Ever since Final Cut Pro X has been out some people have been rambling about how awful the program is compared to their expectations. Here's my opinion on it: shut up.

I'm a newbie in this whole industry and professionalism. I've made professional stuff before, but I'll be digging deeper into all of this. Regardless I'm sure I'm allowed to say something right? I have my opinions and I choose to punch you in the face with it. Haha no kidding. I'm about to do that.

Either way this Final Cut Pro X: man it got awful reviews, partially because it was all new and was missing a ton of features. And I can agree on people's frustrations but man, some of you are just impatient. This just sets an example of these new. Geek-techy people who think they know what they're doing but are slaves to this sort of "function" mentality. What do I mean by that? Well see, "functions" of a program sometimes limit us to what we want to do. Now here's what separates the master and the slave: the people who say, "Oh, because I can't do *this* particular effect, therefore this program is useless to me." are basically slaves to the program. The people who say, "Oh, because I couldn't do *this* effect in the program, therefore I must find another way around it using the same program." end up quite skillful at what they do. Therefore we call them masters. RIGHT? You have to think again about what you do and how you'd do it. Yes, there are technical difficulties, and we'll have to compensate some things, but that's not what I mean. I mean that some of you buy seriously good machines, with expensive, professional software, and complain "No I can't do this because the program is limiting." What does it mean to be a fucking professional after all if you complain that there's no function in the program?

See people are impatient these days. And with such powerful machines, growing speed, and increasing demand for quality and cheaper stuff, I can understand this growing trend. We've been so hooked to faster, efficient things that we need better things all the time! So what do we do when something like Final Cut Pro X comes out? Final Cut Pro X is completely fresh, rewritten, and it's got lots of new things inside. Well, what some of us chose to do was stab it and said "YOU'RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME!" because some things went backwards. To this I say: GIVE YOUR DEVELOPERS SOME TIME. Jesus. And maybe Apple's decisions on some functionality was bad, and I agree to an extent. But seriously, some of us are just so annoying about this "OH YOU'RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH" thing just because you're missing out some functions. I don't think Apple killed Final Cut just yet. Apple's done a wonderful job recreating the old, and making sure the program stays up to today's technologies. And if you don't like that, just continue to use the old version of Final Cut Pro. Update when you feel like it.

You're not being forced to upgrade anything you know. You have the choice to stick around with old software if you so desire. My friend still uses Illustrator 5.5 because he thinks its the best version. Consequently he still runs OS 9 and otherwise but his works are professional grade and excellent. So to me, all these people arguing that Final Cut's professionalism is dead are just fucking immature and a bunch of uncreative losers who can all suck on a big fake flower that says "art" on it.

And I do mean to offend you. Think again about what you've done. You're no longer creative. You're no longer an artist and no longer thinking about what you're producing. You're just machines tied up to stare at a screen producing "professional quality work" as you drag the mouse around. Your work is no longer impressive. And nobody's happy.

Look, it's not just about features, how the GUI looks, or otherwise. It's about what you can make with the given stuff. That's true professionalism to me. I'm impressed with people who can start with a small thing and end with big things. And hey. If you found this offensive. You're exactly who I'm talking about. Like I say, I'm just beginning my way through all of this. I'm so unimpressed at your workmanship, your lack of understanding, and your narrow-minded scope of sight.

I think this applies to many things!! It's not just this case. It's happened with many many many things. And I swear, this is just one of those passing moments where we all like to bitch and whine about how dumb something is compared to the old stuff.

So to summarize:

1. Quit being slaves to the program. You should become a master at what you're given.
2. Patients gives you more than being impatient.
3. Well all have things we don't like about things, but there's no point in arguing about the same garbage over and over. Quit being a dick about it.
4. Quit acting like you're professional. If you're complaining about petty things, you're probably carrying the name "professional" around but not the actual weight of it.
5. Regarding computers: old things get thrown out in the end. Sad news to some of you. I hate this too. But we all have to live with it.

And again, if you don't like the new version of Final Cut just stick with the old one. I think this is a no-brainier and you shouldn't be arguing about how awful the new version is.

Just to clarify on offensive stuff: I really mean it. The creatives should be adapting to new things while keeping in mind basic principles of design and history. Computer technology changes very rapidly, and because of this you have to make tough choices. You can stick with the old or make sure your product works 10 years from now and have no trouble adapting to new things that come.

I expect a year from now Final Cut Pro X will be mature, and the adoption rate will go higher. It's a new beginning for Final Cut.

The full version of Complex Systems (new title for what was known previous as Living Hive) has now been uploaded onto my blog. The complete collection spans some 43 pictures done over the past couple weeks.

These are some of the samples I've uploaded onto DeviantART.


You can see the full gallery here: [link]

Ok guys, this is a rant. I don't care if you don't agree with my opinion but there's something really really annoying going on that I'd like to point out.



The fuck is this? This is like BLATANTLY IN MY FACE sort of tag/annoyance I see now on deviantart. The previous "Do not reuse" tag I complained about was actually better designed and NOW THAT?! It's so huge and annoying. It's full of just disrespect to the general public and distrust.

Look, as much as you want to protect your artwork with copyright, licenses... etc etc you are ultimately putting your pictures at risk by putting it on the internet. So I figure tagging your images with a watermark, a metatag with your name, address, copyright information seems quite enough. Hey if you want to go further use digimark, but please not that hideous thing up there. Also doing MASSCAPS to say things like: Is very disrespectful to the general audience who are just there to view your artwork as a piece of art. It's like having the artist at the gallery yelling at each and every audience and guest when they see his or her work hanging there. Look I'm just trying to say that everything on the internet gets stolen somehow, and we, as the originators need to protect it. But it's only a limited reach you can protect to. If you don't want people taking your art, don't put it online. Share it amongst your private friends and respected members of society.

Yeah, sure I get frustrated when I see my work somewhere else on the market. I had my stuff sold on streets. I've done much to prevent that, but ultimately I've realized the bigger benefit that it's actually kinda nice to have people just take stuff and reuse it. Of course, I still beg of you to ask me before you remix but in return, you'll have the full respect from me regardless of how your artwork looks in the end at least.

The point is this: if you want to protect your work, be respectful still. Being obnoxious does get you the rights I figure, but it's not the correct way to act normally. If you do need to emphasize, do not use It's an useless act and a waste of time. It's disrespectful to your internet audience AND you're just promoting yourself as an obnoxious individual whose protective about everything. Look, I get it. We all have something we want to protect, but with the internet you're basically going to lose that protection to an extent. If you want to protect your work, do some watermarking, tagging, signing. You can also develop your own style, and that totally protects your work. Nothing beats an original style and taste. That's enough. A text that says "copyright 2011 by <person>" is good enough and going overboard is not getting you anywhere.

- Skybase

First of all read this: [link]

Ok did you read it? If not go back and read it, otherwise this journal is just me ranting.

SOMEBODY has a really good point. I really haven't said much about this interesting issue and I don't mean to shoot down your wonderful pictures that you drew for us. Thank you at least for your consideration, but what we need right now is not a drawing, prayer, or whatever else there is that you do, it's a donation. I don't exactly know what it looks like there. I don't live there but my friends do. The people are there. It's a anything-goes situation. We don't know when aftershocks will strike. We don't know when that reactor's gonna go. We don't know how the future looks right now. All we can do is pray for ourselves.

See, I figure that's enough praying already. They pray because its the last thing they can do. We have options fortunately. So some of you have taken the option to draw. I don't call that wrong, I call it "Ok, but how's that going to help my country?" The reality is, it doesn't do much. Those people there won't see your beautiful picture. And they won't care if they see it. All they can be is thankful, and I don't think that raises buildings back where they were. I don't think that brings businesses back at all.

So your prayers, drawings, designs, thank you. That's enough. If you can read this, if you can type me a comment. You probably have a $1, 5, 10, 20.. I don't care inside of your pocket, drawer, desk... etc. I'm not forcing you to donate. It's your choice on what you want to do with that money. But it helps somebody there.

I'm usually quiet on these matters, and I hate to intervene in them. What I can do is what I can do. I figure I can now ask somebody else for that same favor. I thank you for your patients, and once again, I really thank what all of you have been doing. It's time to move on from that stage. There's a lot of clean up to do. We can rebuild, but we need your help.

- Skybase

I finally updated my blog with tons of new things! Some of the things on that blog have never been seen before on deviantART so go check it out!
Link right below, for laughs, I made it gigantic so you can easily click on it.

Massive earthquake, loads of crazy stuff happened to my country today. Pretty wtf. I live in Rochester NY, right now, so I'm not affected by it but I'm obviously mentally affected. My home sits in a safe area, but I can't grantee that it'll stand up to a massive quake like today's. Fortunately the quake didn't exactly hit Tokyo itself, it hit the ocean which made things much worse in many ways. Lets talk about some things earthquakes are scary for.

Tsunamis are scary things. They're not waves. They're walls of water. It's like a flash flood that JUST HAPPENS. If you stand in it, you're done. You will be scraped along the ground, rocks, cars, houses, furniture will beat the shit out of you, and mud will drown you if you don't die with any of the earlier attacks. There's no way you can win. No surfing away. You get caught in it, you lose. So those hit the coastal areas of Japan. Scary thing is tsunamis can keep going for a very long distance, it's not just us, it's everywhere.

Earthquake themselves are scary, but what's scarier is the aftershock. The first quake will be brutal, the next one can cause more than enough trouble. Usually people think the aftershocks are like chillaxed versions of the first one. You're wrong, they can be as large as the first one or worse. So think about it this way. You're sitting in a city of crumbling things, fires aren't starting, everything seems settled for a while. You think its fine, you go back into your home which sits somehow on fragile land that took damage during the first quake. Then, the after shock strikes you. Your home is doomed. The city is doomed double time. Yes, it's disaster on disaster. Rubble on more rubble. Now, your home, resting on that fragile, broken piece of land begins to slide down. Your home and you, everything in the area just slide down the side of the hill. You may have survived that one, but who knows what will kill you next. Maybe another landslide.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be raining there. Rain can make things gajillion times worse than you can think of. Think of the ground becoming liquid. Yes, that's right, literally liquid. Imagine this. You have some water at the bottom of a tank, you have fine, powdery soil on the top. It's stable right now, nothing is moving. But apply enough force, shake that tank a bit, and the water begins to mix up with the powdery soil. It's almost like super-saturated clay now. Imagine a couple buildings on that layer of so-called soil. That building will sink into the ground. Buildings collapse because of this effect. Yup.

Fires are scary too. They're uncontrollable and when fires start during an earthquake, there's no chance until it burns everything away. Those fire fighters, in all that rubble have to find a way to that fire. It's a hard task. Usually by that time, fires are large and impossible to put out. You have to let it be, there's no saving your stuff. It's all gone.

So there you go. You cannot win earthquakes. But you can avoid them. Again, it's just luck how Tokyo dodged the bullet. But who knows what's coming next. The after shocks are still rolling. There's no safety for the next 2 months I'd say. Those people affected will have sleepless nights.

Last thing, and this may shock some of you: it's unavoidable. No running away from it. It sucks, but you have to live with it. That's how a typical Japanese would think. Forget about all the things you lost, move on if you lived through it. Sob about it later.

By the way if you're considering  to "volunteer" on "rebuilding" please don't. You're just taking away somebody else's possible job. What's MOST needed now are jobs for those who just lost it. Don't volunteer. We can rebuild ourselves. Your consideration is good enough and something we can thank for.

If you didn't get it. I'm from Japan. I lived in Japan since I was born. I was raised there. Just attending college right now.

Time for another track on Newgrounds.

[link]

Enjoy!! Vote me something, get me some exposure. Pweez

Happy Meal Time (Original Mix) - Skybase sadly listed under techno lol.
Just because I can... Go vote!!

[link]

Go download!

Hey if you have a NG account write a review or something!

Help Happy Meal Time get a bit more audience pweez.

Like I have any. Damn it.

So ok... I make music for fun and sometimes for business. Last night I was making a song using just my qwerty keyboard and was wondering how far I can go with it.

Either way, Happy Meal Time was what I created in the end. This track was basically created in 10 hours or less and it's got some bumps but you know... it's happy.

Anyway you can download / play the music piece here (it's on soundcloud):

enjoy.

There's been several interesting parts about Pokemon Hunter 2 that I'd like to discuss here on my journal. Unlike most projects I work on Pokemon Hunter 2 is one interesting, free-for-all basis project I'm working on.



=NCH85 and I met up online. At the time, I was interested in working with him on several animation projects which I ended up ditching because of the distance and communication issues we had. It is VERY TOUGH to collaborate on something when you cannot share files quickly.

The projects that I ditched were Galaxy Number Seven, DIG, and various others that were way too complicated or too demanding for both of us.



Aside from these we had quite some time just doing other stuff. I mostly ended up doing a lot of his work. This includes music, voice acting and VFX work. Below are some examples. I'm not credited in some of the works for various reasons.



So that's the beginning of me and NCH85 doing stuff for the fun of it. There's a bit of nostalgia now that I think of it. I've really never worked with an independent flash artist before so a lot of this was fun (and at the same time a big pain in the ass, please lol)

For the first time, I'll be showing you some breakdowns of 2DVFX work done for Pokemon Hunter 2. There are multiple layers of things happening



Oh well there's a ton of stuff I did that went into this. I'm showing a good 10% of the work here. Pokemon Hunter 2 is the LARGEST thing NCH85 and I have done so far together. It's big, epic, and full of brutal action that'll rip your eyeballs out. We expect it to be done sometime during 2011.

So I worked with a bit more to complete this thing.



Which you can view on NewGrounds!!!

[link]

SHUT UP AND VOTE 5. JUST DO IT.

Awwww these songs are so nice. Now I wonder why we won't make new ones. All of these songs sound like one hit wonders by some virtually unknown musicians and others. So I thought it'd be nice to just collect some of the song authors just to make them 0.001% famous.

Frosty the Snowman (released: December 14, 1950) - Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson

Deck the Halls - Traditional Yuletide and New Years' carol, it appears in John Parry Ddall's (c. 1710–1782) musical manuscript, though you can bet it's older than that. Hey, apparently these weren't even tunes.

O Christmas Tree (actually called O Tannenbaum) - German tune. Best version seems to come from Ernst Anschütz who gets the credit for writing it down (1824), although the song itself is old. Lyrics go back to 1550.

Jingle Bells - by James Lord Pierpont (1822–1893) originally published: 1857. This was apparently written for Thanksgiving. WAIT REALLY? THIS IS A THANKSGIVING SONG? Check wikipedia. Man wtf. I hope this isn't a lie.

Jingle Bell Rock - Bobby Helms 1957, written by Joe Beal and Jim Boothe.

The First Nowell - 18th Century, English.

Oh what else.... there are tons more but you can look them up yourself. I'm tired of listening to the same melodies over and over, especially at the airport where I somehow have to suffer listening to this stuff.

It always made me wonder what happens if Aphex Twin, Richard Devine, MERZBOW, Squarepusher, Brian Eno just made Christmas songs. Will our heads explode by the 26th?

Sometimes you wake up, and you realize you're still dreaming.

Giving away a point for llamas is actually nice....

So today I'm a bit bored. I wanted to spend money on something, but I had nothing better to spend on. I didn't want to buy something worth more than $10 so I bought points. What do you do with points? Well... I don't know, waste them? Sounds reasonable. So Yeah, today's llama per point day.

I finally found some time to update my blog. It's been long. Very long. Too long.

I don't know who looks at it, but I still get views. I'll keep it posted with new stuff every now and then.

Here's the link to my blog: [link]