Parts of the article might not be correcly converted. For best experience, go to the Tor site.
http://ttauyzmy4kbm5yxpujpnahy7uxwnb32hh3dja7uda64vefpkomf3s4yd.onion
How I Started Using GNU Linux
DISCLAIMER! I know if you've written a comment without reading the whole article.
I have just mislead you into thinking that this article is my story of starting to use GNU / Linux. It's more than that. I think I gonna blabber about anything that comes to my mind when I will try to recollect my memories. I have never tried to write a memoir before in a way that is remotely interesting to read. And I will try to do it right now. But don't hope for it to be remotely interesting. I'm such a dumbass that a) I put "dumbass" in my name and b) I wrote "remotely interesting" tree times in this paragraph in an attempt to make you feel a bit better about the nonsense that is about to begin.
Imagine being not in the place where you are welcome and not caring much about it. This is very much a description of my early childhood. I remember a discussion that I had with a kid in the neighborhood where I lived. I was about 5 at that point. I think I have a picture of me celebrating my 5th birthday in that area. And we lived there for maybe about a month. Still this conversation somehow got engraved into my memory. The kid was describing an older, meaner kid, saying something along the lines of - "He doesn't like Jewish kids, you know. He is an antisemitic.". I didn't care even a little bit. So what that I wore Jewish Jarmolka on my head. So what that that other, meaner kid was passing right by. I didn't think anything bad would happen. What I thought was how weird his voice was. Kids speak in a high pitched voice. Adults in a low pitched voice. This kid was in the middle. And he sounded kind of sick because of that. Sick in a bad way. The kid who talked to me wasn't antisemitic himself. But he tried to warn me. Though, I didn't understand why. I didn't want to do anything bad to them. And they didn't do nothing bad to me, either. Still, remembering it fills me with a weird sense of tension. What a weird moment that was.
I think about the same year I was introduced to computers. My dad worked at some place that had kids in it. Using my adult brain I can reason about what it was. I think it was some kind of religion-themed place. Like a Yeshiva. Or a Jewish orphanage. Or some kind of charity place. Not a synagogue. But I believe this place had a synagogue in it somewhere. Anyway, what it had definitely, it had a big saloon like room with a bunch of bedrooms connected to it. It looked bright on the inside, but it was a night time. I think, using my adult reasoning again, it was a night of some Saturday. A time when Shabbos just ended and you were allowed to do all kinds of things not allowed during Shabbos. Like for example - use a computer.
My dad wanted to show me and my brother something. We went after him into a room that was dark but had a bunch of computer screens lighting it. All of a sudden the room got full of kids. Kids I didn't know. Perhaps, using my adult reasoning, those were the kids living in that orphanage. I remember that the kids were Jewish.
Anyway he sits me in front of a computer and I see in front of me... unfortunately... Windows XP with Microsoft Paint opened. I was shocked and scared to my dare life. And wanted to run away as fast as possible from this god damned place of evil! No just kidding. I didn't know what a computer was. So I was obviously excited about this thing. And I remember holding the mouse button and tracing a line. I would go up with the mouse and the line would start drawing upward. I would go left and the line would start going leftward. I was amazed. And the first thing I tried to do is to draw some amazing artwork which would wow everyone. And I drew... well... a bunch of scribbles.
I remember trying to sleep after that experience. I failed to understand one very important thing about the mouse. Now I know what was the thing that I failed to understand. But back then I didn't know. I could release the button and draw more than one line. But since back then I had done it only once. And that one time I failed to take my finger away from the mouse. I thought that the computer could do only one thing. And it is - to draw a continuous line.
This utter limitation didn't stop me from wandering about how I can use this feature. I was endlessly excited to learn to draw with one continuous line all kinds of things. I remember taking a pencil and trying various things using only one line. I remember thinking that Etch A Sketch was a computer.
Nevertheless I saw a computer again. This time in a different city. In a different country. I was born in Ukraine. And now we were visiting my dad's parents in Kishinev, Moldova. I don't remember whether I begged him. Or he just wanted to take us there. But he took me and my brother into an internet cafe. A completely different experience.
There I was excited to try drawing more things, but I was endlessly stupefied because when I was sited in-front of the computer I saw something strange. A man standing with a back to me. In a city. What is going on?
Either my dad or the guy who worked there put his finger on the arrow keys. And told me to use those to control the man. I did so and discovered that if I press forward, the man goes forward. If I press sideways, the man goes sideways. If Microsoft Paint blew my mind earlier. This blew my mind even more. Funny how I completely forgot about the existence of the mouse when I was there.
Suddenly something profound happened. This somebody who explained me about controls explained also that if I press Enter, the man on the screen will enter the nearest car in the city. And will be able to drive it. That's when my 5 year old excitement turned on to it's fullest. I think this was GTA Vice City. But maybe it could theoretically be GTA 3. I don't know. I know, though that the game allowed me to drown an ambulance into a lake.
Next couple of nights were terrifying. I was sleeping and seeing how I drive an ambulance through the city. I wanted it badly to stay on the asphalt. But lakes and small bores filled with water appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the city. It was crazy. It made no sense but I kept seeing those images over and over again. Until my dad showed me a different computer where I could drive a car without falling. He double-clicked an icon of a wheel on the screen. And the computer did this:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=DKoY1fw7yCo
This was something on another level. I put my finger on the forward button and the car speeds forward. Then I move that same finger to the side button to turn. It was hard but I could manage to drive and turn a bit in the same time. That's when my father told me that I was doing something stupid. I looked at him. And he instead showed me the keyboard. He put 3 of his fingers on the keyboard in such a way that any one of them would be able to be pressed at any moment. And then he showed me how he presses the forward motion and the side motion together. What?
Roughly about the same time I had another birthday. And we were in Kishinev either on my birthday or around it. And my father wanted to give me and my brother a special treat. I remember a place where he bought tickets. It was an orange room. Nobody was there apart from us. We went inside and there was a big screen about 2 stories high.
We watched a movie about an orange fish trying to find his fish child. And the best part of the whole film was the scene with fast turtles. The cinema was empty for some reason. So empty in fact that the projectionist came out of his room to us. And then, if I remember it correctly, my father talked him into putting another movie. And this time it was a film about space pirates.
When I was little I didn't really notice the hugeness of the screen. I thought about it as if it's just a big TV. And what I cared more about was the story on that screen. I remember the images from back then and wonder how I didn't notice the hugeness of it. If I would now have the cinema all to myself for two movies I would flip!
I remember another movie I saw when I was I think in the second grade. In that cinema I sat in the very first raw. The screen was big, but for some reason it still failed to wow me. Perhaps I had to learn how hard this kinds of things are to make to be able to feel anything toward it.
Came an went a lot of interesting films I saw on TV. I remember very loving the Spy Kids franchise for it's weird technology. I thought that I have to make these things possible. I loved films about inventors. 80 Days Around The World. The Time Machine. Films about people who create things that do things.
My first two books that I read were encyclopedias. One was a fat green one. And the other was less big, but still very good. I remember the illustration in both encyclopedias were drawn so nicely that they were almost photographs. Though I saw that those were paintings. A lot of them showed mechanisms and interesting details inside of things. The text was interesting, but not as interesting as the pictures.
I remember imagining something like a race around my house when I would grow up. I would put myself down into a futuristic car with only one seat. It would have an interesting steering wheel and it would be operated by an engine that would build myself. I knew all of the minute mechanical details that I wanted it to have. I was kind of an expert on internal combustion engine when I was a kid. I knew what the final result would look like. But I had no idea how exactly to do it.
I would build cardboard and paper mechanisms. Once I was making a car and I had to cut out pieces of paper for the wheels. I realized that the piece around the wheel has to be some weird length. I almost re-discovered Pi. But since I needed to glue the piece to itself, I went with 4 instead of 3.14. The little remaining part would be used for the glue.
Then I was exposed to computers more. Played some games. And realized that on computers I could do a bunch of things. I realized that somebody makes those games. This movie I watched about a fish trying to find a fish, was made using computers too. I didn't know how it was made, but I knew it was. And I wanted to learn it.
I remember 2007. I was living back then in Dnepropetrovsk with my Gray-Grandma. And we had a TV. No computers in sight. But once a week for about an hour she would take us to an internet cafe. Anyway, one day on the TV I saw something that blew my mind. Something that was so cool that I was stupefied and excited beyond believe. It was this:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=v8ItGrI-Ou0
This was something beyond my imagination. We had transformers toys. But they were nowhere near as detailed as transformations in this trailer. And the funny thing was that because the toys existed and could actually transform, I knew that theoretically something like real transformers could be possible. It would be an engineering nightmare to build one. But it was theoretically possible. And that was amazing. I finally saw the movie about year and half since the trailer dropped. Didn't see it in the cinema. Saw it in another place. A place about which the next chapter of this article will be about.
But before I tell you about it. I should tell you about 3 girls I met in Ukraine. Yana, Masha and Marina. When I was 6 years old, I already had a lot of access to TV. Nobody set up any filters for us unless dad was at home. So we watched whatever there was. One day I learned on the TV about a French kiss.
At school, being still in first grade, I met a girl named Yana. Literally in the first day of school our parents decided to speak, which lead us to get close together. And I remember telling her - "I love you" - in the first day of school. She answered me with the same. Yana was my first ever real girlfriend. The relationship lasted for a year since her family was moving to Israel. My family too were planning to move. But she made it a lot earlier than I did. Needless to say, during this first year, I experienced my first french kiss.
We were driving in a school-bus, with the whole class, toward a place, not so far away, that had a computer class. Our school was too little for a computer class. So we needed to drive to a closest school which had one. Our school teacher sat right next to me and Yana. Which didn't stop us at all. We, trying to imitate the films, laid down. She was underneath me at first. But then I thought that it was not a gentleman's thing to do. I could smash her with my weight. So since she was a girl, she should be on top. It's fine if she smashes me. I remember her tongue being very wet. And I remember feeling so good.
By the end of the year we started separating more and more. I was still very much liking her, but she seemed less and less interested in me. When in the end she was gone, it didn't feel too heartbroken since she slowly broke my heart through that whole year. I knew that it was over and that I will never probably see her again. So I moved on with my life.
Marina was a Ukrainian girl living at the same building I did. I didn't dare telling her that I liked her. I thought it would not work. I was too afraid. One day she came to me and told it to me. She said - "I love you". And I was stupefied. I was so exited that the whole day after I was drunk. Literally drunk. We spend the whole day together. When by the end she told me that it was a joke. And she didn't actually loved me. That broke my heart. It was too painful.
Then there is Masha. Masha was a very pretty little girl from my class at school. And I was very much in love with her. At first I didn't tell nobody. But one day the word spread that other kids think that I might be in love with her. And she looked at me with the a look telling me that I was perhaps stupid. She never told me once that she loved me. Because probably she didn't. And I liked her for that. Since there was never a moment of a heartbreak. But she also didn't tell me ever that she didn't loved me. So I spent a lot of time contemplating how to present myself in such a way that she would not reject me outright. And I'm talking here about a lot of time of such contemplating. Even when I stopped learning at this school. And even when I moved to a different country. I still thought about some ways to present myself in an epic enough manner as to not give her a chance to say - "No".
Zarichany
We didn't have a lot of money when we were in Ukraine. My mother was an alcoholic, so I didn't see her often. My dad was divorced from her. So I didn't see him often either. I spent my time mostly with my Grand-Grandma and my brother. And she was living and supporting us with her miserable pension. Good thing we didn't need to pay rent. She owned a flat in Dnepropetrovsk. Which, after her death owned my mother. Which after her death I should own. But since there is a war right now and everything is being destroyed, I tend to believe that this property is lost. Or at least has no worth what so ever.
I don't know the full details of the story. But it seems to me that my Grand-Grandma either could not support us any longer. Or was not allowed to by the government. And we were sent to a sort of orphanage for Jewish kids with troubles in family. I knew I had more trouble than most other kids there, since they never let me go on weekends back home. While some other kids did go home on weekends. We stayed in touch with the parents. My dad flew off to Israel to try and arrange a migration. And I spoke to him only on phone for a few years.
In that place I've shot a movie. Here it is:
lbry://silnye_prikoly#edab9b571d95cfabad0577d42949951fd690a42b
I play the Zombie American and operate the camera in most of the shots. The main character is played by a kid that I think also lives in Israel at the moment. As far as I know. But I was unable to get in touch with him. Could be a fun thing to do. Anyways...
This was not the only movie that I've made in that facility. Unfortunately others were not saved. One of the others included another friend of mine, with which I still hold contact. A friend from those days, that is following me here on LBRY and that is a member of my Matrix Groups. Multiple ones. He had very distinct ambitions to become a programmer. And he is good in C now. I'm more of a python guy.
I thought about making games, maybe, or maybe both games and movies when I was younger. Before I ended up at this facility. And I thought that all I need is a computer. This place had two. Both with Windows XP on them. I didn't know about anything else. And I thought quite frankly that nothing else existed. But this friend of mine told me that back home ( he was allowed to go home on weekends ) he has a computer with Windows Vista. Which was not XP. And therefor opened my eyes a little bit.
I remember playing with folders on Windows XP. Trying to figure out the design that wend into that program called Windows. Nobody else thought about Windows as a program. They just thought about a computer as something that looks like what Windows looks like. But because I knew that Vista existed and that it was different, I knew that this was a program. And I knew that there were options. And I was curious of what's possible.
One day I had a call with my father over the phone. And he explained me that there are other operating systems. Apple has they own operating system. I thought, wow. Then there are system that are gratis, as he told me. Systems that people download and install. Something to do with freedom of users to use their computers. Something I didn't really understand much over the phone.
I asked him to teach me programming over the phone, since he knew some programming. My dad is an old Soviet hacker. He tried explaining me HTML. He wanted me to create a file which would be called
I had an idea to make a crazy cool action film while I was there. But I needed software. Somebody showed us Windows Movie Maker. And it was somewhat cool, but it was very limited and I needed more. There was a game installed on those machines that I liked not for the game itself. I couldn't care less. But for the level editor that it came with. It made me understand some basic game design things and editor design things. The game was called Warcraft Frozen Throne.
I thought I knew exactly the type of software I needed and I designed it's interface on a piece of paper. It would contain a 3D modeling / painting software. Green screen removal function. And stuff like this. I tried begging my father to write it for me and send it back to where I was. But he didn't. How dare he?
Anyway, after a year in this place, I finally flew out of the country.
Israel
I heard about Israel a lot. A place full of Jews. A place where I would not be strange anymore. But it failed to make me not strange. In Ukraine I was strange for being Jewish. In Israel I was strange for being Ukrainian. And in such a situation the only thing you can do is embrace your strangeness. Which I did.
During the live in Ukraine the closest thing I had to a personal computer were two Windows XP machines in the hallway of the orphanage. And those were split evenly between more than a dozen of children. So I've seen them rarely and had no control over them.
In Israel my dad had just borrowed a computer from his friend. It wasn't ours. So we couldn't do whatever we wanted with it. But it was a good step forward. It was split only between 3 people. Me, my brother and dad. And I could learn something useful on this computer.
The first day that I arrived, while everybody were thinking about bags. I thought about starting to learn 3D modeling. I asked my dad almost immediately whether he found me a program to do 3D modeling. He didn't. So a soon as we arrived home I asked him to look one up for me. He found Blender. Not the Blender we know today. It was 2009. He found Blender 2.49b.
When it was downloading I was expecting to see something like the level editor from Warcraft Frozen Throne. But when it presented itself I was just simply... confused. It was intimidating to look at. And this intimidation made it feel more interesting. I knew that the level editor from that game was just a thing that was not really serious. While I saw some amazing screenshots of this program. And I knew that it can do some serious shit. I just didn't know how to communicate with it.
Few months later I found a Ukrainian forum site for Blender users which is currently offline. It had some simple tutorials that I could follow. All of them written. No videos. This was very good, since a lot of things I had to understand myself. Also a lot of the tutorials used an even older blender. Which made me think about interface screenshots more deeply.
Then unfortunately something terrible happened. My dad's friend needed his computer back. So we returned it. Which lead my father into looking for a computer to buy. We bought a used one from some crazy Russian guy that talked a lot about an extension he has on his browser that blocks porn. I silently thought to myself "Why would you block porn?". But I could not say it out loud.
The computer had an Intel Pentium 4 CPU from 1999. We were in 2009. It had 700 MB of RAM. And in the first few weeks no GPU. Then my dad found a GPU. Which was ATI RADEON something something.
This was the first computer we truly owned. And I mean it in every possible sense. My dad wiped it clean from Windows XP that it had on it in the first day. I was angry about it. I just had installed Blender on it and it worked just fine. And he nuked the system.
He installed Ubuntu Studio which had Blender preinstalled. It was interesting. But it had many visual bugs so severe it was impossible to use it. Also we had such a limited disk space. ( I think we had about 4 GB of hard disk space ) that it was not useful for nothing.
One day he brought the big boy. A hard drive that had a whopping 80 GB. Anyway... we swapped a distro. This time it was OpenSUSE. And it was terrible. I mean it didn't want to work with the GPU. We had to remove the GPU in order to use the computer. It was a nightmare. And also there was a second nightmare. It didn't have Wifi drivers. So we couldn't even install anything to it. My dad literally downloaded an RPM package of blender at work and brought it home on a USB stick. It worked. But the default cube was showing 5 FPS.
Needless to say we had to do a dual-boot. It was hard. We used two hard drives for it. One for one system, the other for the other. The second system had a support for the GPU and the Wifi. But for some reason it was impossibly hard to install on it Blender 2.49b. The second system, as you might already guessed was... well... Mint.
It was a time of Blender 2.5 beta. And Mint repositories contained it and not Blender 2.49b which I didn't finish learning. 2.5 redesigned so much that I was afraid of it. So every time it was my turn to use the computer I turned it off, unscrewed the GPU and booted into OpenSUSE to do 3D graphics using a 10 years old CPU as the video accelerator.
Until one day I found out about something quite interesting. I could browse the files of Open Suse from Mint. So I could dig into the software directories and could double click on the Blender executable. To my astonishment it totally worked. I had Blender with graphical acceleration, on a personal computer, running on fully Free Software in 2009 - 2010.
Needless to say that I was extremely exited at the time about Avatar. I was obsessing about it's "Making of". And when I saw the film I obsessed about it. Needless to say that the movie inspired me to make my own weird Alien film. This time with green aliens. And this time they are Egyptian space pirates. Because why not.
Using the newly found power to make stuff on a computer I began making my first animated film. Well... I didn't get much further the first few minutes. But the first few minutes exist. Ah... I published them. And I can give you a link if you want:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=GLHFDyJBppI
There is a shot in this crap which depicts a city and a futuristic train. It was rendering on our computer for a whole week. I remember thinking about how impossibly epic it looked. Yeah...
The whole project was a rather religious exercise. I was learning in a religious Jewish school at the time that had a lot of strange restrictions. So I wanted to please them by trying to make a movie about their lore, so to speak. So the movie was a futuristic tale, something like Star Trek, about a space guild called "Space Chabad". Chabad is a religious movement to which my father and I belonged back then.
There is a whole lore of Moshiah ( a messiah ) coming to save the world and making the whole Earth into one big Jewish place. Whatever the hell that is. Perhaps historically it was something to do about fighting antisemitism. But it became a mean of discrimination by itself. While Racism has an idea of human and lesser human. Judaism has an idea of human and higher human ( Jewish ). Which is on the surface the same kind of idea. And I don't like it. So a lot of non religious people do not like it as well. And even religious people sometimes do not like it.
But this idea sometimes is useful to Rabbis to keep people being religious. Which gets on the nerves of some individuals that are not religious, but are still born from a Jewish mother, that means that they are still Jewish and still entitled to be a "higher human". And how dare the Rabbi take this entitlement away from them?
As you may see there is a lot of bullshit in this religion. My personal view is that people should have maximum freedom while having only the minimum power. And only have power to attack those with too much power. To take away their power, while preserving their freedom. In this view there is no distinction between classes of any kind. Jew, not Jew. Arab, not Arab. I don't care.
But I still think being Jewish ( by blood. I'm not religious ) is a useful thing. In theory people belonging to the same group have more chance to accept one other. Even sometimes despite logic. And I want to use that one day. There are a lot of people in a lot of industries that are Jewish. Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Roman Polanski, Rowan Atkinson, Timothée Chalamet, Natalie Portman, Richard Stallman and the list goes on and on. I have a theory that it would be simpler to get in touch with them just for the simple fact that I share the same group with them. Though who knows. Maybe I'm just stupid and don't know what I'm talking about.
Anyway... So the movie is set in future after the Moshiah came and made the whole planet a Jewish planet. But it was possible only because people colonized other planets already. Nobody cared about Earth anymore. See, I was trying to please both sides somehow. Any-who... An alien race is trying to take control over the planet earth which brings it into war with Space Chabad. A guild of space-religious men.
In the same time, the government of the planet finds a group of kids that materialized out of nowhere. Those were time travelers from our time. Jewish residents of New York with a weird superpower to be able to fly.
I planned 6 movies. 3 about the flying kids back in the present time. And 3 about the Space Chabad and stuff. And needless to say, I have animated only that little piece of the animation. Actually, no... I did animate a little bit of the government interrogation scene with one of the kids. But rendering those scenes out got the CPU on fire. And the computer smoked out. I've burnt the only computer I had.
By that time, using various friends that had access to internet which my father didn't control, I learned that Masha, the girl from Ukraine, was coming to Israel. First of all I arranged a welcome party. I spoke to a guy which had a car. And me and my mom drove to meet her in the airport. Later I told my friends that we had sex in the toilet. But in reality we touched hands and that was it.
As she was now in Israel I could try to arrange her to be a part of the whole Space Chabad project. At that time me and one of my friends tried designing everything we could on paper, including a thorough exploration into the plot of the films. And so on. I knew that I needed to shoot everything on the green screen, which was not very hard to get access to. I knew that I needed to get a real company involved. To make it easier to talk to the girl about a potential film role. And I knew people that were involved with... well with... Nitzotzot Shel Gdusha.
Using this involvement with the company, which is rather famous, despite their quality, among the religious Jewish community, and using my then new found ability to argue surprisingly well, I was able to get a donation from the school in a form of a computer. To which I installed Ubuntu 9.04 if I remember correctly. And manually installed Blender and Gimp and few other programs. ( They didn't allow us to have Internet ).
Fast forwards a little bit and I was getting concerned about my own freedom. It was when I was reaching 15. Not yet. My mother found me an old Nokia Xpress Music 5800 which I used as a music player. In the place where I was learning, they didn't allow mobile phones at all. So I had to sneak it under my pillow.
The totalitarian regime that was my school kept getting worse and worse. I was seeing for example, how power corrupts even the nicest people. There was a guy in the school that was one of the most fun and nice people ever. And one day they put him in-charge of us of a day. All of the niceness disappeared from him immediately.
Then there was an extreme forms of utter surveillance. For example, they would check our closets daily for traces of such unorthodox items as Jeans, Mobile phones and pictures depicting girls. Also they checked everybody's mp3 players. Mobile phones were not allowed under any circumstances. But mp3 players were allowed. A lot of music was not allowed. Basically anything that sounds unorthodox, which included orthodox music in unorthodox genres, was not allowed. At one point the director of the school made a rule not allowing kids to scream the word "Yes!" because he felt that it had some kind of unorthodox feel to it.
Kids found ways to get around the limitations. I had photographs of Masha. I held them always in my pocket. And if somebody asked me who what was, I told them that she was my cousin. The issue of mp3 players was easy to circumvent. A lot of mp3 players had a slot for an SD card. So they could keep the music they really liked on the SD card, while having some of the orthodox music on the main memory. So while the search was happening, they would remove the SD card and hand over a "clean" player to be searched. It was successful until the administration found out about this trick and they stopped allowing us to have mp3 players which had a slot for an SD card. You could only have one without a physical slot to enter an SD into.
One day I flipped out and walked out of the gates of that school and never came back. The next day I wore jeans and listened to rock music. I felt amazing doing so.
Around the same time I was frequently visiting my mom's house. She had a computer. This computer had it's own interesting story that I want to share with you.
Originally it was recommended to her by my dad ( when they were already long time divorced ). He recommended it for the simple fact that it came preinstalled with GNU / Linux. Yes. It was around 2011 and there was a computer available that was preinstalled with GNU / Linux. I was excited to see it. Only to realize when I came to the shop, that the shop owner, seeing that my mom is a complete computer imbecile, installed for her Windows 7 on it. I was angry! But since it wasn't mine and she didn't know any difference what so ever. She went with Windows regardless.
Some time later. I would say about a month later. My mom called my dad to help fixing a problem with the computer. He did the fixing by installing Ubuntu on it. I was exited! It was the new Ubuntu with the new Unity Desktop. It was too good to be true.
My mom, being divorced from my dad, found herself a boyfriend that saw an issue with her computer. That is the operating system on it. And he installed Windows 7 on it. A bit later she told me that it felt a bit slow and asked me if I could fix it for her. I did. By installing Ubuntu on it. I remember her telling me that she liked how fast and responsive everything suddenly was. Her boyfriend then installed Windows 7 on it again.
We had an interesting neighbor that is maybe important for the story. He was a painter. I remember we showed each other our... paintings. One night I was just waking around the neighborhood in my new found freedom. And suddenly I saw him standing in the building. He scared me to death. But he was just standing outside, smoking. I was not yet accustomed back then to being outside alone in the middle of the night.
He was a weird person to say the least. He had his windows blocked totally, so nobody could see him from the outside. And not like always closed. He literally filled the windows with concrete, making only very small gaps for air to come through. He was, I believe a Polish Jewish immigrant. He liked art and good cinema. Films of Stanley Kubrick and such. He had Windows, which is strange with his level of paranoia. Perhaps now I could be more useful to him. But back then I didn't know how GNU / Linux was related to privacy. I just liked it more than Windows.
One day he wanted to show me a movie on his big TV. And he plugged in a tape, claiming it to be The Silence Of The Lambs, but it was an old porn film. He quickly withdrew the movie and apologized. I was about 14, so I thought it would be not polite to ask him to keep the movie. But I really wanted to see a whole hour of it. Then he asked if it's okay with me if he removes his t-shit. Since well he claimed that the place was getting warm. One day he showed me a new painting he did. Which included a lot of sex poses.
He never tried anything. Never touched me in a wrong area. Never tried making me touch him. He was simply nice. So even though it was a bit weird, I have nothing against him. He was so polite and so respectful that even such a simple thing as removing his own t-shirt at his own house, he thought he had to ask my permission to. Which he didn't need to.
Around the same time I dropped the idea of Space Chabad since I found it to be too silly and wanted to make something a bit smarter. I had in mind a project worthy of still doing one day. It was called "Sinking In The Fire". And that's what Sheiny Goldberg filmed in my book Sheiny The Hacker. Though, hers is a bit more modern reincarnations of the same concepts.
Originally I wanted a simple UFO first-contact story, a bit in the tone of Close Encounters of The Third Kind, or War Of The Worlds ( the Steven Spielberg one ). Maybe a little bit like E.T. But not too much. I wanted it to be greedier and more visceral. The story was always about a little girl who sees a UFO one night in her window. And then befriends an alien boy. Who, by the way, is hunted by other aliens. And they need to survive... And stuff.
The movie was always supposed to be a love story. I remember opening a forum about it on now closed Ukrainian Blender site. And I remember a wave of criticism to the fact that I somehow wanted to combine a love story and a little girl into one thing. My experience in life didn't make this decision sound weird. I had my first real relationship. A semi-tragic love story when I was 6 years old. So even if I made the girl in this movie 6 years old. I myself absolutely would believe that she could fall in love. The people on the website, though, thought that it was too pedophilic in nature.
I didn't care and for about half a year tried my best on designing the movie. My filming idea was rather strange. I thought I would get a girl from around the place I lived. I spoke to some parents about it. There were two or three girls that I had in mind. But the idea was, I had a particular vision for an apartment in the movie. This resulted in me not even considering filming in any real apartment that I had plenty access to. But rather shoot everything on a green screen and make the apartment in Blender.
Surprisingly I managed to model something that looked not too bad.
The movie is still - work in progress.
Some time later I would introduce Free Software into a real company. Or... well... You know. The guys at Nitzotzot Shel Gdusha were kind enough to call me for some time to make real things. Real in terms of - I would actually work on a movie that would be released.
I was 15 years old and their studio was about 1 and a half hours away from my house. To be present at the studio I was having 3 hours of bus-rides every day. In the studio itself they had given me a computer. A computer they clearly didn't want to be fully controlled by me. My first instinct was to install GNU / Linux on it. But they insisted on Windows. So I just installed Blender on it. At that time I was already way beyond Blender 2.5. I think it was one of the first Blender's that had an option to use Cycles. Which was interesting in one area. Cycles was a true path tracer. But it was lacking needed features like denoising, volumetrics and other useful things.
During the night I had a few hours of being able to hang out with friends. One of those friends was a girl named Mushki. She is really important for the story. One day she got herself a boyfriend. A guy I wouldn't name. A guy about twice her age. She was something like 13 at the time. This guy was something like 24.
Weirdly enough nobody had an issue with it apart from the social workers. The girl seemed to love him very much. Her mother seemed to agree with her choices. I didn't think that there was something wrong either. Non of our friend thought about it as wrong. But technically speaking it was pedophilia.
One day she became pregnant. Which means that this other time, when I knocked twice and opened the door, and entered to her room followed by her mom and few other friends, and when she and her boyfriend laid down, under the blanket and smiled at us. That time they did something quite interesting there.
Needless to say the entire community around her were quite puzzled by the situation. The law in this case says that she is raped! That she was used against her own will in a sexual exploitation act. All of us being literally present at the moment, knowing both of them and knowing their relationship, we couldn't possibly think about it as anything else but love. Therefor, in all of our eyes the law was wrong. The law said something that was clearly against the reality of the situation. It made no sense what so ever.
Soon a strike came up from the social workers declaring two things: One, that the man needs to go to jail and two, that when the baby will be born it will be taken away from the mother, since she is not old enough to be smart enough to care of the baby herself.
They fought! She had to prove herself worthy of the court in the place. And then she had to prove herself worthy to the court. And with a help of some people. With a help of some Rabbi that had connections. And with a lot of legal trouble, they managed to get out of this. The man didn't go to jail. And the baby stayed with the girl, but only under a few conditions: The girl and the man have to marry. Which they did. And both of them have to be orthodox Jewish. Which they pretended to be. But quite frankly, because now it was legal for them to have sex, they went all in on it.
Some time later a little girl was born and her name is Moria. Remember that!
At that time I already abandoned the horrible studio that couldn't even shoot good green screen footage. Not even talking about how they literally didn't know how to model even the most basic things. I was now going to school again. This time it was not an orthodox school. But a kind of interesting school. It didn't have a class structure. Kids ages 13 to 18 were learning in big groups together, based roughly on how much they know. I like that school a lot. Also they didn't have homework, which was amazing. And the school lasted only for about 4 hours a day. Which left me with plenty of time, doing whatever I wanted to do.
There was a guy in the school who was a bit older than me, but that wanted to make some cool stuff. He knew I knew Blender, because I told him that I knew Blender, so he wanted to learn it.
Around the same time, my mom bought me a computer. It's a laptop still here with me. It's broken at the moment. But maybe it could still turn on if I'm lucky. When I got it, it had Windows 7 on it, preinstalled. I mean, of course. I used it with Windows for some time. To be honest I was curious. Blender worked on it. Some games ( fuck those ) worked on it. But it was slow. After a month or two of this bullshit I couldn't help myself and installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it. Which, by the way, is still installed on it to this day. This system, under my wise control didn't break a single time.
There was a Blender file which I began working on, on Windows. And it got rather big and heavy. The computer was getting very sluggish when I opened the file. And I could get maybe 5 FPS while working on it. When I opened it in Ubuntu I couldn't believe what I saw. The same thing opened immediately and ran in a good 30 FPS at least. What was that all about? I started realizing that something was extremely wrong with Windows. Not something aesthetically wrong. But deep in it's core it was a rotten thing. I couldn't explain it back then, but I knew it.
On that computer I started designing an epic project. Taking inspiration from the insane attention to detail in works of James Cameron, I began designing a movie that would be rather huge if I could pull it off. At that time I knew I needed to decrease the cast to people I could get immediate access to. So the story was written to include as little characters as possible. But as much mayhem as possible.
So imagine a dad and his kid trying to survive a war in which the main forces are huge robots. That would make for a lot of epic shots where no real people needed to be shot. And I could use some rather simple green screen work to get the few real people into the imaginary world.
The idea was to occupy myself with designing absolutely everything in that world first. Then designing the entire movie shot by shot into a strange storyboard animation thing. Then looking at all of those shots and designing various simple and cheap ways for achieving all those shots. Then building all the rigs and physical stuff for the movie to be possible. And only then inviting people to act in it.
I did kind of do that. I had rather amazing backgrounds that I could use.
Here is a render of one of the digital sets that I made. Remember I was about 16.
I made the animated storyboard for this movie twice. The first time I was feeling my way around making a film. There was a lot this student filmmaker feel to it. Some shots didn't work well. Some worked technically, but felt strange. Some were flawless. Anyway I decided that this plan was good enough for me to make the movie. So I started casting.
I glued a paper advertising a role for the kid in the movie. I had a friend who agreed to play the father. Though he didn't look old enough. I thought that it was a big problem. I had to fix him a little bit. I found tutorials of how to glue fake hairs in a proper way to make a fake beard. We didn't end up doing any of it. But could be cool.
One day a woman called me. She thought that her boy was good enough for the movie. I couldn't believe that it actually could be happening. First of all I made digital scans of both actors. The boy and my friend that was to play his father. Every shot where I could get away with a rough model I would get away with a rough model. Thought, calling it a scan is an overstatement. What I actually did was to photograph them both in t-poses. And model them manually, texturing them using the photographs. The final characters turned out surprisingly good looking. Though my rigging back then was really shit. It still is.
Looking more into the current version of the storyboard, I thought that I had to re-do it from scratch, keeping only the good shots. The new storyboard was done with the models of the actors. And it was a lot better than the previous one.
The woman that originally called me, changed her mind about the movie for religious reasons. She was afraid that people would cause spiritual harm to her boy if they saw him in such a big production. She believed in my ability to pull it off. But she got scared herself.
Didn't help the fact that the boy was epileptic. The fist time that I saw him have an attack was so scary to me that I almost had an attack myself. But then with time I became more okay with it. The theory of the doctors was something to do with insufficiency of serotonin in the top part of the brain. They even prescribed him cannabis. Since cannabis has an ability to induce serotonin stimulation. Because of that kid I got very interested in neurology. And one day I even made a neurology video. Arguing that we have to abolish all laws and instead teach kids neurology. Being angry at the legal system for allowing laws that made no sense and recently learning about neurology, I had a Dunning Kruger Effect strong enough to suggest that total anarchy, albeit with smart people, would be a good idea.
The mother of that boy also sparked a very interesting feeling in me. I never though I could possibly have this. But I felt that I like her enough to try and, perhaps, marry her. I told her that plainly. And she reacted with dozen or so reasons why it's a bad idea. Most of which were related to law. And that I was still a minor at the time. And that she didn't believe that I could not speak about it enough so she will not end up in jail. I was trying to argue with her neurologically, of-course. Claiming that if I will not have sex now, I will be too sad and kill myself. I was sad, but I didn't kill myself.
When I became 18 years old I was devastated to find out that I'm now an adult. What does that mean? That I will now look weird talking to friends from school since a lot of them could be as young as 13? Being 18 and knowing how stupid the legal system and the moral system around that could be, I had an existential crisis. Are all my friends gone now? Should I sit in a corner and wait until they will grow up? Or is it okay to be friends even though the age and the age-group is different?
Sinking In The Fire, the movie that I wanted to do as a 14 year old, kept reminding of himself. I had written a song that was roughly about the plot of the movie. And in an attempt to learn guitar I had recorded it. The next logical step was a music video. Perhaps I can put a part of Sinking In The Fire finally to screen. I had to find a little girl again. And I perhaps could play the part of the kid that turns into alien and they fall in love. Back then I thought little about how cringe that could be.
I found a 5 year old. Her dad agreed for one night of shooting. And I got from him all the contractual bullshit ( without a lawyer, because I had no money, I had to try and come up with a contract that would be good enough ). The final contract said something like that he agrees for a night of shooting and that I can use footage of his daughter in my projects. I meant multiple, just in case I want to do a tutorial, or a making of video.
I found a photographer who agreed to come over for a night. But that was expensive. I used the fact that I just became 18 to ask from absolutely everybody for money as a present. I had in the end more budget than what I spent making the music video. At that time I felt like I became an ultimate movie director. I managed budget and got an actor involved and it was shot, edited, vfx were done. And finally released. ( First it was released on YouTube on now deleted channel. Then re-released on a different channel few years later. I finished the music video in 2015 ). Cringe alert! :
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KkJ2XyZnUIg
Tel Aviv
Later the life changed drastically. My mom moved to Tel Aviv and I had to move out with her. I was focusing on this movie that I was trying to make. I had no actors and just moved a city. But Tel Aviv. That's a big city. It has more options. Perhaps I might even interest a real studio in making this project.
I tried getting in touch with a few producers by sending them the whole 40 minute storyboard animation. And asking politely to perhaps consider producing it. Nobody answered. So I started thinking of maybe repeating the process from the last time, gluing a bunch of papers and hoping that somebody would call. But other things started entering live that didn't make much room for this. For example I started going to work.
Spielberg's The BFG was coming out. I was excited. It was a collaboration of the same screenwriter and the same director as E.T. And it would show in cinema. In the previous place where I lived we didn't have a cinema. This time I was living in the big city. And of course I went to the cinema. Later I watched Dunkirk and Blade Runner 2049 and fell in love with the big screen. The size, the volume. Watching films on the computer is like not watching them at all.
I didn't really gave up trying to make that film. But I just thought perhaps that I can do something else instead, something simpler. I had one idea in mind for already some time. A movie about future. I wanted to make it as a film with actors. But realized that it would be cheaper and simpler to do it as animation. I still had this insane hatred toward that set of laws that discriminated Mushki. So I thought, perhaps I can write a movie that fights for the freedom and respect of children. And I called the project "I'm Not Even Human".
At this time I had no friends what so ever. All of them were back in the other place. And I was rather desperate to know somebody at least. One Saturday I sat by myself in the new neighborhood. And a religious man talked to me, claiming that he knows somebody that also speaks Russian and is also new in the neighborhood which meant that he is looking for a friend too. I got interested and this man brought a 9 year old boy. From one side a cringed. From the other I was so pissed of on the system, that I thought that he was the perfect friend that I could have. This kid's name is Gleb. He appeared later in my short-short-film "The Package, The Car & The Time Is Running Out". We still sort of in contact. He has a Matrix account. And he lives not too far away. Now he is perhaps roughly about 16 years old. Soon he will have the same existential crisis that I had when I was 18.
I was procrastinating from "I'm Not Even Human". The first thing I did for the movie was to record a song that didn't even end up in the movie itself.
lbry://@J.Y.AmihudMusic#c/jyamihudHallucination#2
Then I was procrastinating even further by trying to write a screenplay that was very much not subtle at all. I'm Not Even Human was about respecting children. Here I started writing a movie about underage porn producers getting into fights with terrorists and outsmarting them, since kids are amazing. The main characters in that screenplay were Sheiny, Chloe and Mendel that you know from the book I written not so long ago. If you thought that the book was not subtle at all, you should have read the screenplay. I had scenes like: Sheiny is recording a sex tape with an adult. And it's about time that the audience will see an eruption of white goo onto her face. So the movie stops and we have a behind the scenes explanation that the goo that we are going to see is made out of yogurt, or something. And then we get a shot of Sheiny blasted with yogurt. The idea was, just before anything too sexual or too violent I would show exactly how it was faked, so people would not feel too uncomfortable. And potentially that could get around some laws that I didn't like. At present time, I don't think it would have worked. But maybe. If you saw Wes Anderson's movie Moonrise Kingdom, you know that with smart film-making you can get away pretty much with anything. Sometimes you just have to be creative about how to do it. Also I thought that perhaps showing a yogurt could be an interesting way to put some product placement.
I procrastinated more. I was a pissed off angry rebel! I decided to do one more not so subtle thing. I've written a song, believe it or not, called "Child In Orgasm" and thought that I would repeat the process with which I did Call Night Moon ( the Sinking In The Fire music video ) and make a music video to this one too. I had to be more subtle in this one. So I decided to use symbolism. Instead of showing kids having sex, which would either be completely illegal or invisible. Like I could imply what they are doing, but put something in the foreground, to block most of it. That was not fun and was not a VFX challenge. So I didn't want to do that. Instead I tried to get across the feeling of orgasm as this overwhelming energy. I have made an animated storyboard of it. But no photographer or videographer was stupid enough to put his name on this. Everybody told me that even the way I wanted to do that was too risky. Here is the storyboard:
lbry://@BlenderDumbass#c/child-in-orgasm-music-video-test#0
Obviously this was somewhat of a piece designed to give kids and idea that they could maybe protest against the injustices of the system. There is a thought police agent in the music video without a face. Which you defeat by getting together. A lot of people were saying that democratic countries are free countries. That you have free speech. But there was a set of ideas that were censored anyway. And even to this day these ideas are considered so terrible that they pull the entirety of democracy with it. How many times there was somebody who argued that privacy should not exists because child pornography could be spread? How many times things like Tor browser was vilified as a tool for pedophiles? And all for what? For a simple denial of a potential idea that child might be a human too. Not a pet, not a slave, not a prisoner, not a patient in a mental institution. A child is a human! A human deserving all of the same human rights that every other person deserves as well. No! - they say. They will come with a thousand reasons just to keep at least one class of people without freedom. Slavery went away. Childhood still exists.
And you may say - safety! Safety? How many times we heard that argument? Look no further than the right to repair movement. If a person wants to do something dangerous it's his god damned right! Endangering other people without them wanting it is bad. But doing it to yourself? Or when two people agree that they want to do it to each other? What's wrong with that?
I'm not saying that we should treat kids exactly as adult. I'm not saying that we should kick out every kid from their family, forcing them to find a job to sustain themselves. Many kids have limitations. They are often short, weak and inexperienced. So some kind of system should be around to help them become higher, stronger and more experienced. Parenthood is a good system that existed for a very long time. Parents provide for kids those characteristic that they themselves lack until the child gains those characteristics himself. But care is not a justification to remove freedom. There is an art for parenting. And this art also includes things like showing kids that they have and ought to have freedom. But if the law forces you to take their freedom away. What good is that? Well we know what happens. People grow up without caring about nor understanding freedom. And that leads to all kinds of injustices.
After a while of procrastination I was motivated to make this movie. And since I was making animation I knew a kind of sneaky thing that I could try to do to make it work better. My idea was to get kids in front of the ideas of freedom. To get them to contemplate possible solutions. And how firm they should be when pursuing freedom. I believed that the revolution should come from the inside. Thus I designed the movie to look on the surface in a particular way, as to penetrate the censorship.
The child censorship is one of the most outrageous things that I had encountered. I will tell you a secret: Most kids watch porn. And they do it since they are very little. That has absolutely no effect on them. Horror films might have a lot more effect on them than porn. I was hiding porn magazines from my parents when I was 7.
I had an interesting position during this time. I had a few little brothers. I had this friend I told you about named Gleb. And by being friend of his, I ended up knowing a lot of other kids from the neighborhood.
I remember being little and crying from some minor pain. The pain was long gone, but I cried regardless, since it kept the parents around me loving and actively caring. I didn't wanted it to stop. There are researches that suggest that kids as young as 4 are very good liars. I knew a bunch of kids. As soon as they know that I'm not a parent, not a person keeping order... As soon as they understand that I can be trusted, they change their tone completely. I urge you to try it.
From the negative side of this you could take my little brothers. One day ( and here I'm jumping way into the future ) my Father asked me to babysit my brothers while he would be away for the whole night. They were obviously excited that I came, since they see me rather rarely ( I lived with my mother more ). But they were not overly crazy about it. Until, of course, my dad came out of the house and locked the door. There was a minute of hesitation on their faces. And then a sudden explosion of absolute holoptropock. They were jumping, fighting, poring cola onto the floor and licking it from the floor. Don't ask me.
From the other side, there comes a weird ability to learn their true natures. I knew a kid who was given a nasty device by his parents. It was a mobile phone. Almost every kid these days has a stupid mobile phone. But that wasn't necessarily the biggest issue. The issue was that this mobile phone, apart from being an instrument of power by the government and various companies, was also an instrument of power by his own parents. His parents activated every single imaginable restriction that it could only have. You know... for the purpose of him not being able to see porn. This didn't stop him. In the today's kids society, if you don't have access to porn, you are looked down upon. So he needed to figure out how to circumvent these restrictions. And he showed me some phone magic that even I didn't understand. But that unlocked access to porn for him. I have immense respect to that little hacker. I believe he can grow into becoming perhaps one of the best reverse engineers.
Needless to say I learned that they have their own little culture. Which wasn't too surprising since I remember myself being a kid not long before that. I remembered the case of Mushki and her daughter Moria. And how nobody was against it ever. Kids see the world not legally, but truly. They understand the difference between a real scary rapist and true love. So my job while making I'm Not Even Human was to penetrate their censorship barriers, while trying to make a fun enough movie that was about a child becoming a free person. My process for this penetration of censorship was rather simple. Make the movie look cute on the surface. The parents, at least those stupid enough to subjugate their kids to censorship will not be smart enough to see the difference.
I knew the movie needed Irony. I knew it needed at least one sex joke. And I knew that it needed a bloody scene that felt satisfactory. So I made I'm Not Even Human. I urge you to take half an hour break and actually watch it right now:
lbry://@VCS#7/Imnotevenhumanshortfilm#3
There is this ironic character named Pito. The whole joke here is that Pito is actually a pedophile. In a similar way Mushki's husband is a pedophile. He is not a rapist. And it was a deliberate choice. The movie is about a time in future where by law until you are 18 you are not even human. Basically nobody respects kids at all ( and perhaps rapist pedophiles are actually legal in that world ). And the ironic twist here is that this particular pedophile actually respects the children, which makes him criminal, but for the wrong reason. Evident by the Mushki's husband those people exist. So I didn't invent anything new. And quite frankly I think in this case, he is more righteous than a normal person.
About this time something quite fucked up happened to me. I was working as cashier at one store in Tel Aviv. And that was one of the more crowded days. I was moving people through me and suddenly a girl came to pay. A girl the face of which was very familiar with. I remember her even smiling to me. Perhaps my face was familiar too. I scanned through my head for an answer of who she might be. I found a potential answer, but it needed checking. Then she gave me her credit card which had her name on it. It was Masha. The same Masha from the school in Ukraine. The same one I didn't know how to talk to since I didn't want to leave her a chance of saying no. But it was already too late. As I understood she went into modeling. Of course she did, she is bloody hot. And I was a cashier in a store. I could do something. I showed her my movie that I just did. But that was about it. Through the time, I realized that I have no chance and I better let her go. Something about planning a way to present myself so she would not have an ability to say "no" was wrong. I didn't want to be that guy anymore.
One of my coworkers saw the film with his wife and she was angry at me for trying to do what she claimed was a straight on pedophilia propaganda. I wasn't trying to do it. The thought that I had was trying to convey was a lot deeper than that. Apart from the obvious "respect children" stuff, my idea was that there is a duality for every subject. And I believed people would just have it in their common sense that a lot of pedophiles are bad, subjugating people. But clearly I made a communication mistake.
It turns out people attribute to you what you say exactly and in not with a consideration to a broader picture. I failed to show the duality. But instead presented the idea only from one side. Which isn't reflective of the truth. And which ultimately kind of defeats the purpose of the movie. The movie is about freedom of children, about respecting them as humans and as part of the society. The movie is about fighting ageism. But the way I put it together made it sound like if I was endorsing one kid of subjugation. It made is sound like I was endorsing rape.
This was because I didn't think this movie through enough. I knew from past experiences that the law could be stupid enough to say things that are objectively not true. Like in the situation with Mushki. But I didn't count that in while preparing my message. Most people believe in what the law says. They believe that under age X any sex is automatically rape. And therefor just showing a person that it could be somewhat otherwise, makes the whole movie seem like one big endorsement of rape. Which it wasn't.
Realizing that, I set out for myself to write a movie which would fix the issues in I'm Not Even Human. And for that I wanted it to have two pedophiles. One rapist and one good person. Originally I wanted to make a movie that would break grounds of whats allowed. You know how Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho broke the barriers by showing a shocking at that time image of a flashing toilet. You know how scandalous was the violence and sex depicted in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. So I wanted to pass them all. And for that I contemplated about what would be the most scary thing ever.
Back when I was 15 or so I was trying to write a movie that would be cheap enough to make with an Israeli studio. I was thinking ahead. But of course, back then I didn't really know how to think things through. So I only was left basically just with the concept. The concept was rather frightening. A horror / detective film about a serial child murderer. And not only that. He operates by brainwashing parents to murder their own kids. I remember having an argument with somebody. He told me that it would be better if all of those kids were 18 years old. And I would argue that it would defeat the purpose. I wanted to make the most gruesome and the most shocking movie ever. And so my perfect age for the murders in the movie would be 8. Because this would be something I would not be able to watch myself. I wanted the audience to really suffer.
This concept was a perfect thing for the movie I wanted to make. I wanted to set down two forces. An antagonistic child murderer who raped and killed his own daughter. And a different guy. Also technically a pedophile. But a guy who wants to stop those murders because he cannot see children being hurt under any circumstances. By putting them one against the other I could clearly demonstrate my point that I don't endorse people who rape. But I only fight for freedom.
Of course just having two pedophiles would not be enough. Because then I'm arguing for the pedophiles and not for the children. And that's a different mistake. So the actual hero or heroes of the movie should be children. A child, in the end of the film, should apprehend the rapist pedophile. Perhaps with the help of the other, good, one. But still the main character, so to speak, should be a child.
I couldn't write this movie. For I'm Not Even Human I had developed a piece of software to organize the production. But I used it only after the story was written. And the story there wasn't that complicated at all. This time I wanted it to be a complex detective murder mystery. So I needed to figure out how to do it. I ended up extending the software for I'm Not Even Human to include a node-based story editor which I could use to plan out the story. And it worked. With that, I was able to make a screenplay which is kind of nice. But there was one more problem.
Around the time when I started writing. I wasn't too far into the script yet. Lars Von Trier ( a controversial Danish filmmaker ) released a new film about a serial killer. I was somewhat of a fan of this director. And there was a possibility to watch the movie in cinema. So I went. The funny thing was that the only screening ( of which there was one ) was happening in Jerusalem. And it's a few hours of ridding a bus one way. On the spot I met with my brother and by chance met with a kid I knew back from the religious school that so happened to cross me on the street. So I took them both to see the movie with me.
The movie was called "The House That Jack Built" and while driving back home I realized two things. One, was that somebody had beat me at making a gruesome movie depicting child murder. Since it had a very violent scene of exactly that nature. And two, was that I was so scared of it that I didn't want to see it ever again. Not even something close to it. To this day, if there is a dark movie that might have suffering, I check the IMDB shocking scenes list for anything related to children suffering. If I see anything I avoid the film.
For about half a year since that film I was totally crushed. First few days I couldn't normally sleep. Then I tried finding any information about the actors who played the kids, just to calm down. Just to be sure that it wasn't done for real. I knew that it was visual effects. But Lars Von Trier doesn't release VFX breakdowns. So it was very hard to convince myself that it was just an effect. Anyway, watching this movie made me realize that I don't want to write that kind of a gruesome stuff into my film. I mean, it still going to have the murderer rapist guy. But we never going to see non of the violence. At least against the children. I'm fine with showing adults get killed in all detail. Here is the current draft:
lbry://@BlenderDumbassImagesHostingForTextArticels#c/the-8-yr-old-script-d-4-p-6#8
As you can probably tell, this movie is not filmed. I was trying to get some Israeli studio involved. But non wanted to work with me. And it wasn't the script. They simply asked me how many views I had for my previous film. And when I answered they laughed at my face.
I was still trying different companies. But I knew that one thing had to be done to potentially convince them that I can pull that off, if they would get to the part where they actually read the damn script. Toward the end of the film, there was a car chase. Apparently I cannot live without a good car chase. So I thought, to calm anybody down, I would do a car chase on a budget of zero. It took me half a year to make 2 minutes of footage. And the result is the infamous "The Package, The Car & The Time Is Running Out".
lbry://@VCS#7/ThePackageTheCarAndTheTimeIsRunningOut#3
For some time after that I was only releasing blender tutorials. I was in a state of limbo. I didn't know what kinds of arguments I needed to present to a film company. I tried boosting he views of I'm Not Even Human, by buying ads for it. Yeah... those were desperate times. At some point I kind of started giving up the project. Perhaps trying to figure out how I can do it on my own. But ultimately nothing came out of it.
I met my girlfriend around that time. She asked me not to write about her too much, so I wont. Also right about that time the COVID 19 pandemic started.
I still had a mobile phone back at those days. So one day I got a phone call from Mushki. This time an adult woman. A mother of two. There was still Moria, but there was her new brother Daniel. Or Dani. She saw my films and thought about making with me something for kids. Something like a princess movie. Something that her daughter Moria would be excited to watch. But something that perhaps we could produce a bunch of and try making a business out of.
I didn't want to do many low quality films. Especially not about princesses. But the idea of making a family friendly movie never before occurred to me. I was always trying to push the bar of gruesome and vulgar. And with I'm Not Even Human I used cuteness to try penetrating through censorship. But in reality it didn't penetrate deep enough. My little brothers still didn't see the movie. And it's all because two scenes that my dad found to be too vulgar for them.
But since I removed all of the murders in my screenplay, going fully family friendly didn't sound like an entirely bad idea. Thought the movie should still carry a message of respecting children. We agreed that the main character should be a little girl. And that the movie would be about racing. The idea was that if a child is controlling the car you have a visceral feeling even though it's family friendly. I would use the reaction most people have on an image of a child driving, that sense of danger and tension, against the audience, to build the core tension of the movie. And then present the film in such a way that by observing an immense driving skill, you start to respect the child that's driving. Perhaps nudging the people here and there to consider thinking about it. And that was the plan.
This was my main project since. And I'm roughly in the end of the animation on this movie right now.
Post arrest
I was arrested a few times during my life. Once I had a heavy metal clothing piece that had sharp metal cones on it. Police didn't like it. The other time I had a knife in my bag. It was used to sharpen pencils. Police didn't like that either. And the other time has to do with my current girlfriend and her father not liking me. So he tried making a bunch of trouble. But ultimately failed.
This arrest, that happened in 2020, was the longest of them. I spend 3 days arrested. It was also the most severe, since they took my computer and they took my phone. And tried looking for stuff in there to put me into jail. Ultimately they didn't find nothing. I didn't broke any laws. Technically speaking they did find something. I had on my computer a bunch of torrented movies. But they didn't think that it was a worthy crime for persecution. On which I agree. So they let me go. But didn't let my stuff go. Since the protocol is bullshit and requires too much paperwork that I don't want to do.
This was a weird feeling. I was so dependent on my computer and my phone that when I had some time to live without them it was rather profound. In the beginning I thought that I cannot possibly live without them. But then I found out that it was not too bad.
Since then I didn't have a mobile phone. One of my brothers gave me his laptop. And I installed GNU / Linux on it. And I wrote most of the my articles on this very LBRY channel using it.
Later I bought this computer and was dumb enough to loose the laptop on the street.
Around the time when I was released I started digging deeper into Free Software. That's when I took a real interest in Richard Stallman. That's when I started reading every possible article on GNU.ORG. That's when I learned a bunch of things that I knew roughly about. I was a Free Software user after all. But I didn't know the details. I didn't know the philosophy. And learning all of it was very nice.
Other people learning Free Software philosophy do it from their Windows machine, or an iMonster. I did it already in freedom. All I had to do is partially change some of my minor habits. Like stop using youtube and watch things through invidious. I spend my whole life using free software. I just didn't know what the real value in it was. I was pro-freedom my whole life. I just didn't know that there was a whole movement of like-minded people.
Richard Stallman also got multiple times into how water because of his views about how children should be respected. And how they should have freedom too. And knowing that about his made me have a very strong connection with him ( thought I never talked to him yet ). I was literally dedicating my life at this point to this message. And here it is coming from a well respected internet celebrity. I felt suddenly at home.
Moria's Race will be made 100% with Free Software. And distributed with Free Software. It's a movie that celebrates freedom. And celebrates respect of children. And while we are here, here is the first teaser trailer:
lbry://@blenderdumbass#f/morias-race-teaser-01#f
Happy Hacking!
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