Ah. I'll have to re watch as I missed it at the beginning. I need to download a lower quality version as my player chokes a lot on the high quality one giving me big gaps in the action. :-( Though there's a good chance I still would've missed it at the beginning of the fight thinking it's the "bad" big dragon.

A few differences: 1 - It's produced on Blender, using Blender as the tool to make the movie. Which means that any feedback from the team goes straight to the devs making Blender better. A lot of Blender's improvements happen because of these shorts.

2 - Many independent films are using "closed" and expensive tools like Maya. Even if you don't like the plot, characters, or general theme of this movie, if you thought the graphics were as good as even a relatively recent in-game movie that was rendered rather than using the game's engine, then I'd say they've done their job, and they've made Blender better while doing it. (In game movies can take quite a team of artists and a but-ton of money to create.) Further, the movie can be shared, and a lot of the techniques for making the movie are shared, which isn't true about most films of any sort.

-- Off topic --

3 - Most of EVERYTHING is bad in some way or other, and yet the people who say everything that Hollywood produces is crap, or everything that this or the other group produces is crap seem to ignore the genuine gems. They don't come along all that often. This isn't one of them, but it entertained me for the length of the film. It was a decent tragedy. Many critics also ignore the value in "this movie was decent and entertaining." It wasn't great. It didn't change my life. It was cliched - the Greeks in their day were saying that every plot and character device out there had already been used - but there's a fair amount of value to being entertained for a little bit, even if it isn't "great".

4 - I'm not saying that this is you, but many who illegally download movies use the "The movie wasn't great" excuse to download and watch them. Or games. Or music. This attitude disturbs me. If you're so concerned about the quality of the entertainments you consume, rather than downloading and not paying for it, let some critic you trust watch it first - be said critic your friend, a paid critic, or what have you, then make the decision to watch the movie or listen to the music. (Or find some cheap/free way legally getting the content, even if it involves a commercial or two.) I think most of the torrent freaks out there actually enjoy the content they consume - I realize that some are collectors and never watch their whole library, but they certainly get to a fair chunk of it - even if the piece wasn't ground breaking in some fashion. They use the tired argument that if it isn't the best thing ever, why should they pay for it? And maybe they shouldn't, but does that mean they should have carte blanch to get the content for free? I don't like Hollywood's tactics, copyright terms, or a lot of the IP bullying that happens, but most don't seem to be downloading copies of the first Mickey Mouse movies, most seem to be downloading the latest and greatest "shovelware", implying that they like said shovelware. Many of the people who seem to criticize everybody also

I don't get the attitude that certain people excelling in their professions should be happy about excelling and that that satisfaction should be enough. That expecting monetary recompense is somehow a gross dereliction of the duty of the starving artist. Why should artists or musicians not get compensated if they create a great recording or movie?

How is saying that artists aren't willing to give up their work for free any different than saying "Most doctors aren't willing to perform surgery without being getting a salary." and then replying "Then they're not really doctors are they?"

Now, if you were being clever with the word illusory, then you can paint a big whoosh above my head. The attitude that certain professionals should simply do what they do for the love of it and not expect some sort of monetary recompense, or worse, should get said money from some other career bugs me. How is an artist going to be a great artist if their most productive hours are spent doing something else? (To a lesser extent teachers and a few other professions have the same "low pay" stigma attached to them.)

That's not to say every artist is great. If one can't make one's way making recordings, doing paintings, or whatever creative endeavor they're undertaking, they may have to work as something else to make ends meet, but for those who are great musicians, artists, or what have you, and can find people willing to pay them for their work, why shouldn't they expect to get paid be that pay an up front lump, royalties, or whatever other method they've come up with?

Without the scar, there's nothing to differentiate this dragon from any other. If you didn't expect the results by the time the fight paused we get a big hint it's her dragon when he sniffs her. Even then we might not be sure it's her dragon until you see the scar. *shrug* I think they pulled this one off really well. Maybe it wasn't a GREAT tragedy, but it was certainly decent, especially given the time frame. My props to the team. I liked this movie a lot better than Big Buck Bunny or Elephant's Dream - that one would've been a lot better had one of the characters not been named Emo.

Did you notice the timescale? She goes from a young woman to having gray in her hair. Given enough time you can hike pretty much anywhere that isn't separated by large bodies of liquid water. Even today people hike across the United States. I'm pretty sure that's true of Europe, Asia, and Africa too. All these places have regions that match up roughly with what's in the movie.

I'm pretty sure many of those details are up there on the site. I know that Blender actually has some built in stuff for video editing, so a lot of the editing may have been done in Blender. Check the site for more details, they tend to be pretty open about what they're using.

& they offer at least Quicken and CSV. 'Course, I can't promise said bank won't go bankrupt, get absorbed into another bank, or change their back end system, in which case your history may be lost.

My suggestion is to not let 6+ months of transactions go unaccounted for. If you've your transactions for all but the last month or 3, then most banks will let you pull the rest of the transactions.

That way, if they get bought, change their back end, or whatever, you have all, or 99% of your data.

If you have your transactions saved locally and downloaded about once a month, then it shouldn't matter that you can only get 3-6 months of transaction data.

My 2c.

Star Wars set the bar for Sci-Fi movies, action, and special effects movies for 20 years at least, in story, acting, and special effects. It can be argued if that was the bar we should've measured things against, as opposed to more cerebral efforts - ala 2001, but it was the bar. To some, it still is, and that's not just your nerdy geeky set either.

The story of the first three was good. Nothing bookwormisghly great, but certainly not bad, and better than just about any sci-fi movie of its time. Some of the literary greats could use a little bit of...I don't know, movement. Maybe actually talk to that guy you're pining over for chapters... There's only so many pages of court backbiting or noble gossip I'm willing to put up with, even from the "greats". Star Wars wasn't a great when compared to literary movies, but it certainly still is when compared to Sci-Fi or Fantasy.

The dialog was certainly campy, and I don't know if anyone other than Harrison Ford could've pulled off some of the lines as well as he did, but he did do it, and audiences loved it. Not just the geeky 15 year old set. Simply put, it was a fun movie!

If that wasn't enough, it was the movie that pulled us into the era of modern special effects. For its day it was revolutionary. Many will bemoan that transition, and certainly Hollywood has done less with more effects - see the prequels - because of these movies, but that doesn't mean Star Wars wasn't the movie that raised the visual bar for certain classes of movies. Heck, a lot of the modern CGI looks flat and stale compared to the models from the original 3.

Sure, held against today's movies Star Wars isn't the visual bonanza it was back when. Its pace was about perfect given the genre. It's story is still better than most of the action, sci-fi, or fantasy movies we're getting today. Or romances. Or..well, let's face it. There just aren't that many great movies out there. Dozens of okay movies, but revolutionary or groundbreaking in one fashion or another? That doesn't often happen, and just shrugging that off in a movie? It might not be the movie for you, but it certainly influenced cinematography for a couple generations of "summer blockbuster" movie makers. Not many movies can claim to hold an audiences attention beyond the release of the next film one is looking forward to seeing. The original trilogy held the attention span of several generations of movie goers.

Man, now I gotta MOVE. I'll have to arrange to pay rent for that leaky attic space. :-b Won't have to worry 'bout fumigation, the place just reeks of moth balls, but I'll have to find a way to convince mom it's better that she move her boxes down the basement than having me do it...

This whole thing making me exhausted just thinking about it. Thanks!

Umm.... B&N, Borders, and their ilk ran out most of the medium and small mom & pops devoted to popular fiction before Amazon came along and made things worse, even when the mom & pops sold used books so you could get new fiction for less than even Amazon offers it. Maybe they're making a comeback, but certainly B&N and Borders ran a whole slew of them out of town before this happened.

Where mom & pops seem to thrive is around the niches, if they do a good job of filling those niches.

There are exceptions to this rule, and there are some larger bookstores - like Powell's in Portland - that put B&N to shame. 4 stories of books, a map to the store, real sections devoted to specialties, rare books, beats, an actual history section, etc., a large bit of their warehouse moved to a building next door, a whole separate building devoted to tech books, and, yes, a coffee shop. Sorry you don't like them, but they're great for folk who'd like to pickup a book, and sit down and read it.

I believe Powell's is paying as much or more for all of their employees than B&N, but the employees often know and care about their sections, and tend to be very dedicated to the store.

I'm somewhere between a freeloader and a regular purchaser for them.
I used to purchase a TON of books from them. I like popular sci-fi and fantasy.
I have always been there, a LOT, doing my on line classes in their coffee shop rather than doing them at home. I buy 1 or 2 coffees for several hours of free internet access.
I bought a Kindle DX, so a lot of the sci-fi / fantasy paperback purchases they were getting from me have dried up. Also, a lot of the classics - and I liked their classics series - are free to me now.
I have a membership card. I still buy books there, just not nearly as many, and with school and a full time job I don't have as much idle time as I did - plus I have a fairly substantial library of books I've already purchased.

HOPEFULLY whoever purchases them keeps them up and running. I'd like to see it where I can buy e-books from them that work on the Kindle...but I doubt that will happen. I'd buy them, even if they were a little more expensive, to keep the bits of the store going that I enjoy. (I like the physical book, but books take up space, and I'm seriously looking at cutting down the number of phsyical items I actually own.)

This isn't a problem with just B&N, of course. Every time we go to a retail outlet, peruse what they have, then buy it online we cause said retail outlet grief. I guess the same could be said if we bypass them all together, but the online retailers benefit from us being able to review things at an actual store without purchasing them from that store.

The flip side of that, unfortunately, is if the price is too high at the retail store...there's only so much of a premium most are willing to pay to support it.

Yeah, well, the electronic book is here, but the college version of it.... *shudder*. You might spend less for that book - but only have access to it while the class is running...or in my case up to 1 or 2 days before the last day you can schedule your final that counts for 70% of your grade. (Yes, I've been studying, but there's always some last minute niggling thing I want to go over.)

If it were public domain - and CA is trying to do just this - and unencumbered by DRM, or even an e-pub, mobi, or PDF where you can keep the book, that might work, but it seems the mighty scholastic publishers are looking for ways to make you rent books for short periods rather than buy them. The funny thing about that is if they'd just let me have the silly thing I'd only access their site once to get the book, rather than every time I wanted to read it during the course of the class.

If you want to record a particular lecture so it can be re-broadcast, better to have somebody who knows how to do the recording to it then force a professor who doesn't want to try to learn it. Every piece of recording equipment I've ever come across is different, and uses different interfaces, and there are tons of different front end programs to make an end product of the recording. Further, unless you're trained, lighting, placing the mic, etc., etc. aren't things the teacher is going to know how to do, nor should we be wasting their time forcing them to learn. Finally, in a lot of schools, even some universities, many computers the profs have aren't setup to be media editing machines, so they're going to be slow and unwieldy.

Recording a lecture by somebody who knows how and has the equipment - cool.

Trying to record the lecture by somebody who doesn't know how, who should be teaching the class, who doesn't have the time to edit it, etc.? Why bother? You're actually detracting from the class and frustrating both your professor and your students.

The founders believed in the principle that once an idea is shared, even if it's simply one person relating a story to another, the second person has a copy of the idea in his head, and that both people now "own" the idea. That person can then share the idea with others, and that ideas, whether they be musical, artistic, pure science, or engineering should be shared - and in fact could not be owned. That society and one's ideas are built on the foundations of the ideas that came before them.

They also recognized that if an author, engineer, or what have you couldn't make money off of his ideas, he was much less likely to bother to create them in the first place, or if he did create them, he'd do it in the guise of trade secrets that would never become part of the public domain, or private showings in the case of copyright. If an idea isn't shared, the public domain doesn't grow, and advances in the sciences can actually regress because an individual or corporation never shared how to create something.

To encourage works to eventually enter the public domain patents and copyrights were created, granting the author a monopoly of the distribution of his works for a limited time to gain a return on his works. In return, when that time expired his ideas would be available, for free, to everybody. The government makes sure of this by keeping a copy of the registered copyright or patent.

I'm perfectly willing to argue the benefits of a much reduced copyright term, and to explicit DMCA exemptions to allow fair use. That playing the radio at a restaurant doesn't equate to a live performance, and that the adds on the radio are sufficient payment for the rights to play the radio at a work premises. The copyright term could be as little as the founder's 14 years. I believe life of the author OR 25 years, whichever is longer, is equitable, but the term of the copyright could certainly be expanded or contracted. I have no problem with copyright being longer than patents as a patent generally will be used in the creation of other things, while the copyright is very specific and only protects a very specific work.

What I'm not willing to grant is that anything that's ever been written or produced is free game for everybody to download, gratis, the moment the work is published. Even if I were willing to grant this, and lawmakers embraced it, I doubt that freeloaders would get what they wanted. Quality works of art, music, video games, and other media, as well as inventions, take a TON of work. Not as a hobby. Not as something to be done for fun outside of your "real" job or just for the love of it, but AS your real job, and more often as the real job of a whole host of people.

I think a ton of people would stop producing media, or do it in such a fashion that the media becomes much more exclusive. Live concerts only, no pressed CDs, for instance. "Yeah, that's the way it should be man!" Never mind the guy saying this might have gigs of downloaded, studio produced CDs. Forget the PC unless the game requires a net connection. We're into console games only, or games where all the content is run off of some centralized servers and you have to pay to get access to said content. A lot of the applied sciences would dry up as corporations become even more cliquish, hording all of their secrets, rather than protecting them for 25 years - or hording them more than they currently do. And, no, I don't think killing off whole industries or types of content so that we can all get everything for free is healthy. It won't be free, and it'll be MUCH more encumbered than what we currently have.

Unfortunately there's not a great way to stop piracy, but there are ways to limit it. Having a convenient way - ala iTunes, Steam, or other popular digital distribution channel - to get ones work is one way, especially if it's more convenient and safer than torrents or rapidshare. Careful pricing is another. NOT ticking off the paying customers with adds against piracy - that the pirates will simply remove anyway - that the paying customers are forced to sit through, pissing us off at the works' owners. International sales are trickier. The same price DOES NOT work across national boundaries, and things that are legal in one country can get you into a lot of hot water in another. I also think that the going price for punishing copyright infringement is pretty silly. It should be like a speeding ticket. $25 per work or something. Sure, if you've terrabytes of media you're sharing, that's still enough to bankrupt you, but I won't argue that that isn't fair if you're illegally sharing that much work.

I think the life plus 70 of copyright is ridiculous. I don't think there's a viable alternative to copyright out there. I think if everybody pirated works, and only paid for those works that they liked the very, very most, or thought that the author was indie enough to deserve a buck, if you remember it after you're done playing his work or listening to his music, but before you spend your money on beer, that there wouldn't be the plethora of content out there that there is today. I think there's a middle ground somewhere out there between the MPAA/RIAA regime and the yokels who argue that somebody who spends months or years of his life - or the lives of a whole team - don't deserve recompense for their efforts, or only deserves recompense on the freeloader's terms, and that this middle ground will be fought over and revisited time and again, and that the fight's healthy, even if some of the laws that emerge from it definitely aren't...and that run on sentences rule!

This is the problem with any DRM. The BEST one can hope for is that there is finally a Betamax, everybody with said Betamax gets screwed - heretical supporters of the evil competitors, and we eventually get "one format" that everybody can use...and hopefully it lasts long enough to matter. (If B&N had signed a similar deal, then all the Kindle folk would be in trouble.)

I own a Kindle and it still irks me that it won't read unencumbered ePUB.

Eventually I hope a tablet computer with some sort of color reflective and high refresh screen replaces the Kindle/nook/what have you and that the e-reader is just an app on it. Until then, I'm waiting to see who ends up with Betamax. (And who ends up controlling the price / availability of books on e-readers, whatever they happen to be.)