ASCII by Jason Scott

A Quick Endorsement

I just wanted to drop a note about a company that's been helping me a bit lately.

Textfiles.com has gone through a number of hosting situations over the years. The material's all over the place, I get tens of thousands of visitors a day, and basically I'm just a huge pain in the ass compared to your garden-variety website that sells hats for cats. For a while, I ended up hosting it in my basement, but that of course killed the incoming line and I couldn't do much else.

I started getting a really great mirror with a place called TQHOSTING, who took on some mirrors of the more popular sites I'm running. I have a machine hosted with them, and the price is solid, and the attitude great. While I never throw all my eggs into one basket, this particular basket is good for a lot of the eggs.

I've been with them for a good amount of time now and things have been great, and since they just ramped up for more business, I thought I'd mention them and send some people that way, since it might be easy to assume I have two settings of opinion with hosting: "Blows Goats" and "Neutral". In fact, I also have "Great". And I've found tqhosting to be great.

Ant Farm

Around 6am on Tuesday, the cache.cow.net machine started crashing. It crashed a half-dozen times this year, increasing in frequency, but this was the big one, and the box stopped successfully checking the filesystems properly. They simply couldn't be fixed and the machine would no longer reboot.

This box does a lot, so I couldn't just leave it down, so off I went to CompUSA, bought about $600 worth of future server, built it, and had it all back within a day. Mail works, websites work, but my galleries are down and will probably need a rebuild. On the other hand, this is a much faster machine and the disk space has tripled to over a terabyte.

This machine is an ant farm.

It's existed in one form or another for about 11 years. It has been a bunch of stuff, starting from a Sun 3/280 to a Sun 3/60 to a few Linux and FreeBSD boxes. At one time it cost money to be able to use it for user accounts. Now you have to have either helped me with things or be related to me. Most people have drifted away to other places for their work since web space and bandwidth have become so cheap. But a few stay around.

There's the website for my brother's gardening business. (If you live in Dutchess County, NY, he'll kick your landscape's ass.) There's my my longest and closest friend's weblog about not writing. There's an ultrafiltration company run by my ex-girlfriend's parents. In fact, the ex-girlfriend has an account here too.

That's not counting all the other websites on here: my Psygnosis tribute page, cd.textfiles.com, and a few sites that I absolutely refuse to explain.

Some people still send me a few dollars every year to keep things up. Others don't pay at all. A lot of the free accounts were people who gave me assistance when I ran a short-lived ISP in 1995. I said "you get free accounts for helping me". Talk about backing the right horse!

When the machine has gone down, they come out of the woodwork. The ant farm has it's side opened, and you can see all the little lives and activities that are still occuring on this box, even after a decade and so many moves. Little businesses, weblogs, music libraries, photos and mail, passing by. The mails that come in, asking what's up with the broken machine, range from meekly curious to humorously snide. Some are friends I would never call friends now. Some get phone calls from me every week. It really does range like that.

Naturally, I have archives going back to the beginning, snapshots of this machine as it travelled between hardware, gained users, lost sites, and so on. I'm keeping the history close to me nowadays; I've gotten a lot better at that.

All of these incarnations, all of these lives are on this little place that isn't a place, this little collection of heated and spinning metal that I keep running, year after year, probably until I myself stop running. It's interesting how that all has worked out.

So things are back to normal now, in fact, some bits are running better than they ever have thanks to the improved hardware and space, and the art farm's sides are closed up again... until next time.

Bucks

I spent a lot of money this week.

Don't cry for me, of course. I don't overextend myself when I spend money in droves and I don't bet the farm on long shots. Even if the BBS documentary never made a dime, it would have set me back about the same amount as if I'd been building a kit car in my garage. That said, it was nice things have turned out as they did, since that enabled me the funds to start working on another one.

Anyway.

When I started work on GET LAMP, I had a number of ideas. I have learned something from projects I work on: if an idea scares me, it's an idea worth investigating. Ideas that make you comfortably sit back and be pleased with yourself are probably firm, solid, predictable ideas, but it's the ones that make you shiver and feel like the floor is shifting that have a great chance of amazing success. Some of the scary ideas I had in the past were putting the BBS documentary on 3 DVDs and making it 9 hours (it ended up being five and a half), and making such an overelaborate packaging. I like scary ideas.

I've had a number of scary ideas for this documentary, and one of them was to shoot in high definition.

In the beginning, I was going to go after HDV, the quasi-hi-definition format that has caused a little burst of improvement in video quality. You can get amazing shots out of HDV cameras. I was specifically looking at a little number made by Sony called the HDR-FX1. It's about three grand and shoots a high definition format, and can store that format on DV Tapes. Money saved, money saved. It's totally compatible with the video editing software I use (Vegas) and it had a bunch of example shots and footage that looked good. So even though going high definition was a scary choice, here was a firm, solid, predictable idea.

But then I heard about the Panasonic HVX-200.

I'd already seen what the DVX-100, the standard-definition ancestor to the HVX-200 could do, how it make things look. I really wanted that look, which is very cinematic and subtle, but wanted it in high definition. So the announcement of the HVX-200 was great. It was to be released on December, 2005. So, that would work out for my scheduling.

Unfortunately, the thing was retailing for $5,995. That's a ton of cash.

As a result, I proposed the Adventurers' Club, a way that people who liked the work I did on the BBS documentary could throw some money my way, and get a few bonus items when the movie came out: 3 copies of the final project, the first copies that were distributed, and their names in the credits. Oh, and of course a copy of the BBS documentary immediately, so they got something for the movie.

Doing this raised me $5000 in two months. Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet. I really appreciate all those folks stepping up and saying they believed in me.

So, in January, it became obvious that:

• The camera wasn't really coming out in December. It was more like February.
• The camera was going to be in random places with random waiting lists.
• The camera was going to cost more than $5995 when you put in the other stuff it needed.

Now, in February, I had an incredible opportunity come up, to interview the author of Suspended and Infidel, Infocom Implementor, and 25-year game veteran Mike Berlyn. Mr. Berlyn was going to be leaving the US and travelling, with no set schedule to come back. He had sold his stuff and was going native elsewhere, and so if I wanted to interview him, it was now or never.

So I got the camera by hitting a half-dozen stores every day (it arrived about a week and a half before the shoot) and I went to a local great rental place called Rule Broadcast to rent all the rest of the equipment I would need for the shoot. I estimated that to get to the equipment I needed for the shoot would be another $3,600. I didn't want to spend that extra money.

So I went down, did the shoot, got the footage. Some of it's a little messed, but there's tons to use for the film. It was, ultimately, a success. I got back from Florida and returned the equipment, and waited for the price on stuff to go down. I waited for further equipment to become available.

February became March became April. Now I was 6 months away from where I'd first annouced GET LAMP and only had about 4 hours of footage to show it. Not good. Not right.

So, this week, I bit the bullet. I bought the stuff I needed.

Here's the secret about the Panasonic HVX-200 that Panasonic is not making clear. It is not a $6,000 camera. It is a $10,000 camera. You can't use the camera properly without expensive "P2" cards, and it's not a good idea to shoot without the "P2" store, a very helpful little bit of equipment that's used to store the content of the P2 cards so that you can store the data away immediately while still shooting. There are external hard drives coming, but they are going to run into over a thousand dollars as well, more in the range of two.

So between everything you need, seriously, we're talking about ten grand. I don't mind this, but I would have preferred that Panasonic make this clear. They do not.

So, this week, I am buying the additional equipment I need:

• 4gb P2 Cards, which store 12 minutes of footage: $650 apiece, had to buy two.
• P2 Store, device for saving off data on P2 cards, $1500.
• Battery for P2, because I got it and surprise, no goddamned battery: $120

WHAP. $3000 down. One week. On top of the camera and other stuff I got.

Now, ideally, this camera will last me through a couple documentaries, so that's one cost down in the future. Also, most of the main people I want to interview for GET LAMP are in New England, so travel costs are shrunk. And this should all be the lion's share of the money I spend on it, outside of the eventual distribution.

But where the BBS Documentary was amortized over 4 years, this documentary is taking a massive money hit right in the beginning.

But you know, I look at some of the footage I shot, the stuff back in February, with this camera, this Scary Idea I pulled onto. And you know what?

I was right.

That is not a photo. That is a screenshot.

That is what GET LAMP will look like.

So that's it. Filming begins in earnest next week.

Podcasting

I've finished uploading the second talk (actually the first, chronologically) that I gave at Notacon. It's called "Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts" and I gave it on the Friday before my Wikipedia speech.

The archive.org page for downloading it is here.

Compared to the Wikipedia speech, this is pretty fluffy stuff, mostly traipsing around the subject and the history of podcasting, with a bunch of other trivia and subjects thrown in. Some people who've never heard my talking style before the Wikipedia speech who might download this one will be surprised at how much slower I talk in this one. Others, though, are probably happy I stopped talking as fast as I did in the Wikipedia speech.

The actual thing that interests me about this recording and speech, though, is how it was accomplished. You're hearing a speech recorded using wireless mics I bought for the Text Adventure Documentary, which are feeding into a digital recorder I also bought for the documentary (and a few other projects). Let me go into audio nerd mode for a moment, since some people care about these details.

The wireless mic is connected to my lapel and runs down to a transmitter next to my left pocket (as I mention at the end of the speech, Notacon staff wired me on the right side with a different wireless setup to go to their cameras and mixing board, so I was one wired up bastard.)

The microphones I use are called Sennheiser EW-100-G2s. The digital recorder I have is called a Marantz PMM671. (I call it the wrong model number in the recording).

Hence, when I listen to this talk, I'm actually less interested in the content than how good it sounds. You can hear me very clearly, you can make out the audience just enough for you to be aware I have one, and the thing just does not distort. The PMM671 records everything to a SD card, and can hold about 3 hours of audio, which it stores in .WAV form. The recorder also has a USB port.

So, basically, I could finish my talk, walk over to my laptop, and have a 300mb .WAV file of my speech. Done. That's fantastic.

What I used to do was put my camera up on the podium, aimed at my stomach, and then record that way. This was uneven at best. Sometimes it came out great, and sometimes I'd wander away from the podium and I'd be screwed. No such problem here! It came out just fantastic.

There were two other official appearances I made at Notacon. A game show called "Wait! Wait! Don't Pwn Me", hosted by Nick Farr of the Hacker Foundation, and a panel called "Hacker Media". I will likely upload the panel, but not the gameshow. No reasonable person wants to watch this gameshow, trust me.

It feels good to be back in the swing of collecting and working. I've moved a lot of gigabytes this week, and intend to move a lot more. Expect digitize.textfiles.com to get a mass of new scans, too.

The Stacks

"I see you're working on digitizing stuff," John told me in IRC. "Do you want some of my magazines? I was really hesitating about throwing them out, and you can have them instead. I'd prefer that."

"Of course!" I said. "I'll pay for shipping."

"There's a lot of them."

"I'm fine with that."

While I was away at Notacon, they arrived. They ALL arrived. All NINETY POUNDS OF THEM.

What John sent me was a massive treasure trove of 1989-1995 era gaming magazines: Electronic Gaming Monthly, Gamepro, Electronic Games, Video Games, Video Games and Computer Entertainment, Nintendo Power and tons of one-offs. This represents hundreds of magazines. The photo you see is just what fit in the camera shot. There's a lot more.

Some are worn to faded softness from years of being read and re-read. Others are like I stepped through a door in 1992 and then came back in clutching my newest issue of Gamepro.

As time goes on in the life of a collector (or archivist, as I sometimes call myself), these sort of things happen more and more. Additions come in the form of boxes or van-loads, not single pieces. I still get plenty of single pieces and want them, but I took in 50+ CD-ROMs recently that went on cd.textfiles.com and of course I am always being sent ZIP archives of people's old hard drives. This is what happens, and I'm quite happy with it.

You can be quite assured that I will be digitizing lots of ads for digitize.textfiles.com in the coming months. Currently, however, I am going through these issues looking for stuff relative to both GET LAMP and the Psygnosis Tribute Site that I run.

I see many fine memories and surprises ahead.

Isn't life wonderful.

The Great Success of the Great Failure

I did a lot of stuff at Notacon 3. I helped get a radio station up and running. I was in a game show. I moderated a panel on Hacker Media. And I did two presentations, one on a history of Podcasts and one called The Great Failure of Wikipedia, a sequel/elaboration on the weblog entry I put on here, so very long ago.

Today, I uploaded The Great Failure of Wikipedia to The Internet Archive. You can find a link to the presentation here: The Great Failure of Wikipedia (April 8, 2006). It's in a bunch of formats, from WAV to OGG to FLAC to multiple forms of MP3. It can be downloaded and it can be streamed.

I'm very happy with this speech. Like others, it was done off a prepared-on-paper-then-memorized outline, with parts added and deleted as I went, depending on crowd reaction and final consideration. I hit all the major points I wanted to; if people agree or disagree, they're doing so based on what I said, not what I forgot to say or didn't mean to say.

People get a little emotional about Wikipedia and some attacks may come as a result of this, but oh well. I'm over it. I consider this one of the better presentations I've done out of the dozen or so I've given at conventions. And I don't give the same speech twice, so this is it. I can live with it, especially considering how well this one came out.

A lot of people thought I was going to attack Wikipedia as being "wrong" and something that should be "stopped", which is a useless argument/approach to take, especially if you're into freedom of expression. My main thesis is that Wikipedia's initial design and architecture, which is now changing constantly, failed to take the reality of humanity and the way people interact with information into account, and in doing so, has wasted a nearly-incalculable amount of energy and has betrayed, to some extent, it's promises, credo and goals. You know, minor stuff.

Anyway, check out the speech and enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed presenting it.

Update: Someone was kind enough to transcribe it for me.
Another Update: And then "Judgmentalist" took it and made it a PDF. Thank you!

Bummer!

Internet Archive notifies me when someone posts a review of something I uploaded to the archive. You get told someone reviewed it and a link to the entry. Someone decided to review one of the raw interviews I uploaded, an ANSI artist named Tracer, at the end of the BBS Documentary run (I believe he's basically the last one I did).

The entry and review is at http://www.archive.org/details/20040308-bbs-tracer but I'll just post it down here. It's from someone named "Pole":

Reviewer: Pole - 1 out of 5 stars - April 4, 2006 Subject: Improvements

I have now wathced a couple of the bbs interviews, but i'm becomming increasingly frustrated... although the topic matter interrests me i cant help but get really annoyed.
some tips:

1.Prepare questions,

2.Show examples of the art or whatever is talked about.

3. Edit the interview! not everything the guy says is interesting, and what the interviewer is saying is just horrible

4. Dont call Errol Morris a "nut"... he is after all one of the greatest docu directors on the planet... i'm surprised that the interviewer had actually read anything about Morris but then dismissing him as a "nut" thats just ignorant...

5.Find people that you actually want to listen to speak...

1 Star for the topic matter.

sorry for the outburst but i got really frustrated by this one, especially because i thought the topic was interesting..

I posted a response, but no idea if it'll show up properly or what the deal is with reviews on Internet Archive. On this weblog, at least, I can stretch out a response, and I think this situation brings up some important points of discussion.

I knew I was taking a slight risk uploading the full interviews of people onto archive.org. The most obvious is that some people would misunderstand the point of doing this, what I was aiming for, and so on. And then to go through and just start ripping on me, well.... like I said, bummer. Not "and I refuse to upload any more" bummer, but just a big "aw, man" while I'm trying to get work done.

Each of the interviews I did (over 200) were conducted under wildly different circumstances, different reasons, and different motivations. In the beginning, of course, I didn't know what sort of documentary I was going to end up with, so people are asked all sorts of wild questions and all sorts of subjects way outside of their "specialty", simply because I didn't know how much footage I'd have at the end. By the end, I have basically all the footage I need, and we're down to me experimenting with the subject to discuss various already-established themes in the documentary to see what they could add to it.

In the case of Tracer (the interview in question), there are several factors that are perhaps not so obvious, or even possibly obvious.

• He was not all for doing this interview; he was basically asked to by RaD Man.
• He hadn't been involved in ANSI for basically a decade, and had done a lot of other stuff since then with both running businesses and a full professional life.
• He honestly didn't remember a lot.
• He had things he needed to do later in the day.

All of these factors add up to a bunch of motivations and situations that I, as someone who was a hardened veteran of many interview setups, had to deal with. And here's what was involved in that.

Some interviewees who wanted to be in this documentary (or my more recent project) have a "story" they want me to get or capture. Maybe it was how they met their wife, or how they had a great success, or how important the subject was to their life, and so on. Sometimes, they know there's a classic "perception" of the subject that they want to dispel. In other words, they wish to be interviewed because they want to give a speech.

Others have been contacted by me or arranged to be contacted by me. I am saying "I have something that I want to talk about with you on camera, and I would appreciate some of your time talking about it. I'll stop by." This is, obviously, an entirely different situation for them.

If the person is 'famous' or a figure of some known import, the dynamic is changed; they have nothing to prove, they know they're "known" for the subject, and they've probably been interviewed about it a number of different ways and have distinct opinions or pre-set micro-speeches.

If the person is not famous and not known for a subject (many of the people who I interviewed, this was their first and only video interview for anything), and I've contacted them to be interviewed, then we have an unusual situation indeed. Tracer was one of those, and there were probably 10 or more of those.

Turned around this way, my style in this interview maybe makes a little more sense. I ask questions of the person, questions they've never had asked of them, and I listen to the answer. I do not have pre-set questions that I click down on, bang bang bang. I instead have a conversation with them on camera, knowing I can clip things down. I had a number of anecdotes/stories that I had at the ready to talk about, and I would tell them, waiting for the person to go "hey, that reminds me!" Some of the best stories you hear in the documentary are from the person going "hey, that reminds me!" and just blowing me away.

But I could see where the unedited interview is boring as dirt to some. Because it is. It's the rough sketch, the subtle dance, the blocking of movements trying to see where things go. Maybe the story in Tracer wasn't ANSI, it was about being online. Maybe it was about knowing himself a little better because he could express his skills in ANSI art. Too many times in this world we think of a person as a "thing" and don't realize they have a life and story outside of the "thing".

If it sounds weird and artistic... it kind of is. I'm thinking of giving a talk on this at a conference at some point.

But back to the misunderstanding.

It's heartbreaking to think someone is pulling these down and expecting them to be completed productions, with editing, subtitles, clips, and all the little slow parts removed. That so wasn't the intention.

The intention was to make available, in basically full form, an interview with someone. Warts and all. Their warts (except where they slandered or otherwise exposed themselves legally without knowing it) and my warts, including my long questions, or my changing the subject matter, or otherwise being who I am.

Imagine watching the filming of a situation comedy, a production that normally runs an hour, but also including the script reading session, the rehearsals, the pre-taping discussions, the bloopers, and the full final shots. That'd be a lot of footage. A lot of it would be boring. Some of it would be pointless. You'd watch some and go "aaa, you're doing it wrong" and then later they'd fix it but you had to sit through all those mistakes.

If you were watching that footage expecting to see a situation comedy, then you are going to be miserable. You are not getting what you expected and even if the footage is useful in a hundred ways (here's how a joke changes, how actors prepare a scene, how a production company sets up shots, how a show is made), it was useless for the way you wanted it.

So it breaks my heart to see these sorts of reviews. I spent 8 months turning the 250 hours into 5 and a half. And they think I didn't spend any.

And I knew there was a risk showing my mistakes or my long monologues or the interviewee forgetting things or mis-stating facts or all the other little irritations and inevitable human aspects of these tapes. I knew the risk was, in a world where everything is pre-baked for you and you just have to press the button and set for three minutes, that I was going to make someone think I couldn't be bothered enough to "fix" the stuff.

But that wasn't the point at all.

When I took an interview of someone that went on for two hours and used 2 minutes of it, I cut out a ton of stuff. Sometimes it was cheddar, of course: us discussing where to put the lights, the person asking me for prompting of remembering an obscure software product, me telling them what I intended to do with the documentary. But other times it was sublime, a person would tell a two minute story (which therefore became not usable for the films) that was intense, informative, endearing and real. And in a regular production, you'd never hear it.

A lot of times, we'd touch on subjects outside the area of bulletin board systems entirely; how some companies were engaged in questionable business practices, specific area of politics and conflict that arose from owning a computer that work paid for, taxes, what movies were playing that week... you know stuff. The inevitable result of doing this across 4 years. There is a lot of anthropological information buried in there, stuff that has a meaning greater than the BBS Documentary itself.

And sometimes, there's historical information that I had no use for, but which I'm sure someone else might. They could take the footage which I licensed Creative Commons and re-use it for their own purposes. When I was in film school and taking classes in audio production, we were given audio tape (this was some time ago) of an announcer doing the schedule of a night of television shows for a local station. He said things wrong, he asked questions, he mis-stated things, he coughed... and we were given a razor blade (this was some time ago) and we had to re-cut his takes into 30 second, 60 second and 2 minute versions. It was a great lesson. And we did it using someone else's raw footage.

Same with my stuff. I could imagine a teacher downloading the MPEG of an interview of someone from the collection on Internet Archive and saying "So, take this 1 hour interview and make it into a 2 minute feature like you might see on a news show." Since the stuff is all out there and licensed so students can do it, they can use it for resumes or portfolios and feel no limitations about this. It's my way of giving back to that group, since it helped form me.

Similarly, I didn't cut out my questions because I wanted people to know what the interviewee was responding to. If I said "what is your fondest memory of a BBS" and they talked about someone they met, you would have trouble knowing what the context was, if you didn't hear my question first. My sometimes poorly-worded, spur-of-the-moment, improvised question.

With a speech deficiency.

Anyway, just wanted to mention this. Be assured, the interviews will continue to come as I can get time to upload them. I'll let you know when the next batch is up.

Oh, and yes, Errol Morris is most definitely a nut.