A Hard Drive That Was D.O.A.

I was going to post on Friday Night but I got waylaid by a bad external hard drive, which was literally brand new out of the box! I bought a bunch of external hard drives the day before Thanksgiving last year as Target stores had a huge sale on them and you couldn't beat the prices! So I bought several and stored them away. I had to make a copy of a previous drive this weekend and so I went to the closet and pulled out a new box with a drive and plugged it in.

Nothing happened. It just sat there. I tapped it lightly. Nothing. Unplugged it and then plugged it in again. Nothing. Dead on arrival! I couldn't believe it. Never had that happen before where it didn't make a sound. Possibly someone dropped it at the store and it still got on the shelf. I then took it and tried it on one of my other computers. Still nothing.

I then ran to the closet and pulled out the other three new hard drives that were sitting there, took the shrinkwrap off and plugged them right in to see if they worked. If they were bad too I was in a bad spot. Luckily they all fired up and were fine so I just had the one bad drive to replace. I had the receipt for all the drives in my taxes folder and so I took it back to Target last night and got a new drive! I waited till evening when I though the return line at Target would have little to no people and to my surprise there was no line! Since I just needed to exchange it there was no problem as it was still close to their store policy as to how long they would honor a return. I got the drive exchanged and went home again and plugged the new one and it fired right up.

I write this now just to let anyone out there who buys a external hard drive and has no use for it at the moment and decides to store it away that you'd better open up the box and test it out just to be sure it works! You don't want to wait too long and find out it's bad and you can't return it! Thought I'd share!

PURGING & DOWNSIZING - Part 3 (How Nobody Wants Music CDs Either)

Here a photo of three of the four big boxes that have been in the living room for a couple of years now. They contain just music CDs and audiobook CDs. I stored them away in boxes and put them there knowing that I'd have to take one box at a time and rip them to digital. I put them in a room that forced you to see them everyday and spark you to get them done. Well, that didn't work as planned. It's a daunting task as there were so many of them and you never know where to start.

I held off originally buying CDs for the longest time as I didn't want to make the switch over from Vinyl to CD right away. I had a decent record collection and still have all the kids records since they're worth money, but going out and buying another copy of something just because it was on CD left me weary. I did make audio tapes to play on my walkman from my records but technology was moving on without me. It was in the early 90s that I really bought music in CD form. I sold the last of my vinyl rock records back in 1991. I bought CDs here and there in the late 80s but not many. I was more of an audio cassette guy since I had a Sony Walkman. When I finally did switch over to CDs I bought only the best of the best stuff that I really liked. That way I wouldn't be left with crap that I didn't know what to do with, but over the following decade of CD buying you wound up buying stuff you might not like as much or only had one or two songs that you liked. I didn't throw anything out or even trade for something else. I kept it all. Eventually, my shelf in my room hit the maximum limit and I was out of room unless I bought a new shelf. Though at this time the digital realm was hitting and I discovered the mp3 and thankfully stopped buying CDs and only bought the bands I really liked, which was like 2-3. More of a collectibility thing than any other. I had to keep my Springsteen set going though even that went completely digital back in 2007 for me.

I grabbed a box from the living room back in 2010 and took a month to go through the box. I ripped about 10-12 CDs a night and made sure all the labelling was correct and such so that if I loaded them up onto my iPod they'd be fine and in order. Each box contained around 200-220CD so it was better to take them in groups or batches. I saved them all as mp3s at 256kbps and if I really loved it I saved it at the highest mp3 rate of 320kbps. By the way, kpbs stands for kilobytes per second. Looking at it now I laugh as 320 was not available till around 2006 or so I think. The top compression rate was 256 and 192kbps is still used a lot. For those that don't know any of this, when you rip a music CD you get a raw WAV file. This is the audio track in a completely uncompressed form. An average song of 4-5 minutes can range around the 54MB size. That's fairly large so you have to compressed it while not compromising the quality of the track. Here's a list of the audio settings when you then compress them to mp3:

FLAC (Uncompressed Lossless) (1:1 ratio to the original CD audio quality even though it compresses the audio by 50-60%) The downside is that they don't play on the iPod since it doesn't recognize the format, but they will play great on your computer through a media player like VLC. Mostly FLAC is great for preserving and storing your favorite music at the highest level... till the next big thing comes along at least.

320kbps (Studio Quality) (4x the compression from the original)
256kbps (Studio Quality) (5x the compression from the original)
192kbps (CD Quality)
160kbps (Hi-Fi Quality)
128kbps (Tape Quality)
112kbps (Radio Quality)
96kbps (FM Quality)
64kbps (Voice Quality)
32kbps (AM Quality)

I listed FLAC files at the highest though. FLAC is a format that has only been around for a few years now though true audiophiles will tell you this is the only way to go. Like the "1080p or forget it" crowd that's all they deal in. It's a true 1:1 ratio to the original CD. There is no compression while it is compressed into the FLAC container. The sound is great with headphones on though I don't know if the average person would notice the nuances. I'm more mp3 than FLAC in my own collection.

I have personally tested all of these. I've taken the perfect and best rock song ever recorded (it's Springsteen's "Born To Run", Baby!) and converted it to each of these to see what happened as you get lower and lower in quality.

There is no distinct quality drop from 320 to 256kbps. The song sounds superb at either of these settings.

There is a minor nuance of the song that is gone when you save it at 192kbps.

160 and 128kbps are ok and if you were listening to the song blast in your car with the windows down, it would be fine. I know some radio stations play songs at 128kbps as well from being in the studio.

I personally would not go below 96kbps for any music. This setting is like FM radio and if you go lower it just doesn't sound as good. It's just my rule of thumb.

Audiobooks I've seen can range from 64 to 128kbps. I prefer mine to be 256 only to retain that "in the studio" microphone quality. So in general I save all my audio at 256 or 320kbps whether considered mono or in stereo. It's a small amount of work ripping a CD so why not save it at the best quality?

When you buy tracks from Amazon.com through their great mp3 downloader the tracks are all saved mostly at 256kbps. They used to be all at 192kbps back when Amazon first started selling downloads though I'm sure that they do in fact sell some of the newer ones at 320. From some stuff I've downloaded the last week or so, they still have been at 256kbps. Other download places offer everything at different rates depending on what year it was uploaded. Remember that 320kbps wasn't available when ripping started in full force so 256kbps was king of the hill. All this might be over the heads of some who aren't into the digital age so hopefully all this information is at least enlightening people to what's out there.

Now back to talking about my audio collection, I finally finished one full box and then didn't do another one for a few years. Life had gotten in the way. So now with some time off this past January I have dove into the boxes and been a CD ripping fool. In one week I did 199 CDs! Exhausting and boring work it was but it was a week well spent. I did the same the following week and so on till every CD was done! I would do them every night starting after 9pm and say I was going to do just 10-12 CDs but would wind up doing double that each night in the end. If I didn't do it, it just wouldn't get done at all. You can't even send them out for someone else to do. Ha! I think that could be a good business for someone to do. People bring you in CDs and you convert them to mp3 for them for a small fee. It would be cheaper than buying a new version of the music in digital form. Anyway, there are several places you can get high quality music at super cheap prices without going to iTunes. I've personally never bought anything from iTunes as I could get a song cheaper than they're $.99 a song rate and also not deal with their DRM copyright embedded on the track though I think they finally stopped that nonsense with iTunes 11. I can't confirm since I don't deal with them. Screw them since there were ways around it anyway.

So when the month of January ended I had about 450 CDs ripped and backed up onto two drives! Then combined with the 200 some I did a year or so ago I now had a complete digital library. Woo!

Now I sit and look at the physical CDs still sitting in boxes. Yikes. Now what do I do? These are way worst that dealing with DVDs. No kidding. You could make homemade coasters and place your soda cans on them at a barbeque. I looked all over my area and there were no used CD sellers ANYWHERE to be found where you could make any kind of money. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch. We had a few places back about 5-7 years ago and I would find out through my research in selling my DVDs that they went out of business completely. There was a store that had bought used CDs in Bryn Mawr, Pa but they were almost financially collapsed from buying them and trying to resell them. They stayed alive by doing away with CDs and just selling old vinyl (and new vinyl) records since in the past several years vinyl records became moderately popular again. The hipster crowd with their pork pie hats and goatie beards who weren't around when vinyl was out originally were now buying and collecting records. Did my heart good to see that people still liked vinyl (or were introduced to it at least) as it's still the BEST way to listen to rock and roll. Bar none.

I made up a list of all my audio CDs I had for sale and had printed them out and given them to people on my street to see if I can sell them for $1 each. I made $5 tonight selling 5 more CDs. Woo! Next week I'll have to figure out what to do with the ones that don't move. I may have to make a donation to somewhere.

I did keep about 50 or so CDs. The ones I really, really liked (for the CD packaging as well) and the ones that I know I can get money for simply as a collectible or as it had a limited amount made of it. One such as my Batman 1966 Original TV Soundtrack CD. This was released on vinyl in 1966 and then it was re-released only ONCE on CD back in 1989 when the first Michael Keaton Batman movie was coming out. It's still in mint condition and hard as hell to find. Digital bootlegs ripped from this CD are available online for free so I am then limited to those Batman fans who would want the actual official CD. I think once people have the digital version they could care less about owning an original.

Digital has killed the sales of physical CDs and the digital bootlegs that are all over the Internet kill resales of harder to find media. Not that I'm complaining. I love bootleggers and how they go about it all. Some of them do superb jobs that I marvel at. More power to them.

Times change and technology marches on. Here I stand simply trying to downsize my life and minimize it a bit. So far I've been successful, though I've not made much money on it as I thought I would. I write all this just to warn people if they have DVDs and CDs like I did/do that you are screwed as well. Just so's you know between friends.

I'm still waiting on others to give me back their lists, they are taking their time it seems. Haha. I really think a donation may be made next week just so I can see the living room without these boxes anymore.

PURGING & DOWNSIZING - Part 2 (Or The Death Of The DVD)

As I was cleaning the past several weeks I knew that the amount of DVDs that I had would have to be downsized as well. I had well over 1,200 DVDs in my collection. It was massive and well-rounded. I haven't looked at a DVD nor actually placed a disc in a player in about two years. They used to be "the thing" but since digital had taken over and I could place hundreds of movies on one hard drive, why would I keep the actual discs anymore. DVDs like comics, toys, music CDs, etc. multiply like rabbits and it can get away from you. If I wanted to watch a DVD it was also problematic as they were all in tupperware containers. They were in order previously but when they got placed back in the tupperwares through the subsequent yard sales I did this past fall, they got all mixed up and out of order. So to find a specific movie was a pain in the ass if you wanted to watch it.

My DVD collection started in late 1998 or so. Maybe it was 1997. I had gotten my first player and for Christmas my mother had gotten me Dr. No and Goldfinger as a gift. My collection had started with James Bond. Now I was also one of those that watched EVERYTHING on the DVD. I loved it all. I loved the commentary tracks and would wind up keeping movies I was so-so about just because the commentaries were so good. Robert Rodriguez still does the best commentaries for his films (along with his 10-minute film schools he does). The El Mariachi/Desperado double disc is still tremendous. I didn't think about how long the DVD would really last in terms of longevity. I do remember the change from vinyl records to CDs was a kick in the ass as you had to go buy everything you liked over again. I figured like most people that DVD's would be around for quite some time and if you kept them in perfect shape, you could resell them later on and maybe make a little something... weeeeeelllllll, that reality was not to happen. Prepare for some reality, my fine readers... as the announcer on the classic Batman TV Series would say, "The worst is yet to come."

Do you like my little Photoshopped pic? I think it works well. To begin though I feel like I should first relate the changes in technology over the past 12 year or so. If you look back to around 1997-98 and look at now, you'd have to agree that this techological boom over the last decade is the fastest that it has ever moved. I remember back in the early 1997 I was buying mp3s of old time radio shows off of eBay. You'd get the CD (DVD-Rs were not around then) and you then had to play the files on your computer or covert the files out to WAV files and then burn them onto CD-Rs so that you could play them on any player or in your car. I used to get 6 episodes of The Adventures of Superman onto one CD-R since each show was around 15 minutes. I then would burn 53 (as I recall) more CDs so that I had the first 325 shows on disc that I was easily able to listen to without being in front of the computer. I would burn CDs for several favorite shows but this large amount of one show was rare. It worked great for a while and you wished that they made a player you could play them on that was mobile. As it would happen, a few years later, Apple released the iPod. Still the greatest thing they ever released to my mind. I had spent $400 and gotten the 20GB iPod and loaded it up. Man, it was great and lasted for over four years and kept going! It was built like a tank and even if you dropped it accidentally onto a soft surface it was fine. They made them solid back then. All that content at your fingertips in a handheld device! We move along to eight years later and I now have an iPod Classic that holds 120GB of music, videos, etc and it's got around 1.9GB of free space left! Plus, now it was almost half the price of the original one I bought! An entire collection of entertainment that fit into the palm of my hand. Incredible! I'm amazed at it still. I gave away my old one to someone who couldn't afford one of the newer models as a gift and it's probably still going strong.

Now let's look at the computer, which has improved in speed and memory over the decade. I have four computers here now: two towers and two laptops. Over the course of this decade we went from CD-R to DVD-R to thumbdrives (or flashdrives) to external hard drives which only improved! Incredible. Technology is moving fast! I remember in 2005 when I was working on Strawberry Shortcake and my system crashed. I had only one computer at that time. I wasn't able to retrieved the work and so I had to redo my audition art over again. It was the worst feeling in the world laying in bed at night and looking up to the ceiling knowing that the files were lost. I then vowed never to have it happen again. I didn't lose much that I really needed, just the work files for Strawberry so it wasn't like I lost old photos and what not but it was stressful regardless. I then went out and bought spindles of CD-Rs (sometimes a CD-RW pack, but I didn't like to keep adding to them for fear that they would fail on me at one time and one did). You could go get CD-Rs on sale in packs of 50 or 100. When they had a big sale on them at CompUSA in Wilmington, Delaware (no longer around) I would buy 6 to 8 spindles and store them away. Every night I would burn a new CD before I turned off the computer or went to bed. If I felt like I was afraid to lose something I simply threw a CD-R in the drive and burned the files over. So by doing that you'd then get a stack of CDs that would quickly build up and sit next to my monitor. I never did lose anything again. Why go to bed in fear when you could have peace of mind for only .60 cents a day? Actually they broke down to even cheaper at the end. I would burn and consolidate all the work onto CD-Rs and store them once the final work was done and submitted. So needless to say I had a lot of them. I used to make up CD cover art and label it all and then store them in the right environment.

And then the CD-R and its 700MB weren't enough and the DVD-R had come on the scene! DVDs could hold whole movies and extras so this was a logical progression and now you had a 4.7GB recordable DVD that could hold the same amount of data that was originally on 4-5 CDs. So I used them for about 2-3 years. Then came the Flashdrive (or thumbdrive as many started calling it since it was basically the size of your thumb) and they would hold at least 1GB of data on them. The ones I still have here are basically 4GB and 8GB ones. I do have one that holds 16GB! But now even those sit in a little tin next to the computer monitor. I just counted them and I have seven. Flashdrives were so "in" that even DC Comics gave out their own thumbdrives to freelancers one Christmas as the yearly gift in 2008. It had their logo on it. I still have mine in the original box as I didn't need to use it as I had plenty here, but more and more artists were submitting their work digitally over actually mailing it to the company. I now only use my flashdrives for little file transfers if I'm moving between one computer to another here. Already out of date and relagated to doing small file transfers if that. Also, I might add, that while these little flashdrives were taking over, the CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R shelfs at stores like Best Buy were getting smaller and smaller. Phased out to barely nothing for a few people who needed them. The CDs on the shelves must have felt like the VHS tapes and audio tapes of old that used to sit there. You can see the techological shift happen at a store level if you remember what Best Buy was like when it first opened to now. Now they aren't even the place for best buys. Amazon.com has been kicking it's ass mostly.

Next came the external hard drive. The logical advance from the flashdrive with even more space though they were fairly pricey. They started at 320GB and quickly moved to 500GB and then to 1 whole TB. Most people didn't even know what a Terrabyte was let alone how big it was, nor how anyone could possibly fill one up. Then it went from 1.5TB to 2TB to 3TB! Now at the beginning of 2013 they are making 4TB external hard drives! I mostly have 2TBs that I use and filling them is not an issue. I have used external hard drives exclusively now for the past four years. Once I got my first drive set up and finalized with data I would then back it all up again onto yet another drive. If it was really important stuff I just couldn't lose, I would make a third drive. Insane to some but that is essentially what our lives will now be, migrating and transferring data from one format to another till we die. Life is one big backup. But man, look at all the physical space this stuff saves! I have my hard drives on one small bookshelf and that's it. They do multiply but not as fast as the physical media ever used to. You may ask if I use any cloud services and I currently do not. I hear mixed reports about them and if they fail and lose your data somehow one day they are not liable for losing it, plus having any kind of personal data on some strange server somewhere just reeks of Big Brother or some kind of privacy compromise.

With DVD, if you rip one and convert it to digital, the best you will ever get is 480p. That's it. Looks small on your computer if your monitor is set up at 1280x720, but if you play it on a 32"-46" TV through a media player, it looks great! If you know what you are doing with the conversion software you can increase the bitrate and size and take it up to 576p. But basically it's topped out at 480p. But now we have BluRay players and big screen TVs that offer 1080p! The biggest and the highest resolution... so far. BluRay discs when ripped can be converted to any size but the best is to keep them at 720p or 1080p. I think a good rule of thumb is to keep everything at the highest quality you can as it will last longer and still be viable as the technology changes over the coming years. You do find people who are "1080p or forget it".

As Blockbuster video shit the bed and NetFlix came on the scene, digital was fully taking over. Now NetFlix has more people streaming movies as opposed to actually mailing them physical discs to watch. Streaming is faster, there is no waiting nor company postal costs for mailing. A computer company named Apple now completely runs the entire music industry with iTunes as music companies who used to produce music and market it stood by and watched it slip from their grasp like sand slipping through their fingers and falling into a bucket named Apple. A computer company, who didn't even want to take over the music industry to begin with, now sat in the driver's seat and had to figure out how to go forward. And go forward they have. The previous music makers like Sony are now relegated to making and selling ringtones for a phone. And then Steve Jobs died and who knows where Apple will be in the coming years as SamSung and their Galaxy 3 are impressing many. So many that the iPhone may be in danger at some point. People can now stream full movies on their computers, iPads, and iPhones as the Internet speeds are getting faster and faster. Verizon FiOS is still the king of it right now, I don't care what Comcast advertises. The speed tests prove it. I've run more than enough of them from different places. For $10 more a month you can get 75mb on the download and 35mb on the upload. They have a faster service over that as well. If I had to move, it would definitely be to an area that had FiOS.

All this in 12-14 years or so...

So here I am in late 2012. August to be exact. I am selling DVD's out front of the house and gone now to several flea markets at local colleges and people all seem to be in the same boat. I see a lot of DVDs and CDs for sale.

DVDs are selling used, if you are lucky, for $1 a piece. Music CD's are 5 for $1.

Yikes!

I saw a guy selling the Avengers BluRay at one of the last flea markets I went to in October, still in the shrinkwrap, for $3.00. Either they fell off the back of the truck or they were used and reshrink wrapped, but they looked brand new to me. Yikes again!

Now I should remind you that I said all my DVDs were still in perfect shape. The discs were PERFECT. No scratches, fingerprints, stains, etc. as I take care of my stuff. If you've ever seen a previously-viewed DVD at Blockbuster you can see that the mongoloids that go there have no idea on how to hold a DVD. I've never bought a previously-owned DVD that looked like it was finger raped by some hanger on from the Stone Age. They always looked like they would never play in the player if you got them home.

For the last several weeks, I've talked and met with several sellers of used games and DVDs in the area. Music CDs have no resale value. None. Zip. Nada. I went to Booth's Corners Farmers Market a week ago and saw TONS of CDs for sale for $1 each in the back area where numberous stores were. Yikes again. The consensus is that DVDs are on borrowed time. Even the resellers of used ones are trying to make a go of it. Luckily through a lot of damn work I was able to sell about 1,000 or them over the course of two and a half weeks and made about $1 each on them. The ONLY reason I got that was because mine were perfect and clean.

Most places in my area right now are offering .50 a DVD. That's it. Take it or leave it. If you bring in a DVD that is scratched or looked like it went through a road trip in downtown Iraq, you'll get $.20.

Yes, I did just say twenty cents.

Hell, I even drove to New Jersey and Delaware to see if I could sell them there. No dice. Too many people are in the same boat as me. I tried pawn shops as well! Most pawn shops said they used to buy DVDs but that they had a hard time reselling them so now all of them in my area stopped buying DVDs a few years ago. Sheesh! I think I should have sold my collection four years ago. Even animated DVDs don't move as well. Parents aren't coming into the reseller stores and buying a couple DVDs cheap for their kids to watch. Even though it's cheaper than going to Target, they aren't buying them. I was told this by several sellers and that Disney movies sell ok, but not great (ala Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Lilo and Stitch, etc) and all the superhero and other cartoon stuff (Batman The Animated Series, Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, Cartoon Network, Hanna-Barbera) doesn't move at all! They'd rather not have that kind of stuff and would rather deal in normal Hollywood films. Oh, Boy. That's not good. Yikes to the third power!

I sold the last big batch to a local reseller and he told me that as soon as I left to go get the other ones I had (as I had to make two trips to his store) he had three calls from guys trying to sell their DVDs. He was on the phone with one when I entered the store the second time. He said he told the others he wasn't buying right now. He said that he'd rather deal with me since my collection was so clean and I had a great variety of classics to newer stuff around 2009. I stopped buying DVDs back in 2009 for the most part. Plus, they were in a non-smoking home so they didn't reek of cigarette smoke. That's a deal killer too. So I gt the highest price. Not what I had in mind but it was better than if I waited another year to sell them.

Even trade in places like Amazon.com's Trade-In site will only offer you a small amount. I priced out some stuff and it's not worth the effort. AC/DC's album Back In Black will get you seven cents! Wow! If I sell their whole catalog of music I could buy a Happy Meal. It's more work to get the paperwork ready and to box it all up and they only give you Amazon credit that you can use in the end anyway. There are other Internet trade in places and I've looked at them all. It's not worth the effort on your part. If you're saying, "Why not try eBay, Scott?" Well, I've looked at that too and it's pretty grim. I had a complete set of Bill Cosby comedy CDs up for sale and they didn't go after three weeks. I kept the price low, but you keep spending money on relisting the auction each week. I've perused other auctions for different things that I could list and even if you bundle a bunch of Harrison Ford DVD movies you won't get much as well, though you will be getting rid of them faster you are selling in bulk by star or by genre. It's a tough deal. I've looked at many sites and they are all pretty much the same.

If you have Pirates of the Caribbean (any of the four films) and I don't care if it's the basic version of the deluxe edition, you'll be making $.20 cents! Yes, I said twenty cents again. You may ask why. Well let me tell you. It's because they sold MILLIONS of copies of the films. Everyone and their mother has one. If you have a movie that is only available on VHS as they never released it on DVD over the years, then yes, you can make a lot of money on the tape as it's a rare movie. And then I would sell it on eBay to get the most out f it. Otherwise, forget it. The more copies there are, the less you'll get. It's like selling comics or toys. Anything from 1980 to now is worth crap unless it's something unique. Like my original set of Indiana Jones toys from 1981 and 1984. If I was to buy a toy today for investment, it would be something from 1979 or much older in mint shape if I could find it. I still get offers to this day since I posted a pic of my Spider-Man Web Shooter from 1975! It's a easy big ticket item if I wanted to sell it since it's still mint in it's original packaging.

So let this be a lesson to those out there. Make sure you take care of your stuff and if you are have a lot of DVDs I suggest you dump them before they go any lower. It's not looking good. I did, in fact, keep about 6 tupperware containers of DVDs. Mostly just my favorite, favorite movies and stuff that was hard to get or could be collectable like my DVD box set from 2004 for the Spider-Man: The '67 Collection which has the complete set of Spider-Man cartoons from 1967. Still my favorite Spider-Man cartoon and the best thing to happen with the release of Spider-Man 2 back in 2004! These sets actually sell for quite a bit but I'll be holding on to mine.

Anyway, I was able to purge my DVD collection and to downsize a lot of space in the basement! It looks superb now, though I'm figuring out where to put the six tupperware containers with the remaining DVDs. I may get rid of the cases and keep the CDs in some kind of sleeves to condense it even more. Anything I think would be valuable down the line I'll keep in its original packaging, but I don't think any of it will be. They'll be using holograms next or something.

For a final note, let me add that you should be buying all this stuff for your own enjoyment and I have built my collections up as well because I've loved the stuff. And if you don't care about making money off them in the end when you really might have to sell them, then don't worry and keep collecting. Some people don't part with anything, but they're hoarders. But there will be a day, my non-hoarder friend, when you realize you just have too much stuff and if you aren't enjoying it like you once did because it's too hard to get to (or to find) and now you want to sell it and are expecting the American Pickers guys to now show up and pay good money, it won't be happening. Techonology is changing and leaving the old technology behind. If it's a book and out of print, it's still valuable as its in a media that will still be around. It's a book. People can pick it up and read it. DVDs and CDs will not be a platform that will be around forever. All this kind of media will be moving onto the next plateau as well at some point. Young college kids don't even own TVs unless to play video games on. They watch all their media on the computer or handheld devices. You may have to buy a DVD player (or any other media player you may like) and put the box in the closet and only open it in case of emergency when you can't buy one anymore as who knows how many people will have a DVD player in the future. Not many have VCRs now, and they were HUGE "back in the day"! DVD is still a good way to get your project out there to the masses, but as a resell, it's a bust. You might be better off donating it and using it as a write-off on your taxes. I do feel better that I did keep all my DVDs in their original cases since I got them. I've known friends who have bought a DVD and taken the disc and put it in one of those CD binders and then thrown the DVD case and cover art out! That's a worse spot to be in as you then won't find anyone who will buy a disc without a case. Resellers won't touch them.

There was a rule that when you bought a brand new car from the dealership and as soon as you drove it off the lot into the street you lost $3,000 off the top of the car if you drive it back in to resell it. If you go and buy a DVD and get back home and take the shrinkwrap off the $20 disc you bought, it's now worth only $2.00. Holy Depreciation, Batman! And we didn't take it out of the case yet!

Next up, was my music CD collection... if you though DVD reselling was hard, Music CDs are even worse... grab the vaseline and bend over. More soon!

PURGING & DOWNSIZING - Part 1

The last several weeks I've been taking time off and cleaning out the studio and house of many things that are just sitting, things I've not used nor enjoyed anymore, or things just collecting dust in awkward spots. Having four big cardboard boxes of music CDs in your living room sitting for over four years sends the idea you are a hoarder or just simply run out of space. I'm not a hoarder since it's easy for me to trash stuff, but was keeping them there in boxes so I could transfer them to digital and then get rid of the physical CDs, but when they sit... and sit... and sit some more, they start to look like a piece of furniture, which they are not. I started ripping my CDs back a year of so ago and got one box done but the other three were still sitting there beckoning for me to finish. I, of course, got sidetracked with the final year of my father's illness and work. This new year triggered me now into final motion to go through and clean out my life and start a new chapter. A good downsizing was needed and so I went to work starting with my studio and going through every art shelf, drawer, and art table throwing out or shredding at least four trash cans of trash every few days. Bags of shredded pulp were thrown into the trash cans and waved good-bye. Above is a pic of the trash cans on Monday morning after one such trash collection. I even bought new jackets, new sneakers, and a new hat just to start out fresh and new. Change is good.

Back last October, I had bought a great, though expensive, shredder at Staples that has been doing a tremendous job! I originally got it to shred old drawings, old paperwork, documents and the like to get rid of stuff and thin the herd and not have to worry about identity theft. I will talk about the shredder I got in another post. My main reason for buying a great shredder over buying a cheaper one is that I simply had a lot to shred. Not only stuff that I wanted to get rid of but all the left over paperwork that that dealt with my father. My mother needed/wanted to get rid of it safely and so I took it to do away with it right. He had numberous stacks of doctors, hospital, AARP paperwork, prescriptions, old bill receipts, etc that needed to be destroyed and a small shredder that only work for 2 minutes before it shuts down from overheating was not going to cut it. So I got the biggest and the best one I could find. Over the months, it's been on the of the best things I've gotten in a looooonnnggg time. You get so jacked watching stuff go down it that you start looking for other things you can throw down it.

I've whittled my art supplies down to those I need and really use the most. If it's not digital, I found that I used basically the same materials over and over again the past ten years. I'll be writing a post about that as well very soon. I've gotten rid of old drawings, sketches, unfinished drawings and kept the best ones or ones that had some kind of sellability to them. This stuff simply builds up to a point and it just sits there and collects dust. Since I've become mostly all digital in other aspects of my life, the more simplistic the rest of my working area is the better. Many hand drawn sketches I've done for work projects on 8.5 x 11 paper I saved since I thought they might sell at a convention or something, but I've not done any conventions in about two years or more (since my love of comics is kind of low, actually the bullshit politics of comics is making it low, not my love for the medium) so they kind of sit but it's a potential money maker at some point.

When I hit the basement, I trashed old VHS tapes and kept only a few that had things I wanted to transfer over to digital, but most of it was old movies I copied and they've been sitting for over ten years. You can't sell even official store bought ones unless they were super rare and never came out on DVD. Otherwise you can try to sell them for a quarter a tape. Yes, $.25 can add up to a lot but you then have to find the person who even deals with tapes anymore. I've personally not watched any video tape media since the mid to late 90s. Since 2001, it's been all DVD, which is outdated and in the toilet as well. Hell, it's been over two years now since I had a DVD player plugged in. But video tape is still, amazingly, a superb archival container in the long run even though the quality isn't as high as a BluRay. More on all this soon in a post as well. I knew video tapes were truly done when they made a joke about them of sorts on the show Elementary recently when a video camera shot video of a murder scene and was retrieved by the police and being on video tape the police looked at it and wondered what would they play it on. No one had a VCR anymore. Luckily Sherlock Holmes had several VCR players in a closet at his lodgings since he liked to watch old police interrogations and to study them. I thought to keep my VCR machines as well since you just never know. I had three but will keep two.

Old computer equipment was thrown away last summer and fall at township collecting events, the back barn was completely cleaned out during September and now the snowblower and lawn mower have lots of room. I marvel how clean it is every time I open the back barn door to get something from it. It took several weeks to get rid of all the stuff in it but it was well worth it in the long run... and now with all the other downsizing I did in the house recently, it's really looking great but there are still clutteres of stuff sitting in tupperware containers and cardboard boxes. My eyes then fell on my DVD and music CD collections...

The Snow Missed Us Again...

Well, the snow storm missed us mostly this past weekend and luckily hit New York and Boston more than Philadephia and its suburbs. We did get around an inch and a smidge more when some of it drifted but overall it was more a dusting that was mostly gone the next day when the sun hit it. I took this pic when it started to come down.

As for what's been going on with me, Look towards the next post...

KUNG FU PANDA Icons Art

Here's some icon art I did for Kung Fu Panda 2. Thought I'd post these as they are a bit different from what I normally post though still interesting in subject matter. All were done in Adobe Illustrator 10 using the pen tool, which I still use though I have CS5 on my systems. I still prefer the older program to work in. I have seen Windows 8 and am afraid of a new learning curve as Windows 7 was a bit different from XP, which I still think is the best they ever did.

I'm Now In 3-D!

I was shopping in Target during December and saw that some of my previous work has now gone 3-D. From a large batch of work I did back in 2007 or so and still going strong today. I think they've repurposed the work more than ten times or more by now. I guess with the way movies have tried to get a dollar from going 3-D, I'm not surprised that some of my stuff in print had taken this turn into another dimension. It's a simple process when the work is in black and white. They did a nice package with the glasses and all! The little ones should love it!

DESIGN INSPIRATION Blog Interview

Wow! This is my 300th post on my blog!

Here's a link to a loooonnnngggg interview I did for Jeff Andrews at Design Inspiration. It was in the works for quite awhile but finally saw the light of interwebs back this past September 13th. Here's the link for people who'd like to check it out. It came out really good.

http://designinspiration.blogspot.com/2012/09/scott-neely.html

I had issues with Internet Explorer taking me directly to it but you can navigate the main site to it as well once you are there.

PHINEAS AND FERB 2-Page Story Color Finals

And here are the final color versions!

PHINEAS AND FERB 2-Page Story Roughs

Here are two different Phineas and Ferb two-page stories I did for overseas back in May I think. I forget the actual timeline as there was a lot going on in my life. These are adapted from two actual episodes of the show and had to be reworked in terms of layout and with word balloons added to make them work as a educational comic. The word balloons added afterwards would then reflect the trimmed down dialogue of the show which was simplified naturally to get it to fit into 16 panels total. There's a lot of detail packed into each panel and took me a bit longer to do than a normal comic.

Here below are the second story roughs for the second time travel adventure. Done exactly as I did the first story. Also for this entire particular gig I did the page layout grid and borders digitally and then did each individual panel art on a separate piece of letterhead copy paper and then scanned them in, reduced them, and dropped them behind the page layout. It gave me some leeway as to moving the art inside the borders to get the positioning just right. Doing it this way also gives me strong looking panels borders that are all of the same line quality. Presentation is everything. Tomorrow I'll post the final color versions!

How Detailed Are My Thumbnail Sketches?

I've been asked before how detailed my thumbnail drawing are since all artists do them differently in terms of how much detail or work is put into them. Mine are pretty loose and rugged and if anyone looked at them at this stage I doubt that they'd know what was going on. Thumbnails are really just for the artist anyway to work out his thoughts and not for other to normally see and you save a lot of drawing time by doing them and working out your layouts and trying to get the best one. Above are some thumbnails that I think the casual observer can get the layout and the dynamics I was shooting for in this P and F comic especially with the first page and the last page. They are about 3 inches high and an inch and a half wide and drawn with a ball point pen. They vary usually and are not exact and sometimes I draw them right on the script in some dead area of the page. Remember that I'm just trying to work out the dynamics of it and where word balloons will go. 

These are RGB scans of my final roughs as I had to work out how the magic pens would work since they had to be done separately and in another media so that they'd translate as "magical". They were done separately and digitally in the end. Hope you like this look into the process!

DOOF'S LAB - Destroyed! Sketches

Here are three background plates I did in November for a Phineas and Ferb comic. To speed it along, I did these three plates of Doof's lab being destroyed to save time so then I just had to draw the characters and then move them or tweak them as they talked so there would be variation in each panel. Basically it was like doing a storyboard. I've done this kind of time saver before on Scooby as well if it's the same scene in say a laboratory or office building. Animation does this naturally but comics used to have each background drawing drawn separately or retraced in each panel, though with a lot of comics being drawn directly or tweaked in the computer nowadays artists can do these tricks rather easily now. This is a time saver for sure.

Did You Know There's A Seagate Lurking In Your Iomega?

Did you know that if you crack open an Iomega external hard drive you'll find a Seagate drive in it?

Now I have been using Iomega drives for years and they've worked great. I started out using Iomega drives 5 or 6 years ago when I stopped burning CD and DVDs with data on them and decided a hard drive would be better since some CDs and DVDs I had burned now had some bad sectors on them. I also use Western Digital drives mostly and recently got a bunch of Seagate ones as they were dirt cheap before Thanksgiving at Target. I still have my one original Iomega 500gb drive next to my main computer and it works fine with no issues...even after 6 years! It's been a warrior for me.

In November, I had gotten rid of three external drives that gone bad on me after many years (a 320gb, and two 500gb ones) so I took them out to the back picnic table and destroyed them with a drill and a hammer. I guess my main surprise was cracking open the exterior cases and finding a Seagate Barracuda drive in each drive! I can't see the marketing on this as to why would I buy an Iomega when I could just go buy a Seagate? I know all hard drives come out of the same place in Malaysia and each place slaps their own logos on the drives but for some reason I was surprised by it. I've not had any problems with the new Seagate drives thus far. You read reviews on Amazon for some external hard drives and people write a bad review when the drive works great for me. I have to wonder what the hell people are doing with the drives for them to go bad so fast.

Anyway, I thought I'd share this minor revelation.

2012 Finally Ends...

Hello all! Yes, I am still here. The Mayans were wrong but it was still an apocalypse if you counted all the things that had gone wrong this year. I've still been working and doing art but have not been posting anything since I was out of sorts since May when my father died. Looking at my blog, the last post I made was on the 22nd of May. Yikes! I knew it was a long time since I last posted but 2012 royally sucked a big one and I kind of wanted to wait out the year in hopes to get a fresh start in 2013 and to start this all over right. To close one chapter and start another.

After my father died in May, I lost two more friends I knew well during late August and early September. I wound up having to go to the same funeral parlor twice in under two weeks time! Then as a capper to it all, we lost Bill White, a cartoonist, who died a few months ago. I didn't know Bill personally as in meeting face to face but knew him well for years from his blog that I followed. And that was a loss since Bill was young and had the same problems by father had at the end.

Then we had Hurricane Sandy. Luckily her full force didn't hit here too hard but it did knock out power from for about 15 hours. During the previous days to her arrival I was not sleeping well as I knew I had to do something about the basement possibly having water flooding issues. Hurricane Irene the year before was a nightmare and one I didn't want to relive when the power goes out. I bought huge tarps and covered the back yard and then hunkered down as best I could. If I could have thrown a force field over the whole house I would have. You couldn't find a generator anywhere in the area so I was lucky to sponge a power line off my neighbors if I needed it. Luckily I didn't. As the storm raged, I was down in the basement shoring up the wall and corners in spots I knew might leak with DryLock as I could see the water level from the water table rising. Some water seeped in through cracks and I piled DryLock on to patch it as I could. As I finished the work and was about to clean up, the power went out. All in all, I had very minimal leakage if any and I was able to sit back and didn't mind the power outage as the brunt of the storm hit turned in time so we didn't get a full force storm. Being 20 minutes away from Philly, we lucked out as New Jersey and New York took a big hit. Luckily I saw the beach this past summer in New Jersey as right now, who knows if it will be open next summer.

Then a few days later, we had the second remnants of Hurricane Sandy hit us again with some high winds but no rain. Again, I lucked out.

Then I just finished a Scooby job on December 21st and was free and clear to enjoy the hoilday. I finished the work at around 5pm and emailed it to California, and then had to run to the supermarket to get some stuff on sale, and then I had to go to and office party that was held at a local bar. It started at 3pm but was still going strong when I got there at 7pm. Needless to say the following day I started feeling a twinge or scratchyness in my throat and on the 22nd I had a runny nose and head cold. Go figure. So this past Christmas I was on Contact Cold/Flu meds and vitamins trying to beat it as fast as I could. So Christmas wasn't fun trying to eat and breathe through my mouth. So fun in fact I bit the inside of my left cheek eating a mini powdered donut! It screwed up my mouth as well so I had to eat soft stuff or eat slow so I didn't rebite it. So as of this writing I have some lingering effects of the cold but otherwise I am feeling fine. Happy New Year... Sheesh. Well, having a cold seems appropriate since all this year I was fine and told myself I couldn't get sick due to issues with my father and missing work. Any freelancer can tell you that a day you are sick is a day you don't make money.

As a bright spot, work was fine this year, but I had changed my life after my father died. I saw my father devote his life to work and spend 58 years in the same building and he was a man who gave up vacation time and weekends as "The place couldn't survive without him." Now I know he lived his life the way he wanted to but I know he must have regretted not taking his vacations when the end was near. A vision I can't get out of my head is him sitting on the edge of the hospital bed frail, bone-thin and crying with breathing tubes up his nose and tubes hanging off like he was a Borg being assimilated and saying, "I wish I had more time. I had stuff I wanted to do." My father was on the 150-year plan it seemed as by cleaning stuff out of his basement I found things that he had bought years ago in the hopes to one day actually do them. That time never came.

It was around late June or the first week of July, I changed my life as well. I no longer work weekends nor holidays for this stuff. I simply don't care. If they can't get their deadlines correct from the start I will not kill myself doing any work whether it's for Disney or WB or whomever. Screw them. I walked off doing the DVD cover to Scooby-Doo Mask of the Blue Falcon as I didn't have much time and the July 4th weekend was right there. I'm tired of ruining relationships (especially with women) and not being able to go to functions due to some kind of work. I'm done with it. I'm not giving my life up for these corporations any more. Especially since they don't care about you in return. You hear that DC Comics? No more cover art done on Christmas Day because some idiot forgot about it and they need it the next day. Thankfully the new editor on Scooby-Doo seems to have it all together and plans my schedule with no drama. The last editor I'm sure used to ride in the short bus to school. It's not a hard job being a comic book editor but they insist on screwing it up.

It's now been eight months and my mother and I have not heard from my father's boss since my father passed. Not a card, not a fax, not a email, not a call. Employers don't give a shit about you, so why should I for them? Now I can't throw his boss under the bus completely since he did do a nice thing and not get rid of my father as he knew he needed the health insurance so I'll give him that. But you'd think he would have sent a card and acknowledged his family after he died. Also the people you work with are passing acquaintances, and not friends. All these so-called friends my father had were not to be seen, nor heard from after they found out he passed. We only had a handful bother to send a card or call. You really are on your own in this world.

So now, since July, I do my work in a timely manner upon a set deadline and I deliver. If it rolls over the weekend, it can wait till Monday. Tough shit. I don't care if you need it Saturday. Go get someone else. I'll be out enjoying the a beautiful spring day. As an example, I got a email to do some work that would have made me work everyday over the Labor Day Weekend. I turned it down. They wanted to extend the deadline by two days but it still wasn't worth it. The funny thing is that the person emailing me about the work was on vacation and wasn't in the office anyway! I guess they got someone else to give up their holiday, I wasn't giving up mine. Everybody takes their vacation but me. Well, no more. I had two barbecues to go to and I wasn't going to cancel them like I used to in the past. So, all in all, this past summer and fall has been great! I went to the beach a few times this year and I travelled a bit and took time to smell the roses.

Like Ferris Bueller said, "Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it."

So true! I'll be posting some art tomorrow! Stay tuned!