[HN Gopher] The Ugly War over Bob Ross' Ghost (2021)
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The Ugly War over Bob Ross' Ghost (2021)
Author : Tomte
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-08-01 08:34 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedailybeast.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedailybeast.com)
| ctf1er wrote:
| The Mountain Dew ad was bit much.
| egypturnash wrote:
| This sounds so similar to the shit I've heard about the end of
| Stan Lee's life, except I think the villains were his children-
| in-law rather than business partners?
|
| I wonder how many similar stories are happening, or about to
| happen, to people who built a lucrative business around their job
| as social media influencers.
| abstractbill wrote:
| The Twitch marathon was my idea, and I did pretty much all of the
| work to make it happen, including negotiating the rights with
| both Janson and Bob Ross Inc (not just the rights to the content,
| but also permission to use Bob's likeness and name in our
| marketing).
|
| I never got the impression there was anything potentially shady
| going on, so this was a very sad read for me personally.
|
| Especially annoying: When the marathon was really taking off and
| the episodes with Steve were shown, viewers really wanted to know
| what had happened to him, and so did we (we weren't immune to
| having emotional reactions to the marathon ourselves). We tried
| _really_ hard to find Steve, both on our own and by sending many
| emails to both Janson and Bob Ross Inc asking about him. In the
| end the conversation was shut down by a curt and cryptic response
| from Bob Ross Inc -- something like "The whereabouts of Steve
| are best left a mystery".
| victorclf wrote:
| I found out about Bob Ross because of that marathon. Thanks for
| your work!
| abstractbill wrote:
| Thanks!
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Have you seen "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed" on
| Netflix?
| abstractbill wrote:
| No, I didn't know about that until today, but I'll definitely
| be watching it as soon as I can.
| stevenspasbo wrote:
| Apparently Steve Ross was just in Fairbanks Alaska within the
| last few days.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/weo1dt/oc_steve_ross_...
| ksherlock wrote:
| The underlying issue seems to be that Bob Ross, Inc, was set up
| with a right of survivorship. Since the Kowalskis outlived Bob
| (and his wife at the time) they ended up owning the company.
| Right of survivorship is common in real estate^1 but seems like a
| bad choice for a non-family business because n-1 owners will get
| shafted.
|
| 1. Example: a parent and a child own property as join tenants
| with right of survivorship. The parent dies and the child now
| owns the property without having to deal with wills or go through
| probate.
| [deleted]
| gwern wrote:
| When you put it that way, it sounds even shadier of the
| Kowalskis, because they were the ones who set it up and it
| sounds like it was known from early on that Ross had health
| issues and one or both of them would likely outlive him.
| rob74 wrote:
| Makes me wonder if I could develop something called "the joy of
| programming", with happy little
| classes/models/views/controllers/interfaces/whatever. Or you
| could see each class as an individual painting with happy little
| methods, properties etc.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| >... Or you could see each class as an individual painting with
| happy little methods, properties etc.
|
| Maybe make some kind of palette of relevant classes with
| various brushes to invoke the methods. Mixing/layering the
| strokes results in interactions.
|
| "...Hmm, your Authorization corner is somewhat too pale, you
| may be missing a stronger password requirement. Let's add some
| Basic-Auth-no-8. See, how livelier it gets! But wait, we can do
| more!"
| akkartik wrote:
| Worth a try!
|
| I have a feeling you'd need to make programming a happier
| activity first..
| trebbble wrote:
| "Now we'll init a happy little project..."
| ERROR: CANNOT READ INPUT
|
| "Well... maybe we have a happy little full disk? Or a happy
| little broken pipe somewhere?" 20 minutes
| later
|
| "Ah, it was a mis-match issue between versions 3.4 and 3.5
| and our command line tools--the error message was misleading.
| What a naughty little error message! But now we're back on
| 3.4 and our tools are happy again. We'll just init this happy
| little project..." UNKNOWN SYMBOL
| 'DYNLIB_AUTOLOADER' ON LINE 836 OF
| ../../../BOBOLIB/INTERFACES/MAGIC_REPTILIZER.BRN
|
| "Um. Now isn't that silly, folks! We haven't even written any
| code, how can we have errors in it? Let me see if... no,
| that's not a path to anything from the current directory, so
| that must be from a process running with a different working
| directory. Let me just do a 'find'... no, no such file
| anywhere on my filesystem. One moment, we'll be back to
| painting trees in no time, I'm sure..." An
| hour and forty-five minutes later
|
| "Phew. There. This language's package manager had downloaded
| a binary for a different processor architecture, and then
| used it to try to build _another_ package, and that failed.
| We didn 't have the file mentioned in the error because that
| was using symbols from someone else's machine, having no
| relation to any files on this one. Luckily these tools let us
| build a package from source--except that was also broken, for
| another reason entirely. However! I found a link to a zip
| deep in a PHPBB forum that contains the fixed package, built
| for our architecture. The link was broken, but I was able to
| use the file name to find the zip on Mega. Hopefully my
| computer didn't catch a virus from it. Now, back to initing
| our HAPPY. LITTLE. PROJECT." ERROR: LIBRARY
| 'ROOPTYROO' REQUIRES VERSION 3.5, FOUND VERSION 3.4
|
| _Flips desk, swears, kicks everything_
|
| ----
|
| Thus ends the short career of Programmer Bob Ross.
| foldedcornice wrote:
| This reminds me of how Harvard's CS50 course by Professor
| David Malan, which is an introduction to programming and
| computer science. In one of the first lectures, Prof. Malan
| shows what happens when there is an error [0] when trying
| to run code in C.
|
| He jokes that he thinks there are "more errors than code
| [he] wrote," and goes through them with a positive
| attitude. Throughout the course, he is also aware and
| openly talks & jokes about the limitations of C as a
| programming language, then discusses workarounds. Any
| feelings of frustrations due to errors are then blunted
| quite a bit, because of prior exposure in the lectures.
|
| It's remarkable how the tone is quite similar. Perhaps
| Prof. Malan is the rough equivalent of Bob Ross for
| programming today.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/URrzmoIyqLw?t=2074
| striking wrote:
| Bob Ross was a drill instructor before he became the artist
| we all know and love. I think you'd have to have someone
| cut from similar cloth (maybe even tougher) for the
| programming version.
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| First sergeant*
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| A paired programmer whose partner ignores all keyboard
| shortcuts
| Jaruzel wrote:
| There were also no such thing as 'happy little
| accidents'. Each show was meticulously scripted, and the
| painting you see him paint is the 3rd iteration, with a
| previous version off camera as a reference.
|
| Even knowing this, he still brings the joy to me, every
| time I watch him.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| For a short half-hour show you kind of need to do that if
| you want to get good results; not a lot of time to take a
| step back and look at things, and you also want to
| actually have a finished painting after 30 minutes (and
| not 24 or 35).
|
| The general message still holds I think: "you're painting
| for your own enjoyment, there is no 'good' or 'bad' and
| the only thing that matters is that you're having fun".
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| That explains why his predecessor, William Alexander,
| made such a terrible painting in the video embedded in
| this article.
|
| Other Bill Alexander paintings you can find online are
| competent. Uninspired but competent. The one in the "The
| Magic of Oil Painting III" is _wretched_.
|
| Clearly the three drafts are an important aspect of the
| final Bob Ross process.
| gwern wrote:
| How about _why's stuff?
| aliqot wrote:
| You can only smack the mouse against the leg of your desk maybe
| twice, tops.
| mayormcmatt wrote:
| Beat the devil out of it.
| dobladov wrote:
| I'm not associated in any way with him, but I would say he is
| the equivalent to what you just proposed.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCodingTrain/videos
| hbn wrote:
| His old intro from when the show was called The Coding
| Rainbow had a direct reference to The Joy of Painting, where
| he appears wearing a Bob Ross perm wig, holding a paint brush
| and palette in front of an easel
|
| https://youtu.be/_t0ZBAk72K8?t=40
| ljp_206 wrote:
| +1, Daniel Shiffman is an absolute treasure. His studio setup
| is fantastic and him and his team (?) produce incredible
| videos.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| After reading this article, it's clear that step one should be
| to retain a lawyer who's an expert in entertainment contract
| law.
|
| Now I'm wondering if a similar project could be 'the joy of
| lawyering in the entertainment world' with happy little
| examples of case law and business partner/family member
| disputes... hard sell perhaps.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Boy, after reading that, it takes the shine off my image of Bob
| Ross.
|
| It seems like the only decent people were Bill Alexander, and
| Steve Ross, and they both got kinda screwed. Steve seems to be
| doing OK, though.
| victorclf wrote:
| Another data point for that saying "never meet your heroes".
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