Spiffworld | Blog

I got an email from a guy (or, “bloke”, as the case may be) who just made a video for a British charity called “Alcohol, It’s No Joke“. They’re using British comedians in a series of videos that start out funny before descending into darkness. He thought I might be interested in them because, as he says, “as someone who clearly knows a thing or two about ironic juxtaposition, you might enjoy taking a look”.

He’s right, I did like the videos. I like that they hook you in with something you like (comedy) and before you realize you’ve been flipped, they’ve already delivered their message to you, non-preachy ninja-style.

If you’d like to take a look too, you can check them out here, and here. They’ve also got a website and are on Twitter @alcoholnojoke, if you decide you really dig what they’re doing.

The folks over at Spintown interviewed me recently, and I think it may be the only actual video evidence that I exist out in the wild (apparently I’m quite elusive). Here’s Part one, and Part two of the interview, in which I talk about my videos and the experience of making them.

The interview was actually a series of questions that I answered while talking into the iSight camera on my wife’s MacBook. So I’m not actually interacting with anyone while I answer the questions (which is probably painfully obvious in the interview as I stare blindly at the laptop’s screen). But I really enjoyed the interview because the questions were so good. I’ve been interviewed before, and the questions are usually of the “so, where do you get your ideas?” or “what does Jonathan Coulton think of your work?” variety. But the Spintown questions were much better than that, allowing me to answer them in the form of telling little stories. It definitely made it interesting on my end, and hopefully you’ll find it interesting on your end too.

I have no idea how many people out there will care about this, but I’ve made Spiffworld t-shirts available on Zazzle.com. It was easy enough to do, since I actually used Zazzle to make the Spiffworld shirt I wore to my first Blizzcon, back in the day. So now, anyone else who wants to sport my site’s logo, can do it too. Merry Christmas!

As I just announced with a short little video, I’m joining the Machinima.com network. Hopefully this will bring many new eyeballs to my videos, which is a good thing. However, I’m still going to continue posting my vids to my normal YouTube channel, so if you don’t care about other people’s machinima, you can just keep doing what you’re doing (i.e. stay subscribed to my YouTube channel) and you’ll keep getting my videos as you always have. And that’s a good thing too. It’s a double-good thing!

My vids on Machinima.com: www.machinima.com/series/view&id=245

My vids on Machinima’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p= FCE740C094DDCEAF.

And in case you missed it in the announcement video, I’ll be posting a new vid this coming Sunday, Dec. 13, 2009. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

I posted new video, sort of. It’s just a short little video telling people that they can follow me on Twitter (something you people already know). Sure, I didn’t really need to post a whole new video just to announce this, but it was more fun that way. In fact, I had more fun working on this 1:22 long video than I’ve been having working on the real video I’m supposed to be working on. And just to give you an indication of how much time these videos take, this video that’s not even two minutes long still took me all day to complete.

The music I used was a wonderful reimagining of Jonathan Coulton’s “Creepy Doll” by BorbaSpinotti. I’m hoping to use more of his stuff for announcement videos like this one in the future.

If I could go back and remake one of my older videos, “Creepy Doll” would probably be the one, and I’d make it more like this video is. The original “Creepy Doll” video was done before I’d learned most of the tricks I now know about how to craft a video, and I wish I’d been able to do more with it. Making this announcement video is most likely the closest I’ll ever get to another shot at “Creepy Doll”, and it was a lot of fun doing it.

I signed up for Twitter. I’m @spiffworld. I’ve got nothing particularly interesting to say at the moment, but if I think of something, I’ll be sure to tweet about it. I figure at the very least, I’ll post when I’ve started working on a new video, with updates on progress and anything interesting that occurs to me about the process. Heck, I should have done this before Blizzcon so I could have talked about that. Anyhoo, follow me… if you dare.

YouTube is changing the way they handle people’s Channel pages (the home page for a person’s videos on YouTube). For the most part, the changes are positive, making it easier for people to view, rate, and comment on your videos in one place without having to go page to page. But they’ve made one change which is really bumming me out — they don’t allow animated .gifs as background images anymore.

This sucks because I was using an animated .gif that cycled through some of the characters in my videos. It was a very simple background but a pretty engaging one because of the animation, and now I can’t use it. That sucks.

I want to ask, “why would YouTube get rid of functionality like that”, but I’m pretty sure I know the answer — it’s either because people were abusing the feature by doing something annoying or inappropriate with animations on their page (although I doubt it), or because the new technology they’re using for the more advanced Channel page just doesn’t support animated .gifs (most likely). Lame. I’m going to write them an email complaining about it, but I don’t expect it to change soon.

Adam Savage, one of the guys from the show Mythbusters, posted this Tweet today:

Maybe the best piece of machinema art EVAR! To @jonathancoulton’s song (and my anthem) “Future Soon”: http://tinyurl.com/l5abqy. Bow down!

The tinyurl link is to my video for “The Future Soon”. That’s right, the guy from Mythbusters (who I saw at the last Jonathan Coulton concert I went to in S.F.) thinks my vid is the best EVAR! Woo!

I’m pretty sure that when people spam a bunch of my videos with those lame “plz dnt rd this but if u dnt post this on 10 vidz u will die” email chain letters, it’s probably actually a compliment of sorts. They see a chain letter thing, want to post it to a bunch of videos, and they post it to mine because they like my vids. However, I hate those things. Spamming those on my videos on YouTube is like spraying graffiti all over my house or something. I don’t care about the freaky clown babysitter. I don’t care about my crush falling in love with me on the next closest Friday. And I don’t care about subscribing or unsubscribing to some guy named Fred.

And here’s the sad part — once you spam me with chain mail comments like that, you’ve proven that you like doing that kind of thing, and unless I stop you you’re likely to keep doing it to me over and over. So, I gotta block you. I know, I don’t want to do it, because like I said, you’re probably just spamming my videos because you like them. But, you’re a spammer and you’ve got to be blocked. I hope you understand. And if you’re ever thinking of spamming email chain letters, please don’t. It’s really, really lame.

All you porn spammers with the moronic advertisements for your porn sites, I’ve got nothing to say to you. You’re just bots, you’re just doing your bot jobs, and it’s really your human overlords who I should be complaining about. So, you porn bots are getting banned too, although I know it won’t stop you from continuing to clog the comments with porn ads. You guys are like Internet kudzu.

Jonathan Coulton’s long-awaited concert DVD, “Best.Concert.Ever.” is finally for sale. I went to that concert, filmed at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, back in Feb. ‘08. Know how you can tell that I went to that concert? Because my face is frikin’ all over the DVD footage (I’m the guy with glasses in the orange Krakens jersey). We were sitting in the front row right next to where one of the camera guys were standing, so whenever that guy turned to get a shot of the crowd, my face was what he got a shot of.

I really was the Best.Concert.Ever., and I recommend that if you want to see what Jonathan Coulton is like at a live concert but can never manage to actually make it to one of his shows, this DVD is probably the next best thing. Go grab a copy today!

As a bonus, the DVD set comes with both the DVD footage of the concert plus a separate CD of the songs from the concert for you to listen to. Nice.