ASCII by Jason Scott

Motivation

I've been asked, in various ways, where I get the energy or motivation to enmesh myself in so many projects. Or to actually finish them. I know why, but the answer is not exactly intuitive.

When I was 25, I woke up and couldn't move my legs. I wasn't paralyzed, but any slight movement, in any direction, caused intense, horrible pain. I at first thought they were broken, but that didn't make any sense and I had done absolutely nothing weird or out of character in the days before. But I literally couldn't move without pain. I crawled off my bed (technically, I slowly fell off it) and dragged myself using just my arms to a phone, and got a lift to the hospital. I can still remember getting down the flights of stairs to the landing. It was scary because there was just no rhyme or reason to the pain, just endless shocks if I moved them, like a cramp that wouldn't stop and involved my entire legs.

The doctor in the emergency room looked me over, had me x-rayed to look for breaks, and ultimately gave me some painkillers. I got crutches and a prescription for more painkillers.

He said "you know, it's almost like you have gout. But you're 25, that makes no sense."

This event turned out to be a warm-up, a tuning of the orchestra for later in the year.

While riding in the car with my girlfriend, Dory, we were having an argument. I only remember the argument at all because I also remembered getting a small shooting pain in my gut, not unlike rolling onto a thumbtack slowly. I ignored it and we kept arguing.

At some point, I noticed I was sweating. Profusely. And the thumbtack or whatever it was was growing, becoming more involved, and taking more of my attention. I brought this up with Dory, and we turned around from where we were going and drove back to her home.

By the time we got there, I was now in marked pain. I could feel shooting stabs all along my side, and with great effort we got me onto the couch, where I sat there, unable to move, unable to really think, except to just feel like my insides had ripped apart and I was bleeding internally.

Which, of course, I was.

The first time something bad happens to you like this, where your body utterly betrays you, and you not only can't do anything about it, you don't even know what it is, that's about as scared and pained as you get. If someone shoots you in the leg, you know that they shot you and why your leg hurts. But what if your leg starts to feel like someone shot it all by itself?

I lay there on Dory's couch, beside myself with pain, unable to move, roll, stretch, or tense in a way that affected any of the pain whatsoever, and I knew pretty much what Hell on Earth was all about.

Later, it was determined what happened; I have kidney stones, brought about by a low pH in my blood, which causes crystals to form in my kidneys and extremities. After a while, these formed crystals are like little razor blades that get stuck in my joints (mostly legs) and in my kidneys, where they eventually pass through my system and rip me inside.

When this occurs, I am in searing, unbelievable pain. It reads like the last third of a Dick Francis novel. I won't attempt to emulate his style here. Even though I know what is going on, it is pain of such intensity I forget its moments and just classify them all into one big, black file in my mind.

When I feel that small tug in my gut, I go "ah, yes", and it happens again.

I've never had alcohol. I've never had recreational drugs. (I don't refuse medical attention and have been given painkillers.) I don't smoke, and I don't generally live a life that puts me in mortal danger on a regular basis.

All that said, I still found out, the hard way, that nothing is guaranteed. Nothing says that your day in the sun today won't be followed by a night in a bloody wreck by midnight.

With this awareness of the roughly 20 or so attacks I've had in the last 10 years, it has been trivial to decide whether to start a project now, whether to begin writing something now, whether to barrel forward and immediately gather as much of what I need for an effort, demarcate my time, stay awake that extra three hours to put something to rest.

And there's where I get my motivation.

Interview on Whitedust

This has appeared on the Whitedust Security Website:
http://www.whitedust.net/article/52/Interview:_Jason_Scott/

Interview with Jason Scott
By Mark Hinge & Peter Prickett (Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:48:17 +0000)

Jason Scott is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. He is also the creator of a documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary which began shipping May, 2005.

WD> What first got you into computing?

Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool IBMer - basically joined the company soon after grad school and stayed on for 30 years, including a few years afterward as a consultant. He was always able to bring home strange machinery from work as long as I could remember (by the time I was born in 1970, my father had been at IBM for about 5 years) and so when he started bringing home different types of computers like the Commodore PET, I was the one of his three kids who immediately took to them. And when the IBM PC came out, we got one of the first ones. The bond was instantaneous and magical for me and computers and has never left.

WD> What was the computer that got you started getting serious on?

I was pretty serious on that Commodore PET, with the chiclet keyboard and the massive 8k of memory, combined with the awesome influx from the cassette drive. I still have it, of course, and it's about 30 feet from me as I type this. So that's about 25 years I've had it.

WD> What was your first modem?

My first modem was actually not mine - my friend Chris Boufford's grandparents had a modem at their place and Chris showed me how it all worked; it was a Racal-vadic 300 baud acoustic, which meant putting the phone handset in a cradle and not talking too loud, lest the data corrupt. Those were great times.

WD> You co started TinyTIM in 1990. It is reported that TinyTIM is the oldest MUSH still running. Why did you start it? Why did you resign in 2000 and from what position?

TinyTIM was a MUD, later a MUSH. People can look up what that means, but if you haven't heard of it, think 'online adventure game/chat system'. I started TinyTIM with my friend John as a practical joke/parody of other such games that were running at the time. There was a kind of overbearing seriousness to online games, with a strong roleplaying aspect as a strict adherence to 'the rules', no matter how lightly those rules had been constructed in the first place. We started our own game to make fun of those games, and a strong community (an actual strong, real community) was quickly formed around it, and has lasted in some form to the present day, online and off. As for my leaving, I'd co-founded TinyTIM when I was 19, and when I was around 29, I had started TEXTFILES.COM. TEXTFILES.COM took off, and while I loved using the TinyTIM game, I was pouring a lot of energy into it for what at that point was a strong set of members numbering in the dozens (with hundreds of other occasional visitors). With textfiles.com, I quickly started to serve out hundreds of thousands of users in a month. If I wrote an essay, I got hundreds of responses or forms of acknowledgements. With TinyTIM, I got one or two. After a while, I realized it wasn't as much fun or rewarding. So, after much personal thrashing, I walked away. The breakup was not amicable. But the game continues to exist, although not anything like it was.

WD> How long did you work for Psygnosis? Your role at Psygnosis has been described as technical support. I suspect that what we understand to be technical support in 2006 is different to 1995. Please explain your role?

I worked at Psygnosis for about a year before Sony (the parent company at that point) moved operations to the west coast, away from Cambridge, MA where I worked, and so the company closed. I then worked for a small start-up in the same office with some ex-employees, but it didn't take off. It's hard for me to imagine how different things are between then and now, because I'm sure the drive to help was there; you either want to help these poor people calling or you quit (or get promoted away). I loved helping people. I loved the sound of relief when I started to tell them how to get around a tough puzzle, or to get their machines to boot, or how to get into the system to figure out why the game wasn't working as well as it could. The Psygnosis US office was small enough that we didn't go crazy over metrics (amount of time per call) and while we were sometimes inefficient about that, we made a lot of people happy. I was in it, of course, because I loved the idea of working with Psygnosis; truly a peak in my lifetime.

WD> You have spoken at every DEF CON since 1999 and numerous other conferences. When was your last speech? And what was the subject matter?

My last speech as of this writing was 'A History of Hacker Conferences' at Shmoocon 2006 in January. I expect by the time this shows up, my big talk will be 'The Great Failure of Wikipedia', being given in the beginning of April at Notacon, in Cleveland. I encourage people to check the site for that con out at www.notacon.org. Good people. Good times.

WD> You made a documentary - BBS: The Documentary. It took you four years to complete and it was premiered at the 7th Vintage Computer Festival. Why there?

The Vintage Computer Festival rules; an absolutely great time. At some point, I think Sellam (the organizer of it) floated me trying out some footage there, and I said I would happily premiere a 'beta' version of it. So I did that, and the feedback from the crowd changed a lot of how the thing ended up being at the end. So it was a perfect match, passionate geek folks seeing a geek movie.

WD> As I mentioned earlier, it took four years to make. Why so long? And why were you so willing to give so much time to the project?

Two main reasons: I have a day job which limits the amount of time I can spend on my travelling and other hobbies, and the pure mass of interviews (over 200) just took a long time to accomplish. And I was going to do 400! As for why, I realized that if this wasn't done, then people who had a vital influence on BBSes and therefore the Internet were not going to get their time in the sun. By getting this stuff on video, I knew I'd be able to do something to 'save' the history of that time beyond just some lines in the back of a telecom book.

WD> Why are BBS's important? Are they still in use?

BBSes are just an electronic extension of communities, of people communicating, and of the human need to gather and trade their knowledge and stories of their lives. It's a basic need, and the bulletin board systems fulfilled that need. While some of the aspects have changed (people generally use internet connections instead of dial-up telephone lines, and HTML rules the day on web forums), the basic paradigms of electronic messaging are still there, still running, still making a difference in people's lives.

WD> Did you run your own BBS?

I ran a BBS for two years called The Works, in 914/New York State, Westchester County. Like a lot of young kids, it went down when I went to college.

WD> What sort of market do you think a documentary with such a specialised subject will find? How have sales fared?

Sales have fared well; I made back production costs within three weeks of release, and the rough numbers go into six figures. I think there's a great market for a well-told story about anything, really. I don't pretend this movie is for everyone, but people who have seen it who weren't forced to see it by others, give me very strong positive feedback. For its 'market'/audience, it is just what folks are looking for. It's what I was looking for in 2001, before discovering there wasn't anything like it. It's not for everyone, but because of that, I could make it so that it would do what it does, very well.

WD> Can you give some examples of the things that the documentary brought to light without ruining it for those who haven't seen it?

Oh, there's a lot. If people remember or know of BBSes, then it touches on subjects that haven't seen a lot of documentary/movie footage about them: XMODEM. 300/1200 baud. Ward Christensen. Fidonet. Boardwatch. Phone Phreak BBSes and 'Boxes'. Cracking/Pirating Apple II software. ANSI Art and the ANSI Art scene. Just everything around BBSes that I could fit. It's 8 episodes long, totals five and a half hours between them, and has tons of bonuses. It's a lot of stuff.

WD> You have written a lengthy essay about BBS Documentary being a Creative Commons. Could you briefly explain why and what do you consider the future of Creative Commons and copy write law?

The essay is a huge one to distill down but I can try. Basically, I am a big fan of being consistent where possible, and it's kind of hypocritical to tell other people that they should share their works and then not do it with your own. And having made an actual 'thing', these hours of episodes, I was big into the idea that when the time came to release them, I would not place the same amount of restrictions on them that copyright law in the US allows. As a copyright holder in the US, you are given an enormous amount of tools and privileges to defend your work, literally for decades beyond your own death. I think, personally, that essentially to protect Mickey Mouse for the Disney corporation, the copyright law has been rendered meaningless, and too easily ignored in the same way that you ignore the babblings of a crazy person. To have that opinion, however, you have to be willing to back it up with your own stuff. So I did. Creative Commons is an interesting solution to the copyright situation; offer, openly, alternate copyright contracts with the world that limit the creator's hold over the works. For a creator, it makes them kind of nuts, but all charity is a little nuts. In my case, I knew it was silly to tell people not to copy my stuff. It was by geeks for geeks and geeks love to share cool stuff. So I got shared, a lot. I estimate it's been downloaded by well into the tens of thousands. That's really cool. I get fanmail. I can't speculate how copyright will continue in this country, but I can go to bed at night knowing I did the right thing with my own stuff.

WD> Many people feel Wikipedia to be a wonderful thing. However you have had some issues with it. Why?

I direct people to my essay, 'The Great Failure of Wikipedia', or my talk on Wikipedia I'll be giving at Notacon, which will be available on archive.org and other locations. It'll say it better than any paragraph or two I throw out here. But I will say this: It IS a wonderful thing. But sometimes even wonderful things can have a dark side or cause as much trouble as they help.

WD> Is there anything in existence that you feel compares favourably to BBS?

Strange way to phrase it. I really like the way things are now, with near-instantaneous downloads of what used to take days. I like some web forums, some chatrooms, I really do like a lot of everything out there. The key is not to act like it's supposed to replace or be the same as BBSes. It's another thing, another situation, which comes down to the same: meeting and interacting with people. And I love doing that.

WD> You are the man responsible for textfiles.com. How long have you been doing this? What does textfiles.com do?

I started textfiles.com in 1998. I did it because I had a nice collection of old BBS-era textfiles, and I wanted them 'saved' by putting it on the Internet, since a lot of them missed out the chance to be transferred to websites. I think that little mission has been very successful; millions have been to textfiles.com since then. Since 1998, textfiles.com has had a lot of success, and also the mission has grown to kind of all sorts of computer history. So as time goes on, I just keep expanding, keep looking, keep adding. I currently consider it the best thing I've done.

WD> You've been involved in the 'scene' for twenty years. What do you consider the key moments?

My key moments are going to be different than others. People can look up the history for themselves, but my key BBSes that affected my early online life were: Sherwood Forest II. Sherwood Forest III. Osuny. The Safehouse. Dark Side of the Moon. Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Works. The Emerson Wall. ARGUS. People know them or they don't. They're like family history.

WD> Your next project is Get Lamp. What is it about? What do you expect to discover?

GET LAMP is about Text Adventures. Think Adventure, Zork, Scott Adams, Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, Inform, and so on. Kind of strange, I know, but it's going to be really enjoyable interviewing people. I think the kind of personality who can write a story/world where they have to anticipate every possible thing a reader would want to know about is a fascinating personality type. I expect to meet a lot of that sort of personality.

WD> When do you anticipate its completion?

I won't even try. The BBS movie was supposed to be two years. Look what happened. I just encourage people to check getlamp.com and ask to be notified.

The Scanination and the Burnination

So Redwolf's watermarking mania cranked me off on the 10th of March. From the 10th to the 11th of March, I finally sat down and scripted a bunch of back-end process to finish a previously dormant project, digitize.textfiles.com. This is a "money where my mouth is" website that would have digitized material, without watermarks, as well as the full TIFFs available for archivists and maniacs.

I finished this project on the evening of March 11th and mentioned it on my weblog.

On the 12th, waxy.org mentioned it. Then the MAKE zine Blog mentioned it. Then a bunch of other weblogs picked it up. digg got it.

Then CNET called. Then we started to get a little pounded.

By the time OSNEWS arrived with their own gang of hit bats, over 12,000 people had seen the website. TWELVE THOUSAND.

It's not really slowing down yet. It's happening again and again; someone goes "Wow, neat shit", and then passes it along to enough people that someone who has a prominent position somewhere lets their audience know about it and it bounces out into the world's face again.

The reason why, of course, is that this is, in its own way, interesting stuff. Either the images are eye catching, as advertising was meant to be, or they show a historical situation, like price or design. Maybe people spy a name of a company long gone or unlike how it was back then. Or they remember something from their own childhood, an image or phrase that makes them feel young again.

That's the great thing about museums. They range the gamut of reactions and emotions, just by people witnessing the exhibits.

Ironically, I've had a number of people contact me about sending me stuff as a result of seeing the digitize.textfiles.com site. And then, in some cases, they ask if it's OK if they can watermark what they send in! I link them to the appropriate weblog entry and say no, no it's not OK. A few have decided to strip their watermarks and send me the originals. A few are up in the air. But I'm holding firm on this, so no need to waste either of our time if you buy into vandalism.

In its short 9 days of existence, the DIGITIZE site has added over 215 pages of scanned material. I have a lot left to go. I've purchased a better flatbed scanner that arrives tomorrow. I am on the beat.

But what about my documentary? Well, that's where things dovetail nicely, because I had on my plate the project of scanning in dozens and dozens of text-adventure related material for the use in the documentary. Guess where it's all going!

And how do you keep track of this stuff flying in? Well, that explains last night's project. I spent a little while coding in Bourne shell, and I am happy to announce that the DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM website now has an ATOM feed to tell you when I've added new material! This is the first main textfiles.com site (outside this weblog) to have such a feed, and likely more will have them over time, but until then, get your newsreader, subscribe to the feed, and you'll know when the latest ads, brochures and manuals join the pack! I promise it'll be something you'll enjoy.

As for the stuff itself, I suppose I could fill ASCII.TEXTFILES.COM with endless yammering each few days about what I've added, but I think that my energy can be better spent elsewhere. When I add a new piece, it'll contain a few lines from me about why it got scanned or what I think about it, and I believe we'll leave it at that unless there's another factoid or relevant essay I want people to know about.

A lot of these have very special personal meaning for me, hence my keeping them nearby for over 20 years. (Some of them I've kept for 25.) So while there's historical meaning in a grand sense, a bit of these are like baby pictures; I remember being 11 and knowing that I was going to get one of these things, whatever it was, or that when I was older I would learn how it was done and make my own. Many of them were programs or products that I hoped I would be there, at those places, being a part of this wonderful colorful world.

And you know what? In a way I am.

Just to switch gears slightly, I wanted to just mention how that whole collecting all of the podcasts project was going.

It's going very well.

I have thousands of different podcasts. I have many tens of thousands of individual episodes. I have hundreds of gigabytes of shows, sermons, mixtapes, chats, you name it. It is a spectacular success.

It's all very scripted and I stress that I put as much energy into this thing on a daily basis as, say, one would putting on their socks in the morning. It's really that far in the background.

Recently, however, I had to start figuring out someplace to store them as I was filling hard drives quicky.

If you want all of the kind of finger-in-the-air pontificating that geeks are truly capable of, far beyond which operating system is best and which computer language will keep you in Cheetos for the rest of your life, just start discussing storage, especially long-term storage.

For my own part, for this project and the amount of money I am willing to throw down on it, I am currently using DVD+R discs.

I have finished a bunch of interrelated scripts that move 4.5gb chunks of podcast into a place for me to burn into two copies, which I store in different binders, and which have unique IDs on them. The MP3s or other files on the podcast directories are then replaced with a short paragraph of text, saying, basically, "this was burned to Disc ID whatever, the MP3 file that was here was this long (minutes and seconds), this big (bytes) and here was anything like ID3 tags." In this way, I can be sure of keeping track of what was downloaded, while freeing up 2-10mb space with a 500 byte pointer file. Which I also back up.

At some point, I'll likely switch to other medium, like maybe just buying $50 hard drives and storing copies off to two of them and then storing those hard drives. Freaky, but it might be good.

Long-term? Do I think this medium is "archival quality"? Am I sure it'll be there in 100, 50, 10, 1 year?

NO.

But at least I'm trying.

That's all I can do.

I'll happily make copies of what I'm doing for any entity that wants this, as long as they cover medium costs, and maybe time if that ends up being significant. Libraries, universities, people.... you know where to find me!

And so it goes. The scanination, the burnination, the infiltration. I'm having a wonderful time. Archiving is my passion. And there's so much cool stuff out there.

If I had a family crest, it would probably say at the bottom, in big letters:

"I WILL HOLD IT."

The Passion of the Scanner

The glory of online life is how easy it is to have two parties, who from any distance would appear to be the same person or type of person, learn how much they really don't get along. Such was how my Friday was spent. But hold tight through our little online battle, because you benefit from it.

I often post little jibes or comments across weblogs throughout the world, either saying something trifling or dumb or maybe attempting to make a point. As mentioned in the previous ASCII entry, I don't like watermarking. I especially don't like watermarking when the party watermarking doesn't actually have any ownership rights over the watermarked item, whether it be scans or films or any online properly. I find it both harmful to the original item (which is now vandalized) and rather base of the people doing it, since they're basically using someone else's work to further their own (financial, material, social) ends.

Sometimes this merely bothers me, and sometimes it really irritates me. Such it was when a relatively new weblog, VintageComputing.com, run by 24 year old "RedWolf", started posting some enjoyable scans of various ads and magazines up... but smarred with watermarks. Big honking watermarks. This weblog only started late last year, so I figured I'd have a chance to, you know, nudge things into proper perspective. As it turns out, into proper perspective isn't where things went.

The entry I posted a comment on was this one. You won't see my comments there because they were ultimately deleted. You also won't see the back-channel e-mail that resulted, until now.

So, at the risk of making myself seem over the top on a minor issue (which I personally don't consider minor), I present to you the online debate of Jason Scott and Redwolf over the issue of watermarking. All postings are real, all rescued from my own save-offs of the conversations. (I really do archive most everything.)

We begin with my simple post on the aforementioned weblog entry:

Jason Scott Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 6:45 am
Please stop watermarking your scans.

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Jason, thanks for asking (albeit a bit tersely).
Perhaps someday I will release all my scans in a watermark-free archive for you to download and save forever (then eventually make a site about based on my scanning work), as I know you must be itching to do. Until then, just enjoy them for the moment as temporary entertainment — or better yet, scan them yourself and you can have them in any format you want. I’m all for the preservation of history (in fact, compulsively so), but without some exclusiveness to our ad scans, they would be worthless to us to provide as entertainment. People would instantly copy them and pubish them everywhere else without giving us any credit for doing the research and work in documenting them. I know you probably have good intentions, but I can’t say the same for everyone else out there.

Jason Scott Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
Your thinking is short-sighted, ineffective, and belies your youth.

To wit:

You provide no exclusiveness to your ad scans; the watermark you use is particularly ineffective against a driven entity, since it’s merely an overlay of a font logo over the graphics. It’s quite undoable.

But beyond the ease with which it can be removed, that still a step that most won’t wish to deal with, so likely it would remain. In fact, this is where your first point is wrong; smarring the images with your logo will not prevent distribution; you lack the legal capacity to mount lawsuits against other sites that would be putting up your jpegs. So they will continue to be distributed, en masse, as time goes on. All you do is make what might be the only scans of these images of a poorer quality.

You are a person with a scanner; this hardly entitles you to placing a “signature” on the items; you are in fact on the edge of copyright infringement by scanning in copyrighted works from magazines. Why go further and place some sort of “ownership” mark on something that isn’t yours?

What dark contigency do you think you’re protecting against by vandalizing the scans? Are you concerned of lost ad-clicks, of lost pop-up revenue? Are you worried that it will be thought that some other entity had the ability to use a scanner, stunting your future career path?

Reconsider your position. It’s flawed and needless, considering your obvious love of the subject at hand.

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Our use of scans of advertisements is within our fair use rights under US copyright law. I believe it is also our right to “vandalize” them with our watermarks. The claim has never been made of ownership of the scanned materials or that we alone have the right to control the distribution of the scanned ads. They are merely presented for consumption with a logo bearing the mark of the publisher. You can distribute them all you want, but they will still have our watermark on it. Feel free to remove them if you wish to take the time. Our content is designed to be enjoyed on our sites, no where else. Therefore if the presentation of the scanned materials looks flawed elsewhere, that is fine by me.

If my work with a scanner were useless and of no value, then neither I nor the editor of GSW would waste our time publishing my work. The time and effort I put into researching, compiling, scanning, and commenting on the materials I scan is worth something. In fact, my articles incorporate the scans into a new piece of art (my column), and that is also well within my fair use rights. You likely look at the scans as something you just want to download and preserve out of the original context in which they were presented (again, my column, which constitutes a “new work”), while I look at the scans in the context of the comments around them, as a monolithic piece of entertainment writing that should not be broken up. If I were mindlessly scanning ads and shoveling them in your face without the added value of commentary or filtering, then yes, I would just be a “man with a scanner.” But it looks to me that you are just a man with a “download button” who has no appreciation for the entertainment I am attempting to provide.

If my mission were to document and historically archive for all time the ads I was scanning and provide them as a historical service to the community, then yes, my position on watermarks would be flawed and needless. However, we in the US who want to make something of our lives have that “dark contingency” to deal with…called capitalism, that drives men to make everything you consume as entertainment, including the movies, music, games, computers, and BBS software you love as well (don’t even get me started on the medical technology that has likely saved your life many times over). Take out that “dark contingency” and you’re living in the Soviet Union circa 1970. I for one like it here in the US. If you don’t like it, move to Cuba or just shut up.

Jason Scott Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
There is no need to wave the little red flag at everyone who disagrees with you. Taking a two-tone approach to the world (you agree with my opinion or you are a communist/anti-capitalist) doesn’t win you any arguments, and belies, once again, your youth.

Part of that youth appears to be an unawareness of copyright law and of the use of specific terms; for example, calling yourself a “publisher” in this context is a bit of a stretch. You are not a publisher, having not created the work, gotten license to publish the work, or, it is assumed, paying the original creators of the work for any monetary recompense you are gaining by distributing the work. Similarly, your tossing around the term “fair use” is flawed, considering you’re using the works for (self-admittedly) financial gain and not for any academic, parody or journalistic purpose.

You are throwing around “entertainment” as a shield that would protect you from being considered an infringer of works, and that’s a weak shield indeed.

Leaving aside your fat-fingered grasp of the legal and economic situations you are in and portend to, I am surprised to hear of your dismissal of both historical and archival efforts, considering you have “branded” yourself as someone who appreciates “vintage” computers and history.

Are you saying that your entire motivation for this ongoing project is financial? Were your initial weblog posts merely filled with keywords intending to drive hits to your site? I don’t mind someone being out front with their motivations, and will file you along with the spam weblogs that collect every ad-click-relevant term they can under one leaky roof, but you seemed to have a different motivation, and I’m sure Simon thought similarly. It seems a shame that we would be both wrong.

Bear in mind, sir; I am your audience. And I am disappointed.

At this point, we switched to e-mail:

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:41:16 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads argument

Jason,

I apologize for disappointing you. I do love what I do (the blog) and do
it because I love it, not because of money (I won't make any money on it in
a very very long time). However, I do wish to eventually make money doing
what I do, like everyone else. That doesn't make me evil, and of course,
you wanting to be a historian doesn't make you evil (or communist) either.
My comments on Cuba and all that were off base and I apologize -- I think we
both got a little over dramatic with our verbiage. I still do not agree
with you regarding watermarks, but I do not wish to make an enemy of you.
Indeed, there are already too few enthusiasts out there to do that. I'm not
sure how we could compromise, but we could at least agree not to fight about
it, and I could delete all of both of our comments on VC&G (that contain our
arguments) if you agree to it as well.

If you really want access to my scans unmodified, I am willing to provide
them to you without watermarks, providing that you don't turn around and
publish them somewhere else instantly. Forget all that "fair use,"
"copyright," "publisher" talk, etc., I just want to protect the work I put
into doing it (at least for a short period of time), whether it's legal or
not (I of course, think it is, but we should put that aside, as I assume you
don't really mind that I am trying to entertain with these ads). I hope you
can understand that desire, and I hope we can, in fact be friends.

Let me know what you think,
Benj (RedWolf)

A second e-mail followed the first:

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:06:39 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: jason@textfiles.com
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

Jason,

As an extension of my last email to you, I thought about it some more and
decided that I will no longer watermark the images of ads that I put up on
GameSetWatch. I have deleted our argumentative comments on VC&G and
replaced them with a message saying that I will no longer watermark them. I
apologize for all the comments I made and would like for us to be able to
put this behind us and be friends. Sorry, again, for all the trouble.

Benj (RedWolf)

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:20:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Jason Scott
To: RedWolf
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

Are you saying that you will continue to watermark the ads that you post on
vintagecomputing.com?

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:25:01 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: Jason Scott
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

I'm not sure. I'm thinking about not doing it on VC&G too, as it is a
logical extension of my other statement. But think about this: would you
rather have the scans, provided as entertainment and with a watermark, or no
scans at all? I do put work into finding and scanning them, and I want to
get credit for that. Like I said, they're not random scans of ads
(especially the VC&G Retro scan of the week), but ones I have spent many
hours going through my materials to find entertaining ones. Is the work I
put into doing that worth nothing?

Benj

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 17:42:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Jason Scott
To: RedWolf
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

You are asking me to validate your value structure, and as had already been
proven in our public conversation, they are absolutely non-compatible. So
that's probably a dead-end to go down.

Your argument is what I call the "heavy lifting fallacy", which says that if
it's a lot of effort to lift a TV out of a store at night and get it through
the broken window, you've somehow "earned" the ability to own the TV. Your
ability to spend hours poring over someone else's hundreds of hours of work
and cherry-pick decontextually amusing pieces does not earn you anything, in
a grander sense. So no.

And as for the "scans with watermarks" or "no scans", I would choose no
scans, since damaged goods are often accepted by people in a general sense,
obviating energy spent to do scans down the road.

Your work is in your descriptions and writing about the scanned art and text
you are appropriating, including any ancilliary funds you acquire from your
writing skills and, apparently, driven hits to your site, since you've
chosen to go the advertising route. I have no issue with your own take on
the works and your writing regarding them. That is journalism, creative
writing, and most importantly, yours. The art is not. No amount of effort in
finding the art makes that different.

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:00:55 -0500
From: RedWolf
To: Jason Scott
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

Jason,

You are a smart man. But in my hasty, inferior, unwise, and youthful
judgement, and in light of what you have just said, I have chosen to change
my mind again. The watermarks will stay. Nothing personal. I really do
like your analogy about stealing the TV, though. I just wanted to tell you
because I have respect for you as a person and didn't want you to think I
was lying earlier when you see watermarks on the next scans. I'm also sorry
to have lost a reader. Please do not sling my name in the mud; I will not
sling yours. We can both go our separate, supposedly mutually exclusive
ways.

Thanks for the enlightening conversation,
Benj

Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:03:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Jason Scott
To: RedWolf
Subject: Re: VC&G Ads Argument

It is quite something that one person's criticisms could make you act as you
have today.

During this conversation, Redwolf modified the comments area on his weblog entry, deleting all of our comments and adding the following two comments:

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Just as a note, there was a long argument here about watermarks that got a little overblown on all sides and I sincerely apologize. You win: I will no longer watermark the scans of ads I put on GameSetWatch.

RedWolf Says:
March 10th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
I will also no longer scan anything because, according to Jason Scott, my value as a researcher, scanner, and commentator on the scans is valueless and “anyone can do it.”

Ultimately, of course, he removed even these two entries, leaving the entire conversation socked away from prying eyes. This is my main reason for "un-socking" it on this weblog.

So there we stand, with Redwolf sinking back into his self-made goulash of Adam Smith capitalism, squatters' rights, and dismissal of goals, and I continuing to harken out my shrill calls of historic consistency, archiving, and some nebulous motivational cloud of "the greater good". From any vantage point but our small arena, we surely seem the same sort of person, but I contend that, ultimately we are not at all.

So.

As I wrote in an essay a while back, I am never content to leave arguments with myself holding a negation (don't do it) or someone else holding the negation (you shouldn't do it) without, instead, redirecting that energy into something productive, with an extra bonus if the resulting project leaves the watching public richer for the effort.

I therefore now announce DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM, a fast-growing collection of scanned TIFFs, JPGs and PDFs of historic ads, catalogs and brochures. With hundreds of megabytes of scanned items in just the last 24 hours (this is what I've been up to), I now present you the beginnings of my own massive archive of watermark-free, entertaining, enjoyable pieces of the past, most of it going back 20 or more years to the innocent days of the dawn of home computerdom.

I'll likely cover a few of these items in upcoming weblog entries... and I hope you all enjoy them.

Under the glory of the Red Flag,
Jason

A Few Handfuls of Flung Mud

I put in the hours; I spend a lot of time doing stuff for the various textfiles.com projects, documentary research/work, and assistance (behind the scenes) of a number of other altruistic endeavors. I get to shoot a few arrows once in a while. Here they are, all presented in one convenient package instead of blown across a pile of weblog entries. Maybe I'll make this a yearly thing.

Librarians: I Generally Don't Like Them

I was pretty stunned when I went down to the Princeton Public Library to give a talk about the BBS Documentary. I met something I rarely encounter: a happy, self-effacing librarian. His name was Robert Keith, and he was great to interact with and talk to, and totally on top of everything. As he proudly toured his excellent library for me, I was taken aback at how nice the whole place was, how much they thought about what was good for the patrons (again, this was the public library, not the University library), and how much they worked to make it a place you'd want to go to again and again.

This is not my usual experience with librarians.

In high school, my librarians would clip out photos or articles they thought inappropriate for students; nothing like opening a magazine and finding actual physical gaps in your reading material. I've watched libraries dump piles and piles of paperbacks, manuals and hardcover books to make room for, among other things, CDs. There's a book by Nicholson Baker called Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper which makes any reasonable person want to take a Duraflame log and smack the involved parties across the face.

I find a lot of librarians really want to be gatekeepers; deciding what's important, granting people access to their "incredible skillsets" and otherwise playing paternalistic/maternalistic control games over the information in their empire.

I read a few weblogs that piss me off, just so I can remember that not everyone is Andy Baio. One of these is Jenny Levine's The Shifted Librarian, which is right up there in terms of self-important gatekeepers who want to hand out the world in dribs and drabs as they proudly "discover" stunning "new" technology like RSS. Out of my fuckin' way, please, I have stuff to do. As an extra bonus, she links on her front page to Why You Should Fall To Your Knees and Worship a Librarian, a self-important essay of proportions my tiny mind can barely comprehend.

Here's what I do: I collect, I assemble, I give away. Repeat. Forever.

Watermarking: Because You Own a Scanner

There are a huge collection of folks out there who dance on the razor's edge of intellectual property. They do it for a variety of reasons, but some of them do it to "save" the history. So explain to me why the hell a place that would scan in old material would feel the need to watermark up the stuff they scan in? Vintagecomputing.com isn't the only one to do it, they're just the most recent (the editor started his weblog late last year). What the fuck? Why does your ability to operate a scanner and get your hands on old stuff suddenly entitle you to spray your flash-in-the-pan site's logo across all the graphics? Is it to drive hits? (That is, make money off your site.) Is it ego? (People should know that when the chips were down and someone had to plug a scanner into a USB port, you were the man in charge.) Or is it just because you think that's what has to be done? Either way, stop that shit. Save history, don't try to become it by waving your site's scrotum over someone else's artwork/effort.

Amateur Time-Management Coaches

Few thematic responses drive me more crazy in message bases than "[Person who did project] has way too much free time." I see a lot of amazing stuff out there, both online and off, where someone dedicated a few hours across a few months to a project. The same amount of time you might dedicate to, say, getting a basement clean or writing out Christmas cards. Whether it's porting the game of Doom everywhere or building a church out of legos or draw something incredible using MS paint.... well, why the hell shouldn't people chose to do that? Is it some sort of crime?

When I worked as a temp, I was often given jobs that just skirted the edge of requiring meat to complete the task; I had one job where I was to answer any call that came through a certain phone, write down the number of the person calling, and then call an assigned on-duty lawyer. (This was so a legal team could be off for the holidays and still seem like they were right there, on the ball.) I did this for 5 days; I sat at a desk and waited for a phone call. Two came in across that 40-hour time period. Two. This was before one could assume there was Internet of some sort at every desk.

How much better that time would have been spent if I could have built a car-flinging trebuchet?

I don't expect people to stop this lame "criticism" any time soon, but there you go. It drives me nuts.

---

Well, that's a load off my chest. How about you?

A History of Hacker Conferences

I finally got around to uploading the History of Hacker Conferences speech I presented at Shmoocon:

http://www.archive.org/details/200601-shmoocon-hackercons

This has been edited for smarts, so I don't sound like a complete idiot, only half of one. You either enjoy this sort of historical talk or you don't; this is not my favorite talk I've ever given, mostly because it's two talks and I didn't have the nuts to split it like it should have been. Next time I won't make such a mistake, or I'll just make them podcasts or something.

I mostly edited out poor phrasings or pauses, not any major content.

At Shmoocon, they scheduled me up against Dan Kaminsky. I had 12 people in the room with me as a result. This means a whole 12 people have experienced the speech before this, and they get to hear how different it is after going through the Jason Editing Machine.

This is the talk that announced hacker.textfiles.com.

Enjoy!

First Weekend

This entry is mostly my giving back to all the people, the filmmakers and fans, who want to know about the projects I've done and the current one I'm doing. Here's how the first weekend of filming of GET LAMP went. Some things went wrong, some things went right, and I learned a ton. It gets technical in some places, as I'm explaining what my thinking was. Feel free to ignore these parts if it's uninteresting and focus on the pictures.

I had decided almost from the beginning of the research phase of the Text Adventure documentary that I would shoot in high definition, likely through the HDV standard, which is kind of a cheaper way to shoot high definition at the cost of a few aspects of color space and resolution. My intended camera at the time was a Sony Z1U, which retails for about five grand before extras, and which would work well with the editing software I use, Sony Vegas.

Towards the end of 2005, I became aware of another camera, the AG-HVX200 by Panasonic, which is essentially a high-definition big brother to the DVX-100, the footage of which I've seen and which, to my eye, looks very much like film and very beautiful. Within a short time, I decided the AG-HVX200 was the way to go. Unfortunately, the camera, which had been announced as being available at the end of December 2005, was dribbling out to the world in very small shipments.

My original plan had been to wait to get this camera, get the necessary stuff, do some test shooting to learn how it works (my way of doing this is to blow out a fun little short film, like a kung-fu scene or a music video) and then prepare for the movie itself, and shooting locally before travelling out to the more distant locations.

This all got blown out the window when I discovered, in January of this year, that Mike Berlyn was leaving the country, and possibly not returning. Mike Berlyn is the author or co-author of a ton of text adventure and adventure games, like Oo-Topos, Suspended, Infidel, Cutthroats, Tass Times in Tone Town, and Dr. Dumont's Wild PARTI. He was a "critical interview", one where people would ask "So, why didn't you get that guy?" if I didn't have some footage of him. While it would certainly be the case that I could do the film without a few "critical interviews", it was worth my while to be able to get as many as possible. (The BBS documentary missed a few, but got a bunch of others, which I can live with).

Mike and his wife Muffy were leaving in the beginning of March, having sold off their home and most possessions, and had no timetable for ever returning. I asked if I could come interview them at the end of February, and Mike agreed.

The first thing I did was get on the waiting lists at three different Panasonic dealerships, one in Oregon, one in Texas, and one in Massachusetts. None requested money down, and all were selling the camera I wanted for about six thousand dollars. Thanks to the Adventurers' Club, this was not a scary amount of money to face. So I got on the lists and waited and bit my nails.

Meanwhile, I contacted a couple other people to interview; a teacher named Jon and Alexis Adams, who co-founded Adventure International. I scheduled them for the Sunday after the Saturday with Mike Berlyn, so I'd have a lot of space to do Mike's interview.

As luck would have it, Omega Broadcast Group got a HVX-200 in and offered it to me, and I purchased it immediately, paying extra to have it fedexed to me the next day. So I was out six grand but with a very nice camera to show for it. I'd already bought a new wireless clip mic for people to have as well as the boom mic I have normally recorded with, allowing me double the protection to get the sound right. And I'd bought a few other new items, like a carrying case and tripod and so on. So ideally, I was now set for Florida.

But.

Now, here's where it gets complicated. The HVX-200 doesn't take tape. And what I mean is, it DOES take tape, but not to shoot in high-definition. If you use tape, you can only record in standard definition. If you want to record in high definition, you have to use one of three mediums, currently:

• P2 Cards, dedicated cards that can record the video, and which you can transfer to your laptop.
• Hard Disks with specialized cases that can stream in the video from the camera
• A laptop running the right software (currently certain editing programs like Avid Xpress or Final Cut Pro.

Of these, the Hard Disks are actually the most cost effective, but they don't currently exist, and don't expect to until sometime March at the earliest. The laptop is a good second place, but the software you need to buy to get the streaming video is currently between $1200-$1400, and that's because you have to pay for the full editing package as well as the capture utlity... but I just want the capture utility! I edit my own way, with my own software that doesn't currently capture the video from the camera I own.

This leaves P2 cards. P2 cards are really frigging cool. You plug them into the camera and record silently. When you press the record button, it's instantaneous, because the camera just starts shooting data at them. And you can hot-swap them. And view the scene you just shot in real-time, skipping around to different cuts within milliseconds. It's very neat.

It's also astoundingly, astoundingly expensive. An 8 gigabyte card, which will hold 20 minutes of 720p video (which I am shooting in), costs $1400. FOURTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS. This is down from $1800 earlier this year. If you can live with half that, ten minutes of 720p video, it's "only" $675.

It is not realistic to shoot less than an hour at a time. So that's $1400 x 3. $4,200. To be able to shoot an hour of high definition video. That is insane. That is not valid.

Now, it was Monday before the shoot that upcoming weekend. So, completely walled in, I chose to try to rent these cards.

As it turns out, there's a great local place, Rule Broadcast Systems, that rent and sell video and audio equipment. They're tip-top quality. They also had both an HVX-200 for rent, along with the cards. The question was, could I rent just the cards?

As it turned out, I could. After going through a credit/professional check, I was able to rent 4 cards, two 8gb and two 4gb, from Wednesday afternoon to Monday morning, for about $460, including insurance and a couple other fees. This was great, giving me time to experiment with the camera, learn how it all worked, and so on.

The thng to note here, however, was that I had basically given myself less than three days to try out my equipment, learn how to use it, find the best settings, and practice my arranged settings before setting off in a plane to Florida to do a one-shot deal interviewing someone who would not be available again. The potential for disaster was great. And as it turns out, I met that potential.

After a whirlwind of practice, I flew down to Florida. As mentioned before, I hate flying, but we had a great deal on JetBlue and I tend to enjoy those flights because they have DirectTV at every seat and TV does a great job of making me forget I am about to crash out of the sky. I got through the flight, as I always have, eventually.

In Florida, I booked a hotel room and tried out all the equipment. One of the lights died on the trip, but that's the way it goes. It just needed a new bulb. I experimented with recording myself, setting all the lights, and sound, and so on. I needed hard drive space outside of the 80gb my laptop had to dump these cards, so I bought two 300gb external seagate drives at a nearby Best Buy. I tried everything out, and figured I was somewhat in good shape.

The next day, I called Mike Berlyn and got directions to the interview location.

The interview itself went great. Mike was patient, friendly, and helpful as I stumbled along with my new setup. I found the new setup somewhat clunky and weird, and I had a hell of time getting the sound right in an appropriate way for the situation.

After the first 30 minutes of interview, I checked the footage on the laptop and found it was too dark. Way too dark, almost unusable. The sound was good, but not the video. I made the right fixes on the camera and we shot for another hour. Later, I found out the clip mic was set wrong and that sound was distorted, but the boom mike picked him up perfectly, so we had great sound, as I cut out the bad channel.

There are ways around the dark footage. I have the sound, so I can just put the sound in with other footage (scrolling shots, photos, and so on) and get around it. I've done similar before. It's not the end of the world.

Mike and his wife Muffy and I had a lunch at a local diner, and then we did some more interviewing. It all went well, we covered some great subjects. They were kind, gracious and absolutely wonderful to do an interview with.

The photos and a couple screengrabs from the interview are here: http://www.getlamp.com/photos/000berlyn. The whole page needs a little bit of tuning but you get the idea.

The next day, I interviewed the other two subjects. One of them, Jon, is a teacher who used Text Adventures in classes. We had a real fun time, covered a lot of ground, and had some fine pizza delivered in.

Now, this is key to understand:

The interview with Jon is not usable.

I messed up. I set something wrong, and the sound did not come out right. A dumb mistake, the kind of mistake that you wouldn't make if you had a camera for more than 3 days before shooting with it. But I made that mistake, and I have to live with it, with an interview that didn't come out. I felt depressed about it that night, and then called Jon and offered to fly him up later in the year to Boston, my expense, put him up, and re-interview him. To make things right, because his story was cool. Later in the year, I'll have my act together with all the equipment and we'll nail it.

I mention this, make this admission, because I want people out there making films to know this sort of thing happens. I am a veteran of over 200 conducted interviews. I shot hundreds of hours of footage, and had years of training, and this mess-up still happened. I leveraged the lack of experience with the equipment for the quality of the shots and the ability to interview someone before they were gone forever, and in doing so, there was collateral damage. It happens. It doesn't mean you should give up, or walk away. It means you get to try again. You take the shot, give it another try, you keep moving. I'll keep moving.

The sum total, however, was positive. The critical interview was gotten. Of the other two interviews, the third came out "pretty good", as I'd made the same mistake in sound but the setup made up for it and I can save the sound without any problem. So the result was that I got a few hours of good solid interview.

A few scrapes, a little clang, but the ship has sailed. I've started the GET LAMP documentary. I am taking a month to get the rest of the equipment I need (the external camera-compatible hard drive) and then I will begin filming in earnest. I will be doing this at least until the end of the year. I will push on. And I will finish it.

It's never easy. I just want that known. Don't think it ever is. I save money by having a one man crew, but I also open myself to risks of mistakes because I have nobody to double-check my work. I take this balance and do my best. If you're out there, making your own sets of risks and benefits, you're not alone. Keep it going. Just keep it going.