Phil Viscer has a post up at his blog that explains pretty much everything about the NBC debacle. I was wrong about several key facts, so you need to read his account if you want to know the real story. It is both better and worse than I expected. Better, because the cutting wasn’t something the show’s creators agreed to. They no longer own the rights to Veggie Tales, and had no say in the matter. It’s nice to know that Vischer isn’t gutting his show for a buck.
But the news is bad for all the same reasons. Veggie Tales is owned by a secular company who does not value the central message and who is willing to re-shape the thing to make it profitable. “God made you special and he loves you very much” has been replaced with “thanks for coming to my house.”
I don’t have much to add to my previous comments, except to say that this is a rotten way for things to have turned out.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Thinking back to the frustration of Blender, one of the things I noticed was that I was suffering from nested difficulties. This is where, instead of solving a problem and moving forward, the solution to a problem involves a sub-problem, which in turn has its own sub-problem, and so on. A day with many problems seems rough, but it happens. A day where each attempt to solve a problem only reveals new problems is maddening, and threatens to drive me over the edge. Consider this scenario:
Drive to store (Get flat tire)
Change flat tire
Continue driving to store (Get another flat tire)
Change flat tire
Continue driving to store (Get another flat tire)
Change flat tire
Continue driving to store (Get another flat tire)
Change flat tire
Arrive at store
This is a bad day, to say the least. Having all four tires go flat would be frustrating, but for me it wouldn’t be as rage-inducing as getting just ONE flat tire under these circumstances:
Drive to store (Get a flat tire.)
Change flat tire
Bolts are stuck (Use WD-40 on bolts)
Get WD-40 out of glovebox. (Glovebox won’t open.)
Pry open glovebox with screwdriver (It’s too dark to see what I’m doing.)
Use flashlight – Flashlight won’t turn on.
Change Batteries (Get batteries from trunk)
Open trunk. (Can’t open it: Trunk key is bent.)
Enter rampage mode.
This is far, far more frustrating to me, even though on balance I might arrive at the store sooner than if I just had the four flat tires scenario. With each new layer of nesting my anger doubles. It’s like an anger multiplier. One level deep is annoyed. Two levels deep is angry. Seven levels deep and I conclude the entire world is against me and must be destroyed. I’m sure this is how super-villians are created: They are normal guys until a day comes when they have a seven-level problem and they decide to hire an army of henchmen and build an orbital death ray.
With Blender, every problem was a five-level problem, which is why the program made me so crazy. I’d hit level five, get enraged, and storm off. Then I’d regain my composure, come back, and try something else, only to have it all happen again. So, it really was for the safety of the world that I had to give up on it.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
When you want an image to use for your character portrait, you have two choices:
Spend years mastering the art of sci-fi / fantasy illustration. Perhaps attend art school. Hone your craft until you can fully realize your character on paper just as you imagine them.
Use Google Image Search and swipe something that looks roughly like how you want your character to look.
For whatever reason, most players take the lazy way and opt for #2, despite the fact that there is a 90% chance they are going to look like a brooding androgynous goth / punk elf holding the wrong weapon.
Go figure.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Steven on the gigantic animated breasts in the otherwise serious Divergence Eve:
I would curse the production staff for this, except that I have to confess that it was the character designs that convinced me to watch the show — which was exactly what the production staff expected and the reason they did it.
Fact is, I’m proof that they made the right decision. I think the show would have been better if the breasts had been more realistically sized, but if they had been I probably would not have watched it. Aargh…
The fan service got me to watch the show. But how many people who would have enjoyed it will skip it because of the fan service? Aargh again!
Yeah, I fall into this latter category. I can’t possibly ask my wife to watch this show with me without feeling like an idiot. The fanservice kept me away from this one, despite the praise I’ve read elsewhere.
I love mechas. I like good stories. But even if my wife was willing to sit through this, I think the breasts would undermine the plot at every turn. It’s like watching Hamlet enacted entirely by Playboy bunnies*: The story is grim and intense, but nobody is going to take the thing seriously in this context.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Jaquandor points to Phil Vischer’s blog, which sheds a great deal of light on the questions I asked yesterday. In the comments of that post, BeckoningChasm took a guess on what was going on and it looks like he nailed it: Big Idea agreed to editing, thinking this would mean making commercial breaks and adjusting the length of the show, and only later did everyone find out exactly what “editing for TV” entailed. Vischer has agreed to do the edits, removing non-historical references to God, but still doesn’t know how that can be done for the older episodes, which are more about God and less about values. Since he wrote many of those shows himself, my guess would be that it probably can’t be done.
On the other side of things, I still can’t comprehend why NBC would want this show. It would be like a Christian radio station wanting to run Howard Stern, but with all the dirty parts edited out. Ok, assuming that could be done: Who is going to want the edited version of the show?
But the real discovery for me was Vischer’s epic 7-part series, “What happened to Big Idea?” Big Idea went bankrupt! I had no idea. It’s hard to imagine, but the mistakes are easy to spot with the aid of hindsight. What troubles me about what happened was how familiar all of his mistakes were. Phil has the same view of management that I do: Hire smart people, then get out of the way and trust them to do their job. I could see myself making all of the mistakes Phil Vischer did. And some of them were pretty bad. The story is painful to read. I went through the dot-com thing myself, and so I know what it’s like to see a company grow and burst. Even though I kept my job, it was painful. What happened to Big Idea is the same thing, only on a grander and more destructive scale. What a shame.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Steven left a link to this story in the comments here: Veggie Tales is to be broadcast on TV, but all religious references are to be stripped out. I’d love to know how they plan to do that. Veggie Tales is a kids show with musical numbers. Some of the songs mention God in the lyrics. Those songs would have to be re-written, re-recorded, and then the show re-cut. Every show ends with Bob and Larry going over to the computer to read “today’s verse”. Bob’s ending catchphrase is, “God made you special, and He loves you very much!” If they take God out of the show, it will be quite a bit shorter and make a lot less sense.
I’m not really angry at NBC. I was shocked when I heard they were putting the show on TV, because I knew the show is explicit about talking about God. It’s a show by Christians and aimed at Christians, so it doesn’t water things down. I was sure if they put the show on the air there would be complaints. A lot of them. My kids don’t watch TV, but if they did I can imagine how I would react to a show that was advocating another religion. This is deeply personal business, and not something that should try to bypass me by proselytizing to my kids via a cartoon show. If I came in and saw Spongebob had been replaced by “Tarot Time with Little Miss Wicca” I’d be pretty irritated. So, I don’t blame NBC for wanting to avoid the backlash that would come from non-Christians and anti-Christians out there. The conservative Christian groups would react at least as strongly if another religion was getting airtime during kid’s shows. NBC is a business, and from a pure business standpoint they have a duty to avoid religious advocasy when the kids are watching, because anything else results in bad press and angry letters sent to sponsors.
What I don’t understand is why the sides agreed to this in the first place. What in the world made NBC want this show? NBC makes this sound perfectly routine, to sign up a show that is totally at odds with their broadcast standards. Big Idea claims they had no idea their show would have to be edited like this, and say they never would have signed the papers if they had known. I find it hard to believe that these contracts were signed and somehow nobody mentioned how this was going to go. Editing – particularly tricky editing like this – costs money and often requires voice actors to come in and lay down some new dialog. Who is going to do this editing? NBC? How did they get permission to edit the show like this? At best, it sounds like the Big Idea legal team didn’t do their job, and NBC was probably at least a little deceptive or misleading. At worst, Big Idea is outright lying.
All of this just confirms my fears that this was a terrible idea to begin with. Phil Vischer (one of the show’s creators, and the voice of Bob the Tomato) is still excited: “Isn’t it great that Veggie Tales is on TV?” Well, no. Who cares? Imagine how the secular / non-Christian types will react when they decide they like the show, buy one of the videos, and get the raw, uncut, explicit version that talks about You-Know-Who. I think they are going to feel like they were duped, suckered in. Christians who like the show already own the videos. So who is the show for?
Now, I’m all for wholesome entertainment that is still, you know, entertaining. I’m weary of the crass booger & fart jokes that are strung together to make kids giggle, and one can only take so much of the “Kipper” shows – television so harmless that it is devoid of content. Something witty yet wholesome is a worthwhile goal, and I’d admire them if Big Idea made another show that was aimed at television with this goal in mind. But the way this happened is just awful. It’s lies and money and will lead to a chopped-up TV show that doesn’t make any sense and won’t please anyone.
On a lighter note, Pizza Angel!
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
Yes, black dragons are powerful. So are level-20 fireballs, demi-gods, and huge mythic beasts. But there is no force in the game as powerful as the combined selfishness and apathy of your players.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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