Given the rest of the show, I'm hoping the clumsy way of introducing the concept was just the writers' way of making the case for doing some cool stuff with it next season. I can't imagine they'd be completely out to lunch on that particular topic, given how well they seem to be handling the rest of the show. But hey, if not... well... at least the first season was good.
Disk Utility found nothing wrong, but here's a strange one: I used a different FW cable and the system boots fine. But I've been using that cable for the past year or so with no troubles up till now. Maybe it's just a fluke, but wow. That was half a day or billable time wasted:)
Religious issues in science fiction are the most interesting things you can look at. Warp core this, wormhole that, but the concept of the Jedis worshipping a dead religion is what made Star Wars (at first, anyway) so sticky for so many fans.
I can't wait to see how they go into this topic on the show... the tension between tech and faith is all the more interesting when the faith can be made up to suit.
I should clarify: the drive was disconnected during the update, but now the system still won't boot while it's plugged in. If you disconnect it, boot, and then mount it afterward, it works fine. Anyone else having this problem?
Don't know if it's just me, but my wife's dual-USB iBook stopped booting after we installed this one. It just spins the loader on startup and never gets to the login screen. Yeep!
1) They get a whole bunch of crappy logos and have to back away slowly away from the contest idea because to pick one would be to turn in a good logo for a bad one; or 2) They pick one logo that half the users like, and the other half hate, and it forks FreeBSD, causing chaos, a plague of locusts, cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria. Let us all pray that BSD really is dying. It may be our only hope.
I run four companies from my local coffee shop. Sit in the back with my powerbook and always look like I'm waiting for someone to show up. But the downside is that you can easily be tempted into vanilla lattes every hour, which costs as much as a 15th-floor corner office, and will likely get me a kidney transplant in five years.
Now if only I had products I sold that earned money, I'd be breaking even...
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I what you said is interesting to me, so I want to continue the train of thought some. It's true that you can make a show more efficiently than Hollywood does. A typical budget for a real-world show would include payment for each exec producer to take 2 weeks vacation... every episode! So truthfully, there's a lot of fat to cut.
But let's say we nix all the inefficiencies and get right down to a cheaper, more flexible production model. Where does that leave us?
That clip you have in your post... take just one of the characters. How much would it cost you to hire someone to make that model? I mean fully articulated, ready for anything. If it's cheap, that's great. But how many models are being used in a show? Can you afford to farm them all out to one person? If not, is there enough work for each modeler that they can afford to not look for other work? How many episodes can you get your people working on at once to keep them occupied? What'll stop them from jumping ship to work at another, more conventional studio?
The question is not whether or not the crew can make a show for 1/10 the cost of an episode of CSI, it's whether they can make 24 episodes in a row for that cost and not implode.
The trick is this: I completely agree with your outlook, because I'm halfway through production of something that works the same way. But I think we need to be very careful about how we execute our projects, because the "mystique" is actually a large part of what makes something worth buying. I wouldn't buy a episode of 24 for $1 every week, let alone a no-name show starring no-name actors. You can definitely get around these issues, but you have to be aware they exist, or you'll get run right over.
I've got you bookmarked and I will indeed be watching for you. Good luck with your project, and I really hope you actually can show Hollywood how it should work.
Oh, and one last question... what are your views on the 22-minute episode length? Distributing as we are, it seems rather silly to stick to that concept, and yet I constantly find myself trying to feel out commercial breaks in scripts.
Two points: 1) I made the point in another reply, but the 1-1.5mil viewership figure is only workable because there are a decent number of viewers already on a certain network who see an ad for a show and tune in to see it. Without lead-ins or other promotions in a central fashion, a show would have a hard time getting 1.5million viewers like that. Theoretically. This discounts word of mouth or really storng niche markets (which are different from basic niche markets... things like Star Trek or Stargate fanclubs that interconnect so well)... but generally speaking you'd have a hard time getting a new show out to that many people without some kind of massive infrastructure base that wouldn't necessarily exist for you. 2) 5*500000 does indeed equal 2500000. I originally wanted the episodes to cost $3, but then I fixed my Producer hat on my head, saw that was way bloody too low, and cranked it up some more:)
I'd love to see something like on-demand episoding in the future, but methinks it has to emerge in niche markets as an alternative to broadcast, and basically try and undercut the networks over time.
If a series has only a few hundreds of thousands of viewers globally, it probably doesn't have a huge budget either. (It's hard to see how such a series would survive today.)
I've been coming at it similarly, from the other side of things. I can't figure a TV show's budget coming in at under $300,000. That's counting on the cheapest of the cheap production (probably without producers, cause they alone can add $200,000 to a budget). But likewise, I can see a show not getting over 500,000 viewers. Being watched is preceeded by being known about, which requires a certain amount of centralized advertising, which probably boosts the budget some.
Anyway, the real problem is distribution at the end. A network pays to make a show for a few episodes, which pays the bills for the production company, which is offset by the advertising for the show (but more likely by the advertising during other more popular shows). So even if a show bombs (
Which is not to say it can't work. But if you look at the typical setup now, a producer'll get a giant load of cash even from a flop, without too much risk. A $1/episode system makes the creation process more open, but it makes the chances of disastrous failure more likely.
If you could hit a large base of eyeballs with something they'd want to watch, I could see $1/episode. But my thinking is it's better to just give it away for free and let them buy DVD compilations every 3 months.
On another note: I'm not familiar with the Finnish way of making TV. Are they subsidised there, or is it a free-for-all like in the US? There are special tax incentives in various countries to make TV production cheaper... if I (as a Canadian) did a show with a French company, I'd pay something like 3/4 of the budget allocation that I would pay with a German company, for instance. Sometimes the mix-and-match game makes things very profitable:)
$1 per episode is the part that is going to trip any of this up. Let's say we can take for granted something like the "long tail" and say that WORLDWIDE, there are hundreds of thousands of fans of a particular show. Let's say that every single one of those (let's call it 500,000) pays $1 to view an episode. That means that the content creator is earning $500,000 for the episode. An average episode of an average show costs far more than $500,000. In some cases, that's hardly a dent in the salary of a big star (which would be part of why you'd be inclined to pay for the episode in the first place). In other words, each episode is almost guaranteed to work in the red. Loss of traction there.
Now the arguent can go that we'll have online purchasing plus regular TV broadcasting of a show (with advertising as usual), which should give you the best of both worlds. But truthfully, would you bother buying an episode if you could watch it on your big screen TV for "free"? So let's say that half of the potential viewers would rather watch it on NBC than downloading it for $1. Now you have $250,000 earned, and all of a sudden the online distribution method is looking truly useless.
So to fight that, to get traction, you raise the price of a download to $5. That means off those same 500,000, you're now earning $1.5M. Woo! But still, not that much. Plus, no one is going to buy an episode for $5. That'd be something like $130 for a show in a year! Buy the boxed DVD at the end of the season and you're doing better (plus special features). So the show would never take off. Dead in the water.
Really, broadcasting has an iron grip on the "TV" world. You can't effectively distribute a series if you make people pay for each episode. The system that governs TV right now works too well --- especially with things like DVDs and Tivo added to the mix --- and no one will try anything new because there isn't as much profit in it.
I'm not saying I don't agree with your sentiment. I would love to be able to buy episodes like that, too... but there's no good way to transition from what we have to what we want, and there's no good reason for anyone to even try.
Wow. You hear that there are no original ideas anymore, but I thought for sure I had such a niche market no one could ever sum up my project so easily.
I invested a relatively massive amount of time trying to figure a way to do this kind of thing myself, tho not so much for the purpose of a no-budget movie... I was aiming to be able to rapidly create episodes of a show to blend into an ARG. The problem is there's no good way to do this kind of thing now without a massive investment in a gaming engine (with strings attached, of course). You have to go the old-fashioned route, one way or another... The best way I could see to do it (though it was far too much work for the returns) was to hire someone to write a huge number of Python add-ons for Blender, but even that was a bit wishy-washy from a practical standpoint. If anyone out there who DOES do Blender scripting/hacking wants to give it a shot, drop me a line (mcm at my website above) and maybe we can do something neat. But really, Machinima isn't really a viable medium for "new" filmmaking until someone puts those peices together for us.
I briefly had polarized glasses like that and saw many screens, and it's true, the iPaq was fine somehow. What stunk for me was that my lenses were slightly different from each other, so while one eye was seeing a half-brightness screen, the other was seeing a full-brightness screen, and it gave me a wickedly bad headache in about 15 minutes.
On the other hand, walking around my office of mostly LCDs, the flickering I kept seeing reminded me of that old Captain Power show... I kept wanting to get a laser gun and shoot things.
Actually, I think part of this question is actually quite good. The question needs to be re-phrased as: Mr Kerry: why do you change your opinions so readily? Do you see reasons, or is it simply to get votes? Mr Bush: why do you NOT change your opinions? Is well-reasoned analysis or just you being stubborn?
If either candidate could answer this question honestly, I think it could make a difference for a lot of undecided voters. In either direction.
But I think the point of this is that it's not the tools that are the problem: there are great open-source engines out there that will improve slowly over time as with any lively project... it's the creation of a game itself (on a case-by-case basis) that isn't viable in a traditional open source environment. Rather than slowly chipping away at a project over a few months or years, you need to slog away intensely - and very likely in secret - so that your end result is worth playing.
I don't know that it's necessarily true, though. I'm starting to think that a "walled garden" approach might be best... keep particpation limited somewhat, and keep the product hidden from the public until it's done, and then release the source. Is there anything inherent in open source methodology that would make this impossible, or is it just that the current perception of open source doesn't involve walled gardens?
Companies always give a damn what package you know well, especially if there are other candidates that produce great output and know the package the company has invested in. It's not a great idea to apply for a Linux server admin job with only Windows experience, even though you could pick up Linux with only a little effort. Unless you're a genius at 3D, you should make an effort to learn the industry standards.
Thank you for this little back-and-forth. It's making the jet lag so much more enjoyable.
I don't know of ANY CG artists who have gone their entire career on one package.
I would agree, but I don't how how we're actually disagreeing with each other. My point was that picking the first app you learn is a question of where you want to go. If you want to do heavy CG for a big house, your safer bet is to learn Maya or Lightwave. If you're unsure, then anything works. You will have to learn more than one package sometime during your career, but being an inexperienced CG artist who will require long hours of extra training to start your first job will likely drop you to the bottom of the heap of applicants.
I heard the same argument a few months ago about digital editing: what to learn, Premiere, Final Cut Pro or Avid? They're all fairly similar, and you can jump from one to another with a few weeks of learning, but if you apply for a job with FCP or Avid on your resume, it goes a lot further than Premiere.
If you're going to be strategic in your investments, then be properly strategic. Learning Maya or Lightwave has a better chance of paying off than 3DS Max for future work. If you're just playing or you're unsure where you're going, then I personally found 3DS Max a better program to learn and use in a hobbyist environment.
I'd say we're saying the same thing here. If you've got a copy of 3DS Max sitting around, then go down that route now. You'll get the fundamentals, and probably have an easier time getting support on the web for your common problems.
However, if you're looking to hop into a job that involves 3D, or you don't have a particular app already, then go with Lightwave or Maya. Because it's what you'll be using down the road (or at least, closer to it).
It's not that 3DS Max isn't worth learning, and it's not that you can't make the switch later, it's just that making the switch wastes time and money, and you both you and your future employer won't want to pay for it. So think about your options and your ambitions, and pick the package that makes the most sense.
I can relate what I learned from my experiences: there are a great many 3D artists that know 3DS Max inside out, and they can produce the most amazing things you've ever seen... but once you get to big renderfarms and big studios, they see it more as a kiddie program than a real 3D app...
Also, as for the gallery on the website... as a friend of mine said, if the animators used 3DS Max for adding a lens flare to a single scene in a movie, they'd be able to claim 3DS Max was used for the movie. Which is why virtually every single major 3D app can claim ownership of every major VFX movie in the past decade:)
In short: learn 3DS Max, because it has a great community for learning... if you want a proper job, learn Lightwave or Maya.
Re:I have always had one or more of these wireless
on
2.4GHz-Friendly Phones?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I actually found a conflict between the wireless phones and wifi to be rather widespread. At my house we had a problem where if you were closer to the base station with your laptop than the phone was to its base station, the phone wouldn't always ring --- and then if you were further away with the laptop the phone would drop your internet while it was ringing. Can't say I've checked out newer phones... we've switched to iChat AV and cell phones for all our telecommunications needs:)
It's true, they do seem very similar. I was actually considering moving to Australia at one time, but after I heard about the crocodiles roaming the streets unchecked, I figured no, I'll stick to my igloo thankyouvermuch.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the rest of the show, I'm hoping the clumsy way of introducing the concept was just the writers' way of making the case for doing some cool stuff with it next season. I can't imagine they'd be completely out to lunch on that particular topic, given how well they seem to be handling the rest of the show. But hey, if not... well... at least the first season was good.
Disk Utility found nothing wrong, but here's a strange one: I used a different FW cable and the system boots fine. But I've been using that cable for the past year or so with no troubles up till now. Maybe it's just a fluke, but wow. That was half a day or billable time wasted :)
Religious issues in science fiction are the most interesting things you can look at. Warp core this, wormhole that, but the concept of the Jedis worshipping a dead religion is what made Star Wars (at first, anyway) so sticky for so many fans.
I can't wait to see how they go into this topic on the show... the tension between tech and faith is all the more interesting when the faith can be made up to suit.
I should clarify: the drive was disconnected during the update, but now the system still won't boot while it's plugged in. If you disconnect it, boot, and then mount it afterward, it works fine. Anyone else having this problem?
Hmm. Removed the LaCie pocketdrive from the iBook and it worked fine. Not sure if it only happens on startup. Yeep. Stupid technology.
Don't know if it's just me, but my wife's dual-USB iBook stopped booting after we installed this one. It just spins the loader on startup and never gets to the login screen. Yeep!
Works fine on my Al pBook, tho.
1) They get a whole bunch of crappy logos and have to back away slowly away from the contest idea because to pick one would be to turn in a good logo for a bad one; or
2) They pick one logo that half the users like, and the other half hate, and it forks FreeBSD, causing chaos, a plague of locusts, cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria.
Let us all pray that BSD really is dying. It may be our only hope.
I run four companies from my local coffee shop. Sit in the back with my powerbook and always look like I'm waiting for someone to show up. But the downside is that you can easily be tempted into vanilla lattes every hour, which costs as much as a 15th-floor corner office, and will likely get me a kidney transplant in five years.
Now if only I had products I sold that earned money, I'd be breaking even...
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I what you said is interesting to me, so I want to continue the train of thought some. It's true that you can make a show more efficiently than Hollywood does. A typical budget for a real-world show would include payment for each exec producer to take 2 weeks vacation... every episode! So truthfully, there's a lot of fat to cut.
But let's say we nix all the inefficiencies and get right down to a cheaper, more flexible production model. Where does that leave us?
That clip you have in your post... take just one of the characters. How much would it cost you to hire someone to make that model? I mean fully articulated, ready for anything. If it's cheap, that's great. But how many models are being used in a show? Can you afford to farm them all out to one person? If not, is there enough work for each modeler that they can afford to not look for other work? How many episodes can you get your people working on at once to keep them occupied? What'll stop them from jumping ship to work at another, more conventional studio?
The question is not whether or not the crew can make a show for 1/10 the cost of an episode of CSI, it's whether they can make 24 episodes in a row for that cost and not implode.
The trick is this: I completely agree with your outlook, because I'm halfway through production of something that works the same way. But I think we need to be very careful about how we execute our projects, because the "mystique" is actually a large part of what makes something worth buying. I wouldn't buy a episode of 24 for $1 every week, let alone a no-name show starring no-name actors. You can definitely get around these issues, but you have to be aware they exist, or you'll get run right over.
I've got you bookmarked and I will indeed be watching for you. Good luck with your project, and I really hope you actually can show Hollywood how it should work.
Oh, and one last question... what are your views on the 22-minute episode length? Distributing as we are, it seems rather silly to stick to that concept, and yet I constantly find myself trying to feel out commercial breaks in scripts.
Two points: ... but generally speaking you'd have a hard time getting a new show out to that many people without some kind of massive infrastructure base that wouldn't necessarily exist for you. :)
1) I made the point in another reply, but the 1-1.5mil viewership figure is only workable because there are a decent number of viewers already on a certain network who see an ad for a show and tune in to see it. Without lead-ins or other promotions in a central fashion, a show would have a hard time getting 1.5million viewers like that. Theoretically. This discounts word of mouth or really storng niche markets (which are different from basic niche markets... things like Star Trek or Stargate fanclubs that interconnect so well)
2) 5*500000 does indeed equal 2500000. I originally wanted the episodes to cost $3, but then I fixed my Producer hat on my head, saw that was way bloody too low, and cranked it up some more
I'd love to see something like on-demand episoding in the future, but methinks it has to emerge in niche markets as an alternative to broadcast, and basically try and undercut the networks over time.
Right.
I've been coming at it similarly, from the other side of things. I can't figure a TV show's budget coming in at under $300,000. That's counting on the cheapest of the cheap production (probably without producers, cause they alone can add $200,000 to a budget). But likewise, I can see a show not getting over 500,000 viewers. Being watched is preceeded by being known about, which requires a certain amount of centralized advertising, which probably boosts the budget some.
Anyway, the real problem is distribution at the end. A network pays to make a show for a few episodes, which pays the bills for the production company, which is offset by the advertising for the show (but more likely by the advertising during other more popular shows). So even if a show bombs ( Which is not to say it can't work. But if you look at the typical setup now, a producer'll get a giant load of cash even from a flop, without too much risk. A $1/episode system makes the creation process more open, but it makes the chances of disastrous failure more likely.
If you could hit a large base of eyeballs with something they'd want to watch, I could see $1/episode. But my thinking is it's better to just give it away for free and let them buy DVD compilations every 3 months.
On another note: I'm not familiar with the Finnish way of making TV. Are they subsidised there, or is it a free-for-all like in the US? There are special tax incentives in various countries to make TV production cheaper... if I (as a Canadian) did a show with a French company, I'd pay something like 3/4 of the budget allocation that I would pay with a German company, for instance. Sometimes the mix-and-match game makes things very profitable :)
$1 per episode is the part that is going to trip any of this up. Let's say we can take for granted something like the "long tail" and say that WORLDWIDE, there are hundreds of thousands of fans of a particular show. Let's say that every single one of those (let's call it 500,000) pays $1 to view an episode. That means that the content creator is earning $500,000 for the episode. An average episode of an average show costs far more than $500,000. In some cases, that's hardly a dent in the salary of a big star (which would be part of why you'd be inclined to pay for the episode in the first place). In other words, each episode is almost guaranteed to work in the red. Loss of traction there.
Now the arguent can go that we'll have online purchasing plus regular TV broadcasting of a show (with advertising as usual), which should give you the best of both worlds. But truthfully, would you bother buying an episode if you could watch it on your big screen TV for "free"? So let's say that half of the potential viewers would rather watch it on NBC than downloading it for $1. Now you have $250,000 earned, and all of a sudden the online distribution method is looking truly useless.
So to fight that, to get traction, you raise the price of a download to $5. That means off those same 500,000, you're now earning $1.5M. Woo! But still, not that much. Plus, no one is going to buy an episode for $5. That'd be something like $130 for a show in a year! Buy the boxed DVD at the end of the season and you're doing better (plus special features). So the show would never take off. Dead in the water.
Really, broadcasting has an iron grip on the "TV" world. You can't effectively distribute a series if you make people pay for each episode. The system that governs TV right now works too well --- especially with things like DVDs and Tivo added to the mix --- and no one will try anything new because there isn't as much profit in it.
I'm not saying I don't agree with your sentiment. I would love to be able to buy episodes like that, too... but there's no good way to transition from what we have to what we want, and there's no good reason for anyone to even try.
Or have you just been reading my email again?
I invested a relatively massive amount of time trying to figure a way to do this kind of thing myself, tho not so much for the purpose of a no-budget movie... I was aiming to be able to rapidly create episodes of a show to blend into an ARG. The problem is there's no good way to do this kind of thing now without a massive investment in a gaming engine (with strings attached, of course). You have to go the old-fashioned route, one way or another...
The best way I could see to do it (though it was far too much work for the returns) was to hire someone to write a huge number of Python add-ons for Blender, but even that was a bit wishy-washy from a practical standpoint.
If anyone out there who DOES do Blender scripting/hacking wants to give it a shot, drop me a line (mcm at my website above) and maybe we can do something neat.
But really, Machinima isn't really a viable medium for "new" filmmaking until someone puts those peices together for us.
It's ctrl-X in Safari. There are lots of useful shortcuts like that on Wikipedia. Not that I can remember any of the others offhand...
I briefly had polarized glasses like that and saw many screens, and it's true, the iPaq was fine somehow. What stunk for me was that my lenses were slightly different from each other, so while one eye was seeing a half-brightness screen, the other was seeing a full-brightness screen, and it gave me a wickedly bad headache in about 15 minutes.
On the other hand, walking around my office of mostly LCDs, the flickering I kept seeing reminded me of that old Captain Power show... I kept wanting to get a laser gun and shoot things.
Actually, I think part of this question is actually quite good. The question needs to be re-phrased as:
Mr Kerry: why do you change your opinions so readily? Do you see reasons, or is it simply to get votes?
Mr Bush: why do you NOT change your opinions? Is well-reasoned analysis or just you being stubborn?
If either candidate could answer this question honestly, I think it could make a difference for a lot of undecided voters. In either direction.
There's a difference between what Real believes in regarding interoperability and what the music industry enforces.
But I think the point of this is that it's not the tools that are the problem: there are great open-source engines out there that will improve slowly over time as with any lively project... it's the creation of a game itself (on a case-by-case basis) that isn't viable in a traditional open source environment. Rather than slowly chipping away at a project over a few months or years, you need to slog away intensely - and very likely in secret - so that your end result is worth playing.
I don't know that it's necessarily true, though. I'm starting to think that a "walled garden" approach might be best... keep particpation limited somewhat, and keep the product hidden from the public until it's done, and then release the source. Is there anything inherent in open source methodology that would make this impossible, or is it just that the current perception of open source doesn't involve walled gardens?
Thank you for this little back-and-forth. It's making the jet lag so much more enjoyable.
I would agree, but I don't how how we're actually disagreeing with each other. My point was that picking the first app you learn is a question of where you want to go. If you want to do heavy CG for a big house, your safer bet is to learn Maya or Lightwave. If you're unsure, then anything works. You will have to learn more than one package sometime during your career, but being an inexperienced CG artist who will require long hours of extra training to start your first job will likely drop you to the bottom of the heap of applicants.
I heard the same argument a few months ago about digital editing: what to learn, Premiere, Final Cut Pro or Avid? They're all fairly similar, and you can jump from one to another with a few weeks of learning, but if you apply for a job with FCP or Avid on your resume, it goes a lot further than Premiere.
If you're going to be strategic in your investments, then be properly strategic. Learning Maya or Lightwave has a better chance of paying off than 3DS Max for future work. If you're just playing or you're unsure where you're going, then I personally found 3DS Max a better program to learn and use in a hobbyist environment.
I'd say we're saying the same thing here. If you've got a copy of 3DS Max sitting around, then go down that route now. You'll get the fundamentals, and probably have an easier time getting support on the web for your common problems.
However, if you're looking to hop into a job that involves 3D, or you don't have a particular app already, then go with Lightwave or Maya. Because it's what you'll be using down the road (or at least, closer to it).
It's not that 3DS Max isn't worth learning, and it's not that you can't make the switch later, it's just that making the switch wastes time and money, and you both you and your future employer won't want to pay for it. So think about your options and your ambitions, and pick the package that makes the most sense.
I can relate what I learned from my experiences: there are a great many 3D artists that know 3DS Max inside out, and they can produce the most amazing things you've ever seen... but once you get to big renderfarms and big studios, they see it more as a kiddie program than a real 3D app...
:)
Also, as for the gallery on the website... as a friend of mine said, if the animators used 3DS Max for adding a lens flare to a single scene in a movie, they'd be able to claim 3DS Max was used for the movie. Which is why virtually every single major 3D app can claim ownership of every major VFX movie in the past decade
In short: learn 3DS Max, because it has a great community for learning... if you want a proper job, learn Lightwave or Maya.
I actually found a conflict between the wireless phones and wifi to be rather widespread. At my house we had a problem where if you were closer to the base station with your laptop than the phone was to its base station, the phone wouldn't always ring --- and then if you were further away with the laptop the phone would drop your internet while it was ringing. Can't say I've checked out newer phones... we've switched to iChat AV and cell phones for all our telecommunications needs :)
It's true, they do seem very similar. I was actually considering moving to Australia at one time, but after I heard about the crocodiles roaming the streets unchecked, I figured no, I'll stick to my igloo thankyouvermuch.