ASCII by Jason Scott

Time Served

Throughout the whole production, I was only kicked out of a house once.

This is actually a very good ratio, considering the number of people, range of locations, and seat-of-the-pants methods I often employed throughout the filming. I would occasionally find myself in a place, say, Washington DC, get a call and learn that my interview had to shift or cancel (either because of work or other factors). So I'd suddenly have nothing to do until the next morning.

One nice part of this process was I had a great phone list of cool people across the country. I'd make a few random phone calls from this list of everyone I had gotten interest from, and sometimes they'd be up for a surprise visit.

Sometimes they were fine with just a social visit, with me showing up and checking e-mail and talking about the work I was doing. They got a chat with me and I got to spend an evening actually conversing with a real person, so everything came out for the best. A happy ending.

Not so happy were a few very small times where the expectations for the interview were simply not translated properly along the way. I have to stress how rare this was. I recall, for example, the time that I had an interview scheduled for 8 in the morning and at 2am, 6 hours before, I was 80 miles from the location. After some quick and foolish considerations, I decided to gun the rental car and just find some place to stay nearby and get an hour or two of sleep. When I got there at 4am, I decided I'd just park in the apartment complex's parking lot and sleep until 8am.

I still remember waking every 15 minutes, in a car, with morning dew on my face and thousands of dollars of equipment in the back seat, worried I'd JUST missed the interview. When 8 rolled around, I called the subject at his apartment, and he explained to me, quite forthrightly, that his wife wasn't comfortable with an interview being conducted in the apartment, and could we do it at the Burger King?

"You bet!" I said, controlling my fatigue-driven rage that I had risked myself driving for hours and hours, only to be shut out of the house. I hung up the cell, turned on the car, and rolled on out of the parking lot. Within 5 minutes I was back on the highway, never to be seen in that part of the country again. Ciao!

It's hard to say if there's really any "fault" to lay there. I likely didn't translate how the interview really needed to be conducted in a place I could set up a camera and lights, and the subject didn't check with his family about an interview. The result was no interview, a galactically grumpy Jason, and a guy wondering what happened to him. A bad situation all around, but like I said, this was very rare; I probably had this sort of bad thing happen less than 5 times, and considering I was shooting for three years, that's pretty good.

Getting kicked out of the house was a whole other situation, and it was all owing to a misunderstanding which is the point of this whole essay.

First of all, the time between contacting the subject and interviewing him was about 48 hours. This was a mistake; he hadn't time to bring it up with his family, and he certainly hadn't any way to really translate what I was up to. Meanwhile, his family basically found out about me when I showed up, and didn't know what to think of me.

After a tour of his wonderful home, we sat down to conduct the interview. He signed the release form ahead of time (note to everyone in the planet: never do this) and we were about an hour into the interview when I heard a voice behind me:

"What is going on here?"

What followed then is really not something I'm comfortable describing in detail, but the result was: One massive domestic dispute, one documentary guy clinging to his equipment prepared to defend it from an onslaught of fists, a lot of apologies from a near-tears subject about the interview not going on, and a hasty shuffle out the front door I'd been welcomed in a couple hours before, carrying all my equipment with wires and papers bulging everywhere.

Through this little explosion, I am proud of one thing; I pulled the tape with the interview of the subject, took out the release he'd signed and gave both to him. He protested, and wanted me to keep the tapes.

But I said "You only have to live with me for a day; you have to live with your family for the rest of your life."

"Professionals", of course, would have taken the tapes, happy to use the "scoop" regardless of what damage and descruction it caused in their subjects' lives. This is why I'm fine with not being called "professional".

Naturally, the question you have is what could possibly be on those tapes that was so bad? What would cause people to turn on me and kick me out of their house?

The answer is either odd or completely expected: the subject had gone to prison due to his BBS.

I'd always been hesitant to make one of the episodes of the BBS Documentary be about hackers. This is because of the pure muck-pile that the whole "hacker" lifestyle/culture/mode of thinking has been dragged through in the last 25 years. I think at this point a solid number of folks are positive that hackers turn off heart monitors with iPods. It adds a nice false sense of "rebel" to the term but does little else other than attract a lot of media attention.

A lot. Of media attention. Enough that hackers end up being the only aspects of computing culture that get sizeable documentaries made about them (although gaming culture seems to be catching up). Why would I want to work so hard, just to make another one?

The result of my going for it anyway, HPAC, actually goes in a different direction, focusing on the positive, the people, the stuff that made kids or adults tick when they used "underground" BBSes and how they looked at it all. I think it's all kind of pleasantly nostalgic, the way I took it on.

And this is without a doubt shaped by who wanted to be interviewed. Almost to a person (with a couple exceptions), these were people who 'got underground', dallied around as you might enjoy skating in pools (you know, trespassing), finishing that up, and moving on. High School. Summer camp. The first kiss. Just distant, happy memories. This was antithecal to most documentaries about hacking, so I went with it, and enjoyed doing so. It was refreshing (and I hope it is for the audience as well) to see a bunch of people going "I used to crack Apple II games. That was fun!" Without the "necessary" point of view of law enforcement bearing down going "these kids were responsible for one thousand gabillion dollars of lost revenue. They must be euthanized." And then frowning.

And to a person, they basically are happy memories that they mention in their interviews. Sysop of OSUNY finished up his time with his hacker BBS, passed it along to some friends, and moved away. The Freeze got away from Apple II cracking, did some programming, and ultimately got into sales and marketing of inexpensive computer parts... and made a mint.

But in doing my research (and remember, I was researching this for years), I found many more stories, stories that were sad, infuriating, incredible, all around how people went to jail or had their lives basically ruined by BBSes.

Why didn't I "tell the full story" and try and shoehorn these stories into the documentary? Well, for a little bit, I definitely did, with bonus material about the Ripco BBS seizure and a police "raid" on the SDF BBS, as well as general mentions of "busts". But I didn't go through blow-by-blow stories of some of the more henious crimes/situations because:

• The people who went to jail didn't want to speak about it.
• The story was so complicated, it would need its own episode.
• I was just feeding into the lurid crap at the expense of the "non-commercial" stories where people just had a good time.
• The endings tended to be 'And then they picked up the pieces of their broken lives and were doing pretty fine until you showed up with your camera, you media wang.'

What I think gets lost in the world is how absolutely horrible prison is. I don't mean "boo hoo, I can't watch my big screen TV" or "now I can't go to the mall, wah". I mean, take this approach:

Imagine that, in a week, you will have to go away. Away for a long time. Years. All your stuff, everything you own, that has to go somewhere. If you're lucky, you have family who can put it into storage, but obviously not all of it. Your furniture, your books, your objects, they can't come with you. It's kind of like you died. Also, you probably owe a lot of money, because you hired someone to try and make it so you didn't have to go away. But you do, and now you also owe them money. Maybe you can sell some of the stuff, your stuff you have to now get rid of, but it probably won't add up to enough to pay off what you owe.

You are going to go away to a prison. In the prison, you will be locked up with bad people. They are often sent there because they keep hurting other people, people not unlike yourself. Your schedule is regimented, your sleep is fitful, and you are, generally, miserable.

You are in your early 20s. Maybe your 30s. Maybe you have kids and they're growing up fast, but now you won't see them outside of the box for years. Other people will raise them. If you're younger, you'll be raised somewhat by this box, this prison. You will be, in many ways, both alone and never alone.

Once you are out, by the way, you will be a different person. Your friends are years older, probably never really your friends again. If you had skills, they're out of date (prisons are horrible about teaching people skills to help them when they get out). Your social skills are kind of weird too, since you were locked up in a highly regimented, vicious environment of people of your own gender for years. You are not trusted by many people, because you are an ex-con. You are, even though the walls are gone, alone and never alone.

Now imagine you are here, you are like this because you ran a BBS in 1991. Because you connected to a computer on a modem line whose administrator account had the password "computer". Because you had a copy of "Print Shop" available for download, and it was downloaded a dozen times over two weeks. Because you had dirty pictures up for download.

In the early 1990s, there were a rash of BBS-related cases where people were arrested for BBS stuff, stuff that now, even 10 years later, wouldn't raise too much of an eyebrow, and they went away for years and years.

I found a lot of these old cases, found the people who were behind them, talked to them or family members that now screen contacts by people like me. And they told me to get lost.

Many were understanding of my approach, and that I was an OK guy who, if not right-headed, was at least right-hearted. But they turned me down, often emphatically. They turned me down and made it clear: Those days are over. We are not going to discuss those days. That person, that part of that person is dead.

It opens old wounds to bring that stuff up, even if there are lessons to be learned. Even if I think that there's something important to be brought up in recounting these stories, it is very mean to poke someone's slowly-healing life with a stick and go "does it hurt? does it still sting?"

Because it does.

Prison does not rehabilitate. It decimates.

I see terms of prison suggested in current law and they are astounding. Five years, five years for videotaping a movie in a movie theatre. Twenty years for discussing certain types of drugs. Twenty years. That is, for all intents and purposes, a death sentence. The person that comes out is not the person coming in. The old person is gone.

As a "professional" I suppose I could have barrelled through, demanded to tell these stories, used re-enactments or "experts" or otherwise slogged in the story without the permission of the subjects. But I didn't make this documentary so I could cease sleeping peacefully. I did it to tell stories that should be told that were waiting, by the subjects, to be told. There's hundreds of hours of footage; I wasn't starved for stories.

I was going to go into detail here, about some really amazing examples of people whose lives were changed forever by BBSes, for the worse, and who carry with them the scars of a time that many have forgotten.

But not today. Some other time. I lose days to anger remembering what was done to these people. And DEFCON is coming up and I have to explain in my talk why documentaries have to be done.

But the next time some ill-thinking huckleberry swings around "put them in jail for years" over some infraction or behavior they do not approve of, I wish, just for a moment, they could feel the hell they propose to send others through, for nothing.

Bovine Ignition Systems

The production company that made the BBS Documentary is called "Bovine Ignition Systems". It's a weird enough name that a couple people have actually stopped paypal orders and contacted me to verify that "Bovine Ignition Systems" is the company that they should be giving $50 to.

The name dates back to 1985, when I was in high school and my friend Jeremy Stone and I decided we should make a band, since that's what you do in high school. Our original name for the band was "J S Squared" because "J.S." was both of our initials. Oh, and as I'm explaining, there were only two of us in the band. And I couldn't play any instruments.

So we started working on songs, and we knew that we would probably be mostly making music that was recorded (that is, we would put it on a 4-track recorder I bought) and not doing many live gigs. (We ended up only doing one.) So we came up with this elaborate set of backstories and ideas that would be behind the band.

To that end, we came up with really crazy "staff names" for our band, instead of "Musician" and "Guy who can't make music". We brainstormed a bunch of weird job names, of which I can remember two: "Rodent Manifestation Supervisor" and "Bovine Ignition Systems Engineer".

We immediately decided "Bovine Ignition Systems" was a much better name than "J.S. Squared" and switched immediately.

Bovine Ignition Systems produced probably something in the range of 30 songs, of varying quality, neatness and length. Our hot period was 1985-1987, when we were sophomores and juniors in high school, although we actually recorded a couple more when we were in college. During this time, Jeremy really got into playing music, including buying guitars, effects machines, and keyboards. This improved our sound, but it also meant he was actually learning how to play. I, instead, went into a weird little thing called "Mods", which are a little much to go into here. Suffice to say, my "Mods" didn't sound as good as Jeremy's "actual music".

After college, Jeremy moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft. He even asked me to come with him, but I liked Boston and stayed there, where I am to this day.

While I worked at 100 temp jobs, a video game company called Psygnosis, a starup named Focus Studios, and the place I still work at, Jeremy stayed at Microsoft. He was a programmer, engineer, or team lead on such products as Internet Explorer, Flight Simulator, Combat Simulator, and even the instant messaging server.

Also, he continued to make music, playing with a couple bands, including one called "80 Something" that did covers of 1980s era pop music, with an ironic flair, and to a very large degree of success. A large enough degree that Jeremy played in front of thousands of people when he was in the band. He also switched his instrument interest from Guitar to keyboards to drums, and even has taken singing lessons and who knows what else.

I, however, stuck with "Mods", a collection of which are here.

Our locations on opposite sides of the country, and our rapidly diverging musical tastes, and our very different approach to almost everything doomed Bovine Ignition Systems from continuing onward. A shame, because we had this very interesting, weird mix.

However, here we are 20 years after Bovine Ignition Systems first came into being, and I decided I wanted the name to live on in some fashion. So when I had to come up with a name for the company that would do the documentary, I named it after this band.

If you want to, feel free to browse the website I have about the band. It has most of our music, and I would say that you should start with "The Girl with the Biggest Hair" and go from there.

One other thing: Because of this weird band name, a lot of people associated us with cows. A lot. And we got a lot of cow things. Like, tons. I have over 1,000 cow-related items, and that's not including stuff I've thrown away over the years because it broke or otherwise went off its best by date.

And it is also why I own COW.NET as a domain name, and why the Bovine Ignition Systems office number is 1-617-COW-TOWN.

Moo.

The Right Audience (and the Sequel)

This entry has a ramble factor of 8. Please use caution.

I took an initial risk when I was plotting out this documentary and how I would approach it, and that was how "technical" the whole thing would get. When you do a documentary on a subject, there's always a balancing act between making it "inside/dense" or "general audience/accessible".

If you assume your audience has had absolutely no contact with the subject matter at hand and in fact has to be convinced they even want to sort of learn about it, then you are going to have to do two things.

First of all, you're going to have to spend a lot of time explaining everything, all the little details and words and mentions and sort of slowly ramp everyone up. You're basically pushing a big rolling ball of unaware folks up a tiny incline where you've got a nice Jellybean of Tasty Knowledge waiting for them at the end of this massive effort. ("Science Fiction people are just like you and me!")

Second of all, once you've spent all this time setting up all the basic facts and making sure there's no movie ticket left behind, you're going to creep a little bit into the culture you've now exposed, but not really that far at all. In fact, if you want your work to be memorable, you're going to have to go for the most broken and weird folks within that culture or event, so that they can stand out and make people feel like all this junk they learned about this phrase and that date was worth it. Traditionally, this is accomplished with a good solid death.

The advantage of such a relatively shallow approach is that you can sell your work anywhere, and to anyone, and you can market the hell out of it, since basically everyone is going to find something for themselves in it. Even if people who actually know "the real story" will find your work vapid, shallow and unenlightening. Sorry, experts! Your princess is in another castle!

The other approach is to aim for a tiny audience, one that is very much in the know. This approach is not often taken, but when it is, you find it much easier to make (since you're not rephrasing everything for simplicity.) You can assume your audience knows exactly what the subject is, in fact they might basically be the subject, and are simply interested in seeing the stuff you're filming for the purposes of learning material (new techniques) or comparisons (seeing themselves). Examples of this include skateboard videos and DJ competitions. I own a bunch of both, and you better know what's so cool about scratching records or catching some air beforehand or you're simply lost about what the big deal is. (Note that I am separating DJ Scratching competition videos from the excellent documentary Scratch by Doug Pray.)

The problem with this second sort of documentary is that you basically wipe out huge swaths of humanity as an audience, while making it particularly useful for a small subset of humanity. And if you're in it to make money, then this is definitely not what you want to do. if you're in it because you want the subject covered in a deep and meaningful (for the subject) fashion, then this is exactly what you want to do.

So I tried to strike a balance in going after the subject matter, putting in enough that a person could sort of self-start themselves into the subject of BBSes, but not make the thing so simplistic that anyone who ever actually used a BBS would be disappointed at the blandness. But my leaning is towards the people who are familiar with computers and the internet, so they could compare and contrast.

In other words, my film is not very good for people who don't actually like computers. It's horrible for people who hate them.

And here we get into a different problem: reviews. I find a lot of bad reviews stem from simply over-marketing of a film to places it never should have been in the first place. When a guy makes a slasher flick for no- or low-budget, that is for a specific audience: people who like slasher flicks. In fact, the flick might be created to almost comment on classic slasher flicks, and if you think there's no such thing as a 'classic' slasher flick, you're now in a very small, poorly lit torture chamber as this horrible slasher flick goes by. In other words, the best slasher flick in the world sucks as far as you're concerned, even if it's really the best of breed. You don't like the breed.

Currently, I have the best BBS documentary in the world. Granted, it's basically the only one of its kind, but I expect some others to show up of some type. In fact, I have gone on camera saying that I hope it ends up being the worst documentary on BBSes ever made, because ones that come after it can hopefully kick its ass. Get cracking folks; these guys are getting old.

I am, currently, too biased and unqualified to say where it stands in the tiny world of Computer Documentaries. Is it better than Triumph of the Nerds? Is it worse than the Blogumentary? Time and the opinions of others will tell. But if you hate computer documentaries, then my movie and all these other movies will be horrible to you no matter how good they are according to the genre's goals.

Big blockbuster movies have to be made to appeal to the widest audience possible. That's where the name comes from: lines to the box office that "bust" out past the length of a city block. People will not be encircling theaters to see the BBS Documentary. It's not designed to be that general an appeal. But Hollywood films have to, to make back their enormous budgets.

On my side, and I know the people who were stunned I released this Creative Commons were wondering: I made back the budget of the film in two weeks. And this is because I knew who I was doing this for and that, when they saw that such a film was available, would jump at it.

For the audience that gets my film and also "gets" it, they are very, very happy. They are delighted, based on the hundreds of letters I am getting, on several fronts:

• The subject matter is not watered down
• There is a sense of covering many parallel aspects
• Both "famous" and "unknown" people are side-by-side
• I don't beat people over the head with narration
• The bonus material gets unbelievably technical
• There is novelty in seeing people talking about BBSes
• Everyone in it is treated with respect

For each one of these "positives", however, there is a negative way of looking at all of them, and if this film is shoved down people's throats as being something it is not, then they note that:

• The subject matter is very dense and technical
• It is unbelievably fucking huge
• Who the hell are all these people
• Where am I
• Why am I watching this, let's go see Howl's Moving Castle
• No I'm serious
• Fine, bye, I'll see you at work

And like I hope I've made clear, this is a "pushing it on people who shouldn't have it pushed on them" problem, not necessarily a "content" problem. I didn't really make the 8 episodes to not come together as a set, although of course people are bittorrenting and copying them separately. Some people will watch the first two episodes and make a judgement as to the other 6, others will go to the one they care about (HPAC and ARTSCENE seem to have this reaction a lot) and that'll be about it. On one level that's fine, but on another level it's missing out on the whole crazy package I worked to put together.

But really..... I don't have any control on "the right way" to see my film any more than people have any control on "the right way" I should have made the film in the first place. I made it "the right way" for me, and for a set of people in the world, which are making themselves known more and more to me every day.

In fact... there's 1,200 of them. So far. Not bad, huh.

And of that 1,200 (plus a few thousand that have downloaded the film), there's a tiny minority, probably less than a few dozen, who have said the most terrifying of questions to me:

"When's the sequel coming out?"

It's always bad to make declarations of any nature, so I'll say this: I have absolutely no interest in making a sequel. Over the course of the future, I will be sorting through the hundreds of hours of interviews and making them publically available; this will add literally days and days of footage of BBS-related material out there, on top of the 5.5 edited-together hours I've now finished. If you want to think of that as a "sequel", then great, but do not expect another pretty box with 3 DVDs (or more) to be coming out in 2008 or anything like that. Not happening. Not what I want to do with another bunch of years of my life.

I'm still involved in BBS history, of course, and I will be using the BBS documentary's research and filmed hours to continue my work in this (still-fascinating!) subject, but my days of making a BBS documentary are over.

But.

And here I put this way down here.

I am working on another documentary. It will make this documentary look like a Hollywood blockbuster. It is of such specific nature that it's weird talking about it.

Unlike the BBS documentary, I don't need to contact thousands to research it, so the needs of it being "open" are much less. I've assembled an advisory team, I've got a mailing list, I've even got a site floating out there.

Likely, I will use a similar model to this documentary, that is, taking pre-orders and keeping people updated, and then using those pre-orders to get over the hump of affording equipment (like a high-definition camera and so on).

If this at all interests you, and you wish to be notified about it, just mail me.

See? It all has a happy ending.

A Bittersweet but Happy Ending

I was contacted by John Sheetz' widow regarding my phone call to them offering the DVD and the interview. They want both. I think she cried at the end.

I wonder sometimes if people think to take the video camera they use to record a holiday and just interview a relative about their life, so the later generations can know what happened in their family. I wonder why, with thousands of dollars of audiovisual equipment, I haven't done the same.

IMDB Assault Begins

It took a while, but the IMDB entry for the BBS Documentary now lists over 70 of the people who appeared in it. It is NOT complete and is missing vital folks, but I was entering names as fast as I could, and then it eventually hit an upper limit, and I decided I would wait to see how long it took names to show up before adding more.

For the record, it took 32 days.

While a month for updates is an enormous time, I am definitely in favor of a "cool-off" period when adding new data, so that you put your best work into adding new information, and don't just dash some off. This is part of why I don't like Wikipedia, because there isn't a a "compile with no errors" situation. (With IMDB, you actually do get automated feedback saying "You know this person is new, right? Did you want that?" and "You spelled all this stuff wrong....") With instant gratification comes a lack of ceremony with adding new data, and it's too easy to not take a little extra time to double-check all the facts, ensure the spelling is right, or that you couldn't add a little more information with a bit more effort.

Now that people are in there, I will be correcting mistakes in their linkages (a few people got linked to currently-existing names in the database, while others seem to have been rejected), and increasing biographical information where needed.

In the last day or so, I am happy to have submitted (and had approved) additonal biographical information for the IMDB entry for Vinton Cerf. Spiffy. I hope more people learn about him and the other folks I interviewed because of IMDB links.

I've been mailing people who were interviewed, pointing out they're "stars" now. That's been fun.

Like I said, more are on their way, but it's funny how this arbitrary database that IMDB really is, can make you feel "legitimate". I think that's just the nature of wanting to be accepted. On a more capitalistic level, people are "accepting" me at $50 apiece every day, so I'm not feeling worried about it at all.

Speaking of money, it costs $35 to get a photo or image up on IMDB. Just in case you're wondering why so many entries lack them.

A Silent Key

While getting together addresses and information to send out free copies of the documentary to interviewees, I have discovered the sad news that one of them, John Sheetz of New Jersey (K2AGI), passed away in January of this year.

Mr. Sheetz was a complete shot in the dark for me, interview-wise; in trying to make an episode about using BBSes for artwork, I wanted to show that this urge and approach was around long before people were using modems to connect to each other. I looked out on the internet and found out there had been Teletype art contests going back some time, which were run by Don Royer and others, and which were massive in scale. Mr. Royer had died some time ago, but Mr. Sheetz was around and when I called, he was obviously a little confused as to why I contacted him and the subject matter of this documentary, but he agreed to be interviewed for it.

I drove from Boston to his home in New Jersey, which also confused him ("You came all this way just to talk to me?"), but I saw that he had made the massive effort of bringing out stacks and stacks of Teletype art for me to see and take pictures of. I took a bunch of shots and then sat with him for an hour interview.

We talked about how all this art had come about, about the process of creating it using the technology of the time, and the unique ways people could use ham radio to send these pictures around. He talked about his own attempts to create these artworks, how a local business got in trouble using Peanuts Characters in teletype form for christmas calendars, and a bunch of other great stories.

We also checked out his garage and his old teletype machines which he still had. I took photos of these as well.

His interview made the perfect introduction to the ARTSCENE episode, and in fact a good 5 minutes of Mr. Sheetz discussing teletype art is in the documentary. He is one of the longest appearances of the 200+ interviews.

Here are photographs from the interview.

After interviewing Mr. Sheetz, I went into further interviews and editing, and we never talked again. I don't know what he thought of the strange guy with long hair and the camera equipment who came to his house for a few hours one morning, but I thought he was a great person and worth every mile of the hundreds I drove to see him.

When a Ham passes away, he or she becomes known as a "Silent Key", because you will not hear their call sign over the air again. I am truly sorry that he never got to see himself on film.

On the other hand, this is precisely why I started this documentary project in the first place. In 2005, there is no John Sheetz to talk about teletype and telegraph art. There won't be in 2006, either, or beyond. The only regret I have is we talked for a mere hour, because my documentary was about a specific subject. I didn't talk to him about his decades of being a ham, or his years working at Bell Telephone, or any of a bunch of other subjects that I wonder are now lost to time.

I try not to think about what's happened to all those reams of teletype art he spent decades collecting.

We stand on crumbling sand.

Buy Buy Buy

Believe it or not, I just went through a day of deep consideration over whether to add the link to the BBS Documentary website that's now on the left side of this weblog's page. I consider it advertising and I don't like advertising, no matter what twisted set of justifications I can throw on you.

Which I'm about to do.

The current state of thinking I have is that this weblog gets a sizeable amount of sites that don't overlap with the documentary, and this weblog was basically created to discuss the documentary, so I might as well have a link to what I'm talking about, in a way that makes sense. Additionally, the documentary is creative commons licensed, which means people are able to download it as well as purchase it, so I'm not really forcing a product down their throats.

Finally, and I guess this is the most important thing, I need to maximize people knowing about this project because otherwise I've kind of wasted 4 years of my life making it just to have it reach a subset of people it could be reaching. That would be a real shame, especially when I'm at the Lafayette Home for Digital Historians and I'm yelling at the TV about how I never got to go to Amsterdam.

The more the documentary sells, the more chance there is of me making more. And along that line, let me let slip that I am in pre-production for two more documentaries. I spend about six months doing research, and who knows how long filming, but I'm in fact working on them. No doubt more details will come out over time, but I don't want to deflect from the BBS Documentary, which has a long way to go in terms of both sales and released additional materials. But yes, selling tons of these things would convince my family that the next little projects would be worth doing. Otherwise, I'm sticking to websites.

So there. A big hullaballo over a clickable jpeg. Who says obsession always works in my favor?

Script: A Lot of Little Things

Let's move away from the documentary to talk a little about my big love: collecting. There's a mental fallacy that I and others of my ilk fall into, where we believe that every single thing we collect has to be a few small clicks away, ready to go, gassed up and waiting in the garage to go out at a moment's notice.

The problem with this is that you end up with files. A lot of files. A TON of files. And if there's one thing a system doesn't like, it's lots of files. Once you get to the point that there's thousands of little one-off images, textfiles, or the like, most systems start to get a little sick, not unlike opening your silverware drawer and finding all the silverware randomly scattered in a big pile. It's just bad.

This required me to make a realization. 99 percent of the stuff I keep on my computers should have the following label:

"A Pile of Neat Crap I Collected At Once And Stuck On My Drive For Later"

Aware as I am of the complete transient nature of websites, when I see one, I wget it, entirely, every piece. I put it into a subdirectory and forget about it. When someone mentions a cool song, or a neat movie someone made, or anything of a "neat thing" nature, I grab a copy.

A good site full of, say, really good drawings or neat 3-D renderings could go into the dozens or hundreds of images. And like I said, my system doesn't like that. So the right thing to do is just stick it all in an archive.

But then we hit the big problem that comes after the "tons of tiny files" problem: you come back to your hard drive after a few weeks, and you wonder what the hell www.doofusnet.com.zip is. Or AMAZING-EYE-SHACK.zip, or, my favorite: "woah.rar", which stared at me at one point.

Hence, I now create two files when I take an archive of images:

filename.zip
filename.zip.jpg

The .jpg is a gallery of every image file in the zip. This takes a collection from being hundreds of individual items to a mere two. I use rsync like cars use gas, so this has enormous benefit for me. I can then look at the gallery image, know what's in the thing, and then go off and unpack the archive if I actually want to look at the stuff inside. In the total sum of this file's life, that will likely be less than one tenth of one percent of the time it exists in my collection. Maybe a lot less. So it makes sense to add the extra unpacking step.

I do everything with scripts. Often ones I write. Here's the script I use. I call it GALLERATE.

Note that I'm leaving in my hysterically informal and non-professional status and error messages with this script; it's how I work with all my programs and scripts, and brightens up what would be an otherwise dreary bit of programming.

#!/bin/sh
# GALLERATE: Turn a zip of images into a gallery.
if [ -f "$1" ]
   then
   rm -rf .galleryworld
   echo "[%] Preparting to squat out $1...."
   mkdir .galleryworld
   cd .galleryworld
   unzip -j "../$1"
   unrar e -ep "../$1"
   echo "[%] WHY DOES IT HURT!!!!"
   montage +frame +shadow +label -tile 7 *.JPG *.GIF *.gif *.jpg *.bmp *.png *.PNG *.BMP "../$1.jpg"
   cd ..
   rm -rf .galleryworld
   ls -l "$1.jpg"
  else
  echo "No such file, assmaster."
fi

Gallerate works by taking the like GALLERATE [filename], where [filename] is a .zip or .rar file that contains images. It creates a temporary directory called .galleryworld, then unpacks all the images into that directory.

Going inside, it uses a great (but complicated) program called "ImageMagick", which has a sub-program called "montage", and then tells it to make a nice gallery, 7 across, of all the images. These gallery images can become large (megabytes big) but it sure beats hundreds of little files all around.

Notice that it tries both .rar and .zip files at once, and tries to deal with both contingencies.

So, why am I mentioning this somewhat technical information?

Like it or not, a lot of people don't learn new ideas by reading manuals or scanning documentation; they look around for little stories, little tales written by people in the thick of things, and then use the morals learned by those writers. It's the nature of learning for some. And by putting this online, maybe down the line someone gets the spark of an idea for a new direction for their own maintenance of images.

So here's my little story.

Once upon a time I had thousands and thousands of files on my hard drive. Now I have a few hundred in pairs. The End.