September saw the arrival of a new Creality Ender 3 3d printer at the Krypton Radio head office. The intent was to create new things to offer as station swag and perhaps create a new line of bespoke merch, something along the lines of props and costume pieces that people might want to buy from us.
I’ve been having a blast with it, and I’m trying to find new ways to use it that will benefit the company and myself. It’s a new creative tool I can use to bring daydreams into the real world.
The Lightsaber
I’d always wanted one of these, from the first time I saw one in 1977’s Star Wars, but the goal had always been out of reach. I printed one. This is the one carried by Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie. 3d printers print in layers, so there are layer lines. You just sand the heck out of it and hit it with primer, and you’d never know it was 3d printed.
I’m working on modifying this one to add electronics to it, but I may just go with a completely different design, one that already supports the idea of adding a blade.
Sabacc Gambling Coins
These replica coins from the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story were printed in black PLA, like the light saber, then painted with black primer, then I added Rub’n’Buff. I hand-sewed a bunch of bags and put 18-20 coins in each one, and gave them to friends and family when we went to Disneyland’s Galaxy’s Edge last month for Life Day on November 18.
My friends and I had a lot of fun giving them to cast members and watching their reactions, which ranged from gratitude to amazement.
I later found out that the Imperial credits were about half-sized, so I’ll be fixing that on future batches, but having bags of these was really something. I looked for a sabacc deck in the shops while I was there, but none of them had the decks in stock.
The Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. It gets its name from the Greek island off the coast of which the device was found. It was fished out of the sea in 1901, and assumed to be some kind of archeological mistake – it couldn’t possibly be from ancient Greece, could it? They didn’t have computers – or did they?
The largest piece is this one. It’s about eight inches wide, and seven inches tall, something around there. That’s what I’m currently making.
The instrument is believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists, and was made sometime around 70-60 BC. It was housed in a wooden box, about 13.4″x7.1″x3.5″, and they know this because they found bits of the box around it. After conservation, it came apart into 82 separate fragments, four of which contain gears, like this largest piece.
The Antikythera Mechanism originally had at least 30 meshing bronze gears, and up to 37 gear wheels that helped the device keep track of astronomical bodies like Mars, the Sun, and the Moon. It could predict eclipses, and could tell you when the next Olympic Games were going to be. It was extremely accurate as well, correctly reporting subtle variations in the lunar orbit, for example.
The device, housed in the remains of a 34 cm × 18 cm × 9 cm (13.4 in × 7.1 in × 3.5 in) wooden box, was found as one lump, later separated into three main fragments which are now divided into 82 separate fragments after conservation works. Four of these fragments contain gears, while inscriptions are found on many others. The largest gear is approximately 14 centimetres (5.5 in) in diameter and originally had 223 teeth.
All known fragments of the Antikythera mechanism are now kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, along with a number of artistic reconstructions and replicas of the mechanism to demonstrate how it may have looked and worked.
My version started as Cosmo Wenman’s rough layout model of it, about the right shape, but with technically accurate placements of the bronze gears and metal features. Wenman’s finished version makes use of a lot of post-printing texturing and paint, but I brought it into ZBrush and added corrosion detail geometry before sending it to my printer, so a lot of the details on mine will be already there when the printing is done. That will will take two and a half full days on my Ender 3 3d printer.
I thought for a while that my version might be too big, but I took a quick measurement of the main gear while it was on the printer, and yeah, it does look like it’s about five and a half inches across, meaning that the size of my replica artifact is probably pretty close to the real thing.
Once it’s done, it gets a little cleanup with a brush to remove tiny filament strings, artifacts of the printing process. Then it gets painted, and I have purchased an artist’s airbrush and compressor for the purpose. Whatever details that didn’t make it into my sculpt I can probably fudge with paint. I figure once I get going it will take about a full day to paint it properly.
The lighting here shows off the printing artifacts on the surface are going to be sanded off. There’s a lot of handwork to go before I can put any paint on this, and only a few days to go before I deliver it.
Rather than sand it all down, I used acrylic sculpting medium instead and just filled in the raster lines from the printing. Then I painted it all flat black, then airbrushed it and added some finishing touches of Rub’n’Buff to make some of the details pop. My airbrush work is – well, I need a ton more practice, let’s put it that way.
Walt Disney
At Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida, there is a sculpture garden decorated with bronzes of famous Disney characters. One of them is a bust of the great man himself. Somebody took a 3d scan of it, and converted it into a geometry file, and being the fan of his work and the man himself as I am, I had to print a copy of it.
One of these days I’m going to print a really big one. The model is actually a lot better than the resolution of my printer can cope with at this size. Still, it’s gorgeous, and I’ve given away three copies of this thing to my Disney-fan friends so far.
I’m sorry you’re not still here, Walt, The world could use you. I’m doing my best to try to follow in your footsteps, but I’m not doing it very well, I’m afraid. I just don’t have the reach you did – but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying. The world needs every bit of magic we can muster.
My first director’s credit was supposed to happen 30 years ago. That’s how I saw it all happening in my head, anyway. But I quickly found out that unless you’re born into the system at the right level of connectivity, that’s just not going to happen. If you have responsibilities to anyone but yourself, it’s just not in the cards, because you can’t risk letting them down.
And so it went, until I was 61, and I was finally in a position in my life to try something, because at this point I had to try something to move forward because nothing else was working anyway. And what I did was this.
Aphrodite and Ben from ‘Mighty Aphrodite!’
I created an animated web series almost on a whim, using a machinema engine that ran on my phone. We made a Kickstarter, it succeeded, and by the time we’re done we’ll have four animated episodes, about 3 minutes long each.
Gone with the Wind it is not. But it’s real, and it’s mine, and it’s my first producer’s credit, my first writer’s credit, my first director’s credit. As small a project as this thing is, I brought this into being by sheer force of will, and with the help of my wife Susan (without whose support it wouldn’t have been possible, and without whose participation it would have suffered from a character arc standpoint), and my actor and voice actor friends, we made a thing. It’s up on IMDB now, and it gives proper credits to everyone who worked on it.
The thing is, in my 20’s I thought I was going to be a director by the age of 30. I went to film school, graduated from UCLA, concentrated on screenwriting because it was cheaper than paying for all that film lab work, and I had a bunch of friends at the time who were all going into terrible debt paying for their student films. So I got my degree and out into the world I went.
And part of it was because UCLA at the time was not all that great a film school, and part of it was because I lacked the industry connections to make any impression on anybody, but my career foundered after that, and I went into computer programming and game development instead, and it was only after years of that that I finally came back full circle. Computers were now being used to make movies with, and I sort of slipped in the back door while nobody was looking and ended up with some 30 odd film credits. Unfortunately since I was working for an often neglected department in a very large studio, I almost never got screen credit for the work I did.
No matter. I still did the work, I still learned what a world class organization looked like from the inside, I still learned what world class artists and animators did every day and if not in every detail how they did it, at least what they did and where to look things up.
And now my lifelong dream of becoming a director and writer has come to pass, but it’s on the smallest project one could imagine. But it’s a commercial project, for a company – my own company, which I founded – and there’s an IMDB listing.
What more may come of Mighty Aphrodite! The Web Series?I have no idea, but I bet we can make some waves with it once I get the fourth episode done – and then we can release them all as a single piece, a ‘fifth episode’, if you will, which will be a good solid fifteen minutes of animated narrative.
I’m certainly humbled by the entire process. I imagined myself at the helm of much greater projects than this, but starting with literally nothing but an idea, I and my friends made something happen. We moved the needle.
I’ve always wanted a home at the Magic Store. I didn’t anticipate either that I’ve have to build the Magic Store myself, nor that the roof might be made of cardboard.
This year I’m hoping to put some shingles on that roof.
This is probably obvious to everyone reading this, professionals and fans alike, but animation is hard work. I’m learning this the hard way. I’m in the middle of production of my first animated web series Mighty Aphrodite!, and I’m quickly finding out that there are a lot of hidden tasks involved in producing something like this that actually haven’t anything to do with animation at all.
It’s fundraising, yes, but after that it’s writing, and scheduling, and recording voice artists, and editing.
And then it’s design and animation (in my case nearly all the design work was done by somebody else, an artist at the company who makes Plotagon), and then you have to render it all out. It was supposed to be a short little thing, just a few quick inserts to cover things Plotagon couldn’t do.
Ben is holding a box. You can’t do this in Plotagon either.
And then reality hit. Plotagon, as neat as it is, really isn’t suited for dramatic storytelling. Not really. Your actors can stand or sit in interesting settings and talk to each other. And that’s it. No walking through the scene, no getting up or sitting down as a motion, no carrying anything, no hand props (unless you count a cell phone welded to their hand), no running, no falling down, no dancing (unless you count dancing in place doing a weird sort of Austin Powers dance move). Even something as simple as a character handing a bag of coins to another character requires special animation.
So, you do your best, and you light everything, and render it out, and then you discover that you haven’t checked your scene well enough before sending it to the render queue, and you’ve just wasted $100 of render farm resources, and you didn’t have it to spare. Vowing not to waste any more money, you render it on the one machine you have, and 216 frames takes 3.5 days. So you’re now trading dollars for time.
Aphrodite standing up from a seated position. You absolutely positively cannot do this in Plotagon.
Some people use a game engine to produce their animation. Some animate straight up in Blender, or Maya. I’m doing a hybridized approach, animating using something similar to a game engine, and then padding out its capabilities when I hit something in the script that I need to do that it can’t do. The next result is that, at most, I have to hand animate perhaps 500 frames out of the some 8000 frames that comprise the episode, which is an enormous savings of time and effort. I only have to animate about 6% of the completed episode, and while that sounds great, and it means my production costs are $300 to $400 per episode instead of $25,000, it’s still a daunting, soul sucking amount of work. The production literally owns you until it’s done.
So far my damned project is about four months behind schedule. Thank God my backers are all behind me and being patient. But boy, lesson learned. An errant line in a script can mean weeks of extra expense and production effort. I’m so looking forward to finishing this episode, so I can get to work on the next two. This is a story that needs to be told, and we need significantly more money than I got on the first Kickstarter to make it not painful to produce the next batch of episodes.
The payoff, though, should be pretty huge. I’m using Plotagon to save me 95% of my production costs and time, at least, but it’s something that isn’t likely to be spawning a hoard of imitators. My show is going to set some records, and hopefully be greater than the sum of its parts.
I wrote this piece a number of years ago. Since then, I have been made Top Writer on Quora for 2018, and this kind of piece I think is one of the reasons why they did that.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The phrase is Latin, and is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
In other words, “Who watches the watchmen?” I have encountered this for years, and I finally figured out the answer to that question.
And it’s a real answer.
The real answer to “Who Watches the Watchmen?” is, “We watch ourselves. We are answerable to our own conscience, ethics, morals and sense of duty. We can trust no one else’s more than our own.”
And that implies that we are being asked to follow somebody else’s ethics and morals without questioning them, and that’s exactly what we’re being asked to do by those very people who ask “Who watches the watchmen?” What they’re implicitly saying is that our own judgment should give way to theirs.
This argument is almost always used not in the search for truth, but in the obstruction of it. It introduces a self-referential logical conundrum that cannot be solved, thereby stopping any reasonable discourse in its tracks. By attempting to declare that there is no clear acceptable answer, the speaker implies that the opponents are intrinsically wrong, and this is a logical fallacy. An unknown solution does not imply incorrect action. It’s basically a false dilemma fallacy, similar to a loaded question such as “Have you stopped beating your wife?” or “Are you going to admit that you’re wrong?”
Those who stand up for the good, the innocent, the right and the just are often publicly attacked by those seek to set themselves on a throne and tell others how to think, feel and act — or worse, seek simply to do society harm and not be caught at it.
The next time you hear someone ask “who watches the watchmen”, think about why they’re really asking this. The answers may surprise you.
I was on a forum for internet radio broadcasters the other day, and the topic came up of why the music industry is in such trouble. iHeartRadio and Spotify are both facing bankruptcy, with iHeartRadio $20B in debt (mostly due to debt carried from a leveraged buyout), and Spotify in the soup for $1.5B. How did they get there? In part, it’s because about 70% of their income goes to pay truly exhorbitant music licensing costs.
The reason why is strange indeed, and it has to do with the way music streaming is licensed. Where a terrestrial radio station broadcasts a (usually digital) signal for anyone to detect and decode back into music in the room where they’re sitting, internet radio sends out an individual signal for each person. It’s as though there was an individual radio tower just for that listener, on a special frequency that only they could hear. Because each signal is legally considered a “duplicate copy”, a whole new set of licensing kicks in.
Now, I’m going to launch into a discussion of digital copying, which is at the heart of internet radio licensing law, but when I’m finished I think you’ll agree that it makes no damn sense.
Making a copy of music from the radio is legal. Before the internet, you used tape recorders to do this. And lots of people did. The recording industry tried to kill cassette tape, because they claimed it allowed people to make illegal copies of music. However, making copies of music for personal use is specifically allowed under most countries’ copyright laws. It falls under Fair Use.
Enter the digital age, and now internet radio uses a different technology. Instead of putting a single signal out into the aether for anyone to detect and decode back into music at their receivers, each individual listener needs to be feed their own copy of that signal. Every listener needs their own separate stream.
Because the signal is now duplicated at the server end when a listener requests a connection, instead of converting the signal into an audible sound stream at the listeners’ receiver itself, the licensing organizations want to call that a “mechanical copy”, and they want it to be treated the same way as a tape cassette or a CD copy of that music. And in fact, the United States, Canada and the U.K. all refer to streaming music over the internet in these terms. This is despite the fact that nearly everyone captures the stream and immediately converts it into sound, discarding the music moment by moment as it plays.
Recording the audio is certainly possible, by a variety of means, but in the purest sense this is no different than sticking a microphone in your stereo speakers and hitting the record button. The stream from your radio station isn’t a copy. It’s data, like what flies through the airwaves from a radio station, every moment of every day. It’s not a copy until you store it.
This Sounds Fishy To Me …
Me too. But as internet radio operators, we have to pay two licenses, one the original artists’ licensing that all terrestrial broadcast pays, and the other this “duplication fee”, because the PRO’s have managed to convince the lawmakers (in most countries) that broadcasting a digital stream through the internet is somehow fundamentally different from digitally encoding and broadcasting that same stream over the airwaves.
How did the music industry function before internet radio was a thing? It was obviously possible – yet somehow we have this redefinition of what a broadcast is because we’re using different technology to accomplish exactly the same thing.
All this lunacy aside, ripping a stream means making an illegal unlicensed copy of that music, even though doing the same exact thing with a terrestrial radio is perfectly legal.
Are we, as internet radio providers, liable for this? No, we’re not. The crime does occur, but it occurs on the far end, where we can have no control whatsoever over the people doing it. It’s literally out of our hands, and we have no legal responsibility one way or the other to stop them from doing it, even if we could tell for certain what they were doing.
So How Does This Hurt the Industry?
It’s murdering it, but not because of stream ripping. What’s happening is that the licensing fees charged to the big internet radio stations – and that’s what most people listen to now, not terrestrial radio – are roughly double what a terrestrial station plays. I don’t know the actual ratio, but it’s a lot.
This basic misunderstanding of the true nature of internet radio is part of why internet radio companies are going out of business right and left. At this point in time, independent internet radio in the United States is down, by my personal estimate, by about 85% from the number of stations present in 2015.
Terrestrial radio stations don’t count here. Most of them have internet feeds too, and they have to pay the extra fees like everybody else. The tiny stations that run on shoestrings, though, they’re the casualties here.
The loss of an individual station doesn’t have much of an effect. Pushing music licensing out of reach of all but the most dedicated business operators, though, has had a massive, very evident chilling effect on an entire communications medium in the United States, and forced many of them to move their operations outside the boundaries of the United States into other countries where U.S. internet broadcast licensing does not have jurisdiction. Almost no country but the U.S. has such restrictive and expensive laws regarding this industry, and the greed of the performance rights organizations are strangling the industry.
This Sounds Bad. What Happens Now?
What happens when iHeartRadio and Spotify (two of the big four, the other two being iTunes and Pandora) collapse under the strain of these fees? The music industry is in for a massive shakeup, and the performance rights organizations like BMI, ASCAP and SESEC are going to be the losers in this.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I was on a forum for internet radio broadcasters the other day, and the topic came up of why the music industry is in such trouble. iHeartRadio and Spotify are both facing bankruptcy, with iHeartRadio $20B in debt (mostly due to debt carried from a leveraged buyout), and Spotify in the soup for $1.5B. How did they get there? In part, it’s because about 70% of their income goes to pay truly exhorbitant music licensing costs.
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