

At Last: 10x better Electric Sheep client for Mac - spot
http://community.electricsheep.org/node/509

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blasdel
Years ago my roommate emailed you when he was excited about rendering a
particular sheep at high-res to make a print out of, and your only response
was to refer him to your art dealer. Almost immediately the sheep in question
was removed from the collection, which led to a serious _WTF Dude_ moment.

It seems like you're planning on getting more communal involvement in the
project besides free compute time, and I approve.

~~~
spot
Wow what blast from the past. That was a requirement for working with that
dealer. I have had really mixed reactions and interactions with the art world.
That relationship went really far south, unfortunately, and i no longer work
with him. And to be clear, the selection of the sheep was mine, not your
friends.

Initially i refused to make any of my work available under anything but open
source licenses. Alas, that turned out not to pay so well. since then i've
tried various compromises between my philosophy, and engaging with society in
order to change it (and to make the electric sheep self sustaining). Pulling a
handful of genomes out of the many thousands was one. Making limited edition
works like hifidreams.com and the just-finished Blu Ray is another.

The next big step is a subscription/freemium model for the screensaver. You
can read some about it here: <http://community.electricsheep.org/node/492>

~~~
blasdel
It was just a random unfeatured sheep in the slush pile, and it disappeared
from the site after he mentioned it.

I guess now that you're employed by Google you won't have to make such
compromises for funding.

You really need to be extremely careful about profiting directly from the
users' work -- not just their CPU time, but the design of and selection
pressure on the sheep themselves. It's especially awful to curate the work of
users for private / limited edition works, especially if reserve that
privilege for yourself.

~~~
spot
1) I am sorry that you have been misinformed. The only genomes I ever pulled
was a group of about 6 about 4 years ago, a group that I selected exhaustively
from about 100000 myself to make large format prints. And the archive pages
for those sheep still stand, including their ancestry. I don't know why your
friend thinks otherwise, but I'm sure it's a simple miscommunication. If you
can point at the "hole" in the archives, I would be more than happy to take a
look at it.

2) My work at Google has nothing to do with it. If anything my time is worth
more now because I am so much more busy.

3) You are right I have to be extremely careful. And I have been, and my user
base is quite happy as a result, both voters and designers. My big problem is
server overload. We just did a survey and of the 836 respondents, 98% would
recommend Electric Sheep to their friends, and only a fraction of a percent
objected to me making money from it ("making" is a dream, for now I just want
to recoup my investment). Nearly everyone recognizes that I have and continue
to put an inordinate amount of time effort and money into this. Donations have
spiked with the traffic I have received from this announcement. Because people
love it and they support me.

I hope you will reconsider.

Thank you, -sp0t

~~~
blasdel
I am pretty sure we are remembering the exact same incident, it would have
been around this time four years ago. I just asked my roommate about it, and
your stories line up:

He saw a picture of an awesome sheep on your site featured as a print, but
with no prices. He emailed you about the prints, you referred him to your art
dealer, and she quoted him outrageous prices that were totally out of scale
with costs. When he went later to download its 'genome', it had been just
removed for that sheep specifically. The capriciousness of the whole exchange
really pissed us off, and we later ended up ceasing to use electricsheep in
the school's CS labs because of it.

I saw the survey, and the whole thing seemed really weird. Of course you're
going to get an extremely favorable response when sampling from your hardcore
fanbase.

The point about your job at Google was that you don't need to extract a
paycheck from electricsheep to get by. Your constant focus on art-world
monetization is extremely off-putting -- it's one thing to take the money on
the table from patrons, and another to artificially limit the audience for
your work. All the 'limited edition' shit seems all the more ridiculous when
there's zero opportunity cost.

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allenbrunson
i downloaded this thing and installed it. it looks kind of interesting.

then i started poking around in the config settings, and discovered that it
was saving tens of megabytes of mpeg movies to disk. i resent it taking up
that much disk space for a screen saver. so i fiddled with the config
settings, trying to get it to not save them. after that, it didn't make
fractal screen images anymore, just a static image that's primarily an ad for
the website. so i deleted the screen saver and all its mpg files.

perhaps there's some bigger purpose to this thing that i'm not getting, but
whatever it is, it's not worth tens of megabytes of disk space to me.

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bprater
I've been using Electric Sheep as a screensaver for a long time.

Often, I'll catch myself on the couch watching the screensaver instead of
commercials. Really beautiful stuff.

~~~
spot
thanks.

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nickb
These fractals are absolutely stunning! Who created them and where can I find
the equations?

~~~
pg
Scott Draves and <http://electricsheep.org/>

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spot
btw i am looking for iPhone and Android developers.

