To Heck With Hulu!

With all the Hulu scabvertising that I've been bombarded with lately I threw the URL into my browser fully expecting what has become the ubiquitous prompt from entertainment content sites over the last year or two.

"We're sorry you're not in the US so F Off!"

Hmmm. Now I'm faced with the option: hack Hulu, which is a bit of a PITA, but not that big of a deal. Or just walk away. At some point as a consumer of entertainment content I have to say "No, you're not the worth the effort of finding/using a backdoor."

The point in short is: Hulu (and other online content distributors), if you want my views and thus my advertising dollars open the door. If you want to be on "the internet" then be on the internet. If not, just go on AOL or let the traditional content distributors like DirecTV or Dish Network, etc. carry on with the status quo.

If your not going to provide something new then we'll just keep torrenting our content which we all know is much more convenient than Hulu. When your revenues drop, don't come crying that it's because of piracy. It'll be because you didn't listen and you let your greed and self pride fool you into thinking you could wait as long as you want to give us what we want.

I like the idea of Hulu, but at this point I can't support them... even by using a backdoor.

Canadian Copyright Legislation Bill C-61

Below is a letter I sent to the following:

To: The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
To: The Honourable Jim Prentice
To: The Honourable Josée Verner
CC: The Honourable Scott Brison (Liberal Critic)
CC: Peggy Nash (NDP Critic)

Dear Ministers,

I am writing to express my great degree of concern with the contents of Bill C-61, entitled An Act to Amend the Copyright Act presented by the government on June 12, 2008.
I am shocked and disappointed by the "corporate protectionism" that a bill such as this endeavors to introduce. While I feel that corporations and individuals should be allowed to protect their investments in creating and producing products I do not feel that we as citizens should be held in ransom by restrictive laws which allow certain corporations or individuals to carry on a stagnate business model instead of being forced by the market to adjust to new market demands.

The direction of this bill and many others like it is tantamount to restricting me to using my car for only one purpose and requiring me to purchase another car for every other intended purpose. It is also tantamount to saying that because I drove my friend’s car I must purchase a "copy" of his car or be faced with fines.

In a free market economy businesses are left to change (or not) with market demands. If a particular business or industry refuses to change as the market demands change they should rightfully dwindle and die.

To say that content creators will stop creating content if we don't enact laws to protect their outdated business models is ridiculous. The concept of creating and sharing art and entertainment has been inherent in the human race since the dawn of time. I have no doubt that any attempts any government may make to try and monetize our inborn desire to share and enjoy entertainment in order to pander to corporate interests will fail miserably whether or not the bill(s) you present are passed into law.

Sincerely,

Indepenedent

I was ready to go off on a rant about all the game developers calling themselves "independent", but then I looked at dictionary.com's definition and WTF!? There are 23 definitions for the word.

I wanted to gripe about how it's become cool to call yourself an "independent game developer" and how most of these so called independents are more than just a couple of coders working in their basements. Many of them are established companies with fairly large budgets and and enough employees to require actual, real offices. I wanted to go on about how I think that once you rely on the income from the games you are producing as your only source of income you really aren't "independent" anymore. In fact you are more likely than not to be COMPLETELY DEPENDANT! You are dependent on your games making money and thus you must build games that you think WILL make money.

I was going to suggest that many of these independent game developers are less independent than the huge behemoths like EA, etc. Those big guys can at least afford to experiment with new stuff once in a while and give it a proper treatment. The small to medium sized companies can really only afford to innovate in small, safe ways.

I really wanted to lambaste all these people for improper use of the term "independent", but then the stupid English language got in my way (23 definitions!). Maybe they should call themselves "Small or Medium Sized Corporations" instead of ruining the term "independent game developer" for those of us who actually are independent game developers.

Incapacitation Abounds

So, here I am. Finally posting to my poor, forlorn blog. The last two months have literally sucked ass. Starting with one of the people who was living in my house leaving with no notice and putting me in a bind for the shortfall on payments. I decided to put my house on the market. Unfortunately for me, the real estate market in Calgary has a dearth of homes for sale right now, presumably from all the saps like me who have gotten fed up with the poor city planning, the grind of being in a city that seems to be all work and no play and the fact the house prices went up by like 100% (or more) in the last 4 years. Now that I'm trying to sell my house it seems as one of my long time friends who was also living with me is trying to sabotage the deal by insisting on doing everything every real estate agent out there says is a bad thing. So the house sits unsold for going on two months now.

So, what does this have to do with software or technology? Well all the stress from this "crap" has put me through the wringer and depression has reared it's ugly head once again. I have done no development of any kind in over two months. I'm finally to the point where I can be somewhat functional again... this blog is proof of that. Over the last two months, in between bouts of sulking I have tried to think of where my strengths and weaknesses lie. One of my greatest strengths is that I take on new subjects with fair ease... this is also one of my biggest downfalls. I have grown so used to, and fond of the learning process that learning new stuff seems to be all I want to do. Every time I sit down to do any development, or anything else for that matter I find myself drawn into some new topic and MUST learn everything about it. Today was a good example of that. I wanted to work on a small issue tracking system for which I built a proto-type database a few days ago, but instead of just sitting down and coding it I had to go off on a tangent and start reading about ADO.net 2.0 and trying to decide if I need to use any of the functionality in it. I'm now at the end of the day and guess what. Not a single line of code :(

From what I've seen, many good developers suffer from this same problem. Maybe that's why so many projects have problems with deadline and budget overruns. It may be a common trait in the developer mentality. We all want to know how to do the next great thing, but as soon as we know we find a new "next great thing" and need to know about that.

Well, I guess this post wasn't too tech oriented, but so far I've enjoyed writing it. Maybe I'll try to do more of these philosophical type posts in the future. I've got one in mind on "What I think about Deadlines".

Shader Stall and Code Cleanup

Well, this last week has been fairly uneventful. I've been playing with HLSL shaders and while I get the concepts I'm not having any luck getting them to do the things I want. So, I've done what I do best... ordered books.

Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists

Programming Vertex & Pixel Shaders

They're both a little dated, but I'm looking to get a good grounding so I don't think age will hinder them any.

With that said, banging my head against the shader wall didn't seem productive any more so I moved on to code cleanup and documentation for Zap Invasion. The code base needed a little TLC and the game play is really lame (simple). The point of the game was to use as a test bed for learning XNA and to that end it's been very good, but I still can't help but be bored by the concept.

I also spent yesterday looking at 3D Game Studio version A7. I'll throw my thoughts on it in to my Choosing a Game Development Platform article when I've had more of a chance to play around with it. First impressions though are that it's a decent engine with all the features a hobbyist would need and a good scripting language that compiles into native code instead of interpreted byte code. Although it's another engine that seems tailored around coding in the engine rather than coding with the engine, which is something I'm not really keen on.

Google

Just testing out Windows Live Writer...

Google

Poor, neglected Blog...

I've been busy being a scatter brain lately, working on lots of things, but not really getting anything done.

• Zap Invasion now has collision detection and sound and now I'm tackling the shaders.
• ZapHazrdous.com is up and running again and is now hosted off site which will hopefully proove to be worth the money.
• My main workstation died.
• The NANO forums are coming along nicely, although there are only two active members currently.
• I tried installing PTBlog, but it didn't work and the hosting service gives me no usefull errors, so I'm looking for something new and more simple.