ASCII by Jason Scott

"If the guy who put out the Saw DVD, for instance, ever even so much as just looked at the packaging to this thing his eyes would catch fire and burst into lacrymotic slag."

Some time ago, I watched a message base on a site called Joltcountry.com mention my BBS Documentary, discuss it, and then go crazy that the thing was actually priced at $50. I found it funny enough that I sent the main complainer/admin of the site a free copy of the DVD set, with his complaints written on the side of the package.

A few months later, he (Robb Sherwin) has posted a pretty hilarious review of the BBS Documentary. I don't usually go crazy linking to reviews, but this one's a lot of fun.

Mentors

I had a number of teachers of film throughout my formal education. If I was feeling generous I'd call them all mentors, but that's not very accurate.

I'll just give them some generic nicknames to refer to them. My film teachers were Miss Arty, Mister Tech, Mister Burnt, The Life, and Dr. Antichrist Fuckface.

I got Miss Arty in High School. I forgot why I wanted exactly to take a film course, but I did, and I was very lucky to attend a nice school that had such things as film courses, flexible schedules, and other niceties that didn't involve wishing I could afford my lunch. I was in 11th grade, a Junior.

We watched a bunch of classic films, such as Psycho, some "Italian Realist" thing I remember involving three people and a bathtub, The King of Comedy, and a few other variant productions. We'd watch the film one class and then talk/report on it the next one.

Miss Arty taught the class, a smug little writing teacher who had obviously wanted to enrich our lives with discussions of frame composition, juxtaposition of shots, alternate views towards the cinematic structure (this was where the Italian Realist Bathtub Threesome film came in) and a host of other way-out-there let's-blow-minds kind of stuff. Bear in mind, however, I'd already been to film school by this point. From when I was about 10 to when I was 13, I watched The Movie Channel almost straight. That may sound trite, but I saw something in the range of about 1,000 films in that period, and I actually watched them. Since The Movie Channel (it's now called TMC) was easily the remainder bin of the "we play movies all day" channels of the time (HBO and Cinemax were the other choices, and Mom didn't buy those), I got to see some really whacked out productions, well outside Hollywood or even independent norms. I learned structure, "film grammar", what worked, what didn't, and most importantly, that there really were no rules as long as everything got wrapped up before the credits started rolling.

Anyway, Miss Arty got what she wanted (a captive audience of people reading up on her version of 1970's-era film structure analysis) and the students mostly got what they wanted (movies in school). I'm sure some of them were displeased about getting nothing too modern in there, but you take the good with the bad.

The big deal was that at the end, you could choose to make your own movie. To my great surprise, only about 5 of the 20 students chose to go this route. At the time, we had access to, basically, Super 8 film and cameras, and we were expected to make something in the range of a five minute film. You will be shocked to know I was one of the five students who chose to go the route of making a film.

In a move similar to what I did with the BBS Documentary, instead of coming up with a film project and then figuring out how to get something like what I wanted out of the equipment, I looked at the equipment I'd have and back-engineer a film that could possibly be created using it, that would be at all watchable. It's all well and good to want to make a full-on professional production, but if you don't have the means, you're going to make something horrible, and all you'll feel is disappointment. That was my thinking, anyway.

So I looked at the sound capabilities of the Super 8 camera (which were at best anaemic), and its abilities to show a lot of stuff in frame (which were none), and my abilities to write something compelling that would be silent, and show maybe one person at a time (which was not all that likely).

So instead, I made a film called "Headrush", which would show, as I described it, "The experience of our high school after you hit your head."

It had stop motion shots through the school, swirling colors and shapes as I ran by offices and classes, and a whole host of bizzare framing that came from me walking around and pressing the little trigger on the super 8 camera at whatever caught my fancy. I used "in-camera editing", which is a fancy term for "whatever I shot, I shot, and I'm not cutting it up". Again, this was because I took one look at the "workbench" for cutting up Super 8 film and knew it was a non-starter for a film that, ultimately, had over 500 shots in 3 minutes.

I knew I could never sync up the film to any piece of music, so I didn't even try. Instead, I chose a piece of music that would defy syncing, called "G-Spot Tornado" by Frank Zappa (Amazon has a sample of the song available, if you don't know it). It's a very fast song, resplendent with lots of little bursts and notes, and it fit well with my work.

Anyway, you know where this is going; I got a C for the course. I still have the graded report from Miss Arty explaining to me, in paraphrase, that while I was aiming for the nonsensical drift of (insert arty film name here) or the crashing juxtapositions of (insert other arty film name here), I had fallen short and produced an unwatchable mess, and that I shouldn't consider a career in film.

So I went to film school.

Considering that I graduated from high school with a 1.7 Grade Point Average, I'd like to thank Emerson College for being more interested in my $16,000 a year tuition than whether I was cut out for college. As it turned out, I was in fact cut out for college, because I graduated with a 2.1, a nearly 25% improvement over my previous grade point average!

At film school we had actual film teachers with both real-world and academic experience, who were more than happy to provide me with a track of classes and labs to learn about the cinematic arts. (We also had a bunch of stuff that wasn't film classes, and I took advantage of that, working at the school newspaper, school radio stations, humor magazine, stage productions, and whatever else I could get my hands on.)

Mister Tech was one of my first teachers at the school in any class; he taught Film I. I had to wait until the second semester of my freshman year to get into a film course because I had to sit through pre-requisites, but finally I got my film class.

Mister Tech taught us how to use the equipment, which is both important and non-important. While I currently possess the skill-set to replace a magazine of 16mm film inside a black bag (to prevent exposure) into a variety of film camera models (none of which are in use anymore), I also know how to use a light meter and to do a variety of light setups that highlight the subject while making the background into a painterly haze. When you look at the BBS Documentary and can see both the person and his office setup, and your first thought isn't "damn, that's dark" or "what am I looking at", that's Mister Tech's influence. He made it clear that you could be any artistic pioneer you wanted, but if you didn't light stuff right, you weren't going to eat. So thank you, Mister Tech. Emerson College, ultimately, fired Mister Tech because they wanted a number of academic-related materials and writings from him, and Mister Tech focused on just teaching classes and helping with student productions. But I haven't forgotten him!

(Any time I look at the shots in my documentary that are in fact not set up properly or in a way I think is sub-par, it's usually because of two situations; Either the camera had been mis-set because of packing and I didn't notice until it was too late, or the circumstances of the interview were such that we were in a hell of a hurry. It was, of course, more important to sit the person down and get their words than focus too much on if the shot was 100 percent perfect. I'd say that out of the 140 setups in the documentary, three of them well and truly suck. Again, thanks Mister Tech.)

Skipping ahead, one of my last film teachers was Mister Burnt. He gets that name because that's what he was. Years and years in the film school, he'd seen it all, and not much interested him. He was unevocative as a teacher, uninspiring as a speaker, and while he (theoretically) knew his shit, he was horrible at getting it across to us. He liked to sit in the back while people presented their works or reports, just another student dazedly watching the proceedings, with not a lot to contribute to the experience. He also had tenure, which I think in this case didn't work out in the school's favor. Maybe he was doing something important elsewhere, but by the time I'd become a student of Mister Burnt, all I saw was a wrecked shell that taught very, very little. I have to strain to even remember Mister Burnt's features and voice, he was so ineffectual. The world is full of guys like this, punching the clock, even if the clock is at an incredible candy factory of dreams, and sloughing along until time and decay throw them into a dirt nap. These days, thanks to my experiences under him, I just note off people like Mister Burnt as one might put up a small plastic yellow sign near a spilled bucket of water: Danger: Passion-Loss Hazard. And then I move on. So thanks, Mister Burnt, even if your life is serving as a warning to others.

I'll put things out of order further with the mention of Dr. Antichrist Fuckface. He taught film theory, and whatever I did to deserve sitting through his class, I apologize heartily and promise that whatever it was, I'll never do it again.

I strongly dislike people who talk about subjects where it is obvious that all, that is, one hundred percent of their knowledge comes from the writing of others. It's perfectly OK and understandable to consider yourself informed in some fashion about a subject because you've read up, but to turn around and consider yourself not just an expert, but someone who should guide others in their knowledge... it's a flaw, a sin, a mistake. It's something I've certainly done, and a lot of people do it, but a lot of people make mistakes and move on; they don't make a career of it.

Dr. Antichrist Fuckface was part of that vile pool of humanity, that little sliver of mold in the meat that takes the most joy in simply tearing down the work of others, providing nothing other than the harshness of their words as the coin of their realm. While there's nothing inherently wrong with going "man, that sucky thing really sucked", it's another to trip-trap happily over piles of work, work that represents that very thing, work, and then go "Unbalanced portrayal", "Meandering secondary character" and a host of self-important jargon where you've made yourself the hero who sees it all with a striking clarity and awareness that the rest of humanity and the arts just haven't caught up to you.

I had a full semester of the Doctor Antichrist Fuckface Experience, where I almost fell for some of his themes: none of us are in any way special, there are no distinct leaders or great minds in film, everything can be ratcheted down to a series of hero myths and sexual game theory... and any learned student of film theory and criticism can pierce through the veil of "talent" and "skill" that is being shown to show that everything is in fact the same baked potato of predictable story.

Now, fine. Like any school, you had your good eggs and your bad eggs, and like Mister Burnt I could take my beating and move on.

However, the school would assign academic advisors in the same field of study as your major, and of course the people most available to be advisors would be those who spent their time awash in theory and not helping with student productions.

And you likely see where this is going. The school assigned Doctor Antichrist Fuckface to be my academic advisor.

The point of an academic advisor is to work with a student to help them see the larger framework of their efforts, to take the ideals presented in the classes and in the grades and so on, and mold all of it into plans for the student. What classes should be focused on, what minors might be dropped, what majors changed... basically, a learned guide explaining to you the roads ahead and what your choices might be.

We locked horns almost immediately. When people say "screaming matches", they usually mean "we didn't agree, and ultimately, we spent a lot of time not agreeing and couldn't come to a conclusion". In my case, I mean we had actual screaming matches, involving actual screaming.

He simply wouldn't sign off on my choices of classes, taking production courses over theory courses, not doing additional media criticism courses, and so on.

And here it is 14 years later, and I still remember, almost to the word, his reason for fighting this.

"Jason," he explained, "you don't have any skills as a filmmaker, and you'll never produce a film that people will watch. But you have skills as a writer, and I think you should go into film theory."

When you apply for each semester's courses, you have to have your Academic Advisor sign off on your choices. Within a short time, I went to the head of the film department, and told them to either sign off on my choices, or I would start my Independent Study Program in Film School Combustibility Rates. They rubber-stamped my choices, and I never let the Doctor darken my destiny or breathing space again, save a chance meeting in the streets of Boston a couple years later that was brief but regardless did not go very well at all. By that time, of course, he was now the head of the film department.

If I have anything to credit Doctor Antichrist Fuckface with, it's that I had five thousand copies of the BBS Documentary made instead of the minimum of one thousand.

So.

This leaves The Life. Time has made me forget the first time I found out about him (I heard about him before I knew him), but I don't forget, for a moment, his way of teaching.

There was a book of cinematography that was very important, which had, in a small pocket-sized tome, all of the information you would need on set. The way that I recall this book is because The Life held it up in class and said "Let me show you what this book does", and proceeded to shove it down the back of his own pants.

"It covers your ass."

I loved this guy.

And the thing is, looking back, he didn't teach a lot about film. That wasn't what he did. What he did was so much more special; he taught us about how to look at life in a way that we would know how to capture it on film. He knew the world was filled with Mister Techs who could tell you what the current sliders did on the control board and how many buttons to press and what clicks you heard meant what the aperture was. But what, ultimately, was the point of all that if you didn't realize that the position of an actor's hands, even as they said nothing, were where the real story of the shot was?

The Life was almost Zen in how he approached film; he encouraged knowledge of lenses, lights, cameras... and make no mistake, he stressed how just a few small stickers in the right place on the equipment would save you precious minutes in setting up shots, and let you get the good light before the sun went down. But he also would talk about sexual politics, the way eyes were the enter of communication, and why you wanted to buy the best clothing for your actors, even if it didn't come out in the shot, because the actor would know and would feel that much better. He shot across all the academic and theoretical subjects, because it was all one subject to The Life.

I loved this guy so much, I took three classes with him. And hung out with him. Of those three classes, one of those was the same class. You can imagine how much this broke the Registrar; the system would never expect you to take the same course twice. But the fact remains that taking the same course twice with the life was the same as taking two different (excellent courses), since he changed it up all the time.

In the BBS Documentary, there are influences from The Life all over the place, enriching it in the same way that a blood system does in a body, and with just as much pervasiveness. That there could be "powerful moments" in a film about bulletin boards surprises a lot of people who write to me; I knew from The Life that there were powerful moments in all things and it was just a matter of helping them come to light. Backgrounds and objects in frame of many of the interviews tell the story of the person's life far beyond what their words do, and while some shots were done out of expediency or with limited options, dozens and dozens more are short stories in themselves.

I get fan mail all the time about the DVDs. I did a lot of the work, but knowing what work needed to be done and in what way, I credit to my mentor, The Life.

He still works at the same film school to this day, except now he works in video production. It's not the tools, it's knowing what way to use them. He does the same magic with video that he did with film, and I assume that the right students who listen to him know this. He's a treasure, and he's thanked in the inside packaging of the DVD set, one of only three names who get a special thanks.

So we come to the end of my little history, a small glimpse into my academic career, one which is well over a decade past and fading with each passing day. Why mention all this at all?

Well, for one thing, I suffer from chronic insomnia. But more importantly, I get letters from people who are starting out in making films, making productions, trying new stuff, and they all see that somehow I "did it", and finished not just one, but eight short films, all wrapped up in a massive package that contains, ostensibly, some amount of learned skill in it. And they'd like to know where that skill came from.

I hope I've shown, in this essay, that some of it came from learning what to do, but also what not to do. I hope people see that love and hate can both drive us into new directions. Even those who would do my dreams harm simply made me strengthen them that much further. And others showed me where to make those dreams, now strengthened, into reality.

We are, rarely, monolithic blocks of singular drives. We are patchwork mosaics, the products of a thousand interactions and conversations and teachers and friends, and the ways in which we reach with both hands into this soup of life and pull out what we wish from it... that is what makes us us.

All that said, I hope Miss Arty and Doctor Antichrist Fuckface each get a kidney stone. On a plane.

Merry Christmas.

The Owl Ball

For about a year in 1995, I worked for a video game company called Psygnosis. This either makes you go "huh" or "oh wow". I'm mostly talking to the "oh wow" crowd, here.

I had a fantastic time. I was 25 years old and here I was working for one of my favorite companies to ever exist. I was in the inside, seeing games that never came out, concepts that didn't go anywhere, rare or underpublished versions of games that I'd known.... and I even got to work on a few things.

On my list of things to do is to write a book (likely online) about my two years in the videogame industry (at Psygnosis and a start-up named Focus Studios). I wanted to wait 10 years before doing so, so I wouldn't be violating any agreements of confidentiality or let still-strong emotion get away from self-criticism or misleading writing to hide my own flaws. So that's on the burner somewhere for the near-future.

In 1993, Psygnosis Limited was purchased outright by Sony Entertainment, who I then learned from the inside were pretty crazy. Over the next few years, Sony worked to kill the Psygnosis name while using some sub-portion of the intellectual properties of the company. There was a lot of back and forth, not unlike that of a pig being swallowed by a very large python with a Playstation on its head. But ultimately, around 2000, Sony finally won out and everything Psygnosis became "Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe".

Psygnosis was and is amazing, and at the time that the name finally "went away", I registered PSYGNOSIS.ORG as PSYGNOSIS.COM was now aiming directly at Sony websites (and still does).

I worked a little on PSYGNOSIS.ORG over the years, writing scripts to make game entry pages, collecting artifacts where I could, and generally doing my best to save the "Legacy". I would rate my efforts at about a 6: I was getting obscure stuff, but I wasn't hunting down every last artifact. A lot of this was because I was doing other stuff, but also I didn't go that extra mile with the scripts. As a result, I was collecting stuff, but it wasn't showing up, and I didn't have that nice positive feedback loop for the archive. (And by feedback loop, I mean with myself; people were certainly writing in and letting me know they were happy it existed).

I finally have sat down and rammed through all the scripts that generate the site, and so the whole thing is much easier to navigate and see all the cool crap. I have had interest from people both inside and outside Psygnosis, and I hope they find the new work I've done and will help me capture some of the history.

As a quick example of the improvement of the site, check out the entry for 3D Lemmings. You can now see files, screenshots, descriptions, reviews, and other artifacts. Saved.

Why do I do this? Good question; how could a company whose goal was essentially to produce games and money have such an emotional effect on me? I'll likely be exploring that in the book and on the site. But until then, it's up, it's now in version 2.0, and I can re-announce it to the world, happy that my favorite game company is preserved in some fashion for the future.

Seven Bits No Waiting

Of all the hacker radio shows that I keep track of, there's a fellow by the name of Droops who helps drive a number of interesting shows. Sometimes he just helps in the background and sometimes he's right there at the fray.

One of the shows, which is a really clever idea, is called "Talk With a Techie", (or T.W.A.T.), wherein he and Irongeek have nearly two dozen people on tap to submit five to fifteen-minute shows about technical subjects, so basically they can put out a daily (weekday) show. I call it RAID: Redundant Array of Inexperienced DJs.

Anyway, I am happy to say I'm among the people tapped to submit shows. I mean, if I can't contribute 5-15 minutes a month, I'm pretty messed up, right? (Hint: I'm not THAT messed up.)

Anyway, I don't really submit normal things. So I thought I'd point you to my current show: Episode #42: Seven Bits, No Waiting.

And yes, that really is me.

Sudden View

It's kind of rare that I'm contacted by people simply because they assume I love text and the manipulation of it. That is, it's one thing to go "here's some old computer stuff, you would like it" and another for someone to go "as someone who can appreciate the creation and manipulation of text, you should be aware of this".

This happened recently when Rod Coleman wrote to tell me about Sudden View, a (windows-based) text editor he's been working on for about a decade and a half. But beyond just letting me know about it, he told me where to download it, and try it out. It's really cool. And the reason it's cool to me may or may not be, in itself, cool with you.

What Rod has done is sat down and tried to figure out alternative ways to interface with text. This is both easier and harder than it sounds.

A lot of times in the world, "good enough" is good enough. If it does what it says, especially if it's incrementally better than what things are now, then people are pretty happy and that's that. Radical leaps forward, while breathtaking, are usually ignored as "weird" or "hard to use" when in fact it's more a case of "not like I saw before".

This is why, for example, almost every computer has a thing that lets you save your current program's data in the upper left corner of the screen. It's better than what was there before, and yet there are likely potentially better ideas, that aren't in wide use. I'm not saying that the file-saving-in-the-corner thing is wrong, just that it's the way things are done and will, for lack of a new idea that's widely accepted, be the way things are done for the future.

Similarly, a lot of text editors are just like each other so there's a very quick ramp-up period, except the "new" text editor will add a few additional ways of saving out the text, or include mail merging, or make you coffee, or whatever.

Sudden View doesn't do any of that, and that's why I think it's worth trying out. It represents one man's journey to understand what about the process of editing text takes the most amount of our time, and what shortcuts we take in writing that come from frustration with a machine as opposed to what the best possible phrasing should be, and so on.

It is interesting to me how user interfaces influence final work. Once you see it in action, you start to re-think your relationship to machines. At Phreaknic this year, there was a short film shown on Saturday night with drunken antics of attendees captured on video. While watching it, I was struck with an odd feeling: it felt kind of like my documentary. Not in content, not in choice of angles, not in the flow of editing.... it was just this sense that it had come out of the same "factory" that my film had. Something about the way the shots switched to each other, the titles, the fades and fade-outs... it was like I'd made it, but completely different than I would have made it. This description sounds weird because the feeling was weird.

Well, it turned out they'd used the same video editing software I'd used. They hadn't even used the same camera... it was the way that Vegas Video happened to interface with the user, to provide them with clips and transitions between those clips and timing, that made our films seem the same. It was very disconcerting; I thought I'd made something unique and myself, and I'd likely made a different model of a building out of the same popsicle sticks. Anyone who looked at them side by side would see similarities.

Once I saw that, a thousand ideas went off in my brain on how to do things better next time. By seeing where I was the same, I was, myself, improved.

Similarly, we write and compose and draw and e-mail people using programs that work similarly to each other. If you are always presented with the receptacle for your thoughts as a blank screen with a blinking cursor, and that cursor does the wrapping of words for you, and you have a mouse that selects text a certain way, and it's this many clicks or keypresses to do this action... it starts to affect you. It's subtle, but it's there.

So it does good to take a trip in different shoes.

Am I saying that we should throw out all our current editors, and go with Sudden View, simply because the interface is different? I'm not saying that either.

But it's rare to pull in a program that does something you do all the time, yet interfaces with it differently. The closest to this situation people usually get is with video games, which often have wild new interactivity... but not really. Point, shoot, load up, check your score... actually, it tends to be predictable more often than not.

The smartest thing Rod has done is make it so the beta test comes with a text file that contains an entire tutorial on trying out the editor. You walk through it, and you just start learning it. So here's what I suggest.

Try it out. Download the thing and run it if you can. And focus on what it's doing to your brain. You'll likely feel the edges and firm walls in your mind you didn't know were there, bumping against expectations and three-steps-ahead plans that your head was making. See if you can work this way, in this different language of interaction. A new user interface can show you what you might be falling into habit with regarding your silly little computer and how you deal with it.

And some people, might realize that this is how they want to edit text in the future, or demand features like this from future text editors.

It's refreshing, like a walk in the park after you've been in a basement for too long.

And hey, it's text. And Rod was right in that regard: I really do love text.

Notapedia

I attend a number of conferences over the months, usually as a speaker and sometimes as an attendee, hanging out, talking, having a good time. I wanted to let everyone know that I'll be speaking at a convention called Notacon.

Notacon is going to be held in Cleveland, Ohio and will feature a bunch of speakers, events, contests, and all the good stuff that happens when you bring in a bunch of both technical and artistic folks together. It takes place from April 7th through 9th, 2006.

Why mention this so early? Because Notacon currently has a pre-registration period, and for cons that aren't the size of an ocean liner, pre-registration helps them break even, since they get certain breaks and the ability to add more cool stuff to the proceedings. And this being the third year, they've really got the whole process down pretty pat. I always enjoy myself, and I would urge everyone to consider going to it, to try something a little different in the way of technical conferences. And because I've grown attached to the event, it's not that hard to take a little time to tell people about it, how great a time it is, and that they should go. So there, I've done it.

My speech/talk I'll be giving at Notacon is called "The Great Failure of Wikipedia".

This is, not coincidentally, the same title as one of the entries in this weblog. It was the first time I talked publically about my feelings about the Wikipedia process, and it spawned a few more entries and clarifications. It also got me a lot of traffic, a lot of like, a lot of hate, and generally... a lot.

While a part of me wishes I'd never started writing about Wikipedia, what's done is done, and the thousands of hits, hundreds of letters and all-around critical attention I've gotten because of it is the way of things. So why not go ahead and speak on the subject at a place I consider to be a worthwhile stage to do so?

The target is moving, of course. I've been working with a few folks who are investigating Wikipedia from within, and there are major changes afoot. And they're going to continue. So the speech I intend to give may modify itself between now and April. But I do promise this: it will be fun, and it will be lively. That's how I give talks.

So there we go, there's an easy excuse to come to Notacon and watch me make a fool of myself in front of an auditorium of people. Or change their outlook forever. Who knows?

Oh, and one last thing, a small law I'd like to propose. Call it Jason Scott's Law of Incredible Projects of Great Beauty and Wonder That You Can't Believe Anyone Would Think Ill Of:

You cannot simultaneously self-aggrandize and self-deprecate your project as it suits your attempt to make people accept what you are doing as right and just.

See you there.

One. Million. Files.

A little milestone went by in the last day or so: my site cd.textfiles.com has now surpassed 1,000,000 files hosted. (Actually, more like 1,029,000 and growing, but still, a friggin' million.)

I don't really go out of my way to talk about that site all that much, mostly because of the fact that it's a legal threat magnet; hardly a month goes by without someone, somewhere, representing somebody, going bugfuck on me for having something on there they don't like. As a result, I don't publicize it and I truly intend never to monetize it.

If you haven't been there, cd.textfiles.com is basically a massive collection of all those crappy shareware CD-ROMs being sold in stores, meets, online and elsewhere, which quickly became called "shovelware" because the "creators" of the CDs would shovel thousands of programs onto a CD-ROM and then sell it as a new product. In many cases, these guys would almost make it sound like they "created" the stuff themselves, instead of the fact they were putting it all on the backs of other guys who were distributing these files under a shareware license.

Without getting too much into the whole ownership thing, the fact is that people were out there collecting everything they could find on BBSes to sell it, usually without checking too closely what that stuff was. Then again, copyright infringement wasn't the new crack, either, so some of these CDs are a bit wild and wooly in terms of content.

There's mostly DOS and Windows-related discs, but also stuff for Atari, Apple II, Amiga, and what could best be described as "other". And like I said, there's over a million of them. Programs, pictures, songs, textfiles.... everything you could imagine, that someone might put online, probably has a few examples in this collection. To be sure, there's a ton of doubled stuff, but in many cases I have various versions of a specific program or file, showing that all-too-important-and-easily-lost progression of a work over years. Why just see the last in a lineage that goes back a decade? So this thing is basically one huge-ass beneficial learning tool.

The primary beneficiary of all this, of course, is me. I have used this archive extensively in the past, either to check up on a fact, review the functionality of a program, or read documentation or textfiles regarding history. Facts and files from this collection show up in the BBS Documentary, and I've spent many a fine evening walking these directories and finding something new.

It brings up a small but important point: there are political and opinion-related issues that these files essentially solve. While there are certainly cases of lies or deceit or other untoward human aspects being reflected, there are also facts that have become muddied and lost over time, subject to people making claims because no-one is around or cares enough to confront them. And people like me, historians, we end up repeating these politically-charged misrepresentations because we have to go by the word of the person, if we have no evidence to the contrary.

Here's an example off the top of my head. While he was not ultimately interviewed (scheduling issues) for the BBS Documentary, I spoke for quite some time with Bob Mahoney of the EXEC-PC BBS (his onetime employee Greg Ryan does make an appearance in the documentary), and during an extended phone call, he dropped a bit of a bomb.

He claimed he had come up with the name "ZIP" for extensions.

See, that's quite a claim, and he said "I chose ZIP for Phil Katz when he asked me to come up with one, because it represented 'fast', like zipping around, and it was kind of sexy, like 'zipper', and I knew people would respond to it."

Well, you see, Phil Katz died in 2000. I've never spoken to him, and never will. So I have no way to verify it.

Unless I go to the files! So looking on cd.textfiles.com for early versions of ZIP, I quickly found a thank you to Bob Mahoney, written by Phil Katz, thanking him for coming up with the ZIP extension. So there we go, controversy solved.

It is not a cure-all. It is another photograph, another album pulled out from the muck to allow historians to look up stuff.

It is of use to patent lawyers who need to cite earlier examples of a concept before some bastard makes 20 cents every time you buy a mug on ebay, or play a song in your browser.

It's of use to people who want to remember how far we've come, looking at grotty, poor graphics (which, by the way, we loved) and simple one-level games. One of the real advantages of digital history is that, with a relatively minor amount of effort via emulators and wiring to old systems, we can experience the past in almost the same sense as it originally was intended to be experienced.

And it's certainly of use to a bevy of names, places, and people who accomplished so much with so relatively little, preserving their identities in the modern era, when so much information could easily be lost.

I love that little site. All one hundred and twenty gigabytes of it. It's caused its share of headaches and I'm sure it'll continue to, but I can list a lot of reasons why it should stay up.

In fact, I can now list a million.

The Adventurers' Club

I've opened up a little experiment, a little idea today. It's called "The Adventurers' Club" and here's how it works.

The next documentary, GET LAMP, is about text adventures. The equipment I used to shoot the BBS Documentary is a bit long in the tooth, and there's been a lot of advancement in the 4 years since I started shooting, and the 6 years since they started selling the camera that I used. So, I really need to buy a little more equipment to shore that up, and also to reach for a higher ground in terms of video and sound quality.

Also, I'm shooting in high definition. Yes, that's right, I'm shooting a documentary about text adventures in high definition.

In fact, the price of HDV cameras have gone down considerably in the past few years, but it's still a lot of money to put out there at once. Money's always a stress, and I'm hesitant to start taking money out of the BBS Documentary project (which is still ongoing) and aim that in a new direction, if I can help it.

So, I decided to offer up a pre-sale subscription to the eventual product. I call it "The Adventurers' Club".

The webpage for it is here.

Here's the pitch and the thinking. You pay in $100 now. You get a copy of the BBS Documentary DVD set immediately, and since I'm charging $40 for that, you're actually (sort of) sending me $60.

When the DVD/movie is finished a couple of years from now, you get three copies sent to you. And you get them first before anybody. Also, you get your name in the credits, no matter where it goes; television, theatres, DVDs, Sony PSPs, Mobile Phones, Ipods, you name it.

In return, I end up with a financial boost which I can apply towards not playing "cheap-out" games in terms of purchasing equipment, lights, and other related items to making the thing look good.

Naturally, this is quite a level of trust I am asking of people. All I can do is point to the previous work and say "I'm going to do another film like that one." Or, more accurately, "The guy who made that film is going to make another one."

Will this fly? I don't know. Here's hoping. I'll report here after the club is closed (I expect I will shut down investment after about a month and a half) how many people joined up.

The web page for the club explains the thinking and the details, so check it out.