ASCII by Jason Scott

Gorp: A Little More

A couple people joked with me and said "Hells YEAH I'd be in a remake of Gorp!" For fun, I started playing "What if" with the whole thing, just to see who owned it, what they thought of it, and so on.

I found this snippet of an interview with the author of the screenplay of Gorp (Jeffrey Konvitz) on a site called Red Hot Planet. It actually explains a bit:

You also wrote a "coming of age" comedy called GORP. The 1980 movie is memorable for two reasons: it was the final film released by drive-in purveyor, American International Pictures, and the cast included then-unknown actors Dennis Quaid, Rosanne Arquette, Michael Lembeck, Debi Richter and Fran Drescher.

GORP was based on my own experiences as a waiter at a camp in the Catskill mountains though, of course, most of it was fictionalized. I was a waiter at the camp and a lot of my co-waiters are now very famous people in the arts, sports, politics, etcetera-but they shall remain nameless. Anyway, I sold the spec screenplay-written right after ANIMAL HOUSE had opened to "hitdom"-to (AIP prez) San Arkoff. His son, Lou, and I produced it and it had a lot of ANIMAL HOUSE humor to say the least. We were also lucky to get a lot of actors at the dawn of their careers. Just to show you what I know, I told Fran Drescher, sometime during the shoot-all shot at a work camp in Georgia in February of, I think, 1978-that she had to get rid of her accent or she'd never make it. What a genius, eh?

Joe Ruben was the director and he had a lot of success later. Chuck Russell was our first AD and Chuck went on to do THE MASK and so much more. Virtually all the characters were based on composites of real people I had known at the camp. The budget was about two million and, of course, the second day of the shoot-exteriors at a summer camp-we had a blizzard that dumped two feet of snow on our heads. But that's movie making, The film had as very successful pre-release screening history, but then ran into trouble in its distribution. Just as we finished the answer print, Sam Arkoff sold the company to Filmways and the owner of Filmways, an orthodox Jew and UJA chairman I believe, did not like the raunchy humor, particularly where it concerned the camp rabbi and he ordered the film buried. Now I am a pretty serious Jew myself and virtually everyone involved with the film was Jewish, but we all knew and still know how to laugh at what's funny...and the film is funny. It did not receive th fate it received. But so be it.

Jeffrey Konvitz wrote it, but he based it at least in some part on a short story by Martin Zweiback. I wouldn't mind reading that short story. You know, to get the literary background.

Zweiback, to be fair, probably didn't recognize his short story in what the final work came out as. (He actually has a rather storied history of his own, including the legend of how he got a film made by Katharine Hepburn by throwing his screenplay over her walled garden.)

A couple things at this juncture:

• TWO MILLION!??!?? WHAT THE FUCK! HOW MUCH IS TANK RENTAL IN 1978!??
• Hey, there's actually a little bit of a neat backstory to this thing.

Anyway, it'd be fun to do a remake, like I said. But a lot would have to happen for this to be the case. And in the meantime, I have this other little film I'm working on....

Gorp

I recently subjected a good friend of mine to a DVD showing of a 1980 musical called The Apple, one of my favorite films. I didn't warn him or anything, but somehow he got through it. (I should probably make a note that I am not recommending this film to you.) What keeps any reasonable person going all the way to the end of The Apple, which is part of its magic, is the obviously gigantic amount of money, time and effort poured into it. While watching it, ignoring my friend's slack-jawed incredulity at this monstrous endeavor, I keyed into a minor but important change in the film they'd apparently made in post-production, cutting out a last musical number and tacking on a convoluted end-scene.

Discussing how this must have been accomplished in a day's reshoot drifted the conversation into what sort of films I would make if I ever worked on fiction instead of documentary, and then, ultimately, this ponderable that my friend dropped into my lap:

"What Hollywood film would you remake if you could choose from any one, with the exception of The Apple because if you remake that and force me to watch it again I will kill you in your sleep?"

After a minute of thought, I answered: "Gorp".

Gorp is a summer camp movie that came out around 1980. It was shot very cheaply, and is at most points extremely crude, vicious and offensive. I first saw it on cable when I was a pre-teen, and when I was in my early 20s I found it on VHS and bought the tape immediately. It was $3, and I got it at a Caldor's department store in the remainder bin. I remember my delight at finding it.

Shot in the middle of the "Animal House - Meatballs - Teen Exploitation" wave of films of the late 1970s-early 1980s, Gorp has little to recommend it to the naked eye. Or the un-naked eye. Or really, any level of taste whatsover. But there are a couple major reasons why I would remake such a film.

First of all, the entire story is told from the point of view of the kitchen staff. The children of the camp and the counselors, normally the center of all the attention in these movies, are in many ways ancilliary, foils against the main characters, who are the cooks, waiters, and maniacs running the food service. In fact, the whole of the interest of the camp is from the staff point of view, with the little politics, the craziness, the evil pranks all being rained down by (ostensibly) adults hired to take care of the campers. There's a nice sub-plot involving the owner of the camp extracting money (in the form of fines) from the staff, secretly cutting his costs by trapping everyone in insane rules and ordinances. There's a what's-to-lose sense about the whole endeavor as the building that houses the staff is destroyed in a near-pointless "war" at the end of the picture that involves a tank and a maniacal Dennis Quaid (in one of his first co-starring roles). As if the blended stew of sex, violence, and viciousness wasn't enough, it's a Jewish summer camp; how many summer camp movies have anyone chanting the Motzi?

Second of all, and this one's a little hard to explain, but the movie is really not done very well. It was shot for cheap money, I doubt anyone got any significant salary, a lot of stuff is obviously first-take-let's-print, and there's just an overriding sense of slapdashedness throughout the production.

As a result, I look at this film like a really messed up old car one finds in the back of a lot where the place took it just to get a trade-in. Some car where you can see where they messed with it, and yet it still runs and just needs someone to, you know, completely redo it from the frame up.

I remember watching this film, eating cereal at the apartment complex in Fishkill, NY, sitting on my little mattress in the room that all four of us slept in to save money on heat, and thinking, at 11 years old, I COULD DO THIS.

That's a key feeling. With a lot of stuff, if you're young, you just sit back in awe at all the magic, unable to discern how it's done, having no clue how human beings did this and not just some wonderful machine from space that has godlike powers. While a sense of wonder is a precious thing to have, its dark side is a feeling of never being able to achieve something like this, to want to think about doing something so intimidating, so impossible to learn. I watched Caddyshack a hundred times in my early youth; I never could fathom ever making a film like that.

Gorp showed me that I could do it. I could totally see how they would set up shots, how the scripting would go, how they would cut stuff together. I got the idea, with Gorp. Since the actors have very little direction in the film, it feels like a home movie at different points, although most home movies don't get a tank to crash through sets. (They should).

The writing has to depend utterly on people talking because they can't afford sweeping shots. The film, in fact, is so cramped in terms of shooting (lots of long takes because they don't have time to determine reverse-angle cuts) that I totally got it, even at 11. And I wanted to do something like it.

I would love that. I would love taking 30 days and 20 college students and a few older actors, renting some blown-out resort location, and just whaling out a version of Gorp. We'd keep the sex, knock up the charm, spin the vulgarity, mix up the interactions a bit better, truck in 100 kids for a day for the cafeteria scenes, get a few amateur demo/stunt guys, and break every rule in the book throwing this thing together. We'd borrow crazy equipment, surplus gear, and ruin a lot of plates of food.

Will this ever happen? I seriously, seriously doubt it. But I wanted to mention that inspiration comes from some pretty weird places, and for me, Gorp set me on the path to a sense of the possible. Sometimes when a magician fails, he's actually teaching his young audience to be magicians, so they can, in their own future lives, not suck.

Paperperson

In my nascent days of system administration, one of the highlights of my job was the opportunity to name new machines as they joined our legion of servers. Eventually, of course, my highlight was being able to write a script that would enable me not to be at my job while it happily chugged away and earned my salary. But in the days when I showed up early and left very late, the Naming of the New Box was paramount.

The company I worked for was in the process of moving away from VMS machines and starting to integrate UNIX into their environment, and I was lucky enough to be the sprout they reached out to to help with the transition. The manager who oversaw the VMS and UNIX administrators had an additional requirement in his hiring process that other people in his position might not: he didn't want freaks.

Even though everyone in our group was technically proficient (except me, by comparison), you would have been hard pressed to know that they were system administrators and not, say, bartenders, busdrivers, or cooks. Regular folk, able to interact with their co-workers or outside parties and be regarded as just another person in the chain, not an ivory tower monarch or bucket of tics and snorting high-pitched whine. While they could tell you, if you wanted to know, why the I/O slowdown on writes in your disk array could be better improved with proper regard of their distance from the bus, they could also control themselves to NOT tell you if that wasn't at the top of your priority to know. Dig?

Our manager prided himself on this. To weed out freaks, he had an interesting approach to a "trial period". He would hire new folks as consultants, giving them a 30 day contract at a sizeable per-hour fee. Both sides won; the new recruit got fat bags of cash every week for a month, and the manager got to see them in action to know if the group was going to accept this new cog in the machine or reject them like a bad kidney.

This early warning system got tripped with the addition of a new admin into the group, who got through the interview process through some means I still do not understand. In her first day (her first day!) as a consultant, she sprayed into the organization all the true attributes of UNIX freakdom:

• Interrupted the General Manager during his "welcome to the company" meeting to correct him on points she disagreed with;
• Refused to sit in her cubicle until her desk was disassembled and reattached so the screen was no longer facing the opening;
• Demanded to go through the company's inventory of chairs until the right level of back and arm support was found (this took some time);
• Spent her time while waiting for her cubicle/castle to be built to her liking to walk around and CORRECT EVERYONE.

This last bit can't really be emphasized enough; her base state was that of talking to you and correcting you, telling you flat out in a conversation (which she started more than not) where you were wrong, uninformed, or lacking the basic facts to make an assessment. She also had some sort of throat issue that would cause her to look away and make a sound not unlike a cat ejecting a hairball. It was strange the first time, troubling the second time, and a circle of Hell by the third.

Our manager obviously knew, and let us know in various meetings, that the consultancy of our newest addition was to be the full term of her employment. But work needed to be done, scripts needed to be written, and meetings needed to be held, so the weeks dragged on.

Her style of UNIX freakdom came out all the time; rewriting scripts she was asked to fix minorly so only she could understand them; writing everything in lowercase, scripts or letters; going from zero to screaming hatred talking about things only she cared about, whether it was a network setup approach or the choice about how much swap space to add to a machine. We cringed in our cubicles as she berated coworkers on minor points, spoke on the phone about the most useless inanities with fellow freaks in lands unknown, and the snorting; always the snorting......

Somewhere in the depths of this dark age, our Usenet News Server needed to be replaced. This was in the days when a News Server was something you built with pride for your internal network, and not something you immediately outsourced to a professional firm to deal with the unending headache. In a percieved version of overkill, we had a nice new machine, disk array with 80 gigabytes of space, the whole kit. Again, however, the most important aspect to me was the naming.

My suggestion, PORNFUNNEL, was immediately vetoed.

Still, we went back and forth about possible names, and the cutest one to place on the machine was PAPERBOY. Delivers the news, right?

You can imagine my horror, to my innocent ears, when our new consultant, hearing of our planned name, said "You can't do that name; it's sexist."

Sexist! Keep in mind that as a young person new to his job, I had not actually encountered such a corrective mindset, but only heard about it as one hears about many mythic fools and freaks in the world. I had assumed this was just a stand-up joke, a threat that parents whispered to their children at night to make them study harder in school! And you can imagine the topper for me when I asked her what her suggestion for a better name would be:

"Paperperson".

Fear gripped me as we attempted to continue a civil conversation about the Naming of the Usenet Server with this new blanket of limitation on the process. Bland names were put forward and we came dangerously close to implementing the actual name "news". How dull. How silly.

But then it hit me. Glancing around with the best poker face I could muster, I said "How about.... page 3?"

The lead admin in the group, a man born in England, started to show glee, then quickly hid his emotion and said "yes, that sounds acceptable". We both looked at the new admin and she paused, before saying "Sure, that's good, I guess."

For the folks at home who might not have read newspapers in the UK, a number of the London Tabloids had taken to including topless pictures of women in their pages, each presented smiling and tits to the wind, with a little blurb about their jobs and thoughts on the world beneath them. It was, essentially, using sex to sell more newspapers, in what would be considered a pretty crass and cynical manner.

Because there was still some amount of division between newspapers and adult publications, the photos of these fair, topless lasses were put on page 3.

And that's how PAGE3 was born. As expected, the new admin worked out her contract and was not offered a permanent position. PAGE3, however, worked on for years after her, happily serving its role in life as a porn funnel.

Five Wikipedia Predictions (A Valentine)

My talk in April at Notacon on Wikipedia is coming up, and should be either fun or interesting (or maybe even both). As part of that I've been both observing and in contact with people embedded in Wikipedia, and I figured it was time to make some predictions. Make of these what you will. I'm focusing on the "negative" predictions since everyone else is in the business of the "positive" predictions. Some of these might sound obvious, some might not; that's the way of "predictions".

Note again, this is about Wikipedia, not the general concept of the Wiki. In all of these cases, I am predicting all of these things to happen before the end of 2006, although I suspect some will happen by the summer.

Wikipedia will no longer allow anonymous edits of any kind.

One of the core aspects of Wikipedia from its beginning was the ability of anyone to edit anything at any time. While nice in theory, this approach fails under critical mass. The work of the programmers of Wikipedia's software and the increase in tools to track edits has cut down on pure unchecked destruction, but the fatigue of an ever-growing army of people who actually want to do minor edits and little else is wearing out on people who wish to control the encyclopedia's direction.

A flurry of press implied that this is already the case; in fact, anonymous editors cannot create completely new articles, but they can edit existing ones. Currently, if you edit an article and do not have an edit history, your edit is often undone until you "prove" yourself. This trend will continue, in my opinion, and I expect they will move to some level of registration and reduced user account creation, walling the garden from the point of view of the editing active user.

Wikipedia will have to split off "user space" from "Encyclopedia space".

Right now, you, as a Wikipedian with an account, can have a page about yourself, the stuff you're into, what Wikipedia work you're doing, and so on. It is absolutely tearing Wikipedia apart.

Why it's tearing Wikipedia apart is part of my talk at Notacon, but the short form is that these user pages, once simple waves from behind the screen to talk about what you're up to, have become pulpits of controversy and hatred that are linked (even if not completely) as if they're just more articles under Wikipedia.

The solution is simple: a "user.wikipedia.org" or "wikiusers.org", a separate area allowing this sort of self-expression to continue.

I see absolutely no fault in this happening; it should have been done from the beginning. In the beginning there weren't really "user accounts" at all on Wikipedia, so it kind of grew organically from the natural urge of people to go "look at me, look at the work I've done, here I am, making my place". But this is causing huge, huge distress on both the infrastructure, and the "anyone can edit" approach. The whole point of a user space is that you control it, and having others come in and either "fix" your work or tell you you're not "allowed" to have things in your user space is causing wasteful friction even by Wikipedia's standards.

Either this will happen soon, or more people will leave/pull back from being treated like they joined the world's largest homeowner association.

Jimbo Wales will be either ousted or have his power curtailed relative to Wikipedia.

Without a doubt, Jimbo is a vital part of Wikipedia's success. His funding, initial guidance, and approach to the site are what helped bring in the critical mass of editors. Unfortunately (for him), he has also created an entity whose entire point of existence is an overriding anal-retentive attention to "policy" and "the rules", all reached by a variety of methods, each with their own set of "policy" and "the rules". And so on, and so on, like a hall of mirrors.

The newspaper articles about Wikipedia in the last six months have focused on two major "events": An article in the journal "Nature" that compared a whopping 42 articles (out of 972,000) to decide all of Wikipedia had only 20 percent less errors than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and errored information in an entry about a man named John Seigenthaler with the attendant hand-wringing about "what is truth" and "what position does Wikipedia and The Internet hold in the nature of accuracy".

What has not gotten any focus are moves by Jimbo Wales that skirt and avoid "policy" or "consensus" or any of the other buzzwords that users who edit Wikipedia live by. He has appointed administrators without following Wikipedia's own "rules" on how that is done. He has had articles not just removed, but their entire editing history removed as well (this violates their own license). He has blanked out and locked down (prevented editing) on articles about people who have threatened him with a lawsuit. And in cases where he has encountered activities he doesn't approve of and appears concerned of looking bad (editing his own biography was a minor offense), he has taken on the approach of mentioning idly what he'd like to see done, and an army of folks will do his bidding, out of a natural urge to follow the "leader".

This dichotomy cannot continue; Wales makes appearances on television shows and in newspaper articles speaking in a tone as if he majorly or solely guides the direction of Wikipedia, while at the same time promotes an environment where people are led to believe that a consensus guides Wikipedia. Something has to give.

(Of all my predictions, I am weakest on this one, because power is pernicious in its effect on sense, and few things are more steely-gripped than a person holding onto power.)

Wikipedia will make it almost impossible to edit entries on living people (or any entity that can sue).

I'm vaguely cheating with this prediction, since this is already becoming the case. If you don't like an article about yourself in Wikipedia and you wish to ensure that the entry on you contains no information you don't like, threaten to sue Jimbo Wales. Threaten to sue the Wikimedia Foundation. There are notable cases where entire swaths of information have been pulled down for shaky reasoning, simply to get legally-concerning items out of Wikipedia.

This is the bucket of cold water that will affect the love-fest of editing on Wikipedia more than anything else. There are facts that are, by any measure, accurate and real (dirty deeds listed in public records, criminal histories, and so on), that are simply not 'allowed' to be on Wikipedia. They are blanked out (again, not put into a "document editing history", but all trace of them removed) and in a few cases the articles have been locked so that no work can be done on them.

This is working for the moment, but it can only increase in frequency, so it is likely that a rule will be put in place, phrased in relatively neutral language, that will prevent living entities from getting too detailed a background in anything but the most basic of facts about them. And it is because of lawsuit threats.

Subpoenas are the ultimate edit.

Wikipedia will add advertising (banner ads, text ads, or pop-ups).

What's the sound of a million people going "Well, Duh".

I only make this prediction because there are a number of myths that people who do editing work on Wikipedia and who pour weeks of life into the production operate under. One of them is the idea that the Wikipedia will always be open and free and sans the grubby hands of capitalism fingerprinting their work with urges to buy, buy, buy. Apparently the story of CDDB has not had an effect on them. That's fine.

A lot of people are offering Wikipedia a lot of money to put advertising into their pages. One day, they will win. I just happen to think this is the year.

Check back in 2007 for how many I got right or wrong.

Lifecycles and Audiences

I am terrified of planes. I don't discuss it much because, well, what is anyone going to do about it?

I should also say I'm not terrified of the planes themselves, just being in them when they're flying.

Flying is a complete torture to me, from the moment I board until it slowly taxis towards the gate after landing. I am literally in a state of pure fear for most of the time, until I reach some sort of anguish threshold and collapse onto myself, often into sleep. I wake up and I'm just messed up enough that I don't really realize where I am, and then eventually we land, during which time I am back in terror.

Why do I fly? Because logically, it is the fastest way to get to places, and when doing my films or meeting people who I care about or respect, I don't want "it'll take too long to get there" to be a reason not to see them. I do it, one might say, for a form of love. Love of people, love of my work, wanting things to be done and not to hide away in a cocoon of intentions and rough sketches. So I take it, like a beating. I'm usually back to normal around an hour or two after landing.

Occasionally, very rarely, I can reach some sort of zen moment where I forget where I am and why I am here and everything that can go wrong and just look out over clouds. At that point, I consider the span of my life, the things I have done and the things not yet done. And inevitably, I always think about how I didn't get down any of my Fundamental Truths.

One of life's many little jokes is that we don't start to get a real grip on stuff until it's often too late to do anything about it. The worst part is that we get told by others who are later in their lives how they got a grip, but we often don't listen. Or we sort of listen and then drop it. So, I'm going to write two things that have been getting on my mind a lot recently, and leave it at that. It'll let me feel a little better that I put it down somewhere, the next time I board a plane (February 24th, actually).

Everything has a Lifecycle.

I'll describe this truth within the context of the three obvious examples: Jackie Chan, Lloyd's of London, and Slashdot.

Jackie Chan, international movie star, beloved kung-fu action hero, and worldwide beloved charity head/businessman, was born in 1950. As has now been documented countless times (including the excellent autobiography I am Jackie Chan), he had an extremely hard childhood: put into a Peking Opera training school where he was abused and subject to all manner of physical training/trials which, ultimately, had little use in the modern world upon his teenage years and graduation from the school. From this, he got involved in construction and odd jobs in Australia, before taking on stunt work in the Hong Kong film industry. He got small parts in films, and then got fashioned as a "New Bruce Lee" upon Lee's untimely death. His talents, physical skills and self-reliance have resulted in many excellent films containing action sequences and stuntwork that he's played a part in.

However, Jackie Chan has a life cycle. He is in his 50s now, entirely unable to do some of the work he was doing in his 20s, and risks he took in his early film career would now be past suicidal. He is obviously going to continue to make films, and add his mark to them, but to expect him to do some of his earlier work is both unrealistic and refusing to think of him as a person who is growing older and into different directions; he has tried romantic films, producing other films that simply have his name on it, and basically branching out. While I would love a world where Jackie created new films equivalent in approach to Police Story and Drunken Master, there is simply not the same Jackie Chan that made those films available to do them. His life has gone on.

Similarly, Lloyd's of London, being hundreds of years older than Jackie Chan, has a more involved life cycle. There are also many recountings of its history (an excellent one is here) but here's a short form.

Started as a coffee house by Edward Lloyd in the 17th century, located on the docks, had good business from sea traders and runners providing information on shipping, and facilitated this with writing supplies and desks. After Lloyd's death, the swarm of illegitimate business in underwriting led a group to split off and call themselves "Lloyds" and do underwriting. Throughout the next two hundred years, Lloyds has had a number of ups and downs, both insuring unusual items and paying out/taking in enormous sums in celebrated cases, including the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and a variety of celebrity body parts.

The Lloyd's of the 17th century was wildly different from the Lloyd's of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. But there is this "tradition" and "history" urge that people have to compare what it is to what it was, even though the very natures of the world Lloyds moves in have inherently changed. Fundamentally. While there will always be conceptual ideas (bad things happen, pay in against that in insurance, reap some reward in tragedy) that hold true, the nature of a life cycle means that the Lloyds you walk into today will be nothing at all like it was.

This is either really obvious or not so obvious. What I am saying here is that many people fall into the trap of pointing to the multi-hundred-year history of Lloyds as ongoing proof of its relevancy, or choices. While some of that might be true, nobody who works at Lloyds was alive when it started, or when it broke away from Coffee. Nobody there would have first-hand knowledge how it was functioning before World War I. Almost none would know how it functioned before World War II. There have been thousands, many thousands of meetings, arrangements and contracts that have shifted Lloyds in many directions since it was started. To point to how it was as indication of how it should be or lamenting how it has changed... that is denying this fundamental life cycle.

It is likely that 2050 will not see a Jackie Chan. But 2050 might see a Lloyds. But if it sees either, they simply will not be the same entities they once were, no matter what dollops of marketing, slow-moving montage films, or posters will proclaim.

It might be easier to then point to Slashdot, which will be celebrating 10 years of existence in 2007. Started by a couple college students, this discussion/news site has grown to enormous amounts of influence and power within online circles, guaranteeing not just a huge amount of hits to a site but lots of ancilliary attention and placement in minds outside obvious "geek" realms. Take it from me; I've been Slashdotted or caused Slashdottings a number of times and I've seen the effects. People call and contact you from amazing places when you're Slashdotted.

The Slashdot of 1997 is nothing like the Slashdot of 2006. It has similar outward appearances, with the logo and color scheme being the same, but almost everything else is different: the staff, the underlying software engine, the hosting facility, the choices of stories and the nature of communication within it.

The founders are there to some degree, but they are simply not the same people; they are 9 years older. How co-founder Rob Malda is at 30 (which he will be in May) is a lot different than how he was at 21. To apply the same measurements of how he should act or play a part in the site, or draw on his statements when he was a recent college grad as indications of what he's thinking today... it just makes no sense.

Slashdot was sold to an entity relatively early in its existence, which was sold to another entity. Slashdot is, primarily, a business, geared towards generating revenue for both itself and its related sites. It's easy to forget this, and apply standards on it as if it was being run out of someone's home, but that's the fact. It's also the fact that in some ways Slashdot itself will fall back on this, and not do the least bit of journalistic research or credible action, simply because there is no outward reason for them to do so; getting things fundamentally wrong has not affected readership, and the comments below each entry allow some amount of "wait, that's wrong", so little obvious effort shows up in the final, scrolling collection of new stories.

Pro or con, Slashdot has changed, and is changing ever onward, until it will disappear or be further unrecognizable from what it once was. As a historian, I am interested in the changes, and in the previous incarnations, but I try not to fall into the trap of acting like the Slashdot I load up on my browser is anything but an entity of the present day, subject to the pitfalls and triumphs of 2006.

So where the hell am I going with this?

History is not a template for the future. History is an explanation of why certain mistakes happened, why we got to where we are now, how we did it, and an excellent way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon. There is an enormous of hand-wringing, online and off, comparing the world of the present to the world of the past, and attempting backflips and neck-stretches to somehow use these past worlds as templates for the present one. We live in a world where you can contact your loved ones from a field or in a moving car, where you can know within seconds what someone is thinking about you, and where you can turn a frozen block of meat into a dinner better than princes once knew.

To ignore lifecycles and to use the past as shackles holding back progress or, at the least, inevitable change, is a mistake. Don't do it.

There's Fundamental Truth number one. I will relax the next time I see the wings shake.

Hatred Often Springs From Uninterested Audiences

A shorter Fundamental Truth, but one that I care very deeply about. I've been reading an enormous amount of online material lately (this always happens when I'm working on a project like GET LAMP) and what I find, more often than not, are dismissive or highly-critical treatises about creative or commercial works from people representing audiences the work should never have been put in front of.

Let's stick with just movies this time.

The absolutely best Kung-Fu movie is still an absolute wreck to someone who doesn't want to watch Kung-Fu movies. A person who wants to see a romantic comedy will never enjoy a zombie flick, no matter what amount of effort was made into making it the best zombie flick ever.

The nature of marketing and publicity is to expose a product to as wide an audience as possible. The issue with that is that often the work, through no fault of its own, is not actually geared towards as wide an audience as possible.

On the flip side, there are films that are most certainly geared towards as wide an audience as possible. They make certain concessions in plot, casting and shooting so that they will appeal to everybody who walks in the door. It is unlikely, therefore, that it will treat any one of those groups with much respect or satisfy them fully, but on the other hand they won't lock too many people out, either.

This may or may not seem obvious. But how much energy has been wasted avoiding it!

I am asked about putting my BBS documentary in front of as wide an audience as possible. But I've spent a lot of time watching reviews and responses to it; and there are people for whom this is the greatest movie ever. They absolutely love it, they love the length, the subject matter, the approach, the shooting.

But I get people who hate it too. I find, generally, that they were misled by others as to what the film was, or they came in with a different expectation. ("Should have been more like Wargames. Should have had less people talking. Shouldn't have been so technical")

This is why I've always worked to make the film and its contents known, to have lots of preview material and descriptions that show it's a very technical documentary that features a lot of people talking. If someone comes along and shows it with the inherent lie "It's as amazing as Star Wars" floating in peoples' heads as they watch it, it will be horrible. It is absolutely the worst episode of Star Wars ever. (Episode XI: I Keep Getting a Busy Signal).

I'm just sticking to movies here, but this Fundamental Truth applies to a lot of stuff besides creative works. It applies to education (being told a subject will be a certain type of experience in learning and it is not), to tools (being told a tool can be used a certain way when it doesn't do that very well), and to people (presenting someone as having skills they do not have). In all these cases, these subjects all have very good uses and skills and abilities, but only if they're presented the right way or are upfront. The energy then spent defending or criticizing the entire misfit characterization, dilutes the equivalent of many human lives over the years.

There. Now they're both out. Enjoy them. And the next time you see me somewhere where I flew, realize how much I truly wanted to be there.

A Little Bit of Nostalgia

When I was 17 and a senior in high school, we had to pose for yearbook pictures. Horace Greeley High School, where I attended, had a nice policy about the pictures, which was that the students could basically choose their backgrounds, poses, and the rest. Since I spent most of my time in my house, that's where I had my photos taken, and beyond that, I had the photos taken in my computer room. A student named Rachel Lovinger was assigned my photo, and we took a bunch.

I lived a happy life for my years in Chappaqua, NY. I lived with my father in a 4 bedroom house, and I had run of the top floor, which became a kind of weird geek paradise, one I tried to live up to later when I bought my own home. I do remember, at the time, being very happy with the world I'd set up for myself. My bedroom had two parts to it, a computer lab and a bedroom/media area (the pictures you see here are from the computer lab) and I even had a remote monitor coming out of the computer into my media area, so I could watch the goings-on on my BBS while also watching TV or playing music. I have nothing but the fondest memories of my late teens, sans a small incident where I was thrown out of the house.

Unlike a lot of the "person in front of swirly background" photos that populate yearbooks, photos like the ones I had taken also document my room, and my earlier computer life before I went to college or ran textfiles.com or anything else. Of the 20 or so photos taken, we obviously only used one, but I was able to get a contact sheet from Rachel, which I kept, and which these photos came from. Obviously, they weren't really meant for final publication, and look a lot worse than they could, but the information is there.

Obviously the second one is posed, with a Commodore PET computer lodged in front of my main system where it normally wouldn't be. The rest of it is pretty accurate.

There's so many little reminders in these photographs, I don't know where to begin. That's an IBM PC with an expansion chassis, making it look like a two-level monster. I ran The Works BBS on that for two years before leaving for college. It's impossible to see in the photograph, but the Works BBS login screen is up. I can see business cards from BBSes that I used to call, taped on the desk. There's a dot matrix printer there, which I printed out many messages and files from, which I kept (and still have) and which I've been slowly re-digitizing BACK into text. And the walls are completely covered in computer and BBS articles that I would pull from Microfiche at school, photocopy, and then tape up.

(Naturally, since all yearbook photos should have semi-secret messages, there's those two pieces of paper with letters on them, with the simplest of one-letter shift ciphers on them, for others to find: "HELLO: DONNA, JOHN R., JEREMY, JASON B., BRANDON, BRITT W., SARAH - B.I.S. FOREVER!" By doing this in the photo, I didn't have to put it into the paragraph in the yearbook. The B.I.S. did in fact end up being forever, since that's the name of the production company for the documentaries.

If you're a die-hard fan (I apparently have a few), you can feel free to download the entire contact sheet (700k) from the BBS Documentary site. I like the last one from the bottom, left side.

I've had a number of people send me photos like these posed near or using their computers, often taken by family members going "Here he is in his natural habitat, always in front of that computer."

My advice is that if your family member does something all the time, take photos of them doing it, they'll thank you years later, because everyone wants at least a little memory of the times before, and stuff they may not have thought about for decades will come rushing back. I know this because I get many dozens of letters a month telling me that's what textfiles.com does. And thank goodness for that.

ONE. MILLION. DOLLARS!

Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:56:37 +0200
From: Chevron System LLC
To: textfiles.com
Subject: Regarding textfiles.com

Hello,

I'm interested in purchasing your domain "textfiles.com". I'm seriously
interested in buying textfiles.com. We use the services of Escrow.com
which is a US government licensed escrow. If you are interested please
contact me with your asking price.Thanks for your time.

Best Regards,

Chevron System LLC

I get a request to buy one of my domains about once every few months. At this point, I just ask for an incredible amount of money, and leave it at that. I've had domains for 10 years now, domains like cow.net and someone comes along hoping to buy it for two thousand dollars. Goodnight!

I wouldn't let textfiles.com go for less than seven figures now. And why would I let it go at all? Because at seven figures, I could use that money to further the goals that textfiles.com stands for and the work it does. And why wouldn't I let it go for less? Because it's a part of me, like my name or my voice.

Speaking in Princeton

I know I always hate it when someone tells me where they'll be speaking.... TOMORROW. But there you go.

I'll be speaking/presenting at the Princeton Library in Princeton, NJ tomorrow (February 7th) at roughly 7pm. You get to see some of the documentary, hear me babble, and then, if you're feeling frisky, buy a few copies.

See you there, assuming about 100 details about your life that I shouldn't.

Adventurers' Club (Last Followup)

I finally removed the Paypal link from the Adventurers' Club page, as well as the part where I beg people to join. Instead, it's now a description of what the club is and who the members are.

There are 50 members in the club (not all are listed, at their request).

This is five thousand dollars.

It's nice to have one of the high points of the production occur before filming begins. That's just amazing to me, fifty people sending in $100, wanting the film to be made and to show their support.

Since I promised each person 3 copies of the film, that's 150 copies that go right off the top into the world. Pretty neat!

Filming, by the way, starts this month. Don't ever hesitate to mail me with suggestions and requests about the production.

"I can't imagine they would enjoy such a conversation."

I had a call waiting for me on my voicemail, from a Jennifer Pew (her phone number was 206-903-3915) of a law firm called Dorsey and Whitney LLP, who specialize in IP law. She asked me to call her back, in association with an MGM vs. Grokster case.

Now, there's always that interesting swimming feeling when a law firm calls you. I've been through the legal colon enough times to know you give up nothing, discuss not much, bother less. Doesn't hurt to call back.

Talking with Jennifer for a while, she asked me about a file available on Kazaa, with my name on it and BBS and so on. The track, which she couldn't pronounce, didn't sound like something I'd written, but there are a lot of songs on the BBS Documentary soundtrack, and as we all know, most peer-to-peer programs keep the titles and artist names with near-talmudic precision. So with names like Sleepy Rabbit, Manolo Camp, and Treewave, who knows what they could be called now.

I asked, "Wasn't the Grokster vs. MGM case settled?" She said this was a new one. What the hellafuck. I was wondering if she was from the good guys, the EFF or whatnot. I mean, if I get to testify WITH those guys, hey, free trip to California and maybe I get to give Larry Lessig a hug.

So we're dancing around simply because I'm wondering who she represents. At some point in my sleepy mind, the "plantiff" vs. "defendant" thing clears up, I remember she said Plaintiff, and I ask who she's a part of. She explained it was a consortium of firms, including media companies.

At this point, my tone turned what would best be described as "vaguely hostile".

I hate this shit. I really do. I was kind of curious to figure out what song it was they were associating with me, and how they decided it was me, and how they got the phone number, and all that. But after a while, I realize I'm talking to a paralegal. Paralegals do not consider themselves evil. Paralegals are, in my experience, torturers who have not been allowed to use the forge yet to make the hot coals, but they're waiting and hoping. I consider them part and parcel of the law profession, very little of which I personally like. (I do like a little of it.)

She offered to put me in touch with an uberlawyer to hear the song that supposedly Jason Scott made or otherwise has his name on, but I said, ultimately, "I can't imagine they would enjoy such a conversation." Who needs it, it's Friday.

I explained that all the music in my documentary was licensed under Creative Commons. Later she verified it by saying "so you provide it under a public license." I said no, CREATIVE COMMONS.

The salient phrases from me, which basically ended the transaction, were:

"I do not want to be associated with whatever you are doing in any way, and if my name shows up in any legal document from your firm I will be very angry. If people are distributing music with my name associated with it, I hope they are giving it to schoolchildren. For free. Forever."

Anyway, so if you make or otherwise involve yourself in musical production, maybe you too will be "called on down " by Jennifer or her other zombie paralegal compatriots to ask if you authorized your music to be made available on Kazaa. Be sure to top my reaction, if you so choose.

Dit dit dit hey wait

With absolutely no fanfare or warning, Western Union ceased its telegram service on January 27, 2006. They notified employees internally in mid-January, and then abruptly closed off the service.

The full message for saying goodbye to 155 years of telegraph service was:

"Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative."

The first official message (that is, part of a demonstration for a built prototype line from Washington to Baltimore, was sent on May 24, 1844. It read, ``What hath God Wrought?''

In fact, you can actually look at a photo of the actual tape that was sent. Badass, those historical archivists can be.

I am not a big fan of the standard weblog "this event happened, now I will comment off-the-cuff-with-no-research for the next 3 paragraphs and look at you dumbly" approach to journalism/event notification, but I do have to say, this was handled quite poorly.

Understand that Western Union has gone bankrupt and then been bought out a number of times, and that the vast vast vast vast majority of its funding comes from money transfers (started in 1871) and not telegrams. I'll be willing to make a reasonable guess that the telegram revenues were almost in the range of a rounding error. But that's more of that off-the-cuff stuff I was talking about.

Instead of giving you a massive rant and historical essay, may I instead recommend a book that I had recommended to me by the author/speaker Richard Thieme: "The Victorian Internet", by Tom Standage. Were that I could compose a book so effective, so perfect in presenting its facts of history and event, and linking them to today.

Regardless, I left a foamer in their customer service box at the Western Union site, and I would send out this call: Send out one last telegram, this day or on the anniversary of the telegraph on May 24th, and give this incredible technology the sendoff it deserves.