The Ugly War over Bob Ross’ Ghost (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The Ugly War over Bob Ross’ Ghost (2021)

thedailybeast.com

67 pointsTomte33 comments

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".

Apparently Steve Ross was just in Fairbanks Alaska within the last few days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/weo1dt/oc_steve_ross_...

Have you seen "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed" on Netflix?

No, I didn't know about that until today, but I'll definitely be watching it as soon as I can.

I found out about Bob Ross because of that marathon. Thanks for your work!

Thanks!

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.

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.

If I read correctly, it sounds like when Bob Ross and his wife died, their shares of the company were divided amongst Annette and Walt Kowalski. What happens when the remaining two original partners die?

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.

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

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

+1, Daniel Shiffman is an absolute treasure. His studio setup is fantastic and him and his team (?) produce incredible videos.

That is exactly who I thought of immediately after reading the previous comment.

How about _why's stuff?

>... 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!"

You can only smack the mouse against the leg of your desk maybe twice, tops.

Beat the devil out of it.

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.

Worth a try!

I have a feeling you'd need to make programming a happier activity first..

"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.

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

A paired programmer whose partner ignores all keyboard shortcuts

First sergeant*

It's not a bug, it's a happy accident!

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.

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.

Another data point for that saying "never meet your heroes".

The Mountain Dew ad was bit much.

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