Comments on: Wherein June 19th Gives You Tidings

By: Flack

Flack — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:23:47 +0000

Thanks for the quick fix on the litfiles directory. While I’m sure you like knowing about such problems so you can fix them, I always feel a little bad about mentioning them. It’s like showing up on free hot dog day and then complaining about the hot dogs. Maybe the hot dog guy is grateful for having his hog dog service critiqued, especially then the dogs are free — and maybe hot dog guy doesn’t like his free services picked on. Either way, thanks for the fix and thanks for the hot dogs … er, files.

The lit scene was definitely birthed from the art scene. When The Stranger and I founded Soulz at Zero, we modelled everything we did on the art scene. As a result, a lot of art scene people found our little litpacks and complained that the art sucked (kind of missing the point). I was a writer, not a coder or a graphic artist. It wasn’t until we finally got a real viewer that people began to take us seriously. Like many of our shared hobbies, the Internet killed us. When goth kids could post their shitty poems on Geocities for free, there was no market for our monthly collection of shitty poems.

I knew Soulz at Zero had made it when we turned up on the Elite Acronym Lists. (http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/BTW/cs941211.acr)

By: zpinzane

zpinzane — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:29:11 +0000

1. I’d had yet to hear of this movie, so maybe 6 months of pre-release buzz really is needed. What’s kind of odd is that, it looks, sounds and smells like your typical Hollywood drama, and as far as I know it’s unusual to market them so far in advance. It’s a different case with something like Cloverfield, which was basically created because of prerelease hype. I guess maybe the powers that be are trying to recapture a similiar spark in a jar.
2. Funny you mention the BBS ads changing the file sizes. I’d have never thought of something like that affecting a collection in that way, but there you go. Your choice to include different versions of the file with different ads in them is interesting. On one hand, is it even necessary? Seeing as how the untouched pack is the original deal. But on the other, BBS ads were a pretty important part of pre-web file transmission in “the scene”.
I’d have to say I agree with hosting as many iterations as you find, however you could really be opening yourself up to an almost limitless supply of slightly different, yet same packs. In theory of course; who knows how much of this actually exists.

On a side note, a small project of mine is collecting these BBS ads which morphed into FTP “ads” refered to as “spread.nfo”s. The practice kind of died out awhile ago, for what one would assume are security reasons within that scene. It’s still interesting to find them in unlikely places though.

Nice post!

By: Jim Leonard

Jim Leonard — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:57:26 +0000

On the 10th anniversary, I would love to see a .torrent of the 2G textfile collection, which .tar.bz’d will most likely come down to 800MB. You can host this anywhere because you can throttle the bandwidth and connections to your liking. Sure, it will take about a week to seed, but once someone else has it, the seeding floodgates will open.