online with friends. In those halcyon days, people who took their games seriously trekked to small tournaments to compete for bragging rights and token prize money.

Today, the best players in the world play 14 hours a day and can make decent to spectacular money. Sneaky, a moppy-haired gamer whose real name is Zachary Scuderi, is one of them. He’s among Etienne’s star players. Cloud9 pays him well above $100,000 a year, though it won’t say exactly how much, and he makes many tens of thousands on his own from people paying to watch his stream on Twitch, Amazon.com Inc.’s video game streaming network. Sneaky has earned more than 85 million views on Twitch by making gaming look easy, but Etienne was starting to worry that his star had lost his focus.

While Sneaky coasts through life on his extraordinary ability to click quickly, earning fans with his slacker, every-man charm, Etienne buzzes with energy, having muscled his way to the top of the gaming industry with the sheer force of his personality. At Xerox Corp., Etienne, a burly, bearded, friendly-faced man, sold large printers, photocopiers and other services to law firms and insurance companies. Despite the tedium, he excelled. His experience selling that most corporate of items—a few years after the characters in Office Space took a baseball bat to the printer/copier—taught him how to pitch just about anything.

But it was the time he spent outside of work in the mid-2000s that would be the guiding force in his life. Every night, Etienne obsessed over World of Warcraft, and he eventually began recruiting players for his top-ranked guild—a group of dozens of players who worked together to slay monsters and harvest precious weapons. “I was always out there looking at current talent,” Etienne said. He signed copy machine deals during the day and secured elite dragon slayers by night. “There was no money involved. It was competitive, and it mattered a lot to me,” he said.

Growing tired of his day job, Etienne spent a lot of time on Curse, a gamer tip site. After seeing a posting for a sales position there, Etienne landed the job. A year later, he jumped ship to Crunchyroll, an anime streaming site, to build a sales team. (One of his friends on World of Warcraft introduced him to the CEO.) He generated $16 million in sales during his last year at the company, he said. A couple years into that job, one of the people who bought advertising space from Etienne told him that he should help out a then 17-year-old kid named Andy Dinh. Etienne and Dinh would go on to become powerbrokers in the esports world—and rivals. But at first, they were friends.

Dinh had created a website called SoloMid that had guides on how to play League of Legends’ dozens of different characters. The site was growing more popular than he knew what to do with. Etienne started giving him advice and then helping him sell ads on the side. SoloMid’s advertising quickly climbed from $3,000 a month to $80,000 and kept growing from there, Etienne said. “Jack helped sign some of our very first partners,” Dinh said. “Jack listens, he’s smart, he’s emotionally intelligent and I learned a lot from him.”

Etienne signed on to manage Dinh’s team, called Team SoloMid, in 2011. Eventually, Etienne’s boss told him to quit the side gig. Etienne did but soon regretted it. Within months, he decided to quit his day job instead and form his own team.

In 2013, he spent $23,000 on a five-player team of professional League of Legends players with a small following. Soon, he had a mutiny on his hands. The players had wanted one of their friends to buy them, and so instead of fighting, Etienne arranged a sale and then bought the contracts of another group of players. The team chose a new name: Cloud9.

Sneaky was 19 years old and had just moved to Los Angeles from Boca Raton, Florida, to try making it as a professional. He shared a room with three other gamers and was making $500 a month. After buying the team, Etienne took on a parental role for some of the players, especially younger ones like Sneaky. When he moved the team to San Jose, California, Etienne picked up Sneaky from the airport. The owner rented an apartment for the team to live in and kept the fridge stocked. When the players clogged the toilet, Etienne brought them a plunger.

That summer, in 2013, Sneaky and his teammates went on a surprise run and made it to the League of Legends championships. Etienne got more than his money’s worth. A winning team made signing sponsors much easier. The culmination of the following season, in 2014, was bittersweet. Cloud9 lost 3-to-2 to Dinh’s Team SoloMid.

League of Legends is a war between two teams of five players each. The winner is decided by which team’s archer, mage, monster, warrior and healer can work together to murder their enemies and destroy their opponents’ base. To be a dominant force in League of Legends, you need to be really good at clicking and typing quickly and precisely, while predicting your opponent’s movements and coordinating with your team. It requires incessant practice.

To watch Sneaky play League of Legends is to watch someone transform the game’s most vulnerable characters into powerful opponent-destroyers. It’s satisfying to watch someone do it so effortlessly.

Millions of people watch Sneaky play for hours on Twitch while he delivers a dour running monologue. “The main reason I started streaming more was because I talked to Jack with the team, and we were actually wanting higher salaries,” Sneaky said. Etienne suggested they make extra cash on Twitch, where spectators could pay him for advice on in-game weapons and characters, Sneaky said. He’s required to plug Cloud9’s sponsors from time to time, and that’s why his legions of fans are so important to the team. When the U.S. Air Force Reserve ran ads during his Twitch stream last year, Sneaky would stand up and salute, earning many lulz from his fans.

Under Etienne, Sneaky quickly became the cornerstone of Cloud9. While Sneaky won game after game, Etienne recruited top players around him—and he secured investors to buy their way into the top League of Legend competition. Over the years, other players came and went. But Sneaky remained, and that was good for business.

For months, Etienne grew convinced that Sneaky was taking an increasingly lackadaisical approach while playing with his teammates. And in June, Etienne had had enough, announcing he was benching Sneaky along with two other top players. “We’re looking for players to always be hungry,” Etienne said.

Sneaky’s public reaction was muted. He began playing on Cloud9’s second-tier team with the promise that he could try to earn his way back onto the main team. On Twitter, the team posted this message: “No one said it was easy being a C9 fan. We appreciate everyone who sticks with us regardless of what changes are made.” The message: Cloud9 is bigger than any one player.

The same month that Etienne demoted Sneaky, he announced a major business deal with Red Bull, and soon its logo was plastered all over the team’s jerseys. A national advertiser was betting on Cloud9.

In June, Etienne held a meeting with his investors modeled after the WWE. Thirty top executives showed up to one of his team houses in Burbank, California, to get an update on the business. They eagerly boarded a bus to the Blizzard Arena nestled between Warner Bros. and Walt Disney studios to watch a Cloud9 team play Overwatch, a game where friendly-faced, gun-wielding avatars blast each other to bits over a small plot of land. Cloud9 won and a month later, won the national tournament broadcast on ESPN.

Meanwhile, with Sneaky off the premier League of Legends team, Cloud9 lost four out of five games at the start of the season. Etienne relented and put Sneaky back on the main roster.

The post Can This Man Make His Video Gaming Team a $1bn Business? appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

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#Entertainment #business #Cloud9 #esports #Jack Etienne #video gaming

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merrynewtonmas · 7 years

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December 28th - Season of Reason Day 3 - Books

December 28th Season of Reason Day 4 BOOKS: An Information Revolution Until the invention and widespread use of the Internet, books and paper were humanity's most valuable tools to create and document scientific progress. The use of paper allowed human beings to talk to people across the globe and through time. The invention of the Printing Press gave the invention of writing and the technology of paper a mass audience. This combination of paper and printing made our modern world possible. Today's Celebration Today's Season of Reason activity is simple, honor the inventions of paper and the printing press by sharing a book. An actual book with paper, ink, and binding. The book you share should be something that you have read that means something to you. Share what books you gave and tell us why @merrynewtonmas. Use #newtonmas #newbook to tell all of your friends the cool books that you receive today. Books and Paper Today we are going to recognize the impact of the Printing Press in the advancement of science and technology. Specifically, we are going to talk about moveable type printing which is defined as a printing press that has the ability to take letters and characters in and out of the printing plate and move them around to form a different word on another plate. It may seem like a small difference between a Printing Press with a fixed plate but the ability to to swap letters and words out of a plate and put them into a new one caused an explosion of books in the medieval world. If you ask a group of 100 people , “who invented the Printing Press?” most will answer Johanes Gutenberg. Actually I hope that they answer Gutenberg. I fear that many of the answers will be “I don’t know” or incorrect because of some fuzzy memory they have from middle school. I guess it really doesn’t matter because Gutenberg wasn’t the first person to invent a moveable type Printing Press. Just to be clear, Gutenberg did independently invent his printing press in around 1450 in Europe but he wasn’t the first to do it. That honor goes to a Chinese inventor named Bi Sheng. Bi Sheng was a man of “unofficial position” during the Song dynasty meaning he did not take the exams to become a scholar-official but still worked for the government in some some capacity. Sometime after 1042 he invented the first moveable type Printing Press in the world. The first generation of presses used either wood cut or ceramic characters and the ceramic type soon won out because the wood characters were not hardy enough to be used more than a few times. Using ceramic makes sense if you think about it because the Chinese were world leaders at making porcelain and other pottery at that point in time. So why do most textbooks, history teachers, and state curriculum guides hold to the notion that Johannes Gutenberg is the inventor of the moveable type Printing Press? Is it because the United States is culturally oriented to Europe instead of China? Is it because Gutenberg’s press was more versatile and durable because he made his moveable characters with metal and Bi Sheng with ceramics? Is it because of the self imposed isolation of the Ming empire after the Mongol takeover of China? A strong case has been made by more than one academic for each of these reasons. Allow me to advance my not so original idea as to why Bi Sheng is not recognized as the inventor of the Printing Press. That reason is simple, Chinese is hard. Functional literacy in Chinese demands knowledge of between 3000 and 4000 characters. Historians reading ancient texts have to know over ten thousand words in order to understand what they are reading because, ya know, language changes over time as people invent and discard words. The language that the Chinese use is not based on sounds like English. It started as pictograms and evolved into characters that meant specific things. Symbols were combined to create new words and the process took on a life of its own as the years went by. There is more to it than what I just described but for the purposes of our discussion that is what you need to know. There is an advantage to this language structure. The symbols and characters spread all over Asia and are used in more than just China. So, you could have people that spoke different dialects or even languages who would use the same writing. They may say different words for “house” but when “house” was written down, it was written exactly the same way by speakers of different languages. This is quite useful because it unites disparate peoples under a common written language and the central authority can distribute orders and information so that everybody can understand. Also, this is a boon to trade because it gives people from different regions a way to talk to each other. The giant disadvantage to this language structure is that the reader needs to know at least 3000 characters to function in day to day life. That means if you want to communicate with someone by printing a few paragraphs of text, you will need a keyboard with at least 3000 buttons. Right now, I am typing on a keyboard that has only 72 buttons. This is what the racks of letters that Chinese printers in the middle ages used to make basic messages in text. The Chinese did invent the moveable type printing press before anyone else and they used it for many things. Information distribution, printing money, and copying Confucian texts for would be scholar officials to study in preparation for their exams. But the sheer size of the characters needed to compose a simple message made these machines expensive to produce and rare. It is no wonder why this technique did not make it out of China onto the Silk Road like so many other Chinese inventions and advancements. Movable type’s potential was limited by the language of its inventor. Chinese was not suited to exploit all of the gifts of the moveable type Printing Press. Western languages were because their alphabets were based upon the sounds the letters made. They are phonetic alphabets. English has 26 letters and 42 basic sounds needed to communicate. The sounds that exist outside of the traditional alphabet are given combinations of letters to make the necessary sounds like /sh/ or /ch/. We know that many words in English do not sound the way that they are spelled but these instances do not require that an entire new character is created, we just need to memorize the irregular spellings. Yes, it is true that Gutenberg did not speak English. All the native languages of Europe share the same qualities as English in this regard. Once Gutenberg was created metal letters that could be moved from one plate to another, an information revolution was born. Before the Printing Press was invented it took monks years to copy them by hand. Recently a man in Britain set out to copy one himself. It took him four years working 14 hours a day. Check out this article The original Gutenberg bibles took a while to print too but they didn’t take as long as a person did to copy by hand. The printing revolution had two long lasting effects. The first has to do with Marco Polo’s tales about travelling to China in the late 1200s and early 1300s. Marco Polo’s book was one of the most famous books in in Europe in the 1300s and 1400s when people were still copying books by hand. Once Gutenberg’s printing presses started churning out books, Marco Polo’s tales became a bestseller trailing only the Bible in number of copies printed and sold. One of these books ended up in Christopher Columbus’s hands in the late 1400s and inspired him to look for a shorter way to the China that Marco Polo described. When Columbus ran into the new world in October of 1492 he had two books in his possession, The Adventures of Marco Polo and The Bible. Both were printed on presses like the one that Gutenberg designed. The other effect of the printing revolution that Gutenberg started in 1450 was the quick distribution of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses all over Germany in 1512. Without the rapid distribution of this important document the Protestant Revolution may not have happened. Within one lifetime, the moveable type Printing Press designed by Johannes Gutenberg helped unite the hemispheres and split the Christian church. Those two events alone would make the Printing Press one of the most influential inventions of humankind. Add onto that list of accomplishments the sheer volume of knowledge that was printed into books and shared all over the world. The printed word has directly caused every human triumph in the last 500 years. Not just ‘had a hand’ in the invention of new technology but actual directly influenced the creation of these inventions because they stored knowledge of previous inventions that were needed to advance science and technology. Without printed books there would have been no Scientific Method, Declaration of Independence, Theory of Gravity, or even the Internet. Moveable type printing and books have given mankind more treasures than any other technology so far. The internet has a shot at being more influential than the printed word but it still was created by a bunch of engineers using books written by scientists who paved the way. via Blogger http://ift.tt/2DpRDpr

#merrynewtonmas seasonofreason

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criticalotterstudies · 7 years

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Mostly, Rand would savor Musk, a hyper-logical, risk-loving industrialist. He enjoys costume parties, wing-walking, and Japanese steampunk extravaganzas. Robert Downey Jr. used Musk as a model for Iron Man. Marc Mathieu, the chief marketing officer of Samsung USA, who has gone fly-fishing in Iceland with Musk, calls him “a cross between Steve Jobs and Jules Verne.”As they danced at their wedding reception, Justine later recalled, Musk informed her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” [...] Here’s the nagging thought you can’t escape as you drive around from glass box to glass box in Silicon Valley: the Lords of the Cloud love to yammer about turning the world into a better place as they churn out new algorithms, apps, and inventions that, it is claimed, will make our lives easier, healthier, funnier, closer, cooler, longer, and kinder to the planet. And yet there’s a creepy feeling underneath it all, a sense that we’re the mice in their experiments, that they regard us humans as Betamaxes or eight-tracks, old technology that will soon be discarded so that they can get on to enjoying their sleek new world. Many people there have accepted this future: we’ll live to be 150 years old, but we’ll have machine overlords. [...] In Silicon Valley, a lunchtime meeting does not necessarily involve that mundane fuel known as food. Younger coders are too absorbed in algorithms to linger over meals. Some just chug Soylent. Older ones are so obsessed with immortality that sometimes they’re just washing down health pills with almond milk. [...] Peter Thiel told me about a friend of his who says that the only reason people tolerate Silicon Valley is that no one there seems to be having any sex or any fun. But there are reports of sex robots on the way that come with apps that can control their moods and even have a pulse. The Valley is skittish when it comes to female sex robots—an obsession in Japan—because of its notoriously male-dominated culture and its much-publicized issues with sexual harassment and discrimination. But when I asked Musk about this, he replied matter-of-factly, “Sex robots? I think those are quite likely.” Whether sincere or a shrewd P.R. move, Hassabis made it a condition of the Google acquisition that Google and DeepMind establish a joint A.I. ethics board. At the time, three years ago, forming an ethics board was seen as a precocious move, as if to imply that Hassabis was on the verge of achieving true A.I. Now, not so much. Last June, a researcher at DeepMind co-authored a paper outlining a way to design a “big red button” that could be used as a kill switch to stop A.I. from inflicting harm. Google executives say Larry Page’s view on A.I. is shaped by his frustration about how many systems are sub-optimal—from systems that book trips to systems that price crops. He believes that A.I. will improve people’s lives and has said that, when human needs are more easily met, people will “have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests.” Especially when a robot throws them out of work. [...] Some sniff that Musk is not truly part of the whiteboard culture and that his scary scenarios miss the fact that we are living in a world where it’s hard to get your printer to work. Others chalk up OpenAI, in part, to a case of FOMO: Musk sees his friend Page building new-wave software in a hot field and craves a competing army of coders. As Vance sees it, “Elon wants all the toys that Larry has. They’re like these two superpowers. They’re friends, but there’s a lot of tension in their relationship.” A rivalry of this kind might be best summed up by a line from the vainglorious head of the fictional tech behemoth Hooli, on HBO’s Silicon Valley: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.” [...] Six months after the Puerto Rico conference, Musk, Hawking, Demis Hassabis, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at Berkeley who co-authored the standard textbook on artificial intelligence, along with 1,000 other prominent figures, signed a letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons. “In 50 years, this 18-month period we’re in now will be seen as being crucial for the future of the A.I. community,” Russell told me. “It’s when the A.I. community finally woke up and took itself seriously and thought about what to do to make the future better.” Last September, the country’s biggest tech companies created the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to explore the full range of issues arising from A.I., including the ethical ones. (Musk’s OpenAI quickly joined this effort.) Meanwhile, the European Union has been looking into legal issues arising from the advent of robots and A.I.—such as whether robots have “personhood” or (as one Financial Times contributor wondered) should be considered more like slaves in Roman law. At Tegmark’s second A.I. safety conference, last January at the Asilomar center, in California—chosen because that’s where scientists gathered back in 1975 and agreed to limit genetic experimentation—the topic was not so contentious. Larry Page, who was not at the Puerto Rico conference, was at Asilomar, and Musk noted that their “conversation was no longer heated.” [...] Trying to puzzle out who is right on A.I., I drove to San Mateo to meet Ray Kurzweil for coffee at the restaurant Three. Kurzweil is the author of The Singularity Is Near, a Utopian vision of what an A.I. future holds. (When I mentioned to Andrew Ng that I was going to be talking to Kurzweil, he rolled his eyes. “Whenever I read Kurzweil’s Singularity, my eyes just naturally do that,” he said.) Kurzweil arrived with a Whole Foods bag for me, brimming with his books and two documentaries about him. He was wearing khakis, a green-and-red plaid shirt, and several rings, including one—made with a 3-D printer—that has an S for his Singularity University. Computers are already “doing many attributes of thinking,” Kurzweil told me. “Just a few years ago, A.I. couldn’t even tell the difference between a dog and cat. Now it can.” Kurzweil has a keen interest in cats and keeps a collection of 300 cat figurines in his Northern California home. At the restaurant, he asked for almond milk but couldn’t get any. The 69-year-old eats strange health concoctions and takes 90 pills a day, eager to achieve immortality—or “indefinite extensions to the existence of our mind file”—which means merging with machines. He has such an urge to merge that he sometimes uses the word “we” when talking about super-intelligent future beings—a far cry from Musk’s more ominous “they.” [...] Russell took exception to the views of Yann LeCun, who developed the forerunner of the convolutional neural nets used by AlphaGo and is Facebook’s director of A.I. research. LeCun told the BBC that there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human drives—hunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation. “Yann LeCun keeps saying that there’s no reason why machines would have any self-preservation instinct,” Russell said. “And it’s simply and mathematically false. I mean, it’s so obvious that a machine will have self-preservation even if you don’t program it in because if you say, ‘Fetch the coffee,’ it can’t fetch the coffee if it’s dead. So if you give it any goal whatsoever, it has a reason to preserve its own existence to achieve that goal. And if you threaten it on your way to getting coffee, it’s going to kill you because any risk to the coffee has to be countered. People have explained this to LeCun in very simple terms.” [...] Eliezer Yudkowsky is a highly regarded 37-year-old researcher who is trying to figure out whether it’s possible, in practice and not just in theory, to point A.I. in any direction, let alone a good one. I met him at a Japanese restaurant in Berkeley. “How do you encode the goal functions of an A.I. such that it has an Off switch and it wants there to be an Off switch and it won’t try to eliminate the Off switch and it will let you press the Off switch, but it won’t jump ahead and press the Off switch itself?” he asked over an order of surf-and-turf rolls. “And if it self-modifies, will it self-modify in such a way as to keep the Off switch? We’re trying to work on that. It’s not easy.” I babbled about the heirs of Klaatu, HAL, and Ultron taking over the Internet and getting control of our banking, transportation, and military. What about the replicants in Blade Runner, who conspire to kill their creator? Yudkowsky held his head in his hands, then patiently explained: “The A.I. doesn’t have to take over the whole Internet. It doesn’t need drones. It’s not dangerous because it has guns. It’s dangerous because it’s smarter than us. Suppose it can solve the science technology of predicting protein structure from DNA information. Then it just needs to send out a few e-mails to the labs that synthesize customized proteins. Soon it has its own molecular machinery, building even more sophisticated molecular machines. “If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead. “Only it won’t actually happen like that. It’s impossible for me to predict exactly how we’d lose, because the A.I. will be smarter than I am. When you’re building something smarter than you, you have to get it right on the first try.”

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itsiotrecords-blog · 7 years

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Succeeding in life is not easy. Go ask someone who you know is successful, and they will surely tell you that it takes tremendous amounts of hard work, commitment, patience, dedication, and perseverance to succeed. They might even add that in order for you to achieve success, you need to fail first. Failure goes hand-in-hand with success, as failures are wonderful opportunities to learn and grow, and not the end of the road as many fear.

The next time you face heart-breaking failure, think of the following famous people. They all failed, but that didn’t stop them from pursuing their dreams, and ultimately achieving success.

#1 Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg is considered one of the greatest Hollywood directors of all time. He brought us critically acclaimed blockbuster hits like E.T., Jaws, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, and Schindler’s List. But before he became successful, famous, extremely wealthy, he first experienced several failures, one of which was not being admitted to the film school of his choice. Spielberg wanted to study film at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. However, he was rejected due to a very low grade average. He applied again but got rejected again. These two failures didn’t stop Spielberg from pursuing his dream of studying at USC, so for the third and final time he sent another application, and unfortunately, this too was rejected. These rejections, no matter how painful and depressing they might have been for Spielberg, didn’t hinder him from succeeding in his career and life. Spielberg eventually got a job at Universal Studios where one of the employees noticed his gift for creating films. From there, he became the Spielberg we all know today.

#2 Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe truly is a Hollywood icon. Though she died in 1962, she is still adored by millions of people throughout the world up to this day. She has been the inspiration of many songs, poems, books, and paintings, and her movies are studied as art in many academic institutions. Born Norma Jean Mortenson, Monroe had a very sad and difficult childhood. She lived in numerous foster homes since her mother couldn’t look after her, and at age 16 she got married just to avoid living in an orphanage in Los Angeles. In 1948, Monroe signed with Columbia Pictures. However, she was soon released from said contract because, according to Columbia, she wasn’t talented and beautiful enough to become an actress. Fortunately, these hurtful words and failure didn’t stop Monroe from pursuing her Hollywood dream. She later on starred in many films produced by another (smarter) movie studio, one that made her America’s most famous sex icon.

#3 Milton Hershey Before Milton Hershey, the founder of Hershey Chocolate, became an expert businessman, he worked as a printer in a local newspaper. Later on, he quit his job and got employed in a candy factory. There, he learned the art of making candies. After several years, he quit that job and decided to open his own candy store. However, Milton’s first entrepreneurial venture was a failure. Not wanting his failed business attempt to hinder him from succeeding in life, Hershey went to Denver, Colorado, to learn the art of making caramels. After acquiring the necessary skills to manufacture caramel, Hershey went back to New York and attempted to set up another candy business. Unfortunately, this too was a failure. Despite the two heart-breaking failures he experienced, Milton didn’t give up on his dream. He went back to his family’s farm and spent his time creating various kinds of chocolates and candies. He eventually learned how to make delicious milk chocolates. Hershey’s milk chocolate became an instant hit not only among the kids, but adults too. This success with milk chocolates greatly helped him establish his own chocolate factory , which brought him immense wealth and fame.

#4 Theodor Geisel Theodor Geisel, more popularly known as Dr. Seuss, is considered one of the greatest children’s authors of all time. But before he became a prominent figure in children’s literature, he experienced a series of heart-breaking failures. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was the first book Dr. Seuss had ever written, and before finally finding its way as a children’s classic, it was rejected 27 times! After continually being told his incredibly amusing story of how powerful a child’s imagination is was pure rubbish, Dr. Seuss was ready to give up. He was walking down the streets of New York City when he bumped into an old friend, who just happened to be the new editor of the children’s department of a publishing house in New York. He read Seuss’ book and decided to publish it. Nobody called Suess a failure after that.

#5 Henry Ford Henry Ford undoubtedly revolutionized the American car industry. He didn’t invent the automobile, but he was the man responsible for manufacturing the first reliable, simple, and budget-friendly versions. Before Ford invented the Model T, cars were only for the rich. But due to his determination, hard-work, and ingenuity, he succeeded in manufacturing cars that were affordable to the average Americans of his time. However, it took two major failures before Henry Ford finally succeeded. The first company that he founded was the Detroit Automobile Company. He was the man behind the design and production of the cars, while William H. Murphy was his financial backer. However, a year and half later, after Ford established his first company, it was dissolved due to major problems with the car design. Despite this failure, Ford did not give up. He asked Murphy for a second chance, and with his financial assistance he founded another company, the Henry Ford Company. But unfortunately, this too was an absolute failure. But Ford was not a quitter. He did not let his two major failures hinder him from achieving his goals. Right after he left the Henry Ford Company, he met a wealthy Scottish man named Alexander Malcomson who was willing to back up him financially. With Malcomson’s help, Ford finally perfected his car design and established the Ford Motor Company.

#6 Bill Gates Microsoft was not the first company Bill Gates founded. In fact, his first company had nothing to do with computers. Before Microsoft, there was Traf-0-Data, which specialized in creating products that processed raw information gathered from daily traffic encounters, and made reports for traffic engineers. However, this venture was a failure. An important demo of the Traf-0-Data 8008 didn’t work, an event which caused Gates and his business partners to dissolve the company entirely. Fortunately, this failure didn’t stop Gates. He kept going on and finally, a few years later, all of his hard work and dedication paid off. He succeeded and established Microsoft, which is undoubtedly the biggest computer software company in the world today.

#7 Stephen King When it comes to the horror genre, no one can equal Stephen King. He is a literary genius who entertained and terrified us with books like Misery, The Shining, and The Stand. But King’s success and fame didn’t happen instantly. It took several failed attempts before he finally hit the jackpot. It’s a wide known fact that Carrie was King’s first published book—the story of a teenage girl who possessed telekinetic capabilities. However, before it became a best-selling novel, Carrie was rejected not once, twice, or even 27 times, but 30 times! King got so disappointed with the rejections that he decided to chuck it in the trash. Luckily, Tabitha, King’s wife, found the manuscript and encouraged him not to give up. Following his wife’s encouraging advice, King sent Carrie to other publishers. And his wife was right. A publishing company liked King’s work and decided to publish it. Many years and numerous best-sellers later, King became an established and highly successful figure in the American literary world.

#8 Harland David Sanders You might now know Harland David Sanders by that name, but you might recognize him better if we stuck the word “Colonel” at the beginning of his name. Sanders was the founder of the extremely successful global food franchise, Kentucky Fried Chicken. He is living proof that no matter who you are, how old you are, or what little you have in life, you can succeed if you just work hard and persevere. Colonel Sanders started selling his secret chicken recipe to different restaurants, homes, and individuals at the age of 65, after his official retirement. Despite his old age, Sanders traveled throughout America for two long years, selling his chicken recipe to anyone who would listen. At first, he was rejected and mocked by the people he approached. There’s even a legend that states the recipe got rejected 1,009 times before someone finally accepted it. Whether that number is accurate or not is irrelevant. What’s important is that Col. Sanders showed us that with hard-work, commitment, and hope we can achieve anything we want, even if that means failing or getting rejected over a thousand times.

#9 Walt Disney Walt Disney is credited for elevating the status of fairy tales and cartoons. Without him, we might have never known Mickey Mouse and all his remarkable friends. Aside from his classic works, Walt Disney’s life is a source of inspiration too. For one thing, he was fired from a newspaper company in Kansas City because he wasn’t creative enough. Because when you think Walt Disney, you definitely think boring and unoriginal. In addition, Mickey Mouse was actually rejected by MGM studios because they believed that a giant cartoon mouse would scare women. And to top it off, in 1933 one of his most successful pictures, The Three Little Pigs, was rejected because it only had four characters. As you can see, Disney’s climb to success was a very steep one. However, despite the many nonsensical failures and discouragements he encountered, he did not quit. He held on to his dream and worked hard to achieve them. True enough, all of his efforts paid off.

#10 Michael Jordan Michael Jordan is a superhero, at least on the basketball court. He showed the whole world that unparalleled skill and out-of-this-world showmanship are what distinguishes the greats from the legends. But before Jordan achieved two Olympic gold medals, won six NBA championships, and earned five MVP trophies, he encountered heart-crushing failure in the form of somebody who thought he was too damn short to succeed. With the help of his brother Larry, Michael got invited to join a basketball summer camp and try out for a university team group. In that camp, Jordan impressed all of the participants with his superb basketball skills. The coach supervising the camp recognized his talent, but he was hesitant to include him in the university team group because he was quite short in basketball standards. At the end of the camp, a list of those who got admitted to the university basketball team was handed out. And much to the dismay and surprise of Jordan, all of his friends’ names were on the list except his. This greatly crushed his heart and dreams. He came home feeling ashamed and discouraged. He even wept. Thankfully, his loving mother gave him an advice that greatly encouraged him to continue on improving his game and pursuing his dream. In an interview, Jordan recalled, “She said that the best thing I could do is to prove to the coach that he had made a mistake.” He did exactly that and much, much more.

Source: TopTenz

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