Level 99

That's the artist's signature, actually!

Someone get me a BeardStone. Soon, I will evolve.

.... OH GOD NO WHY SERIOUSLY NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO I believe in nothing anymore. There is no hope anywhere. Innocence is dead. Simply dead. I may be the co-host of a podcast that talks about, looks at, and reads the most depraved and disgusting stuff you can find on the internet, but THIS. THIS is beyond me. Simply put: my childhood innocence and nostalgia != flying through rings being controlled by spanking someone's butt that has a $30 controller stuck in it. I hate you, Ubisoft. Avoid any house that has this game inside of it, and no one should ever think of touching controllers related to anyone within that house. It's just a safety precaution everyone needs to take, for the good of humanity. And no, Ubisoft: those are not what people look like who will be your target demographic for playing this game. THESE are what they look like:

Obviously, trying to talk sense and logic about this is pointless. If you wanted to do the stuff that was left off the album, why does that necessitate a re-release? Couldn't you just do it and, you know, submit it yourself, like normal mixes?

Here's some preview art for the project, since things are coming along nicely! This one is for the level Under Construction, which was remixed by Protodome. This is just the sketch, it needs to be colorized, but you get the idea:

Oh no you don't, don't you go back to Joe Cam saying that we are against releasing his work. What I am personally against is what YOU'RE doing, not HIS project. Do your own work, Brandon. Don't take someone else's stuff and try to push it for "completion", especially if you're not including everything the original had. Take some responsibility for your actions, admit you were using this as a vehicle (if not to the public than to yourself) and move on.

I'm personally against this. Opening it back up was not what I signed my song up for. I thought your idea was to gather the songs from the original for a proper release, NOT to open it back up for additional tracks. That's really really really inappropriate, in my humble opinion. I'm debating whether or not I want my track on this now. Edit: Now that I think about it, there were a lot MORE tracks on the original incomplete version of KK setlist. This is basically a minimized version of the tracklisting and then whatever additions you had plan. I'm not cool with this at all. And is there ANY theme to the project besides just being a "compilation of songs"? I'm not seeing any. Nor do I see a super-apparent enthusiasm for the game, or its music. This really just looks to me like this: you saw a finished project that didn't get a good release, asked if you could try and get it a full release, and are using it as a vehicle to put your own tracks on there.

Has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about, Dave. There is a clear distinction between "Hackers" and "Pirates". Nobody is discussing pirating as the focus here, merely the hacking. The price of games has no point here whatsoever, though piracy falls in line with what hackers can enable. I bought my PS3 with the mindset that I could, if I wanted to, run Linux on it. I actually did that for about 2 weeks while my computer was down and I was waiting on a new motherboard. It didn't run that great, but at least it RAN. Now I don't even have that optinon, no matter how capable the machine may be of running it, nor how capable people may be of programming for it. I understand the need to not post the easy-bake directions for making shit like an atomic bomb. Sony needs to protect its assets. When it comes to punishing the customer because of something that is assumed is done for "piracy", then that's wrong. Hacking and reverse-engineering is a method of learning and discovery. People need to begin understanding the difference between a hacker, a pirate, and a cheater.

I disagree to a certain extent, actually. Certain fundamental things, like drivers, cpu service code, and BIOS-style things should be made open for public knowledge and tinkering. Other things, such as their interface, should only have a moderately open policy. There is a line that needs to be drawn between openness and giving stuff away, it's just that right now some "hackers" are fighting for what they morally should have access to, while other "hackers" are trying to access stuff they do not. Things, like the private key, do not belong in the hands of the public. Having the ability to run a Linux kernel that has access to all 8 cores and the gpu is something that should.

The statement about not being able to alter the software due to agreement to the EULA is 100% correct. I had a conversation with my co-worker, who's a lawyer, and he is also a big gamer, so he had much relevant legal insight into this. The hardware is fine to fuck with, its yours, but if you want to run any software on it that isn't Sony's you better make damn sure its your software from the ground-up and nothing from Sony's whatsoever. This is why WINE is a legal implementation of windows executable architecture and directx: it's a clean-room reverse engineering and the people working on it have to sign an agreement that they have not, and will not, have access or extrapolate data from Windows source code. I, however, am an advocate of invention, and the more Sony keeps fighting these hackers, the more their exploits are going to be public and pushed farther. Sony should have offered these kids a job: make them sign a NDA, get paid to do ACTUAL work for the company, and further allow people to do what the PS3 was originally designed to do: run Linux. You don't fuck with Linux people. Ever. Sephfire hit that nail on the head.

If anyone's been paying attention to the Sony news lately, they're likely in the know about how GeoHot got the private key and basically unlocked the PS3 for people. Sony pushed back, got a restraining order and is taking GeoHot to court. Sony had also requested Google to get IPs and other info on anyone who watched the youtube that showed the key and the method of jailbreaking. Sony has basically stated they're basically going after anyone who sees or spreads that key. Hackers have been fighting back at every turn. It's basically a game of trading blows right now, with Sony continuing for legal lockdown and the hackers going farther and farther to get the code and the info spread far and wide, publicly. Sony took it to the next level this morning, when German Police raided the house of a PS3 hacker. There's a great makezine article on Sony's trend of going after consumers and innovators that nicely sums up the mentality of the company. I realize that is a metric fuckton of links, but I assure you, it's all interesting reading. Chime in with your thoughts on Sony's tactics and if there's any more info as things progress. Edit: A little more backstory on the issue: The larger models of the PS3, from launch day all the way up through the release of the slim models, supported the option to install an alternative operating system (mostly Linux flavors) on a separate partition on the PS3 hard drive. GeoHot, a notable hacker who jailbroke the iPhone, posted news and knowledge of a discovered exploit that granted Hypervisor and Read/Write memory access. This exploit was accomplished through Linux, and as a result, the new PS3s and the Sony firmware that followed the exploit's reveal removed the Install OtherOS option for "security reasons". Mind you, this was a feature that was highly marketed and pimped at launch, and for the people who bought a PS3 in order to run Linux on a highly specialized core and architecture were massively pissed. People continued to try to hack the PS3 and, not too long ago, a group called fail0verflow was successful in getting past security countermeasures and found the ability to reveal the PS3 private key, which is used to sign software as being "Sony official". GeoHot released this key last month, publicly (heck, even Kevin Butler accidentally retweeted the key). Since then, all shit has hit the fan.

Dear everyone: Either contribute to discussion about this project or stfu. Thanks, The Beard

Pitching a request for an album is perfectly fine, however just like the requesting single remixes, its all up to chance whether or not it gets anywhere. I will say that requesting albums is far FAR less likely to result in something getting picked up, but there's never any harm in putting ideas out there.

The absolute best course of action is to always have an external hard drive dedicated JUST to being for hdimage backups. You have a 1 TB in the mail, and once you get it up and running, order a 1 TB external. Windows 7 has a fantastic built-in backup system which, when coupled with a burned backup-restore disc, can get you back up and running if this happens again in no time (or if you switch hard drives and want to get everything back up on that). If you want more info, let me know. Its always AFTER people's hard drives die that they regret not backing it up, and you got lucky this time being able to recover what you did before it hit the dirt completely. As a musician, losing years of project files and program configurations can be the most frustrating thing imaginable. Best of luck!

SHHH Nobody's supposed to know that, damnit.

On a random whim, I have attempted to calculate how many times our infamous reading of My Immortal has been downloaded. My rough estimate is that this abomination has been downloaded over 22293 times. Bravo, internet. There is no hope anymore. (read: THANK YOU FOR BEING SO AWESOME) More Fanfic and episodes will be on their way soon!

There is no need to contact the judges really until about 5-6 months pass and they have publicly passed the "Mixes subbed before" date of your mix considerably without you getting a response. At that time, it becomes what's known as a FALLTHROUGH, and you can contact the staff saying they might have missed you mix. Funny thing is, the judges have been hauling ass the last 6 months in order to get the time between submission and initial reaction DOWN to this much. If this were last year, it could have been upwards of five months before you heard if your mix was paneled, dp'd, or flat-out rejected. They will get to your mix in due time. Patience is the name of the game. The people who are judging get a metric fuckton of submissions, and also have personal lives, so they can only work so fast. You've done everything you basically can right now: Made a WIP thread (which, I should also say, goes against convention because the general rule is one mix per thread in the WIP forums), submitted a song to the panel (you can only submit one song every three weeks at a maximum to the panel), and....now the waiting.

Thanks to everyone for their support. Thanks to your donations, we're more than half way to the physical production estimate! The art is coming along very nicely (there's a few finished pieces, and all but about three images are without rough/final sketches) and the majority of the backend stuff is done. The website should be done around the same time as the artwork, so the project looks to be sitting very comfortably ready ahead of the release date. There's still a month and a half or so left before the donations are going to be cut off. Hope everyone is doing well and keeping themselves busy in the meantime.

And not content with just posting that tonight, here lies the next big undertaking of Fanfiction (probably OCAD's last, considering the quality): Sonic in the Search for Love. http://lemonsinseries.com/ocrab/?p=447 Ugh.

This Place is Haunted Interview! Check it out: http://lemonsinseries.com/ocrab/?p=444