The first episode of 2015! Hi folks. This week (yes… this is still supposed to be a weekly podcast) I talk about ways to get started and get inspired on creative projects. It’s the start of the year and folks tend to think about what they want to do over the course of the coming year… but sometimes get stuck right out of the starting gate. Maybe, just maybe I give some suggestions that can help thaw out that paralysis and get you moving on your projects.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

This episode is a week late… or I just skipped last week. I suppose it depends on your perspective. In any case, I cover a lot of news in this episode since two weeks of it happened since the last one.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

Though it’s a bit scatterbrained, this is a fun episode talking about knowing your audience. When you produce creative work, it’s a good idea to have a notion of the people for whom you’re producing it. And amazingly, this is something that a lot of creatives sometimes overlook or forget about. I know I do on occasion. So I talk about it here as it pertains to writing and commercial TV (and yes, also how it relates to Free Software and the UI episode from last week). I also have a bit of a mini-rant about small business owners and their friggin' dogs. I still don’t get it.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

In this episode I talk user interfaces. Specifically, I try to crack the nut on why it seems that the user interfaces for open source tools appear to get higher scrutiny and more anger thrown at them than their proprietary contemporaries… and if that’s really a problem at all. Sadly, I’m not sure that I have any real solutions, but maybe we can use this as a means of launching a discussion that’s actually meaningful and productive. Maybe.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

This week’s episode talks about tutorials… well, specifically how we tend to treat tutorials. There seems to be an overarching trend toward replicating the process in a tutorial verbatim without actually learning how to apply those techniques elsewhere. People learn how to push a specific series of buttons in a specific way to produce a known result… and it’s lame. I take a bit of time during this episode to try to sort out whether the responsibility for fixing this lies with the tutorial maker or the person following the tutorial.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

You may have noticed that I skipped a week in airing the podcast. That’s because I was at Blender Conference 2014 in Amsterdam. I mentioned this in the last episode with a question asking how I should cover the conference. I should’ve realized that you, the wonderful audience, would ask me to interview everyone there. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to everyone… partially because there were over 250 people there and partially because, well, I’m a bit shy.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

This episode of the Open Source Creative Podcast covers a topic that we see all over the place in the creative world, but it seems to be especially prevalent in the web communities of open source creative projects. I’m specifically referring to the topic of collaborative projects or community projects.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

In this episode, I respond to a topic that was brought up here in the comments of an earlier episode, as well as on Twitter. Namely, the notion of selling extensions, add-ons, assets, and so on for open source tools. Specifically, this was brought up as it pertains to the Blender Market, a site by the folks at CG Cookie with the purpose of letting Blender users sell these kinds of things to other Blender users. It turns out that this is a pretty interesting topic to talk about (I should know… I did it 3 times).Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

This episode is a bit more of an update (well… it’s the first one, so I suppose “announcement” makes more sense than update) on the personal projects I’m working on through at least the end of the year… a lot of writing going on in there. I also touch a bit on the new sleep schedule I’ve been testing out for a couple months now. And I ponder an overall structure for this podcast itself.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.

In this week’s episode I get a bit ranty about a few topics. Not only do I expand upon a bit of a fired-up digression I made in last week’s episode (regarding the nature of how people think about the computer graphics industry… especially people who have been in and around it for a while), but I poke at a few other things like clickbaity headlines from the uniform school of web marketing and the meaninglessness of the term “professional”. All in all, I’d say it’s great fun. Hopefully you think so, too.Originally posted on monsterjavaguns.com.