ASCII by Jason Scott

Now That's My Idea of a Party

I browse the referrers to the BBS Documentary site. OK, that's not accurate at all. I pore over the referrer logs of the site with the help of scripts and track down anytime anyone talks about the documentary. I made these scripts a good while ago and so it's effortless to go between them and see what people are saying.

Some people are simply saying "I want." Others are linking to it and reviewing the copy they got. I like to read those.

One of them was an invitation to a bunch of friends to come watch the documentary. I love this. Here's the invite text, with identifying marks all removed:

From: XXXXXXXXX
Location: IXXXXXXX's House
When: Friday, June 3, 7:30pm

You can find out more about the documentary by going to http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

Other Lands

It looks like, in his excitement to tell his buddies about this new BBS Documentary thing, someone translated the pitch page into Chinese. At least, I think it's Chinese, and links to a bunch of .cn sites.

That's quite something to see.

Out There

Well, it's amazing what a difference a day or two can make. On the weekend I was jamming through hundreds of packages, preparing my project to go out into the world. I mailed them out on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and some more today.

(By the way, all US autographed copies are out, internationals are about to go out, multi-packs of DVDs that were ordered are going out.)

By yesterday, DVDs that I mailed out Sunday had started to arrive in people's homes. Some likely smiled and shoved the box on the to-do pile, while others started watching, and mailing me.

Only a few have really mailed me so far; I think there's a lot to digest and there's a ton to watch, so naturally folks are just trying to get through the DVDs as best they can. The general consensus seems to be pleasant surprise that it flows well, and delight that it's done.

All well and good, a pleasant start to the shipping of the documentary.

And then I got slashdotted.

Slashdotting has happened to me a half dozen times or more over the past few years; it has definitely reduced its pure crashing stampede of power, but it is still very, very breathtaking to watch that jump in interest. As it was, I had spent a long time with the websites preparing them for just such a contingency, with the use of a hosting provider named dreamhost who handled the load just fine.

In a slashdot story, comments are rated by moderators from -1 to 5, with -1 basically meaning "troll or off-topic". Whenever I read those stories that mention me, I always make a point of going right down to the bare metal, the full "show me the whole box" approach. You get a real insight into the dark reaches of the human mind if you do so. You also get all those immediate emotional responses that come from people who have ripped away any sense of decency or politeness. Sometimes (just sometimes), it's good to hear these things.

One of the messages bothered me because it was character assassination claiming I'd posted the story of my documentary under another name to "astroturf", along with a nice additional hulk of opinion about my egomaniac personality and dominance of conversations. You go, girl. I refuted the "I posted it" part (it was a gentleman named abcbooze, who contacted me after the posting to apologize if it brought too much traffic) but you really can't refute the egomaniac part; I like me, I'm my biggest fan, I hang out with myself all the time.

The rest of the messages that weren't of a nostalgic nature (that is, actually directed at the documentary itself) fell into three general camps: Holy crap it's fifty bucks, Holy Crap it's five and a half hours long, where can I download it for free.

I answered these general concerns as best I could in one or two messages, because otherwise you're running around playing whack-a-mole. At some point, maybe I'll write essays on the thinking behind all these choices I made, since that would be fun. But not now.

See, the slashdotting caused a Boing-Boinging, which is a little smaller but still very significant, and a very interesting set of people read boingboing; I was also a guest columnist on that site for a while, before they got out of that habit.

And the Slashdotting and the BoingBoinging caused a lot of orders.

A lot.

Of orders.

Enough, in fact, that the DVD pressing is now paid for.

That's a lot of orders.

And more are coming by the hour; people are hearing about the project, spreading the word, reading about it and making decisions to buy a copy, and I appreciate that very, very much.

This is a digital age, one I have taken advantage of by shooting this on digital video, editing off a hard drive, distributing with a DVD medium that is digital, and including a box that was designed in a computer. This is all great and convenient and good, but it also means that for some people, downloading a copy is the same as owning it by buying it from me.

I won't go too much into this rather dreary "please pay for it" stuff because when I read it from the other side, as a customer, it turns me off. I don't see how it wouldn't do the same for others.

The entire documentary is Creative Commons Attribute Sharealike 2.0 Licensed. This means a lot of things, but basically is means that when you buy a copy, you can do whatever you want with it. An awful lot. And whatever you do or make with it, you have to also allow your creation to be the same way. Why did I do this? Because treating my customers/audience like moronic criminals is not what intelligent beings do. I am not a company, I am a person. When I see creators wave their little flaming sword of copyright at people, poking their own audience in the side with it, it's a breathtaking level of lame. I do not wish to be lame.

What I am saying, in other words, is that not only have I made it easy to copy the documentary, I've made it something I'm basically encouraging with the license. It doesn't mean I don't want to sell the copies I am having shipped to my home and mailing out, obviously, but on the other side, in the long run, I would rather people watched these documentaries than have me chasing down children and running through their piggy banks for dimes because they learned about Fidonet.

At some point, I'll go into the full meaning of what I've done with this licensing, because I think it's important. But not today.

No, today, I had to call the DVD plant and tell them, before the truckload (and it is a truckload) of BBS Documentary boxes were sent out via freight, to send me ANOTHER few hundred copies via two-day air. They should be arriving on Friday, and all these new orders will be immediately filled. I do NOT want people waiting for these if I can help it.

At worst, people who order for a few days next week might have to wait a week for their DVD, which I think is the edge of tolerance. After the truck arrives, of course, I will be literally buried in these things, thousands of them. I promise to get a picture of that. And at that point, ordering a copy gets that copy shipped out that day. And ever onward.

So it has been a very lucrative day for me, and I guess this is the beginning of "the payoff", where 4 years of work come back to wash over me.

I just wonder what sort of flotsam is going to come with it.

I'm in the IMDB

Here's my entry in the IMDB. I actually gave them a metric ton more detail than that; their FAQ explains that the way the database works, it first has to register as a new title, and then all the rest of my entries/information are then populated in over the next couple of weeks. So, basically, don't worry; that thing will be loaded.

I'm going to have a lot of fun with that. Ward Christensen will be in the IMDB! And oh yeah, me too.

Another Pile Leaves

A bunch more went out today with my local post office, who officially hate me. In the future, I'll be using the nice online postage facility so that I just drop the boxes off in a bin for delivery, but for now it's pretty much a big manual operation and eyes widen in the line when people come in and I'm carrying 30 boxes.

Still going through the piles of names left as fast as I can. Some people are likely to be receiving their DVD sets today. Hurrah!

BBS Documentary Ships

A lot of people have been getting their day-to-day news about this production and all this DVD stuff from this weblog; I'm sure the 2+ day news blackout has been painful. Let me let you know how it's all going.

First of all, the vast majority of the DVDs have shipped! Hundreds went out on Sunday, and another hundred went out today. I will post conclusively when every last single pre-order is out the door, but I'm expecting most of them to be done within the day.

The remaining orders are:

Autographed copies (because there's an additional packing step)
Orders of more than 1 (special boxes)
Foreign/Overseas orders (forms, forms, forms)

Assembling the final packages was a lot of work; even though I'd assembled everything as far as I could previously, the last disk required not making the slipcovers and putting the case in until just before packing. This was an enormous amount of time required to put these together, but it does mean that people will be getting their DVDs up to a week before they would have if I'd just waited for the truck to come with the pre-assembled pieces.

I spent basically all Friday and Saturday packing all these boxes, verifying addresses, getting things sorted, and generally preparing for the onslaught of mail. The dining room was used for assembling the packages, and then the kitchen became the shipping depot, with stacks of packaged, labelled DVDs ready to go:

There is a post office in Boston that is open 24 hours and is staffed on Sundays, and so I showed up with my many, many boxes and gave them big, soulful eyes. They lent me a mailing cart and with the help of my friend Charlie, we sent out a car-load's worth of these things:

Surprisingly, the post office took this guy showing up with an insane amount of boxes in stride, and the two nice ladies who were manning the desk initiated a two-part load-balanced stamping operation, which slammed through the stuff in about 15 minutes:

Finally, here I am with the reciepts for an enormous amount of mailed-out packages:

Quite a trip. Like I said, another bunch went out today, more go out tomorrow, and the "odd" pre-orders (multiples and other issues) are going out around this time as well. It turns out I have to fill out an enormous amount of forms for shipping overseas, and this will delay people, but not by much and I expect to have the whole thing cleared this week.

It was definitely worth all the effort, because some of you have waited seven months, and a week makes a difference; be aware, if you get a box for your pre-order, the director assembled, packed and shipped it himself.

I suspect one or two of you got two copies for the price of one. Congratulations.

Then begins the inevitable fun of returned/misaddressed packages, bounced checks, chargebacks, and all the rest of the fun that comes with mailing out "stuff" into the world at large. Oh, and the reviews. Did I mention the reviews!

Stay tuned.

It begins

A box of DVD 1 arrived. I tested it, it worked. I am typing this with rubber gloves, because I have to get back to the table and assemble. I don't know if I'll make it to the late shipping at the post office tonight, but I'll try.

We are real.

Housecleanings

We're getting very close to The Moment; which is when we go from where this Documentary is an idea, a dream, a concept, to where it is a product and I am a seller. In that way, we cleave its existence into two pieces.

In the time up to now, when there will be products in my home to go out to people who buy them (and I have to say, Buy! Buy! Buy!), there was no documentary. I had no films I could point to having done, no previous works I could show beyond websites and speeches, and only photo albums and related material from the production to show I was real.

In the beginning was Andrew Mudd. The Mudd Man dates back to about five years ago, to an ill-fated idea I had where I was going to sell textfiles.com t-shirts. I decided that this would cause me legal and other issues, so I decided against it. Andrew, however, had already sent me money for it. In fact, I had his money and put it into a folder and promptly forgot about it. He was the only guy who did so.

Eventually, I started work on the documentary, in June of 2001. (It really has been that long.) And I found Andrew's money, and contacted him, and he said "Hey, just put it towards the documentary." So here, five years later, he finally gets something for the cash he put in. So Andrew's got everyone beat.

Then come the people who, when I started work on the production and there was no idea if it would even be affordable, much less a sellable concern, donated money. Just flat sent me cash on the theory that the textfiles.com guy would probably make something pretty good with a camera. They gave me money ranging from $1 to $111. They all get copies, regardless of what they paid, and everyone over $50 gets two. The $111 guy gets three. So there's an incentive to donate; people who sent me $5 get a $50 documentary, including free shipping. But they also sent me money 3 years ago.

Then we get to the pre-orders, people who have been sending me money since October of 2004, a full seven months ago, who bought copies of the documentary, again, sight unseen. Based on what, if you look at it that way, constitutes a prospectus, a huge "to be determined". So that is a very special amount of trust right there.

Some people have known me for years. Some people never knew me except by my work on textfiles.com, and some people didn't even know that. So that's a lot of trust to be working under, and don't think I don't know and appreciate it.

From this point on, things change, of course. It WAS people who were willing to walk around scaffolding to see what was going to be and drop some cash, and now it'll be people who see the neon sign and stop in for a drink. What was a guy's little project is now a company's product. The company is the same guy from the little project (I have not sold this documentary to somebody), but still, it's a company.

When people order, there will be a stock of this product in-house (literally) that then gets shipped to them. I will be pushing and promoting this project throughout 2005 and into 2006. I will be talking about it in varying tones, based on audience and venue, and I will be likely engaged in debates and discussions. I will be speaking from some position of authority, having spoken to many of the pioneers of BBSes and the people who moved and shook BBSes throughout the arc of its existence (an arc that has not ended). In other words, I am a published documentarian/historian with a product to sell and a history to discuss and otherwise be involved in.

But before today, I was not that; I was just a guy. And everyone who believed enough in that guy to give him your hard-earned money in the hope he would do good, I would like to thank, one more time.

One-Day Delay! Of Course!

From my printer:

Hey Jason - It looks like the Disc 1's had some `stamper' issues and have now been re-scheduled to ship 5/19 - which means you would receive your 500 then on 5/20.

We will keep you posted.

So there we go, a one-day delay. Meanwhile, the dining room is now set up like a war room, with all the stuff ready to go, just waiting for The Word.

Discs 2 and 3 now in their cases

Wow, that's one way to spend an evening. Be rest assured; if you pre-ordered or ordered a DVD set before this very moment, you will be receiving a copy of the BBS Documentary that was hand-assembled by the director. Wearing rubber gloves, so no lifting fingerprints.

It brought me back to my days as a temp worker, being given an insanely easy thing to do hundreds of times, making it slightly less easy.

Ideally, Disc #1 shows up tomorrow and these suckers start going out. So, barring ANOTHER delay, a bunch of people will have a very nostalgic weekend coming up.

Stacking the Odds

This arrived today:

So here's the best part. Only discs 2 and 3 arrived. Disc 1 is supposed to arrive tomorrow. It's like Zeno's Paradox, except with DVDs. As was explained to me by my friendly printing elves, the duplication of the three discs are three separate projects, and the assembly is a fourth. I have been sent the outcome of the first two, and hopefully the third is on its way, and then it's a race; can Jason assemble and mail these out before the truck arrives with unbelievable amounts of discs?

It's not like there's not a lot to do, since I have to be assembling the packages, putting the labels on the boxes, and so on. It's just really insane that there's that one annoying step.

They look great, though, hard to argue with that.

So, I didn't call the people who asked for a call yet because they do NOT get a call until the packages are dropped off at the post office. (In case some of the people reading this are wondering why they didn't get a call yet).

Packages and Slipcovers Arrive, DVDs Soon

So I woke up to the Fedex guy ringing my doorbell and found that he had 11 boxes for me.

9 of them are DVD cases and 2 are slipcovers. Just so we're all clear, I am still waiting on the actual DVDs to arrive, which is supposed to happen this week.

Goodness, there's a lot of them. I'm in the process of autographing the copies I said I would autograph, to match them with labels and then wait for the DVDs to show so that I can pop them in and mail these things out.

Unfortunately, some boxes arrived damaged... but luckily, not enough to affect pre-orders. I am working this all out with the shippers, and the reason this happened is because I've been monkey-wrenching my printer's procedures to force a drop shipment of DVDs and cases so I could assemble them myself, faster than their people who are assigned to the job. So they basically sent me a bunch of boxes of boxes in a weird way and Fedex was a tad rough with them, and so now I have to go file a claim with Fedex.

I only bring this up because it's an interesting insight into "The Process". I'm sure for people who do this sort of work all day, it's all part of the job; it's "oh, this box got dinged, we do procedure X Y Z and we're back in business." But of course this is all the first time through for me so I go bugnuts. I actually made the mistake of calling the printers before a time-out period, and I ended up having to call back about an hour later so they could see I was Bruce Banner again.

"The Process" is usually hidden from people because a person with an item to provide wants to make their customer/audience feel like it's all magic, all going on behind the scenes and you don't have to worry your nice little head about this headache or that headache. Since I don't mind my life serving as a warning to others, I've tried to be transparent about the whole thing as I've gone. I expect to do a post-mortem discussion/essay about what went well and what didn't, and I hope people use that to some degree in their own projects. Rest assured, "The Process" has a lot of ups and downs and what the list in your head might have as a single item, like "get copies of the DVD" or "send it to the printer", turns out to be 20 little steps that all require attention before that one single step is really "done".

So here we are with this special shipment has already filled my dining room with boxes.

I can assure you it is quite surreal to stare down hundreds of copies of your "product", when that product was nothing but a dream a while earlier, a goal or plan that you had ideas about but nothing more. To go from sitting in my old apartment going "I'm going to make a movie!" to standing near an open box with dozens of "the movie" looking expectantly back... it's quite a feeling.

And I ordered a lot more than just these. Someone asked me recently if they'd "missed the boat", that I'd made the same amount of DVDs to match the number of pre-orders and after that, they were "done" and there wouldn't be any more. Let me be the first to assure everyone... I HAVE PLENTY. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Plenty for everyone. And if I sell out, I will make more.

My goal had always been to tell the story of the BBS as best I could, or, if I hadn't told some parts as well as people liked, inspire them to improve upon the foundation I'd set up. To that end, after spending years making this mini-series, I intend to do my best to get it to as many people as possible. And if, once you've seen this documentary, feel you want to, tell as many people about it as you think can stand the news. I'll ensure I have copies ready for them.

I am going to spend a lot time talking to folks about this work. I will be speaking to a lot of people in hallways, on stages, on radio and wherever else they'll let me talk. I expect to have some heated arguments and I know I'll continue to get the interesting mix of accolades and put-downs I've gotten so far.

It's going to be quite fun to do so. Because this is a solid, sizeable "thing". At five and a half hours of episodes, I would hope I'd covered an awful lot. There's a range of emotions and situations and statements and stories in there, far greater than I would have imagined. And now they're protected for the forseeable future, soon to blossom on screens and laptops around the world. Good stuff.

Update: Amazon repaired my entry so that it no longer wrongly claims these are Region 1 DVDs (they are regionless and copy protection-less). I have to say that Amazon has impressed me with their responsiveness, actions, and ease of use. I thought this was going to be hell incarnate, and it was heaven.

The Big Time

Another important milestone:

The BBS Documentary is now available on Amazon.

The entry says that the DVD has Region 1 encoding; that's not true, and I've sent in a correction. The DVDs have no Region 1 encoding.

Now, people who know of the BBS Documentary through this website and through the main BBS Documentary website might say "Well, that's kind of odd; it costs more than on your website". And here we get into the wierdness of selling through a big-name retailer like Amazon.

Basically, I make less money than I do selling the documentary myself. Significantly less. Yes, even selling the documentary for more on Amazon, I make less. But the balance of this is that it's on friggin' Amazon.

People like yourself who know of me and my project for years (and in some cases, years and years) have the score down already; you either bought it through my site or intend to buy it through my appearances at various conferences, or maybe you're just going to download it when you have the chance. But this makes you one segment of the audience. Another segment is going to hear of this project by word of mouth, from the radio or from a message base or in a conversation at a bar or what have you. These people will, naturally, go home and either go to Google and look for "Documentary BBS" or something, or they'll go to Amazon.

Other people put more trust in the Amazon brand name than a guy in the middle of who-knows-where. They'll want the Amazon guarantee and refundability and whatever else they want from Amazon. So for those people, I have the DVDs for sale that way.

I don't LOSE money selling through Amazon; I just make significantly less. But the trade-off is that I reach a lot more people this way. You see my issues. Also, no autographs through Amazon, for what that's worth.

Note that Amazon doesn't have some special "Jason Batch", or anything; they're waiting for my boxes just like you are, if you already ordered.

Oh, and I added it to my Wish List. That felt great.

Text goes In, Text goes out

Among my various directories have been contributions sent to me by folks that I haven't completely gone through as of yet. Generally, when something comes in from someone, I have scripts that let me integrate the new data into my archives. They find doubles, they let me describe what the files are, and then they put them into the right directories and re-build the directories with the new information. People wonder how I do so much, and I always respond "with scripts", because I use them extensively.

My inbox was originally shoved away in a weird place, but I decided that I should probably leave the files that are not yet sorted in a public place, so people who find something they need or who want to do some looking themselves can do so.

So, tonight, I introduce to you:

The TEXTFILES.COM INBOX.

This little weird site will have all the archives I'm currently on tap to sort through when I have time. The main reasons that I don't go through an archive are usually that there's a ton of same-named-but-not-the-same file, which raises suspicions and needs a much closer look, and files which have a place on the site but I'm not sure where (NFO files are an example of this; they're going to get their own site soon). In other cases, I have been sent programs, and in yet others, I am grabbing a copy of a website and haven't sorted the ugliness yet.

It's weird stuff, but there you go, if you feel the need to browse through my inbox as if you were visiting the textfiles.com offices or had an internship or something, now you know what it's like. And yes, it's about 165 megabytes.

Days of Delay

Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 11:50:35 -0700
To: 'Jason Scott'
Subject: Scheduling delays ...

Let me know if you're interested in this option, and I'll see what the plant says.

None of this would be as problematic or concerning for me, if I hadn't implied, committed, and otherwise promised people this whole thing would be going out the door in December of 2004. It has been very troubling for me how much I misjudged. This is a small delay but it has been on top of a dozen small delays. For this, I apologize to everyone who has ordered it, for my incredible delay in finally shipping.

It's real, it's actual; I've shown one or two episodes to groups of folks, so it's not vaporware or anything, but man, what an annoying time delay. I've learned a lot about DVD production, mostly that it is expensive and time-intensive. Now I know why they say a film is going to DVD and then everyone sits on their hands for 3 months.

A bunch of people, upon finding out that I was willing to autograph these, have asked me to autograph their copy. I have no problems doing this at all, so don't be afraid to ask.

I've been working on the website, with a few new subpages going live soon, allowing you to download music from the films, get an introduction to BBSes, and so on.

Packing Boxes Arrive, DVDs in about a Week

1,000 packing boxes arrived at my house today. This is what $800 worth of packing boxes looks like:

It's starting to dawn on me more than it did before just how much stuff I ordered to my home. I finally sat down and did the numbers... at least one room of my house is going to be nothing but storage of DVDs, with another couple rooms being the assembly and autographing and mailing locations. I've basically committed to turning my home into a factory.

Now, the stuff people care about:

I recieved mail from my DVD place. They tell me that the printer has me in for the printing around next Thursday-Friday. I have told them Saturday Next-Day delivery is a-ok with me, but there's a chance the stuff won't go out until Monday. So I'm now saying we can expect this stuff within 9 days.

This is a lot of stuff. Egad.

Swastikipedia

Some days, I feel like I should have never written anything about Wikipedia, positive or negative. Like many cults, it has extreme members or well-meaning folks who do not understand what they are part of, and who take me on personally and then fall back into the ranks should I respond poorly. Some of them, should I respond within the confines of Wikipedia, point to the rules of discourse on Wikipedia and how I am breaking them.

Fine. It is not hard to post here and have people reference my ideas here; Wikipedia now sends hundreds of folks to my site on a regular basis, all wondering about looking at the strange fellow who does not love Wikipedia. I wave to you, from behind my glass.

But I am not really the "Anti-Wikipedia Guy". I like to think I have more important things to do. Wikipedia will not live or die by my words, so I will not waste words easily aimed at the betterment of my own sites for the sake of proving my own thoughts to people who fundamentally disagree with me.

But I can spare a few words.

I was asked... well, demanded, really, to show an example of my general belief that "a low barrier leads to crap", which has been misinterpreted a number of ways (and really, my entire essay has been misinterpreted, but that's the way of life online). The tautology, which is flawed, is that if I can't find an article on Wikipedia that is poorly written, my contentions are false. Well, that depends on what you think my contentions are.

Therefore, I will rest my case on a single entry: That of the Swastika.

Here, contained in one entry, is everything that I have issues with regarding the implementation of Wikipedia as it currently stands with its rules. A person could look at the first entry and then the last one, see how big and fluffy and full of photos the last entry is, and go "success!".

But dig deeper under the surface of this entry, and then you start to see the cracks in this "success".

With over 1,500 edits done to this entry over its 3 year lifespan, the process of becoming even slightly familiar with the editing pattern could be a full day's work. I spent some time with it and my analysis is nowhere near complete, but here's some interesting points along its journey.

The Swastika entry starts its life in March of 2002. By the end of 2002 it has gotten 11 edits, mostly minor nips and tucks trying to get a grip around what it exactly is a symbol of and what way to format the image.

In January of 2003, someone coming from an IP address makes a selection of changes over the course of a few days. His revision history shows someone who was big in 2002 and 2003 and then faded away (or they got an account, but it's strange they would feel no need for an account for nearly half a year and then suddenly decide they need one). It also highlights one of my issues; without asking people to at least register in some way before making changes, it devalues all the other people willing to be tracked and cited when working on entries. It's not like it costs money or that you can't have a billion accounts... it just makes it that more disheartening when your stuff is changed by someone who you hope is on a static, non-shared IP address.

By July of 2003 there have now been roughly 30 edits to the Swastika entry, resulting in a bit of change but basically the same information.

And something happens in July of 2003. It gets over 50 edits during that month from roughly 15 different people. And then the troubles begin.

If you start going through the edits, one by one, and only a maniac would at this point, you see points raised, links created, statements made, and then slowly, over time, they're removed.

A link between the Nazi Symbol and Socialism is put up, and later, someone called "Nlight" calls it "presumed nonsense" and removes it. Why? Who the heck is Nlight? Well, someone who couldn't take it anymore, apparently. But if you go look back at his older entries about himself, you see he's a computer geek from the northwest. Why did he remove the link between socialism and nazism? Because he felt like it. Because he "presumed" it was "nonsense", according to the edit. So now the socialist guy has to become a content defender, pulling back his socialism link with a citation of it. But now here comes Rasmus_Faber, about 20 minutes later, to undo the socialist guy's work and return it to the non-socialist link. What is called a "revert war" then occurs, with Socialist guy trying desperately to keep his entirely valid Socialist Party link about the Swastika alive while Rasmus Faber (who is, as his page says, a software engineer) repeatedly stops his changes from staying.

Throughout "The Battle of January 31", the changes go back and forth between Socialist Guy, Rasmus Faber, Nlight, and Mrdice, who, as far as it can be surmised, simply jumps into the Melee to "help" Nlight's valiant attempt to not link Socialism with the use of it by the Nazi Party. (Mrdice, by the way, gives up on editing Wikipedia in early 2004, leaving behind a legacy of zip-and-run edits where he accuses, demands, dictates and runs away, with none of that boring, time-wasting need to show any authority or reputation with his subject.)

And lo and behold, that little nugget of information is lost, the work of four people working at odds with each other over a battle, all of them located all over the world, fighting over what actually might be a real fact.

The story of the swastika's entry continues after this, for over 1,200 edits. Dozens of people are involved, lots of facts are lost, many are gained... and you would be hard, hard-pressed to show why many of these folks should be editing the Swastika entry in the first place. Calling this "open source" and comparing it to programming projects is borderline insane: open-source programming projects have a core team with goals in mind that they state clearly, who then decide what gets in and what does not get in. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not, but people with anonymous IPs can't just come in and fundamentally redo the graphics code on the program and then disappear, never to be seen again.

This is what I mean; you have a brick house that, from a distance, looks decently enough like a house that people say "see, community building works". But what isn't obvious on the surface is how many times those bricks have been pulled apart, reassembled, replaced, shifted, modified, and otherwise fiddled with for no good reason other than battling an endless army of righteous untrained bricklayers who decided to put a window there... no, there... wait, no window at all. If you declare the final brick house a "victory" while ignoring the astounding toll of human labor required to get it so, then you are not understanding why I consider Wikipedia a failure.

And all of this wouldn't be important at all, if we didn't start to see the Wikipedia definitions propogating throughout the internet, being something you get automatically on a lookup from Trillian or Yahoo using it as a way to get facts. That goes beyond scary.. it borders on negligent.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a documentary website to take care of. It's waiting for me, and nothng gets done unless I work on it... which is just fine with me.

A Quiet Transaction

Every day, fifteen thousand people visit textfiles.com. That number is a little hard to fathom for me, although I try. My statistics program tells me that across a month, it works out to roughly a quarter of a million unique visitors from around the world. A quarter of a million.

I field about 200-300 emails a month about the site, ranging from dewy-eyed wonder to seething anger. That means less than one-tenth of one percent of the people who are on my site communicate with me.

This is fine with me. In fact, it's more than fine.

I am saddened when I hear of sites that are popular, that get a lot of visitors who come because that site offers something unique or at least alluring, who then turn around and consider this not a gift, not a wonder, but a field waiting to be harvested.

I've sat through the emotional paragraphs, the insistent screeds, the angry rants indicating that they have the right to treat their audience as a series of floating coins in the air; to bounce around and snatch them like a game of Mario Brothers. I'm sure they hear the little "ding" noise while they do it, too.

Children learn by watching what others do, and I come into contact with young people who see that their sites must have banners, must have ads, must ask for Paypal donations because that's how the world works, because that's what they are told the world works like.

Make no mistake, I like money. I like money a lot. In fact, go ahead and send me money, tons of it. I'll swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck and spit out the occasional gold watch.

But money does something to you, when you start to get it in tiny amounts from your site. It makes you change; it makes you look at things a little harder, consider things a little differently. Should I discuss this subject to get more hits? Should I not talk about this subject because it'll drive my page ranking down and cause less donations? Suddenly, you're no longer running a site... you're running a storefront, a dingy amateurish storefront with a few glittering items in the window desperately trying to drag folks off the street long enough for it to register with the ever-seeing camera you've installed that will throw out coins if the person stays in your store long enough.

No, thanks.

There is a plugin program for the Firefox web browser called Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is going to shoot a lot of this approach to a website in the head. Greasemonkey shoots out a tendril into your dingy storefront, smashes the camera, rips the advertisements in half and grabs your shiny baubles, all in about a millisecond and while other tendrils are doing the same thing all up and down the street.

The tendrils that shoot into textfiles.com will do work, but not very much. The biggest "my fault" complaint I get besides various concerns about content are the green and white color scheme, which I solved for people some time ago. My site doesn't assault, doesn't demand, doesn't declare... it just offers the world as I have collected it to you.

Tens of thousands of people come to my site. Sometimes they come for one file, skipping my welcome screen, directory, explanations and context, just to directly yank their specific target and disappear forever. Sometimes people come and go and never knew they were on my site. I don't brand the textfiles and I don't use javascript trickery to detain folks like drunks in a cell until they are subjected to their required ad-watching. (With Greasemonkey on the job, they wouldn't be able to anyway).

Make no mistake, I used to brand textfiles. I proudly wrote my script, made it brand the textfiles with where they came from, added a demand they visit me, insisted they know who I was and how great I was and how lucky they were to be getting this file from me.

I was also 13.

It was 20 years ago.

I also used to smash mailboxes.

I grew up.

A quiet transaction, that's what I give. A silent, non-judgemental transfer of information from human being to human being, via machines designed to do so as quickly and fully as possible, with no data lost, no aspect removed. It is not flashy, it is not lucrative, it is not judged.

It is a miracle.

Last Check Disc Approved

I recieved the last check disc in the shower.

Actually, I was showering when FedEx arrived with a stack of check discs of the first DVD of the set, which close-watching fans know was the remaining disc to go through the approval process. As was proven by Disc 3, submitting a dual-layer DVD instead of a couple of DLT tapes was the trick, and the whole thing came out working just as I had both expected and hoped.

So that's it, the final piece of the puzzle has been locked into place and the printing will begin. I am paying to have a subset of the discs shipped to my house so I can get them out to people absolutely as soon as possible.

It is relatively surreal to watch the DVDs now; they're all done, I can do no more changes, and the urge to want to nip and tuck is somewhat maddening. It's also entirely unnecessary. These things are good. I will, of course, be encouraging disinterested third parties to write about the documentary. I'll just hunker down in my lair and wait for the onslaught.