Creating The Means For The Production @thefineyoungcapitalists - Tumblr Blog

Happy Birthday Vivian James

Why are you writing something?

We took all the money, left over from the Scholarship Fund, as well as all the money from the poster sales. And we gave it to a Film School.

Why?

In Canada there are two types of Film School, one focuses on the study of film, another focuses on production of film. In production stream in the students 4th year they will make something called a Thesis film, which will their final project.

Now for some reason, Gamergate, and the people who were associated with the Scholarship fund, really hated Paul Feig’s Ghostbuster film. But they wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t because they didn’t want to see women in film, but because they felt that it was reusing an existing story, or rebooting an old idea.

To that point they were much more interested in films that had female main characters that were original, or a new intellectual property.

To celebrate Vivian James’s Birthday, all of the money we gave to the Film School, has been ear marked for an award every year for the next 4 years.

The award will be given to the student that chooses to create an original film with a female main character. The gender of the Direction, Writer, or Producer does not matter, but the main character must be a woman.

This film will go on to be played in festival and act as calling card for the film makers so they can create future productions.

FAQ

What’s the name of the Scholarship?

The Vivian James Film Award.

Why isn’t it called “Ghostbusters Sucks So We Made This Scholarship?”

Intellectual Property Laws.

Will the name of the award appear at the end of the credits?

If the director chooses it will appears at the end of the film as

“The Vivian James Award - Organized by The Fine Young Capitalists” and include the picture of Vivian James used for all of our Scholarship projects.

Will this be last production that the Scholarship does?

Yes, probably part of the reason we gave away the money was for accounting reasons.

Where can I send emails to complain about this?

[email protected]

Can /v/, 8Chan, and Gamergate take credit for this? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No one asked us about Gamergate for its anniversary. We aren’t sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. But Koretzky didn’t know who we were so it’s not surprising. The Canadian division of the company would like to make our official opinion on the matter the image above. Stolen and modified from (http://kurkoboltsi.deviantart.com/art/Enter-Lil-Slugger-319228232) the nerds will get it, and that’s more or less who we were trying to reach with this whole thing anyways. Despite popular opinion you gamers are the people that are helping minorities make games, both through us and other projects.

Danielle isn’t involved in the Gamergate conflict and Autobotika quite franky is so far away from it’s silly to ask their opinion.

The project while not finished is at a state where TFYC no longer needs to be involved. And while Twitter is fun, we really feel that most of the people using it to contact us would be best helped if we no longer responded. The store is now closed for poster and what not, although if you have a personal request we may be able to meet it. We’ll be Open Sourcing the code in the next 30 days and licensing all the art under Creative Commons as per our arrangement.

Danielle still has time left with the programmer, after he recovers so if you have any suggestions for the game submit them on the Steam Community page and we’ll implement them into her game. Before we hand over all the rights. If you are a backer we will be contacting you about your reward and you can always contact us a [email protected] with suggestions.

At some point, you get tired from doing work for no money, and we passed that point month ago. And quite frankly I don’t think when either side writes the story of what happened in the game industry for the last year we’ll be mentioned. To those asking if we’ll do it again... that depend if we can find a way to raise the money in the end the limiting factor is always money.

But on the topic of crowdsourcing and to address all the criticism that we’ve got... it’s difficult to take your criticism seriously... when your project still hasn’t been completed. When it’s finished we’ll be happy to bow to your superiority.

You can get it here, but please play the demo first.

http://store.steampowered.com//app/367710

We are paying to use your computer

We can not replicate the OpenGL error on any system, we’ve tried on multiple systems, and hardware configurations and we can’t replicate the error. I.E. it works here and not there.

If you are having this error, I.E. that the game is telling you that you need OpenGl 3.1, have a high speed internet connection and have either installed the Afterlife Empire Demo, or the Afterlife Empire Full game we will pay you 20 dollars an hour to have remote access to your system to diagnosis the error.

If you are interested contact [email protected]

On Updates

Since Friday we’ve pushed 5 separate updates for capability. If you were unable to run the game before (I.E. It gave you an OpenGL error or just loaded with a black screen, could you please try the game again. If you are still having problem it will help to diagnosis the error.

On Modding Text

Somone was asking to edit the text in the game. Since it support modding you can install these zipped file at http://www.thefineyoungcapitalists.com/DavidText.zip in your Mod directory, (You can find it by Right Clicking on file in Steam and go to Properties and Local Files to find that folder, work in both the Full Version and the Demo version.)

Edit the JSON file and you can change whatever text you want.

Feel free to create incriminating screenshot, change everyones text to “Fart,” or you know create a constructive work.

Visit Original Link

The programmer wishes for me to write out that the OpenGL version I got are wrong...

The current version is OpenGL 4.5

The version installed with Windows varies but OpenGL 1.1 is the most common

He plays games on his PC (Master Race Represent) and the games run on his fine.

The code that is causing the error is

if (!_vertexArray){ glGenVertexArrays(1, &_vertexArray); }

He’s added code to make sure all the openGL function he is using are actually installed and it will now warn you properly instead of just quitting or crashing.

He mostly does IOS stuff where this isn’t a problem.

From Lola

Hello everyone,

Thanks a lot for your interest and unconditional support in the development of Afterlife Empire.

We’ve been working hard over the last month on bug fixes and improvements in order to build the best experience possible for all the indiegogo backers who have believed in this project. While we’ve made a lot of progress, we’re not there yet, and we’ve decided to postpone the release in order to bring this project to a level you’ll be proud of.

We’ve heard from a number of people in the gaming industry, expressing their frustration with the delay. This is totally understandable - nobody likes to see deadlines slip, least of all developers. But we believe it’s best to postpone instead of releasing an unstable game.

We understand that in this industry, there are many developers who are more experienced than we are. But we have trouble understanding the negative commentary when what we’re working for every day is to produce Danielle’s game in the best way possible.

We wish we could be more active on social networks, and communicate our daily advances or problems during production, but we have a small team and right now we’re dedicating all of our energy to developing and improving the game as much as possible.

We truly believe, as you do, that Danielle’s game can be amazing. We hope you can understand our reasons for delaying the release, and that you keep supporting this incredible project.

With a heavy heart we say

From Danielle and Lola

Hello everyone! We want to thank you for being interested in Afterlife Empire. We want to provide the best game possible, so we're going to be delaying the launch a bit so that we can do so. Most of our team is working on Macs, so we haven't had as much bug testing as we'd like on PCs. With our backers having the early access keys we are getting a lot of support and reports on potentially game-breaking bugs we need to fix before we release the game. For our backers, please email us at [email protected] with reports of any crashes or bugs you experience so we can fix these as quickly as possible. Screenshots are welcome, along with as much detail as you can provide. For everyone else waiting, we hope that you understand that we want to present a polished product for you to play. Thank you for your patience and understanding. We'll be announcing more details on the new release date soon! Stay spooky!

Are you worried about running afoul of drama on Steam?

... Yes the Steam drama will be the Drama that kills the project.

Current Developments

First of all Afterlife Empires Steam Greenlight page is up. Greenlight is our prefered way of distributing the game so if you have a moment feel free to vote it up at

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=370251965

Second of all, we offered a scholarship for STEM through a partnership with the Porn Charity. Well we are happy to announce the winner, for the first year.

Jordan Newton who is studying Computer Science we’ve included her essay so all of our backers have a better understanding of what we saw in her.

Growing up, I have always loved video games, and it’s been the general consensus that I would always go into the field myself. However, it wasn’t until just recently that my aspirations were more refined to the grand vision of the future that I see now. I want to completely revolutionize the way we think about the union between education and technology using the awesome, enthralling power that video games have. Inspired by my younger brother and his struggles in traditional classroom settings, my dream is to work in the game industry making educational games that are actually both fun and functional. Because my little brother has so many learning disorders, he developed a severe anxiety towards books and reading. However, his love for video games has made me realize that he loves great stories as much as any avid reader does, and that his voracious appetite for games has actually helped him dramatically improve his reading skills. After this startling revelation, I began to research the link between “gamifcation” and education, and have shifted my career goals to making games that teach not just for people like my brother, but for gamers of all ages. After studying and experimenting with “gamification”, there is absolutely no reason that gamers—regardless of age, gender, race, sexuality—can’t learn things of merit from games. If Minecraft can teach kids about digital logic and basic circuitry, why can’t we teach any other subject? I also believe that I deserve this scholarship for my work in promoting diversity within the field. I am a National Center for Women & Information Technology Aspirations in Computing winner, an award given to young women who serve as inspirations for both young women and women who have long been in the industry. I am also one of nine young women worldwide chosen to be a She++ Campus Ambassador, a position that gives college-going women the resources needed to help alleviate some of the specific problems that plague their campuses in regards to being both accessible and hospitable to underrepresented demographics. I also teach weekend computing workshops for middle school girls, volunteer with GEMS clubs, and mentor several FIRST robotics teams. Ultimately, and hopefully through developing my games, I hope to become a positive inspiration for girls wanting to become computer scientists and game developers themselves. I feel that many of the women in the industry spotlight give an overall negative impression of the field, and are actually pushing aspiring young women away from the field rather than encouraging them to pursue their passions. I want to set a positive example for women everywhere that you can be both kind and successful in a field that has for so long been telling them that such a feat is impossible. Financially, these dreams are a long shot. Annually, my FAFSA EFC is the absolute lowest it can be, and I have had to take out private loans and borrow to be able to pay for my education thus far.

#gamergate

hey guys. how are you. just wondering when the stream will be ready for download.

It you have not recieved your stream contact [email protected] and they will send you a link.

On Pointless E-Drama

So we sold about 27 posters. Which in one case is really cool but in a more accurate case, did not cover the cost of creating the posters, printing them and purchasing the Shopify account. All in all we made exactly $50 bucks, which we are using to purchase a framed poster of Lizzy as Zelda to ship to her. We are going to write an email to her so we can get her physical address, something that we find vaguely ironic, as her reason for leaving GamerGate was that information was placed online. We will be still selling posters for the next weeks so feel free to purchase them at

http://the-fine-young-capitalists.myshopify.com/

And the funds will go into the scholarship fund for next year. Apply at

http://www.thefineyoungcapitalists.com/Scholarship

I feel that the reason for the poor sales is of course out fault. It’s difficult to promote these kind of things, and even with awesome designers, it’s hard to attract attention, especially if you don’t want to engage in the normal sort of E-Drama.

We’ll contact the design idea winners privately and work out how we can illustrate design for them for a smaller cost.

As for the rest of it…

When we started the women in game design project what we really wanted to do was two things.

1.) Get women more involved in game design.

2.) Show that the gaming community wanted to support them.

Everyone feels that we have accomplished that goal.

But Matt literally wanted to work on the project with the goal that he just handles the money, and the planning and not have to deal with the public. So far he’s had not one, not two, but three writers from top online publications call him a scam artist, he got death threats, and multiple people from an Online Anti-Harassment Task force have openly attacked him.

All of this was expected; in point of fact we had multiple meeting on the topic before we even started the Indiegogo. This is why Lola is the only person in the video, and why Heather presented the project. But none of that really matters and Matt was the person who made the comment on the Reddit and now it’s “his” project for some reason, despite the fact he is nether getting paid or directing the production.

The fact that no one is talking to Lola or Danielle shows the deep sexism that is present in the gaming issue. And the fact that the supposed moral majority in the gaming press hasn’t contacted them for their side of the story further expresses that point.

A man by the name of John Bain once said that the best thing for people that were interested in improving the gaming climate was to not focus on Internet celebrity drama. And it’s with that comment in mind that we will be moving our webpage TheFineYoungCapitalists.com to focus on the scholarship fund in the next couple days and not Afterlife Empire

Afterlifeempire.com will be hosting the majority of the updates on the project. And you can contact [email protected] or [email protected] if you have any question on how the money is being spent. But for the good of Danielle and Lola we feel we should separate the two projects.

In the end no one cares about the drama involved in creating the game, and everyone cares that the project actually be delivered. We feel dealing with the E-Drama and these smaller projects distract us from that goal.

We’ll update people sporadically on how the game is going Via Twitter and Tumblr but I don’t think we’ll be dealing with anymore of this E-Drama. Which includes not making silly post to gather attention.

It will be interesting to see how that works for us. I think it will make it more difficult for us to get through Greenlight in the future. But in the end all we did was give women the tool to present their ideas and rely on the Gamer community to support us in creating them.

Thanks for that Gamers, but to make you proud, we really have to stop following the endless drama that is Gamergate and actually finish the game that you paid for.

On Issues

First we created the first poster for the NotYourShield ArtProject which is featured above. It depicts @lizzyf620 as Link.

Lizwas a well-respected member of #NotYourShield until she was driven out by a vicious doxxing. She had a strong interest in the Zelda universe and we choose to depict her as Link from the Zelda franchise. This was a reaction to what happened to her. You can pick it up from our website and of course we’ll be sending Liz a copy.

You can pick up yours at http://the-fine-young-capitalists.myshopify.com/

And than the bad news.

Generally speaking helping a first time developer work with a group of developers to make her first game is difficult. It’s even more difficult when various writers have decided to use you as a Boogieman in their articles. But I have to talk about something that we aren’t having the best experience with and thankfully it’s not After Life Empire.

When we announced the #NotYourShield art project what we were doing was two things.

1.) We were trying to get #GamerGate and the gamer community in general to support diversity initiatives by focusing on the development of games and not changing existing titles.

2.) We wanted to show how diverse the #NotYourShield community was to remove the stereotype that both Gamers and GamerGate members were all white basement dwellers.

We understand that Kickstarter has made it possible for more games to be made, and it certainly resonates with certain projects. Explosive Kittens has apparently reached over 5 million dollars and while that is certainly amazing (And makes our accomplishment pale by comparisons) it really shows the importance of exposure when it comes to crowd funding. It’s important to understand that while Explosive Kitten is a neat idea for a game, the fact that everyone involved already has a known media presence act as a force multiplier for it’s idea.

What we really wanted to do was give a student who believes in creating games with diverse characters a bit of money to start their career and then eventually after doing a couple projects try to get a following so they’d be able to do a Kickstarter.

Our issue is ironically the same issue that we would have with crowd funding, which is getting people interested. We’ve been selling posters for a while now, and if you factor in the cost of creating the art we are running a negative.

Now while we love creating artwork, it’s important to understand that our first goal was to actually raise money for a diversity award to be administrated by a Video Game program. And our first goal, overrides the second. I.E if not one is buying, we ain't raising money. We’ll see how it goes after we release the first poster from the community. But if there isn’t interest we might just give the money that was going to the artists to the school.

#notyourshield #gamergate

A Heartfelt Apology

I feel with all the drama that’s been happening today, it’s important we make an apology to one of the people that was touched negatively by the project. To Christopher Poole also known as moot, the administrator of 4chan we humbly apologize.

Now it’s important to note that no one at TFYC ever posted to 4chan, except one time in which we were immediately banned and called a “new fag,” because we posted incorrectly. We honestly felt that reaction was deserved, as we hadn’t lurked sufficiently on the site.

But we did post to our twitter about 4chan. The post that started it all was a simple thank you to the site. Before Gamergate actually had a name the majority of the traffic to our campaign page came from 4chan, from their discussion of the Zoe Post. Their anons treated us quite well and we posted a simple thank you for their effort in supporting women in games.

We did not expected the response we got, the message was retweeted at least a hundred time which brought in more donation, as well as anger at the fact that we’d allow donations from 4chan. And when we responded to anger, saying we appreciated /v/ supporting women in games and that /v/ loved games above all else it sort of struck a cord with the community and it’s opponents.

We did not expect so much of our money to come from 4chan, we honestly expected TFYC to have a stronger community connection on other sites, with a more social justice focus. Vivian James came from 4chan, much of the original content came from 4chan, and we did videos specifically for 4chan because of their donations. People think this was to increase revenue, but in reality it was to thank them for their work, because we never thought we’d reach our goal, and we wanted at least some legacy of their commitment.

It’s important to understand that while 4chan is a website with a community it’s also owned by Christopher Poole. And while we never meant to speak for 4chan, it’s become clear that in some way moot felt we were speaking for his site. For that we humbly apologize and understand that our action may have caused him stress. In the end 4chan was his business, and while we though we were showing how it’s community could do good, that message was lost in the mainstream media.

But we want to tell everyone who supported us, may they still post on 4chan, or having transitioned to 8chan, we appreciated your support and we are still working to make the game you funded a reality. And to everyone else I think it’s important that history note, that it was really that community that stepped up to support us on it’s own accord, when we were in trouble.

Maybe it was all for the lulz but you all still made a difference.

And to ruin it all by shilling, We are still selling Vivan James posters, all profits will go to creating an award to be given to student graduating from Video Game design to make their first game.

https://the-fine-young-capitalists.myshopify.com/

An Open Letter to Briana Wu from Gamerbros

The identity Gamerbros has a long-standing tradition in the gaming community. It represents a group of people who will purchase the same Madden game, year after year with the only change being the numbers on the players uniform. A group that would pay 60 dollars to play a simulation of basketball, when they already own a hoop and a ball. Do you know how many beers have been drunk to keep that experience interesting, how much liver damage has been done. To be a Gamerbro is to steadfastly stick with consoles despite their inferior performance. To stick with titles that have long since grown stale. Gamerbros made Halo, and Call of Duty the multisellers that they are today. Do you know how long we spent playing those games, how many Doritos’ were eaten, how much Mountain Dew was drunk. How many girlfriends sexual needs were clearly ignored. We do not stand with Total Biscuit. Total Biscuit does not enjoy Call of Duty, he does not play Console games. He stuck with his wife when they were separate by both the law and the ocean. Do you realize how much tail he could have got with his fame? No bro would throw that away. Total Biscuit runs a podcast with a woman, who is both attractive and does not show cleavage so we have to listen to what she says. He supports a Starcraft team entirely made of players outside of the USA, an insult to Merica. He casually mocks the console market, and discusses issues like the right to free expression on his podcast instead of instead of how to cheese in Destiny. This man, if we can even call him that, is not and will not ever be a Gamerbro and we all denounce you for identifying him as such. You must learn that the world is a diverse community with many identities with their ideal and behaviors. We are clearly offended by your characterization and demand an apology. Sincerely the Gamebro community.

On - "I have never been a member of the communist party."

We’ve said this line on three separate occasions and I’m going to explain why, and also why we put up the stupid petition, sign it here. During 1950’s there was something call the Red Scare, which is also referred to as McCarthyism. After America ended the Second World War with the dropping of the atomic bomb, almost immediately America went into a cold war against multiple communist countries. And it became apparent that the USSR had hundreds of spies deep in the American government.

And the government started putting into place ridiculous policies.

In March 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9835, creating the "Federal Employees Loyalty Program" establishing political-loyalty review boards who determined the "Americanism" of Federal Government employees, and recommended termination of those who had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union, as well as some suspected of being "Un-American".

In 1958, it was estimated that roughly one out of every five employees in the United States was required to pass some sort of loyalty review. Once a person lost a job due to an unfavorable loyalty review, it could be very difficult to find other employment. "A man is ruined everywhere and forever," in the words of the chairman of President Truman's Loyalty Review Board. "No responsible employer would be likely to take a chance in giving him a job.

People were brought in front of congress and were interrogated on these issues for real or imaginary crimes. And these policy was used by the RIGHT against left leading policies and as a means to decrease civil liberties and increase the surveillance state. Minorities were targeted, LGBT individuals were targeted, every minority was affected. But the larger issue was how ludicrous ineffective it was, many of the people that were using these policies to arrest and gain sensitive information were themselves soviet spies already in the government.

These polices attacked various media creators, writers for Hollywood were interrogated and lost their job, the red scare was in part responsible for the wide spread approval of the book “The Seduction of the Innocent,” which said that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. To totally affect our culture arguably for the worst.

When I saw a writer from supposedly the most progressive video game site, advocating in a sidewise manner that people should sign this petition it completely set me off. This is dumb this stupid, there is no #GamerGate party, there is no need to create a list of member for the sole purpose of punishing them, and there is no reason for a person who coined a phrase to have to deal with this stupidity. This is the dumbest I’ve seen in this whole debate, not because it’s the worst thing, but it’s being done by a supposed journalist who should know better.

So you know, for all the journalists reading this could you start fucking writing article about women in the game industry that focuses on their content. Because being oppressed isn’t a selling point when someone is putting down 10 dollars.

On not "News" and Why Gamergate sustains.

One of the problems with the Web 2.0 world is how it's affected what news is covered. Before the Internet revolution, “News” was as the name described news. The newspaper and the nightly news were your only window into getting the events of the next day. If you didn't read it, world-changing events might silently pass you by.

And it, well sort of, grounded in the culture in a certain groups of events. Newspapers, like video games, are one of those things where the first one costs half a million, and the second one cost pennies to make. You could be a consumer for pennies, but to print your own was an undertaking. This gave the mainstream press incredible control over what was discussed. 20 years ago today regular people were legitimately discussing the Mir Space Station, for two reasons, one it was a big deal at the time, and two because the “news” was covering it.

There was still gossip of course. Who was sleeping with whom in your community was a popular topic of discussion even among those who didn’t read the paper. The newspaper did have an entire sections devoted to printing the press releases of the stars of course, as well as the “leaked” information from their publicists. But the media was focused on facts, even if they weren’t completely true.

One of the untold stories of the time concerned Entertainment Tonight. ET was relatively unsuccessful at its start. The ad sales were easy but the viewers were poor. When the series began, it focused on what movies were being released, who was in them, and where you could watch or listen to the content. It was more of an on air review of the latest media trends, than a gossip blog. The apparently mythical objective review there has been so much discussion about.

When Entertainment Tonight really started becoming profitable was when they moved away from being reviews, to being a news show. Suddenly those press releases became breaking news, breaking news that warranted interviews with the celebrities involved, or their publicists, or eventually people who were just tangentially related to the issue at hand. The assumption before was that viewers would see through this manufactured drama, but results showed that while many did they were more likely to discuss it with others. Giving sensationalized information was actually better as it not only attracted attention but also discussion, much of which was refuting the points made. All this discussion good or bad made it must watch television.

Howard Stern once said words to the effect of, the people who like my show listen to it once, the people who hate my show listen to it twice so they know where to get offended. In the rating of a show there is no column marked, viewed ironically.

What history forgets is the way the Internet started out. The Internet was more or less a free printing press when it began. If you look at the early net, you actually saw people concentrating on technical news, world news and events (As well as a massive amount of pornography.) The first online publication were surprisingly respectable, almost to counter the assumption by the public at large they weren’t. But just like Entertainment Tonight, they all slowly moved away from covering information objectively and instead focused on the emotions of the issue. Before, discussion on a news story was free advertising, but online with comment threads, message forums, referral links, and online ads it was a way of making money. It’s telling that Reddit, “The front page of the Internet” in not a news site, but merely a means of commenting and organizing existing news.

We’ve been tracking various websites that discuss events around TFYC, /r/GamerGhazi inevitably has more comments and more interaction with us than /r/KotakuInAction. KotakuInAction normally approves of what we are doing and nothing ruins a conversation more than approval. While at the same time GamerGhazi has tons of points to discuss, a surprisingly high number which aren’t true. When we discuss the issue with Anti-GamerGate “journalists” (A term we use only because it’s clear they have a bias), everything becomes about emotion and drama. No Anti-GamerGate reporter has ever asked us about feminism, in fact the only interviews where people have asked us to STOP talking about feminism were clearly Anti-Gamergate.

What fuels the fires of GamerGate is the outrage against it. Just like with Howard Stern people have more or less quit their job, to watch it not once but twice so they know exactly where to be offended, which fuels the other side anger. Commenting on the news shouldn’t make the news. But so much of the GamerGate discussion is not on what happened but what someone said about something that may have happened. @radicalbytes has less followers than we do but he’s retweeted more by his “enemies” than his followers, so he’s much more visible. Crash Override Network has 22 articles not because it’s news, or because of journalistic corruption, but because it drives traffic, and people want to add their own opinion by repeating what others have said.

I regret that in the end the main limiting factor of TFYC might actually be that we don’t fight enough to make enemies with the minorities we are trying to help, and too much time working with them to make the world a better placeI think it’s a sad message when that’s the best way to survive in the current media space is to hate everyone. We don’t know what to say, because all people in social justice want to do is talk about them selves.

But then again, in the current media space I might be saying all of this for attention.

P.S. Boingboing stop linking to articles about us that have no facts in them

#Gamegate

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