Ugh, Well we ran into MAJOR bugs upon launching the forum. It’s currently been taken offline to try and fix things. A lot of the comments to older news posts got locked as part of launching it, but I’ve unlocked a few of the recent ones. We may try again tomorrow, we’ll see. To everyone who did post comments, they will still be there when the forum goes back up.

In the meantime I’ll be finishing up The Tunnel.

The official forums are now up! You can click on the link at the top to access them. Not only are these in a traditional forum format (as opposed to Vanilla mentioned earlier), but all your login information and comments have been preserved. If you are registered on Accursed Farms already, your information will carry over into the forums.

You may notice the page design seems a little different now. This redesign was necessary in order to accommodate the forum plugin. I still consider the entire design in a temporary state and you’re welcome to propose a different look or layout, I’ve already created a thread in the forums on the topic.

The forum design is also NOT FINAL, it should probably be considered to be in an alpha or beta state. There are multiple problems with it and at the moment that will be fixed in the near future. Some of the known ones:

-Color scheme for text, backgrounds, etc. is not final at all, some minor text may appear as black on dark grey
-Forum layout still needs some work as well
-Some forum icons are displaying incorrectly
-User avatars currently aren’t functioning yet

So lots of cosmetic things, but the core functionality of it should be good. Since the majority of the last 24 hours were spent JUST on fixing things like the color, I was worried how long this might stall things, so I decided to launch the forum anyway. I’ve been eager on getting the forum launched for a while since it allows people to participate more in discussions than just replying to news posts. I’m not worried about the bugs, I’ve seen other examples of what this forum software can do and it’s quite impressive. Don’t worry, it will look better than it does now, I promise.

Comments are now disabled on the main page since I think it would just create redundancy. Now if you want to comment on a news post, you’ll be redirected to a thread containing the same post. This applies to future posts and all posts made up to this date. I also mean ALL posts as all the old news posts from the old blogspot location have been imported over. To reduce redundancy even further, news posts will be sorted into different categories. For official video releases, those will get filed under “Civil Protection,” “Freeman’s Mind,” or “Other Videos” accordingly. Everything else will be under “General News.”

The forum topics are based on your input so far. Additional ones can be added if there’s a large enough demand. Also as my first abuse of power, I’ve added a section for stuff I’m more specifically interested in, even if it may not relate directly to the videos. Some of you may notice there’s no subtitles section in the forums. That’s intentional. The subtitles section will be such a big thing in itself I didn’t want to launch it at the same time as the rest of the forums. That will go up a few days from now with its own news post on that.

Big thanks goes to David Donaldson for putting this all together (DaveD in the forums). He runs Fugcraft.net, the unofficial minecraft server of Fugworld.com, a Team Fortress 2 Community. I also want to give thanks to “Jexius Something” and Luke McKee for also coming up with functional designs, though theirs weren’t the final version.

I’ve gone and started a few threads in the forum, but feel free to start your own there. I’ll likely get more involved in the forums after the next episode is completed. If you spot any problems with the forum (besides color scheme and layout), either private message DaveD or else start a new thread about in in the forums. Enjoy!

EDIT: Several major bugs are cropping up. David is trying to fix it the best he can so far, but I’m getting pretty tired, it’s possible some fixes will have to wait until a little later. I appreciate your patience and I’m confident this will look a lot better in the near-ish future.

Hey everyone, I’ve been very busy lately, lots of stuff has been going on though I’ve probably appeared to be dead on the site. I haven’t caught up on all the comments yet, but here’s a rundown of what’s been happening:

INTERVIEW:

A few weeks ago, Machinima.com contacted me about an interview. I’ve been trying to postpone everyone asking about that until “The Tunnel” is done (more on that below), but I couldn’t really put off Machinima.com since they’re the largest reason so many people watch my videos in the first place. I was told it would go up a couple weeks later, and here it is a couple weeks later and some viewers have spotted it and have been helpful in posting it in the comments. Here’s a link:

Video Interview with Machinima.com

This is the first I’m seeing the footage as well, it appears they stretched my face. It was actually filmed entirely blind on my side, I couldn’t see the host I was talking to, so if my behavior seems odd, that’s why. I think this is my first video appearance on the internet. I’ve been kind of avoiding that since I don’t look like Freeman these days, but hopefully people will keep watching the videos anyway. I’ve been saving a lot of money on haircuts in the meantime.

FORUMS:

I’ve had some dynamite responses regarding the forums, but have been incredibly busy, with replying to everyone being on the “to do” list for day after day. The reason they’re not up is probably my fault at this point, but I’ll get to it soon.

THE TUNNEL:

This is why I haven’t been active on other things, “The Tunnel” is getting DAMN close to being done, I’ve gotten some good help and I think it’s a real possibility that ALL the audio will be done this weekend. After that, I should be 24-48 hours out from having it 100% done and uploaded.

FREEMAN’S MIND:

Time on this has been siphoned toward “The Tunnel” but it will be resumed immediately afterwards.

OTHER:

I’m going to be moving soon to a mysterious location for mysterious reasons in a few weeks, some of my time has been spent getting ready for that. That will disrupt production for a little while, but I intend to get “The Tunnel” and at least one more FM episode done before then.

EDIT:

It seems I was ambitious, the sound editing still isn’t done, but a lot of progress had been made (besides myself there are currently 3 sound editors working on this, I’m hoping I don’t need more). I’ll have another update here once it’s completed.

* * * EDIT * * *

I’ve been flooded with promising offers in all categories since I made this post. I think if I get anymore I’ll just get overwhelmed and will have to send a bunch of rejection emails to new people. I still need to review all the emails and reply to everyone. Thanks to everyone who contacted me about this or was planning to.

The exception is that I’m still accepting help for the forum integration. While I have received a couple hopeful emails, more input / offers in this area won’t hurt, especially since the forum still isn’t up.

* * * EDIT * * *

I was hoping to avoid making this post, but I feel like production is getting stalled some again and I need more help to get things done. Help is needed in multiple areas and I would appreciate anyone who might be able to give me a hand. Unfortunately my managerial skills are still lacking, so choosing who to pick for working on different tasks may be a bit haphazard, but I’ll try and reply to everyone who contacts me. Any work that gets used will receive due credit. If you’ve contacted me once offering help with any of these areas already, feel free to contact me again. Here are the sections I currently need help with:

SOUND EDITING:

I’m going a little crazy about trying to finish “The Tunnel” and right now the biggest area that still needs work is sound editing and effects. Right now if all the sound effects were completed, I think the episode could be completely finished in 24-48 hours. I’d really like to get this done in the next week if possible. Otto Beumelberg has been doing a fantastic job on the scenes so far, but as this episode is the longest one to date, I think it may be a bit overwhelming for one person (myself included). Nowadays usually just the dialogue is recorded in-game for Civil Protection, with everything else being added in editing. You would need to have experience doing volume balancing, position mixing, and providing different sound effects as needed (it won’t be anything too exotic). Some reverb mixing may also be needed, but the levels for the remaining scenes are relatively light. I will ask to listen to some prior example of your work to get an idea of your skill level. While speedy work would be great, I’ll be more concerned with how the final result sounds.

FORUM INTEGRATION:

I’m eager to launch the forums as soon as possible, but some of the people working on it have become busy and there’s still a big problem to solve before they do get launched. The basic problem is that I want to have news posts that are made in Wordpress to be duplicated as threads in the forum somehow. Ideally, they could be sorted into different cateories related on the topic. If you know of how to accomplish this, please let me know, I could use the help. I believe we’re going with phpBB for the forum, but I’ve heard BBpress can also be good. As long as you can achieve the functionality I’m after for the forum, I’m open-minded as to what software is used. Comment and user crossover information would be desireable, but not required.

VOICE ACTING:

Some of these won’t be required for a while, but I wanted to try and start auditioning people early in case it takes a while to find someone. These will probably all be one-time roles I’m afraid (for now), but they will get your name in the credits if they’re used. You don’t have to actually match these character descriptions (though it will help), just be capable of sounding like them. All roles are likely to require some degree of shouting. Having some means of voice chat is preferred, but not required. Here are the character descriptions:

1. Male, age anywhere from 30s to 60s. Sleazy sounding character, preferably with a stereotypical New Jersey accent. Should sound somewhat older, bossy, and aggressive. I’ll need this role sooner than the others.

2. Black male, age from later 20s to 40s. Just a typical black american accent. No stereotypes will be involved for this role, but the character model will be black, so the speaker should have a characteristic black voice. There are some inflection differences from you honkies.

3. Female, age 20s to 30s. Looking for a standard “Valley Girl” accent, not too young-sounding. Nothing too overdone, just having the obvious accent. Here’s a good example I found of it.

- - -

If you can help me in any of these areas, please send me an email to [email protected]. I haven’t forgotten about everyone else’s emails either, but emails related to video production take priority with me over more casual ones. If you emailed me a couple months ago, there’s still a good chance I’m going to reply to you, I’m still far behind on that.

Here’s a bit of an update as to what’s going on with the forums. Work has been progressing on the forum, but we’ve run into some setbacks. The problem is trying to find a balance between the interface and features. My original plan when the site was relaunched was to eventually transition over to a forum with all the comments and entries carrying over. This is currently possible using the “Vanilla” web application which is compatible with Wordpress, however I can’t say I’m fond of the layout. It doesn’t follow the traditional forum layout and I find it a little confusing visually, like it’s a news feed page rather than a forum. Since the forums are something I plan to use as well, I want something my brain can process more easily.

The other main contender for the forums so far is phpBB. This has a layout I’m much more accustomed to, but I’ve been told it doesn’t have as many features and integration with all the current posts and user login information may not be possible. I’d really hate to ask people to create a new login AGAIN, so we’re still exploring the options. Ultimately it will come down to what I think will work the best for the long term.

To clarify some more, here are some screenshots I found of both forum layout styles:

Vanilla:

While Vanilla does have forum categories on the right side and posts on the left, I feel like it doesn’t make the most use of the screen space and it might not be immediately obvious that this is a forum and not just more news posts.

phpBB:

This has a much more familiar forum style, makes more use of horizontal space, I generally like this kind of layout for a forum.

These aren’t necessarily the only two options for forum software. I also found an article which lists an absolute ton of forum plugin options, though I’m too web illiterate myself to know what’s best:

http://www.wpmods.com/which-forum-script-should-you-use-with-your-wordpress-powered-website

If anyone out there is knowledgeable about Wordpress and forum integration and is interested in helping, please contact Zachary Reidell ([email protected]), who put a lot of the current website together and has been doing almost all the work on this so far. I’ll of course give credit to anyone else who helps get the final forum launched.

Also, I may as well announce now that I’m planning on phasing out comments here once the forums are launched. There are multiple reasons for this. With the forums, discussions will be more targeted. So if you have a specific question or comment, you won’t have to just reply to the latest news entry. Another reason is I think it will lower the redundancy of comments if there’s a primary place to comment in the forums as opposed to the homepage AND the forums. Finally, I’m getting more comments on the homepage now than ever before. Within a few days it’s in the hundreds, and as I make more videos it’s possible it will increase. Thus having actual forums will make things more manageable for me in the long run. My goal is to have all the news posts (hopefully past ones all the way back to 2006) duplicated as threads in the forum so commentary can continue there.

In other news, my voice is now better and I’ll resume working on Freeman’s Mind sometime tomorrow.

EDIT:

After waking up coughing about 20 times this morning, my voice may not be as well as I thought. I can talk normally, but I don’t know about parts where I have to shout yet. Unfortunately Freeman tends to shout a lot. I’ll see how things go.