A Feather in the Wind

To our dismay, the artist and author Marjane Satrapi has passed away.

As she wrote, ordinary Americans and Iranians have more in common with each other than we do with either of our governments, which have far too much in common with each other.

"This show is problematic because the hero didn't kill the villain at the end": When does he steal the bread?

"These two characters who were close friends throughout the series don't kiss at the end! What the fuck?": When does he steal the bread?

FLY launches on Kickstarter June 9th ! 11am EST just 4 days away!! Help our story take flight !

Yeah, sometimes the background is more intensive than the characters. Anything with a lot of hard-edged geometry - architecture, industrial elements, vehicles - tends to take the longest. Keeping everything in perspective and rendering things like masonry details on top of that eats up a lot of time. Populating interiors with enough detail to satisfy my desire to make it feel authentically lived-in is also a lot of work. Often it takes some historical reference gathering too. More naturalistic backgrounds like forests and prairies go much faster.

I genuinely think the dream smp as a story and it's failings can only be done by someone who was a fan or at least had some respect for the series. Listening to anyone who doesn't try and talk about it is very...painful, like I'm sorry but the Hamilton homages were really good and fun and helped make sure everyone understood what was going on! I've been listening to the frostbye freeman's video on scripted minecraft videos and i am wincing at the incorrect details and honestly somewhat pompous takes on what counts as a good story.

Wilbur's writing was genuinely good and moving at times, and the smp hadn't hit it's BIG popularity yet when it super was leaning into the hamilton stuff so they still were mostly just goofing around and the scripting was a lot looser. Like he spent the entire opening gassing up the early more obviously scripted stuff as if there wasn't like 30 over a million views yandere simulator knocks via all the yandere highschools, it's the same thing!

By the time the story shifts into Technoblade's allegories the entire genre of the smp has changed from a goofy joke about countries that also tackled things of justice in the background, into a more tense action and espionage story that fits allegories better (which tbf i always thought were a little forced, tommy is not theseus at all really, techno has more in common but thats a whooole other rabbit hole)

Also head writer? Since when was Technoblade a HEAD writer, he wrote the stuff around his own character yes, but everyone else around that was being written by dream quackity and tommy after Wilbur stepped down! It was not or never was his goal to tie all of the dsmp into a cohesive story to my knowledge or according to anything I can find.

While he has some points about people fighting for attention, a lot of the arcs that went nowhere or suddenly pivoted or stopped were for a lot of reasons outside the server's management. While I am sad some things didn't get proper endings, their existences weren't problems or a sign of arrogance, it was people excited to tell their own stories. Some failed, some didn't, that's natural for a collaboration of this size, and while things could have DEFINITELY been organized better 100% its just how its going to go in a project like this that not everything is going to be able to get the attention and streams it needs, people have lives outside the smp and have other things to do or run out of ideas, it happens.

If anything I liked how everyone had their own lore! Everyone had biased versions of events or thoughts and opinions! No one needed to agree on everything because the inherent nature of choosing a streamer is choosing a bias! No one 100% knew the truth, and everyone who saw the same event came out with different interpretations! That's just how things work! Thats not a writing error!

You say none of it made sense but did you actually ask someone who cared about the series about it! People have spent so much time piecing everything together it's actually kind of insulting to flat out state that it makes no sense when so many people could just straight up tell you the entire timeline for their streamer, or of events, or how things led into each other!

God I hate the use of "if everyones the protagonist no one is" like first of all, pretentious as hell. Second of all, the point of the other streamers isn't to just be supporting cast but to ALSO have their own goals and desires, because all characters have goals and desires! While tommy is the quote unquote main character, everyone in the dsmp has clear goals or at least interests that make sense for them to go after! Do you expect badboyhalo and quackity and everyone to just do nothing while tommy's in exile? No! That's stupid and he is ALSO a streamer who needs a story to tell!

It would be completely immersion breaking and so much less real feeling if every single story and every action was just about tommy and if he's not in the area it just stopped until he got back! You can just admit this kind of format isn't for you! Lifesteal isn't "worse" because there isn't one singular main character, that's not how servers work! You pick your favorite and see their pov and how they see events unfold! It's not supposed to be an unbiased telling, it's one person in this world giving their biased and personal accounts! THIS KIND OF CONTENT HAS BEEN AROUND SINCE LIKE 2012 WITH HERMITCRAFT, IT'S NOT NEW!!!

"The dream smp's only lasting legacy besides the amazing countless fanarts is infecting all the wannabe content creators it spawned with a terminal case of main character syndrome." Oh fuck offfff, have you literally talked to anyone in this fandom ever? Songs, animations, cosplay, stories, and CAREERS were launched off the back of the dream smp "and that final folly" say you've never talked to an inniter without saying you've never talked to an inniter.

Genuinely the entire dream smp part of this video is insulting, misinformed, and lazy. Getting key differences wrong and presenting opinion as objective facts. The worst part? You can find every single issue in an old school scripted series. He spends the entire opening talking about the good days when minecraft roleplay was earnest and was well written and had meaning but like?

"its homage" every single yandere highschool series but especially the main og of samgladiator's

"it has too many main characters" mianite

"too many dropped plots" aphmau, just aphmau in general

"the lore is confusing" jurassic craft

in fact, you can sum up ALL OF THAT UNDER THE YOGSCAST

YOU KNOW?

ONE OF THE BIGGEST SOURCES OF THOSE SCRIPTED MINECRAFT EARLY ROLEPLAYS THAT GOT SO HEAVILY PRAISED AT THE START? SHADOW OF ISRAPHEL?

IT HASN'T GOTTEN WORSE AT ALL, EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM LISTED, IS NOT THE DREAM SMPS FAULT, BUT IT HAS BEEN THERE SINCE THE GODDAMN DAWN OF MINECRAFT ROLEPLAY!

Calling all of the dream smp, life steal, all of those smps "crude performance art" is genuinely the most disrespectful thing I've heard I just, how is this video not disliked into oblivion!? You say they've yet to change from genre to it's own medium of art, but that means nothing! That has no meaning! It is the same thing! The medium is just the place the story gets told, it's the lens the story is created with. Writing is a medium! Drawing is a medium! Painting is a medium! Minecraft smp videos are inherently in the medium of the minecraft program!

The utter constant disrespect of the genuine stories and tales people try and tell with minecraft, saying minecrafters have nothing to say, it's cruel! I can find you so many minecraft videos over an hour long that are poignant! I can give you so many stories about minecrafters handling tough themes! To dismiss it ALL as lazy slop is at worst a show of utter pure pretension, and at best a lack of understanding for the genre and a lack of research.

Why are you trying to engage with a minecraft scripted story as a FILM it's NOT A FILM and it is not TRYING TO BE A FILM, it's closer to a tv series! You say people cant be off their cellphones during a film, but you're BINGING something not MEANT to be binged! You are also engaging incorrectly! You would fail to grasp the merit of a podcast because people listen to them while doing other things! Each video he showed of parrot's has MILLIONS of views so clearly, this isnt a universal fact! you just do not like this kind of content! That is okay! It does not mean theres a secret sickness!

Genuinely every word out of this person's mouth makes me want to start biting, he calls the videos entertaining, then DERIDES THEM for not being "actual stories" and that "he needs to sit at the grown up table if he wants to be a story teller" like literally? what the fuck is wrong with this guy? Just because it's not fucking brokeback mountain doesn't make it not a story. A story is just that, a story! You can tell a story in three lines

"Once upon a time there was a dog named spot Spot had a nice nap about chasing squirrels before he woke up Then he went to chase squirrels before taking a nap again"

THAT'S A STORY, that's objectively a story! im being a storyteller! Its not a long story, it's not LITERATURE, but it is in fact. A story. Just because it's not the odyssey doesnt make it not a story! THAT'S HOW STORIES WORK. How can you deride a story taking place in minecraft...for being bound to the rules of minecraft? thats a part of the medium! YOU JUST SAID YOU WANTED IT TO BE IT'S OWN MEDIUM AND YET YOU CONSTANTLY DERIDE EVERYTHING THAT MAKES IT UNIQUE

The lack of self awareness, the lack of care, the lack of understanding why these videos get so many views, it's insidious, it infects every pore of this video. The premise is "i dont like something therefor its bad and im going to ramble about cinema to make me sound smart for saying that" and it's so goddamn blatant that he worked backwards from an inherent bias against a type of medium to condemn it as a whole without taking any real steps to question that bias!

Also the sheer nitpicking against "content creator" vs "storyteller" like i get content creator is an annoying term and everyone hates it, but its literally just shorthand for "makes something for other people to enjoy" like oh my god you don't need to treat it like it's this disgusting plague on the minecraft community. Like you ask why minecraft roleplays have to be scripted smps, and the answer is that some stories want to be told through that lens, while others want to be told through different lenses of what minecraft can be used for. You might as well ask why some people use pens instead of pencil or why people use fantasy instead of sci-fi for all the meaning that question actually has. It's either so benign it has no meaning to ask, or complete apples or oranges!

God, how am I only 30 minutes in. I don't even want to continue. This was only supposed to be me rambling about how the dream smp cannot be understood fully as a story from someone who refuses to engage with it on it's terms, but the sheer audacity of everything this video says is just...disgusting to me and I had to keep commenting on it.

For someone who talks about how important brevity is, this hour long video is full of boring unrelated nonsense that easily could have been cut, false dichotomies being drawn, and far too much time talking about stories you clearly dont want to give even a chance. It's just bad, it's the "why is minecraft boring now" video for minecraft roleplay where it demands it be something its not and never has been, and then throws a fit about it and about people who do like it and holds a nostalgia for something that has the exact same flaws and thus polishes into something Better.

The tradition continues :D I adore them so much <333

And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.

A website of tiny ceramic frogs.

Not for sale. Just… all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.

I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.

“This is your website?” I asked finally.

“Yep!”

“You coded this yourself?” I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.

“Yep!”

“So… where’d all the frogs come from?”

“I made those too,” he says, beaming. 

And while I’m processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.

“And THIS one,” he says, “I made for you! As a thank you for the interview.”

It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case he’d wash out in 90 days and we’d hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team.