Robert Pelloni's Blog

If you want to build a company and you don’t know how, you just go to Michigan LARA and start an LLC or Domestic Corporation for $50. An LLC is a shell that protects you legally and can have its own Tax ID, but you pretty much just use your own bank account as needed. A Corporation is a legal entity (magical corporeal person) which can be divided into shares of stock, divided among shareholders, and has its own taxes which it must pay itself and bank account which it owns itself. The shareholders do not control the bank account and cannot take out money from it at whim, paid employees (including the owners) must be paid through a payroll system and otherwise only purchase business expenses. Technically shareholders do own a percent of the bank account, which they would receive for instance if the company was liquidated or sold. What I wanted to do and why is this: Make a Corporation with 1 share, and have that share controlled and subdivided by a Blockchain cryptocurrency with a smart contract (if you want to be really hip, otherwise a spreadsheet with some equations would probably do just as fine), in which founders, employees, and ideally especially customers are given ownership of the company, distributed automatically by the smart contract from a central reserve owned by the corporation. Disassemble a DDR platform, the buttons are all modular. The platform is basically made up of 9 square modules mounted to a base frame. The button modules are actually 1:1 compatible with ITG and the PIU middle button, they are straight ripoffs lol. Clone the frame and bars (also interchangeable). Clone the wire harness and lights, replace with super bright LED ones. 9 panel platforms should avoid patent issues. Clone STAC boards or partner with them, etc, there are a couple other solutions as well. Large cheap TV with fastest refresh rate and lowest latency, 1080p is ideal (4k unnecessary and needs higher spec PC), welded to steel backing panel, with plexiglass cover protecting the screen from frustrated kicks. Sound bar and compact low/mid tier gaming PC in protective case welded under or over the TV. Low-mid (cheap, reliable) spec Dell PC from eBay with a low profile GPU card running Ubuntu with Stepmania 5.1b2 or github master build, with Simply Love theme, with a startup script. Make a simple menu button interface from a USB arcade buttons kit. Start with all the packs from Zenius-i-vanisher, there are several other great archives out there as well. Then mod Stepmania to grade difficulty based on an algorithm that takes into account several weights such as total steps, steps per minute, song length, maximum step density, number of jumps, etc, to give it a rating value, because fan-made difficulty ratings are all over the place and are all based on different scales entirely. I think Simply Love implemented something like this recently but I didn’t see it in action, could just look into that. Might never have to bother with Stepmania source code. Always start the song selection screen on Beginner 1, the official games all start on a level 3 or something, I guess to eat quarters, but it discourages lots of people who immediately fail the first song. Then maybe fix Dance Dance Convolution to generate step alignments correctly and train it using the entire official stepfile archives from Zenius-i-vanisher. Create a new song search interface in Stepmania or Simply Love that searches YouTube for a song, calls youtube-dl to download it, and calls DDC to generate steps for it. Also might be able to do it entirely from Simply Love with lua. Can do really cool futuristic stuff like tournaments between locations with wall mounted TVs with webcams linked, real-time high score boards, etc. Don’t need arcade license or anything else for just pads and TVs, shouldn’t be any restrictions on being 24 hour, maybe. Please do always put the safety steps next to the pads because new players tend to step off the sides and could twist their ankles. Donation based community centers like Noisebridge SF with 24 hour access were a big inspiration. Could sell nutritional drinks, fruit smoothies with protein, etc. Having showers and towels available would be nice. Combination shelter, community center, rehab center, physical therapy, and mind and body restoration clinic. Maybe like the coolest Church youth group arcade ever, with enough stimulation to keep addicts and maniacs like myself focused and distracted from their “demons,” and enough challenge for any kid to learn how to become great at a cool skill, even by accident. It was the first time I was ever proud of something I could do, and that stuck with me for the rest of my life and made me believe I could do anything. And I sure did, kinda, but the results weren’t so great as I’d hoped, so just make sure you finish school, go to community college at least and get started on a stable path as well as chasing your dreams. The whole idea of “you only get one shot and you have to give it your all” is nonsense, we get plenty of chances in life and there is plenty of time. It takes a long time to really get good at stuff, anyway, and a lot of that just happens automatically as you get older. And it’s really all about learning, not winning. The ideal world is one where everyone wins, what could be more fun?