Is it Just Me, or is this Community Stingy About Sharing?

Author: jfade

Dated: 2 Jan 2007

I was thinking about this a lot yesterday and have started thinking about it again today, and I'm wondering if this is just me thinking stupid thoughts or if this is true in general...

What I was pondering about was the seeming lack, or at least what I perceive as a lack, of tutorials and technical information that is freely shared and available in the community. Now I know there are some tutorials out there and there are some really great ones in various places, but there just seems to be a big lack of tutorials that go beyond the basics and into more detailed information and specific techniques.

For example, there are some basic modding (IE BHAV editing and the like), tutorials out there, but there don't seem to be any that go much deeper. In another example, I know there are some more advanced object creation tutorials out there, but some of these are very outdated or no longer correct/needed due to a new technique that was discovered.

But it's not like the techniques are simply not KNOWN, you can see certain creators using them all the time. Yet it just seems like no one wants to write tutorials explaining how these things work or at the very least write a brief thing that will lead people on the right track to get them to be able to use the same method. You may think “well can't you just open their file and see what they did?” That is partially true, but it may not always be apparent, and people, especially aspiring creators, shouldn't have to go digging around in other people's files to see what they did.

On top of that, there seems to also be a shortage of technical info. For example, the formats of the various resources sometimes change with new expansions, or have new things added, and ever since the original formats were figured out, it doesn't seem like the new formats have been explained anywhere. Of course, I could be wrong on that and may just be looking in the wrong places, but it seems like this is happening to me. However, I feel that if more programs and tools are going to be written, this info needs to be publicly available, not buried somewhere or hidden in a location that only certain people can get to.

Now I'm not saying there's a complete lack of info, but it seems to be so scattered and so sparse that it's difficult to track things down. This is not community friendly. If the community's creativity and ingenuity is to continue to grow, there needs to be a movement to make things happen from all creators. But what I want to know is this: Am I alone in feeling this way? Does anyone else think there needs to be a more open exchange of information? And if there is to be a more open exchange in a centrally located place, WHERE should it be done? At an existing site or at a totally new one? Or should we just try to repost everything in multiple places?

Of course, regardless of what you all say, I do intend to make an effort myself to make more tutorials and share what I know, but I want to know what you all think as far as how I (and I hope others) should go about it?

Thanks for any input you can give. :)

Whoopee! I've got Family Fun and Glamour Life Stuff Now, Thanks to Black Friday!

Author: jfade

Dated: 27 Nov 2006

Well, I said I'd never pay 20 dollars for Family Fun Stuff and Glamour Life Stuff, and I've kept true to that! It all started on Thursday, November 23rd...

You see, it was Thanksgiving, the day before Black Friday in the US, and I made the horrible, horrible mistake of looking at the ads in the paper. Once I saw the great deals, I couldn't stay home all day and be lazy as I originally planned...

So that Friday morning, I woke up at 4 AM, got cleaned up, threw some clothes on, and ran out the door. By 4:45 I was outside Circuit City, the store that had the ad that I was most enticed by.

In addition to having awesome DVDs on sale for very awesome prices, they had both Family Fun Stuff and Glamour Life Stuff for sale at 8 dollars each! That's right, 8 dollars. I personally have always felt that these stuff packs are a total rip off. However, I will admit, if they were priced at about 10 dollars or less to begin with, I would get them. But there's no way I'm paying 20 dollars.

Anyhow, I got to Circuit City at 4:45 and the line was HUGE. In case you didn't know, the Black Friday deals incite massive amounts of people to get up at ungodly, uncivilized hours to stand in lines and fight over the good deals. The store opened at 5, and all 200 or so people there piled into the store at the same time. This is yet another horrible flaw of Black Friday. You could barely move in the store, let alone find what you needed.

Once I found everything I came for (and a few other things that were placed suspiciously close to the line for the checkout that I also suddenly found myself wanting) we waited 2 hours in line to pay and leave. The reason? Well, as we found out eventually, the registers weren't ringing things up properly and they had to manually change some of the prices, which takes an extremely long time as they have to have a manager do it.

Sooooooo, after getting what we went to Circuit City for, we went to Best Buy to grab some more other small things (5 DVDS to be precise) and got in the ENORMOUS line there. It was at least 5 times longer than the one at Circuit City but it moved very fast because they had a larger amount of cashiers (Circuit City only had 2), and they had a very efficient system set up. Anyhow, we were out of there in an hour.

After that, it was time for one last stop at Walmart for even more DVDs (did I mention that I'm a DVD junkie, especially if they're cheap?). At that point, it was about 10:15 AM. I'd been awake and shopping for basically six hours, and I was ridiculously tired.

However, in the end, I got 310 dollars worth of stuff (mostly DVDs) for only 110 dollars. Was it worth it? Yes. Would I ever go out on Black Friday again? Ermm... if the deals are good enough, yes, but I don't think I'm ever going back to Circuit City on a Black Friday again. :P

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