ASCII by Jason Scott

The Calibration

I made the relatively hard decision not to have Vista in my home. This is tough for me, because I've been using Windows computers as my front-end to my stuff for over 10 years, and I have done an awful lot of work on that operating system family. Walking away has the potential to be difficult. (I should note that my system at my day job will probably be Vista, because it's not under my control.)

But walking away is what I'm doing; crippling cards and drivers and messing up the whole user-OS balance in the name of ensuring access to the latest Adam Sandler movie doesn't strike me as a fair deal. In fact, it has that heady perfume of a forced ass-raping, the coquettish sounds of laughter and snickering behind my back as I pay through the nose to have "approved" monitors and cables and who-knows-what-else so there's a clearly defined red carpet for major studios to protect their little flicks.

There are professional/amateur whiners better suited to make the case for why you should or shouldn't convert (upgrade's not a good word here) to a Windows Vista system. I'm more interested in the meta-situation, that of changing your operating system and what that has meant.

There are computers you touch and computers you work on/own. If you define "own" as "it was partially or completely mine, and I did stuff on it beyond testing to see if it beeped", then I have owned the following computers:

• Commodore PET.
• Atari 800.
• IBM PC (5150! I had one of the first 1000).
• Apple IIc.
• Commodore Amiga (500 and 1000).
• Macintosh SE.
• Sun 3/60, 3/280, Ultra 2 (COW.NET once ran on Sun 3s)
• SGI IRIS 3000.
• Six Billion Anonymous x86-based machines.

Obviously, as a computer historian guy who gets sent or buys an awful lot of old crap, I've "owned" a lot of other machines and my basement laboratory that I do my research in is what the experts call "chock full":

But just because I have something in my house doesn't mean that I can harken back to long-spent weekends or nights hacking away at the box trying to make things boot or try stuff out. Hence I have Commodore 64s, Lisas, Atari STs, Apple Powerbooks, TIs, and a whole other range of computerized doorstops, all waiting for their short moments in the sun when I boot them up to test a theory or try some donated software. You can rest easy, Fan of Your Chosen Old Computer, that I've definitely played with your favorite platform or machine. But when I say "own", I meant it was in the bedroom or the office, not the basement or attic.

As should be obvious from the last few paragraphs, I love these fucking things. Just adore them. They've ruined my vision and they've horrendously inflated my sense of self-worth and social context, but it's a fair swap. I'm fine with the damage they've caused because of all the weeks, nay, the years of what they've given me in return. The chances I'm going to wake up one day and go "Gaaahhh, what have I done, I have wasted my life" are very unlikely, at least as far as blaming computers for any of it. I state it clearly: I am a computer guy.

Therefore, what computers I'm doing "stuff" on are very important to me. I have been expressing myself using them for a quarter-century now; they're an extension of me, of what I do, how I am known, and how I know. Sometimes they disappoint, sometimes they freak me out, and sometimes they have left me shivering in my chair, crying. But other times they lift me out of myself, raise my hopes, bring me dreams to join my own. I use them for communication, for entertainment, for work, for learning. And like any tool, I can react very positively or negatively to shifts in how a given computer "does" things.

It has always been possible to configure or change a computer to suit the user, but more often than not the user has had to configure or change to suit the computer. There's a big difference between prodding around in the back of a circuit board to solder in a modification that lets you change how memory works, and plugging in a USB device that immediately adds a new port or peripheral.

In the rush to define themselves, home computers were more often than not "open" affairs, where the best and most successful plan was to focus on getting the things out cheaply and to as many distribution networks as possible, not to lock the thing down. There are, of course, exceptions to this everywhere, from the demand that Macintoshes have no slots to the artifical limiting of memory in Commodore computers to ensure future models would be purchased. But you didn't feel, at any point, that the computer was "against" you, just that the company was being a short-sighted basket of fuckfruits to make a few extra bucks or cut down on maintenance calls.

But bear this in mind: if they could have, they would have. Texas Instruments tried to control the market for TI 99 cartridges so that you couldn't have third parties come out with cartridges without paying TI. Atari sued the first third-party makers of cartridges for the 2600, Activision. (Activision won). Situations like this occurred in mainframe eras too, with IBM pounding the stuffing out of "IBM-like" resellers or vendors, or charging significant amounts of cash to "upgrade" a machine by removing a wire inside, unblocking access to additional capacity. What I'm saying here, is there's no Garden of Eden situation with commerce and machinery/computational hardware, just periods when the greed hammer hadn't yet pounded every potential nail.

That said, just because the situation has always been around, doesn't mean you have to swallow it like a tasty gumdrop, either. If something you buy doesn't work the way you expect it to, if it turns out that you were promised one thing or given another, or if you realize you're being slowly cornered into someone else's revenue stream and they're pissing away freely into it, you can mostly say no. Or at least, you can try, and not just live in a constant BOHICA mode, getting slowly drunk on bad beer and thinking that singing along with songs on the radio constitutes freedom.

The vital situation, the step here that I think Vista finally took, was turning what was traditionally "your" computer and "your" operating system, and vitally shifting the total balance of power to where you were now a "user" like a junkie or lab rat is a "user", not like a bulldozer operator is a "user". You got voted off the island. You were charged for a membership to the club but you can't use the steam room. Meetings you weren't allowed to attend and which claimed to be in your best interest were adjourned and the minutes all said the same thing: Praise the user's money. Fuck the user.

Windows XP, this previous revision, had a measure of dumbassery I could live with. It'd bitch like a kid who lost his ice cream cone when I installed certain pieces of software, but then it'd let me do it anyway. It would slow down noticably after a few days of being up, and occasionally would go into conniption fits when I happened to request a thumbnail of a movie with whacky codecs in it. But it was possible to go play whack-a-mole with processes and bring it back to some level of normal. And it was comfortable, and I could do stuff on it.

And like I said before, it's not like this stuff hasn't been creeping up, nesting, making little catacombs in your freedoms as a user of technology. You can point to End-User License Agreements and maintenance plans and nutbag intellectual property laws and all manner of maneuvers conducted over the past few decades. They were all there, but like a lot of people I mulled them like water buffalo down the hill, knowing in the back of my mind that those fuckers were eventually going to stampede and possibly trample over something I cared about. It was just a matter of when, and whether I'd be around for it.

Well, I'm officially around for it. So !VISTA NO!, if you please.

Some time ago, I started putting more and more of my efforts into working in FreeBSD. Textfiles.com is basically a BSD shop, with my scripts and programs for mantaining it all in BSD and with the applications that people connect to also in BSD. I rsync. I work in Perl, script in bash. A lot of my "work", therefore, is not on the Windows boxes on my desk but downstairs on the BSD boxes or across the country on same. I've been splitting my efforts for years, in other words, spreading the love around, embracing computers but not just the one that plays a chord when it boots up.

So then the question becomes what exactly do I do in Windows? This is the calibration, the tough part, the self-assessment of realizing what I do. Here's my list:

• Edit my video.
• Master DVDs.
• Burn DVD-ROMs and CDs.
• Connect to IRC.
• Telnet or SSH to other places.
• Web browsing.
• View PDFs and Flash Animations.
• Play music or movies.
• Write in notepad.
• Play demos or games.
• Variations thereof.

Immediately, we see stuff I can do equally well on a FreeBSD box: ROM burning, IRC, ssh, telnet, viewing PDFs/flash, web-browsing, writing in a text editor, play music or movies. There's almost no definable difference between doing it on a Windows box and a box running a X server. The only reason I don't do that now is because the Windows boxes are the ones on my desk.

The others are the sticking points. Video editing and DVD mastering persist because I've really grown comfortable with Vegas. I really like the way it does stuff. I like the speed, the ease, the way I work with it. I've grown comfortable with it. The demos and games, well, that's because they're written for Windows, right? They use the Windows stuff and so they won't run anywhere else.

So there's it. I am basically on Windows because I want to edit video and play a few games. (In marketing terms, these tasks/attributes are "sticky".) That's not very much, is it? If I got comfortable with Adobe (which runs on Apples) or any of the free video editing software programs that are getting progressively better, I could ditch that part of Windows. And the demos and games? Well, I could probably just watch the demos at work occasionally, or at a friend's house, or something similar. That's hardly a reason to keep around a system, just to play a couple games. Hell, if I got my hands on an old copy of XP (when it becomes old), I could probably just keep that in a separate partition, dual-boot or use a vmware-like thing, and then play the stuff that way. I'd have choices.

And there we see; a little time of thinking and I can know exactly why I'm staying and how easy it is to leave when I'm ready.

It took me quite a while to compose that list up there, racking my brains for what I actually do instead of just saying "I need Windows, so too bad about the raping." I would start to consider what I thought was an intractable, Windows-only thing, and then I realized there were free programs, running in a BSD system, that did the exact same thing out there. Often better. (Sometimes not better, but good enough).

It is very uncomfortable distilling your life, your love, into a little list. But when you do it, you realize what's really important to you, and you can step forward and make decisions based on facts, not hopes and rough sketches.

There's a big difference between a vista and a horizon.

The Wikireporter

For reasons that become less clear with each passing day, I have a feed coming from Wired News. I think part of it is a nostalgia regarding how Wired used to be when I first stumbled upon it when I was 24, and the other part is that over time I've appeared in it. And don't think I don't appreciate that very, very much.

But in my battered and arrow-pierced helmet as Wikipedia Critic, I can't help but be particularly galled by the efforts of one Tony Long, cub Wired reporter (actually, the Copy Chief), whose stories keep showing up in my feed reader, along with all the other ones.

I happened to click on one, found the article a little short, and then, at the bottom, the dreadful words: (Source: Wikipedia). Well now, that's fantastic; next I'd be inspired to have (Source: Guy I Know). I simply assumed he was on deadline, had to shoot some thing at his editor to make them shut up, and then he'd get back to, you know, work.

Wrong. Here's some articles from the last two weeks:

• Jan. 28, 1986: Challenger (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 24, 1848: Gold! (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 23, 1978: Pfffttt.... (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 22, 1984: Dawn of the Mac (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 18, 1911: Clear the Deck (Source: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 17, 1985: Please Hold (Souirce: Wikipedia)
• Jan. 15, 1969: White-Knuckle Ride (Source: Wikipedia)

Notably, none of these articles are listed as being "written by" Tony Long; they're marked off as "compiled by", as if the Herculean effort of going to en.wikipedia.org and pressing Open-Apple-C deserves the same nomenclature as contacting a series of individuals to create a summary. Those graphs and charts in a newspaper that show clearly what happened in the last 20 years in a subject, or which show exactly which states have the most beehives? That's compiling.

Obviously, newspaper journalism has a long and studied history of just yanking whatever comes down the newswire or which goes by on TV, and then just printing it, meaning something completely wrong or misheard can become canon. My favorite band, Negativland, did an amazing album about this whole phenomenon called "Helter Stupid". Check it out sometime.

But even if this is the usual way of doing business, there's something about the wikipedia angle that irks me. I think it's the fact that the use of Wikipedia as the primary (and only!) source for an article is considered kosher enough to credit it at the bottom, and this is A-OK.

We do this everywhere: claim something is still being worked on, acknowledge it's got some pretty major flaws, promise we'll work them out in the future, and then dump more and more infrastructure on it. I guess it's what people just do. But doesn't mean I have to like it.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Lyons Pinball

I had a very successful weekend in Colorado. I got to interview two interactive fiction authors for GET LAMP, and even got in an interview with an arcade owner for the arcade documentary. As previously stated, if I can fit in something for ARCADE, I do it, but never at the cost of a text adventure interview. This is why when I was just in Chicago, even though it's the center of the coin-op universe, I only filmed text adventure authors this time through. One of the Colorado-based IF authors, Robb Sherwin, was kind enough to point out the existence of the Lyons arcade near where I was filming, and after some contact with Kevin and Carole Carroll (the owners), an interview was arranged the same weekend.

If you don't want to wade through a bunch of paragraphs being sold on this place and why you must immediately buy a plane ticket or get into your car and go there, I'll just give you three words: Joust Pinball Machine.

Only 402 were ever made. All of the surviving ones are in the hands of collectors. It's one of the rarest machines to find. And you can walk right in the door and play one. I swear to you, I was sure that I was going to take a dirt nap long before ever getting near one, much less be given the opportunity to play one. Not only did I get to play, but Kevin gave me a tutorial and matched me up against another regular, so we could go head to head. Oh, did I mention the Joust Pinball Machine is a head to head pinball machine? You might not have known that, which I inferred because you're still reading and not in your car driving directly to Lyons, Colorado.

Lyons Pinball is the dream and family business of the Carrolls, who were inspired to open it by the sight of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. This isn't some worn-out busted pinball hall gripping onto its last days; it was opened just 4 years ago, designed from the ground up to be a primo pinball location. The arcade is open 4 days a week; Kevin explained to me how they spend the "closed" days performing maintenance and upkeep on the roughly 40 pinballs onsite. Their policy and promise is "100% maintained", which means that when you walk up to a machine, whether it's 10 years old or 40, it's going to run properly and not ruin your game with a stuck bumper or broken flipper.

The machine selection's great; besides a wide range of pinballs including Black Knight, Theatre of Magic, Cyclone and Eight Ball Deluxe (Limited Edition), they have the almost impossible-to-find-working Discs of Tron in an environmental cabinet, as well as the equally-rare fully-working Hercules by Atari Pinball, the largest commercial pinball machine made. (It uses a cue ball for a pinball).

Here's a couple screengrabs from the interview, with Kevin in them, next to a few of those well-maintained machines.

Wait, are you still here? When's your flight?

The Very, Very, Very Long Tail

Like a lot of people on the web since 1993, I have a semi-static defunct webpage about myself located on my cow.net website. (I think the fact I own the domain COW.NET also indicates how long I've been around.)

On the COW.NET page about myself, I welcome people who are browsing, and invite them to "buy the T-shirt". This was just a throwaway statement, a little joke. Sometime later, I heard about this new company called Cafepress, which takes your images and allows yourself or others to purchase items with those images on them. Since I thought this was pretty funny, I created a "Storefront" with a Jason Scott image.

And then promptly forgot about it.

Almost seven years later, I got mail from Cafepress, saying "You really need to clear up your mailing address and some other account information before we can pay you." I went and checked, and I guess I was owed money for all those sales! So I filled out the crap and then forgot about it again.

This week, this showed up in my mail:

Drinks on me!

Vaguely avid readers might note that I do my best to avoid fad jargon, those phrases that weblogs like to use to seem hip or at least cynically superior to others by keeping track of whatever twisted refashioning of language is hot this week. I sometimes fail, of course, but I really do my best.

However, I can only imagine that a certain percentage of people would look at my mad sack of cash and say "That's the Long Tail at work."

If you've not heard the phrase "Long Tail", therefore, let me summarize it as best I can: A guy from Wired is making a living selling people a fucked-up bell curve. Or, if you prefer, we've acquired a new messiah who says, in book, weblog, magazine and audio form, that Given Enough Time, You Will Eventually Sell All Your Stock.

The "long tail" is the slow, steady trickle of people wandering into your virtual (or real) storefront weeks or months or years after you set up shop, and finding that they still want your product. If you make a graph of sales, this drawn-out plateau/line resembles a very long "tail" attached to that sweet, sweet lump of sales at the beginning of the graph.

If reading about it makes no sense, don't worry; there's a website, article, book and walrus all explaining the concept in intricate detail. OK, fine, the last link doesn't give you anything but a walrus.

I mostly ignore this whole fad because it has the same attributes of a lot of classification fads, that is, a lot of obvious statement followed by a branding which is then used by person or persons capitalist-minded to cash in on the resulting rush of interest. This is how downloadable recordings became "podcasts", adding a comments section became "peer-to-peer collaboration", and how, way back in 1998, removing the "(y/n)?" from downloads became Push Technology.

Unfortunately, I'm now seeing it leak into an area I care about, namely, moviemaking. Long Tail Wired Dude made this entry about making a "Long Tail Movie". As far as I can tell, his brilliant idea is to make shitty movies cheaply and make back the meager budgets by never throwing away the stock.

Because what we need are more people whipping out lame, fastly-produced shit and demanding twenty bucks.

The best part about "The Long Tail" as a "movement" is that, like Humpty Dumpty, you can make the word mean whatever you want it to mean. Anything where something takes a long time to run out can be a "long tail". Any case you have trouble with sales after the initial curious rush of people is really a case of you exploiting the "long tail". If you sleep with someone a lot and now not quite so much, your not getting some tail is part of the "long tail".

I'm not saying the concept doesn't have merit or isn't in some way true; I'm just saying it's another case of rebranding being used to grab concepts and then market them into the ground. If you recognize that this isn't a revolutionary bit of thinking and is what it is, then have a great and fantastic time using the hot new fad jargon.

There, a blog fight. Where's my posse? I gotta spend this mad Cafepress cash, and I'm all about the Washingtons.

Fear

I hated a lot about the middle school I was transferred into in 7th grade. This is good, because there really was so much to hate, and it was best to get started on that right away. But let's focus on two things: computers and fear.

The school had a computer lab, like a lot of schools of its type, and in our case the lab was a locked room containing roughly a dozen Apple IIs with green-screen monitors along the walls, some long tables in the middle, and one Apple on a cart in the front that had its own monitor. This room also had a desk, which was a ludicrous addition, taking up valuable space, because this was the kind of school that figured a computer lab was just a classroom with computers in it. It was also devoid of any character; if it had posters on the wall, they were meaningless pseudo-educational crap. Or, they were something a school psychologist believed would prevent the students from stabbing each other. The view out the windows was of the roof of the school, a bunch of heating and cooling elements and the steam coming out of the cafeteria. This was not a fantastic place of computer presentation.

This bland little room was lorded over by a single teacher. I previously used nicknames instead of real names when referring to my teachers, out of some mutated sense of privacy and not giving them reason to sue me. So let's just go with calling him Mister Slick.

I still remember Mister Slick, like a beating. Imagine circa-1979 Steven Wozniak with 1/100th the computer knowledge, the same grin and beard, and with a dash of sneering superiority... and you're getting there. He was already Lord High Supreme Master Overlord of the computer lab when I started attending that school, and I want to speculate that he was the one teacher that saw these things coming in and offered to be the go-to guy for maintaining, teaching and working with them. I have grave doubts any of the other teachers wanted anything to do with the silly boxes on the second floor, and that they would bless and praise Mister Slick for taking the problem out of their hands.

His "real" classes were in Mathematics, where he'd cover the usual aspects of taking a bunch of numbers and making other numbers, a subject i've always been rather poor in. But he also taught computers, using these Apple IIs, and the combination of comedy and tragedy in these classes still haunts me.

It is a time-worn tradition for a person narrating a story about using computers as a youth to portray themselves as being the best at it and leaving everyone else around them, authority figure or contemporary, in the dust. So I will immediately say that there were at least a dozen people better than me at the school in all matters and subjects. I am not the fucking hero at the top of the heap with his sword held alight. I was probably in the upper percentiles but in the grand scheme of things I was just another 12 year old messed up nerd.

But I did like computers a lot. So that's something.

The computer at home was an Atari 800 my mom had bought for me for the holidays one year. My computer at my dad's house was an IBM PC. It was on this Atari 800 and the Commodore PET before that and the IBM PC that I'd been doing computer stuff. Before the Commodore PET came home one day, my dad used to bring home whacky little half-calculator half-computer things that IBM had lying around the research lab. I wasn't able to solder or unscrew panels, but I could certainly handle my way around a dozen sort-of-operating-systems and do programming to an extent (in BASIC). I could also rip through the source code of other programs and do that very important surgical procedure of replacing all the status messages with profanity. So by the time I was transferred to this horrible middle school, I had about 4 years of computing experience under my belt.

This was, just to give some perspective, a time when you had to get a lecture about not touching the part of the floppy disk that was shiny. A time where you had to be told to keep the disk in the paper envelope that came with it so it wouldn't get dusty. It was also a time when Mister Slick was offering to the students a special deal of just five dollars a floppy disk if they didn't have one of their own. Just five dollars! Times a hundred students. Way to go, Mister Slick.

What I remember of my classmates at the time is the fear, that horrible, sickly fear that so many showed around computers. Most didn't have one at home. Many were truly terrified of them, as one might be of an open flame or a handgun, convinced they were one wrong move away from disaster. Computers weren't wonderous toys; they were vicious tools they would never master and which would cost them grades because the big Box of Mystery didn't work in a way that made sense. Their eyes would grow wide when the floppy disk drive churned. "What's going on?" would be whispered between them as it booted. "Did I break it", "Is it supposed to do that." "Please, you use it, I can't type". I still hear those voices, if I think back to them.

The thing is, I think a bunch of my classmates were proud of their ignorance. Not knowing something, in a place where knowing things was ostensibly the goal, was a twisted sort of accomplishment, especially if you could cull out a passing grade from it. It's hard for me to really describe this pervading sense of accomplishment of non-accomplishment, but it was there, and I hated it. Learning was fun to me. To others it would just result in more responsibility, more things to get wrong, more things to not seem cool to your buddies with. Teachers like Mister Slick never seemed to get inside his students' heads about this stuff, try to help kids rediscover how big and wonderful the gift of learning was. Rote memorization and dull lectures punctuated by surprise call-on questions were the orders of the day. Every day.

Mister Slick didn't like me, and I didn't like Mister Slick. He wanted everyone in the class to know nothing about computers, so he could proudly stand at the front of the lab and tell the groups of huddled students what GOSUB was and how to set a variable. He'd put out an assignment, like writing a program to convert temperatures (with the formula in the assignment) and then he'd slowly talk people through it. Unfortunately, his pristine lectures would be interrupted by the tap-tap-tap of my group chowing through a beta version of the assignment. Guess who was typing. Since Apples would beep occasionally, his haughty monologues would be interrupted by one as I did my best to refine the now-working assignment I'd finished in the first 5 minutes of class, ignoring the tapping shoulders of my terrified groupmates who were well and truly convinced I was doing some sort of satanic spells to make things function with this box of mystery. What he wanted was a room of dull sheep. What he got was 22 sheep and one somewhat-sharp sheep. God, did he hate that.

How much did he hate that? I was given a -20 for class participation in my math class grade.

Let's cover that again. I was given a negative number for the class participation grade, chosen as such because it would drag my final class grade below the "passing" threshold.

Who does that sort of thing to 12-year-olds who are a little too far ahead in the class and a little too unwilling to sit around while the lectures cover subjects and programming skills learned years ago? Well, Mister Slick, apparently.

Ultimately, my parents angrily got the grade raised to 66, to make it so I wouldn't have to take that class and possibly that grade again. I wasn't allowed in that parent-teacher conference, but I'm sure it was as civil as could be, Mister Slick explaining in some amazing jumps of logic how a negative grade could actually exist in the educational toolbox, ready to shove into an errant student's eye. I'm sure he smiled that winning smile of his the whole way, too.

Somewhere in here, I started work on a program called "Applejack".

"Applejack" sounds like a cool keyword, which is probably why I started using it. Written in Apple's default BASIC, this program started out with a pretty cool title screen (composed of percent signs and pound signs alternating) and a set of instructions and a cool blinky menu. I was interested in the chrome and the flash, and getting it just right so that it'd be funny and neat. I got to a few dozen lines, optimizing it, trying to get it to run fast and have lots of room for expansion. "WELCOME TO APPLEJACK", it would say. "WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?" I tinkered with it, considered how to make it read and write to the disk, make it be able to take instructions to write itself somewhere and do something later, and maybe even check back with me, somehow. I had only a rough idea of what Applejack was about, and when I had time on these computers, I'd intently type this or that, testing, honing, practicing.

It is only now, looking back across a quarter of a century, that I realize what was going on: I wanted to write a computer virus. A virus borne of sadness, of hatred, of a feeling of powerlessness. A program that would listen to what I had to say, and carry out vengeance against the prideful ignorance I saw around me. "I'll show them, I'll show them all bwaa haa haa" is not a particularly complicated or insightful action plan, but like a toked-up venture capitalist, a twelve-year-old can sometimes forget the bigger picture in spite of himself.

Luckily for, well.. for everyone involved, really, Applejack stayed the way it was, a few forgotten boards nailed into a tree in back that could have been a treehouse, but ended up as nothing. An especially good outcome since the rough plan was to make the treehouse capable of levelling a city block. As they say in programming, Applejack never got any "teeth". It was a empty vessel, ready to wreak havoc as soon as I finished writing that pesky "havoc" piece that was missing.

I had so much rage back then. Rage and loss of hope. Most of my classmates, however, had no rage, just fear and lack of perspective. This was 1982. I've seen articles in the last decade or so talking about how schools have "changed", how kids are "different" and new measures need to be implemented to handle this current generation which is more illiterate, more violent, more in need of drug therapy than any before.

I don't know; I think it's the same old feelings in a world where communication is now as common as water and air and electricity. Just another resource, another thing you can just yank into your teenage world on demand. I don't think the kids are different; we can just hear them better than ever before.

I hope someone's listening.

Rock on Out to the Blockparty

Yes, somehow I'm still finding the time to continue efforts on Blockparty, the demo-party-in-the-US that I'm an organizer for. The website has a bunch of information about it, and further updates are happening shortly. Avid readers of this weblog will recall that I went off about this big project just a short while ago.

If you heard about this thing from me and are on the fence about whether to attend, this is your best time to come to the logical conclusion that attendance is mandatory. Because the hosting event, Notacon, has a tiered system of tickets with earlier ones being cheaper, it's totally in your best interest to buy tickets now.

So much for shilling. Now let me give you some good reasons to go.

We've not been sitting around, hoping everyone will grab a party hat and truck on down fueled by pure faith; We've been burning up the phone lines and e-mails trying to get some demoscene-related speakers to show up. And man, has that been working out.

To introduce people at Notacon as to what the "demoscene" is, we've brought in Andy Voss, "Phoenix" of the group Hornet. He's one of the top experts about the history and story of the demoscene, certainly in this country. And with over a decade of playing an active role in his own right, he has a lot of credit and stories to his name. He'll be giving a talk called "Allow Me To Demonstrate", which will serve as a primer on what all this stuff is.

We got our hands on Andrew Sega, who many people within the demoscene know as Necros. You know someone was a memorable musician when they have shrine websites dedicated to them. I first saw Necros at the NAID event and was blown away by his presentation. Now, 11 years later, he's been brought back to share his skills.

One of my best buddies, Trixter of Hornet will also be appearing talking about his jaw-dropping technical tour-de-force "8088 Corruption". He took an IBM Model 5150 (that's the first IBM PC, 4.77MHz CPU and all) and made it show full-motion video and accompanying sound. (!) He'll be bringing the machine he did this on and throw everyone into an old-school tour-de-force.

What I'm saying here, is we're going to make this an amazing time. It'll be worth the trip. So start pencilling in your end of April.

Here's the order page. Help me and the rest of the team make this a party to remember.

Oh, and as people are likely finding out, I just spent a full evening rebuilding this weblog from the ground up. When you're getting contacted by web celebrities that are complimenting you on your writing and telling you to change the fucking fonts, it's occasionally nice to listen.

Quag7's State of the BBS, 2006/2007

I am posting Quag7's amazing entry in the 80sBBS mailing list on my weblog, because of the sheer amount of work and thought that went into it, and the issues it brings up.

---

About 6 months ago I took a tour of approximately 40 modern BBSes. I had a nice HTML article I was writing up but then I didn't really know where to publish it.

So, while I have my thoughts together, I figured I'd write them up here.

I called these bulletin boards to try to get a sense of the state of the BBS scene. I wanted to see not only what people were doing, but to figure out why they were doing it.

One of the first things I noticed is that a lot of people run boards today for nostalgia. Sysops put their systems up to relive days gone by. And Isuppose there's nothing wrong with that, except that, it seems to me, this ensures that the scene stagnates. There's a difference between retro and retro-cool, and most boards I telnetted into were the former - dusty museums, so to speak.

It may well be that that is the fate of the BBS scene going forward. Some would say, perhaps fairly, that that is the just fate of bulletin board systems, given the modern internet and its offerings. I haven't made any conclusions about this myself, yet.

I am an advocate of the modern age, and of the future. The past is valuable because it got us here, and everything in the future builds on the present and past. I enjoy a little nostalgia like everyone else, but the reverie of these little sojourns into the past does not last long, and it is not enough to sustain me.

To the extent that boards out there now are museums of sorts, many of them succeed in that regard. The problem is, if the boards I telnetted to were at all typical, most of them lack any kind of activity.

I noticed:

Stock Wildcats. For Christ's sake, stock Wildcats were a scourge even during the BBS era, and they are mind-numbing now. I'm not sure what the pleasure is in running an unmodded stock Wildcat, other than...

A nostalgic concern with doors. There are dozens and dozens of boards out there running a lot of classic doors. And that's fine, except most of them, like the boards they are connected to, have almost no activity.

I see dead, tumbleweed-strewn Fidonet echoes. This is particularly depressing. If one thing should have survived and should still be vibrant, if the BBS scene has any purpose in 2007, it is Fidonet.

Lots of BBS networks that have no reason to exist, as far as I can tell. I'm surprised anyone still bothers.

In short, to sum up - far too many BBSes, far too many networks, far too many echoes/subs on those networks, far too many classic Doors, and not enough users.

Perhaps this is not news to most of you.

From time to time on this mailing list, the question is asked, what can be done recapture the spirit of the BBS age?

"It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation." (This is from the movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, quoting from the Hagakure. When this quote appeared in the film, I thought of two things - BBSes, and the 1960s)

This is a sad truth. But I also believe that things can evolve, and elements of every age can be recaptured, reprocessed, translated, redefined, and improved.

I sense - and this is just my own personal experience - that while the internet affords far greater resources than any BBS ever did, a few things are missing from it, and over the years, some of these issues have been commented upon here.

I would not want to go back to a time before Wikipedia, Google, Google Earth, IRC, YouTube, and so forth. (Though I would like to see things like MySpace blasted right the fuck off the internet, but that's a whole other rant).

One thing about every BBS I visited, was that it was refreshingly free of spam and banner ads, and there was a notable dearth of the subliterate knuckle-draggers you find on sites like MySpace.

I am still not a big fan of web boards. I realize that they are now the way the vast majority of the internet communicates, but they have problems (some software is better than others).

Frankly, I still think nothing beats a good Usenet client for public messaging. Some BBSes had some really usable subs, in terms of the BBS software, and I did like the navigation on those. Unfortunately, the only messages on most of these subs were from sysops.

One thing that paradoxically seems to reduce the usefulness of boards is the fact that they are accessible from anywhere in the world. If you had offered me this capability when I was a sysop, I would have jumped on it. But unfortunately, this has somewhat diluted the novelty of BBSes.

Every community needs to be built around something. H/P/A/V/etc. and pirate boards never had any need to be local; in fact, this worked against them to a large degree, because there were only so many people into these things in any local calling area. Many of those boards succeeded, though, because they had a common interest which built communities across wide geographical spaces.

Most of the boards I remember enjoying had a lot of local users. They lived in towns nearby or even went to my high school. There was a common frame of reference for schools, people, roads, towns, and so on that you could build a conversation on. It was possible, therefore, to put up a PCBoard with a name like "Somerset County PCBoard" and build an active user community around that, because at bare minimum, people lived in the same area and had similar experiences to build relationships on.

Most boards out there now seem to be unfocused; they'll take anyone, and there's nothing that particularly connects users. A lot of the boards are running stock or near stock, with few if any mods or even cosmetic flavor. There's nothing that pulls like individuals together, and keeps them coming back.

I'll ask the SysOps here - of all of the people who have ever signed onto your board, how many were one time callers, who never came back?

Running a board takes time and effort, especially if you're running something paleolithic. You not only have to deal with hacks for internet connectivity, but also unpleasant extinct operating systems like MS-DOS in some cases. I
appreciate the effort involved, but on it's own, it's not enough, unless you're just running a museum (which is fair; I don't mean to bash anyone's efforts).

On a personal level, and this just represents my opinion, I found that there was very little out there for me, personally. I was never a huge fan of door games, and probably 4 of every 5 systems that still exists, seems to exist solely for the purpose of running these doors. Message boards were dead. What else is there? File sections with a bunch of old shareware? I guess that's interesting, once again, for nostalgia, but one website with all of that stuff would be more than adequate for that endeavor.

When I brought this up to a few people, I got a "What did you expect?" response - unanimously. I expected there to be a lot of dead boards, but I didn't expect the whole BBS world to be in such a state. I guess I'm just naive or disconnected. I've been gone awhile, except for this list, and it's only the yearning for something I can't find on the net that brought me back, and brought me around to these boards.

Most boards have a bunch of echoes no one uses, along with multiple redundant BBS networks that have little to no activity. I assumed, for the first five boards that I telnetted to, that the echoes were simply broken, and weren't updating, but after telnetting around and looking at the echoes on each, I came to the conclusion that most of the networked message subs really are dead. It reminds me of the massive sad redundancies on Usenet.

I tend to think of the peak of the BBS era as being earlier than most other people I've talked to. To me, 1986 or 1987 is the year that the scene was at its maximum and most vibrant, and possibly this was because the entry barriers were still fairly high (having the know-how to configure and keep a board running) and systems ran on proprietary 8 bit systems which required a fair amount of specialized knowledge.

Kids were still getting systems for Christmas, so there was a constant influx of new users each year. What I'm trying to decide is whether or not I consider that to be the ideal period because *I* was different, or because the online scene was different. I haven't come to a conclusion about this yet.

But I miss the Spirit of '86; the sense of newness and adventure where you really felt like you were exploring every time you dialed into a new system. Often I get a little taste of this feeling late at night when I find some weird website or system to telnet into and explore. These are almost never bulletin boards, however, and they wind up being more novelty than anything else. They also lack people; characters.

I'm so bored with modern technical communities. I'm tired of looking at peoples anime wallpaper, reading about OS partisanship as an end of itself (OK mister FreeBSD, so you're all l33t cos you run it - what have you built with it?)...

I'm bored of Slashdot, bored of people with big mouths and nothing new or interesting to say. It used to be that you could potentially get your ass kicked at school or get yourself banned if you were a jerkoff on a local BBS. Sure, there were adolescent war boards, but most of them didn't last long. Sysops as cops, moderators, and appointed adults helped bring out the best of people or at least keep the screwheads at bay.

Now, though, it's a bunch of little doggies with big barks and IPods and not much else. So many of the message boards I read are full of these loudmouthed, insulting jerks who piss in the rivers they drink from, because there are no consequences to being a complete boor. These people have always been around, but there's no negative sanction for this behavior, and it's become the expected way to communicate. Disagree with someone? Flame them. It's not the abusiveness I object to - it's the *tedium* of the abusiveness. I enjoy a good flame as much as anyone else. 99% of flames are just lame. Many are unwarranted, many are trolls, and many ruin whatever worthwhile was being discussed.

Bad signal to noise ratio. And I'm only talking about people who can form reasonably coherent sentences.

http://photos.imageevent.com/revolution/myspace/www_myspace_com-jakejekyll.htm

Too many guys like this. Too much crap like this.

BBSes, because of their nature, are petrie dishes where you can, at least in theory, grow healthy ecosystems of users (they're not the only way - some decent moderation on web boards could also do it)...

I just think there's an opportunity for a "back to the land" movement here...The benefits are growing quality communities of people, but also attracting people who have been online long enough to see the ways in which online communities can rot, and can do something about it before these problems metastasize.

RESUSCITATION

If there is any hope for the BBS world, there are a few things which I think need to happen, and again, this is just my opinion, and I'm open to other suggestions.

(1) Decide whether or not the BBS scene is worth resurrection. It may well be that the only purpose for modern BBSes are to be quaint museums; nostalgic tributes to the past run by people who were there. Certainly there are some superior technologies out there now which may be so substantially superior that they cannot be replaced or replicated in a BBS environment. So that's the first thing - is there anything to be gained by attempting to revive a scene which is, for all practical purposes, dead? Does anyone have the time and energy for this? How many willing sysops would be willing to once again learn how to mod their boards and keep updating them on a regular basis?

This is not the same, as anyone knows, as updating a web page or writing another "dig me! I have an opinion!" blog (I'm not bashing all blogs, just 99% of them). So many blog posts would be fantastic as BBS posts.

(2) Consolidation. There are too many boards, too many echoes, too many networks, and not enough users. I have to assume that many people running boards are concerned with putting their name on something. What I'd like to see are BBS networks collapsed into one or two - preferably just Fidonet, and then perhaps a raunchier, more underground network. Within each network, redundant echoes should be consolidated, and dead echoes should be eliminated entirely. Aside from territorial pissings, I cannot understand why there are still a dozen or so BBS networks out there, given the number of users. There's no need, for example, to have a dozen football echoes spread out across as many networks, when there is, at most, a trickle of posts to each. Choice is *not* a positive thing when its overall effect is massive dilution of activity to the point of extinction.

What we need is more collaboration. If anything, the free software/open source world has shown the benefits of such working relationships. We need to resurrect the concept of the co-sysop. Reasonable operating systems like Linux, the BSDs, and even Solaris, are free, and allow, at least in theory, people to work on systems in tandem, remotely. Imagine if you could have 8 or 10 developers/sysops working on each BBS, in terms of moderating message bases and, perhaps more importantly, extending the capabilities of systems through modding source code? What I'd like to see are collaborative boards with ten co-sysops and no Sysop at all. A collaborative effort means you can join forces, and well-structured teams of system operators could be greater than the sum of their parts. Plus, with all of the years that have passed, I'm sure there are some fantastic ideas that no one even thought of implementing during the heyday of BBSes.

Redundancy given the size of the BBS user community is one of the biggest problems out there now. There are way too many boards, just like there are way too many Linux distributions. This is true, too, of door games and the number of people who play them. It would be far better to have bigger games with more players on fewer boards than a bunch of dead games or games with one or two players like there are now. Pretty much every BBS seems to have the same uninspiring advertisement for itself: 400 FIDONET ECHOES (all dead), 29 DOOR GAMES (all dead), etc.

The question is whether or not those with the inclination to be system operators are likely to abandon their own fiefdoms and pitch in with others. BBS message networks in general have a long history of personal politics and egos, and frankly, given the moribund state of things, those egos are completely unwarranted. A duke in a wasteland is a duke of nothing at all. One possible approach to this problem is some equality among participants, or democracy where it can be implemented without utter chaos. Does someone always need to be the king? There are other ways of running systems. A charter/constitution is good place to start, which defines ways groups of developers or co-sysops can make decisions. Government of rules, not of men.

Heh, maybe I'm just dreaming. I'd be willing though. I can't be the only one.

(3) Evangelization. Many newcomers to the internet don't even know what a BBS is. There's got to be a good way of bringing the right kind of people into the BBS world, and one way is to make BBSes retro-cool, rather than retro-nostalgic. In Jason's documentary, one of the ASCII artists (forget who) talks about the apparent pointlessness of ANSI art - like, why would anyone take so much time doing that? Well, I've always considered ANSI art cool in the way great graffiti art is cool. I have a feeling that many younger people would find it fairly cool, that is, if they ever had a chance to see it. In telnetting around, I've seen some really cool ANSI art out there (some of it original, some of it purloined from art packs). Quality ANSI speaks for itself. It could be used as the signature of the BBS scene, because there's nothing else like it on the internet. I'd like to see advertising for boards in the form of ANSI screencaps, but I'm sure others have other ideas as well. I think ANSI makes a statement, and good ANSI is still fairly remarkable to look at. And in a way, with ANSI, the medium is the message in the most essential way. It's fairly startling to look at now, because it looks so much *unlike* stuff you see on the web.

As far as I know, all of the major operating systems have telnet clients, the basic interface required for modern boards. Most people don't know they have it, and if they do, don't know what it does.

There's got to be a way of making people aware of BBSes, but there's also got to be a compelling reason to get people to use them.

BBSes need to evolve....Which brings me to #4.

(4) A technological "Great Leap Forward" without the negative connotations of that phrase. Bulletin board systems ought to be more MUDdy and less menu-ey. There are some old technologies still in use on many of these systems which serve no particular purpose, such as ZModem, which telnet clients don't support anyway unless you're running a specialized BBS term. I can think of some interesting ways NNTP can be used for message bases, FTP or HTTP for file transfers, and IRC for chat...I'm sure there are developers with better ideas than me. The main thing which makes a BBS is the linkage of these facilities together - a BBS is generally nothing more than a message base, file base, chat system, and maybe doors and a text file database, all under one roof, with nice pakaging. Web interfaces for most modern boards provide facilities for these things but they don't do it very well (IMHO).

As others have suggested (and I agree), a sense of "placeness" is also essential to a BBS. We have the computing power and multi-user capability to develop this sense far beyond what it ever was back in the 80s and early 90s.

There ought to be lots of easter eggs, interactive, realtime online games, and other such facilities. Some kind of standard for writing these new things needs to be developed. Ideally, there should be a lot of extensibility with low entry barriers. The first software I ran, C-Net, was fantastic software - all of the essential stuff was compiled, with a lot of the stuff in Commodore BASIC so it could be modified. I'd love to see some kind of standard such that doors could be written in Python or Perl, using libraries and classes to interact with the BBS software (I haven't looked too close at this in recent years; I'm not sure what's going on with doors, so if I'm talking out of my ass or this is already being done, apologies in advance).

(5) A worldwide summit of what is left of the BBS scene should take place, and this should be online. That is, if anyone is at all interested, and everything I've written in this essay has been written with the assumption that people *are* interested. We need to have some kind of mailing list, or perhaps IRC channel, and we need to figure out ways of better working together if this scene is worth saving. In theory, most of us are old enough to be mature enough to set aside some of our differences and pull together to resurrect the scene - that is, once again, if anyone is really interested in this - which remains to be seen.

I was surprised, frankly, at the number of BBSes which remain. I was under the assumption that the number of people who would have any interest in running a board would be a lot smaller.

One thing I've noticed is that there are too many BBS lists, going back to the consolidation issue for a moment. A lot of these exist because people have been publishing these lists for years, or because all of the boards run certain software. I would really like to see consolidation in this regard, and have those who run lists now become co-maintainers, or whatever they need to make it worthwhile for them. It's simply too hard to find boards to call. And BBS lists which exist often don't provide enough data on systems, such as a mission statement or what they offer. Frankly, too many sysops haven't thought about that too hard, either. It's worth doing.

CONCLUSION

All of this is based on the assumption that anyone is *really* interested in putting the work in to resurrect the BBS scene, and I do think the scene really is dead or nearly so, and continues to sink into obscurity. It may well be that it's time to admit it's dead, and simply accept the fact that most boards are museums, and that's all there is to it.

But something keeps gnawing at me. I'm as pro-internet as it is possible to be. I am astounded at how things have turned out. I'm old enough to still be amazed at what's going on out there, and I am as immersed in the internet as it is possible to be. I spend a lot of time here. I think I'm qualified to have an opinion on things, on this, my 23rd year online.

And I have found nothing which replaces the BBS. I've found things which replace parts of it, and many things that BBSes simply *couldn't* do, but I miss bulletin board systems nonetheless.

As I said earlier, I am not sure whether this is simply a form of unshakable nostalgia - because I was young, and alienated, and bored in the suburban monoculture I grew up in, and at the time BBSes were an escape from that, or because truly, something is missing - something the internet should have going for it, but doesn't. Usenet used to have a little of this, but even that's dried up in most places. Spammers haven't helped, and fewer people want to put the effort in to moderate, or at least try to lock out people who having nothing to contribute but crap.

I don't have all of the solutions, just a sense of what needs to be done. On several occasions, I've considered putting up a board again, but I download the software, and then think about the complete lack of activity on most of the boards I called and ask, "Why?"

I look at my Linux system and wonder why there's not more BBS software available to run, software-wise, and I consider the potential for massive collaboration on multiuser operating systems such as this. I consider the amount of free tools, programming languages, and documentation out there, and it really makes me ask, what if? So much of what's out there now provides collaborative facilities we couldn't have even dreamed of back when. I rarely even write scripts on my local system; almost everything I do at work or here at home is done via SSH on a remote system.

I have a hard time figuring out what others think about all of this because so many of us (this list is an example) are involved in the past, and documenting and preserving it. That's important; that effort needs to never end, but I have to wonder if there's some kind of future in all of this - a movement, really, that just needs a little hand to get started.

I am interested in anyone's comments on this - feel free to reply to me here on the 80s BBS list.

I think the first step is that summit I talked about. I think we need to have a talk about the scene and find out if anyone has the energy or interest for this. Fair enough if no one does. My own sense is that it's going to take a lot of people to pull this off, if it's worth doing at all, especially when it comes to consolidation - if my sense of needing to consolidate is correct at all.

If you know anyone beyond this list who is interested in any of this, feel free to forward this on.

- Quag7

A Sysop, Forever

I often get updates to the Historical BBS List I've been maintaining since 2001. Sometimes it's just changes in time span or sysop name; other times it's the addition of an essay or story someone remembers about their own or someone else's BBS. I get, now, five years later, an average of 4-5 every day.

One that recently came in was for Devil's Dungeon BBS, which his brother sent with the following paragraph:

"Don DeLapp Jr. & Don DeLapp Sr. worked together to launch Devil's Dungeon back in the early 80's. Starting out on the CPM with 300 baud modems. Eventually they upgraded to 1200 baud on a IBM/Compatible. Dedicated phone line, and many late nights coming up with .ans artwork using TheDraw.exe The BBS almost went down after Don DeLapp Jr. was killed in 1987 by a drunk driver (http://www.jimdelapp.com/d/deaths/Death.htm) I am his brother, and at the age of 10 years old I would not let my father put the Bulletin Board to rest, we renamed it to Don's Dungeon which is written on my brother's headstone at the Holy Trinity Cemetary in Webster, NY. Later the name changed to Space Quest, and other's started up Space Quest II, and III, Black Cauldron) I recently snagged some information off the old BBS 5.25 inch disks (http://www.jimdelapp.com/d/files/BBS%20Days/) Recently Don DeLapp Sr. died, but their memories remain. Live long & Prosper."

It's not every day someone sends me such a complete story about the people behind a BBS, and it's certainly an even rarer event to have someone send along a vintage photo of the sysop with their BBS in front of them:

So this is Don DeLapp, Jr., who was born on Sep. 23, 1971 and died on Aug. 7, 1987. As referenced in the paragraph his brother sent to me, Don was killed on his bike at the age of 15 by a drunk driver. This resulted in his father wanting to shut down the BBS and his brother, 10 years old, convinced dad to instead rename the BBS after him and keep it running in Don's memory. It's quite something to ponder how that conversation must have gone, with a father mourning the senseless death of his son and his remaining son pleading to continue on what the eldest son had started, even if it was something as simple as a computer and a phone line.

But what really stunned me was a photograph of Don's headstone, which shows, clearly, the BBS immortalized along with him:

The way things work with web pages and web forums today, it's too easy for one of these "communities" to yank up this photo, put it out of context, put it on a "silly gravestone" collection or otherwise dehumanize and detract from what's really going on here: a family trying to make sense of the loss of their son by etching into his gravestone the things that defined him as a person up to that point. His drums, his portrait, his computer project that must have been endless hours of intensity and fun for him.

All Don had known was the world when BBSes were the way to do things. He never got to see the increased speed, the world wide web, the great stuff that came after; he's locked, like so many others I could name, in the way things were back then, and how life was lived online. And now, set in stone, the importance of the BBS in his life is there for all to see.

In December of 2006, Don Senior died during an operation and was buried next to his son's grave. Co-sysops, forever.

Six Days a Week

So that's the question obviously being posited on this weblog: can I create something worth reading, roughly six days a week? I'll end up getting behind, but I intend to keep this up until I run out of things to say, subjects to cover. I'll try not to repeat myself, try not to fall into the typical blog blandness of dropping names of friends who you couldn't possibly care about. I'll try and avoid using terms like "lazyweb" and "intarwebs" and "me like" that people who are hip and yet not hip use to show they really don't care about expressing themselves beyond demanding things of strangers.

Why take on such a possibly punishing schedule? Because I like challenges. Because I obviously like writing. Because I need to get into the habit of writing well, and doing so in volume. I have books to write, essays to write, articles to throw in other directions. I have ideas that need refining.

But most of all, the idea of six days a week of writing without repeating myself scares me. I use fear as an indicator of "good idea". This doesn't work with, say, testing the safety of equipment. But it works pretty well for projects. If I sprinkle a little fearful idea here and there, I find the project is better.

Along with this will likely come a little bit of a redesign of some sort. I don't currently intend to change the white-on-black coloring scheme; there's just too many complaints from people, whining I don't look like Everything Else, to just fall for that yet. But maybe I could stand to have some sort of option where you could change the colors for yourself if you'd prefer. The formatting breaks on the page, renders wrong; I should sit down and fix that. I should do a lot of things, and having constant new content will inspire me to try to fix it up for the better.

The fundamental question, of course, is do I really have all that much to say? I honestly don't know.

I guess I'm going to find out.

169

It's about 11pm when I'm finished talking with David. The interview started at 7pm, with me unpacking all the equipment and setting up the shot the best I could, and then interviewing on and off for about an hour. Then I packed and we talked about text adventures and future ideas and the production, and as it got to be later, he was worried about the oncoming snow and the time I had before me to drive.

I never like to leave if there's still stuff to talk about; some people I may never see in person again, and there's nothing better than rushing headlong into subjects and ideas with someone you have no preconceptions about, no knowledge of what they know or don't know, no limits. It's great, and I never walk away from that if I can help it. But that time had come.

The next interview was Scott Adams. Scott Adams co-founded Adventure International, the first company dedicated to selling games. There's a few guys selling games here and there before AI, but not with a full-time staff like Adams and not with the lasting, permanent effect on the genre of adventure games as his company had. Scott was 169 miles away, and it was starting to snow.

I'd thought ahead, having heard the weather reports, and rented a SUV with all-wheel drive. It guzzled gas a bit but it also had less chance of ending upside down in a snowbank.

169 miles, due west, into Wisconsin, and then 169 miles back towards my flight out of Chicago. 348 miles, give or take, to do one interview. To some that's a lot. To others, not so much. But it's nothing new to me.

I found my limits during the BBS Documentary: after about 300 miles in a single day, I start to get goofy. I try and keep it below 200. This was much less than 200, so I was in good shape.

I'd been up since about 8am, after having going to bed at around 3am. 5 hours of sleep, not so hot. Dave was my second interview of the day; I try to pack these trips up with 2-3 interviews a day, to get the full value out of the airline and hotel costs.

I got off to a wrong start, missing my turn off and driving through the Illinois countryside for a while. I got a hold of Interstate 88, which wasn't exactly the interstate I wanted, but it went west, which I definitely wanted to do. By midnight, I'd found a rest stop which had a map that could set me in the right direction. 169 miles was starting to become closer to 200.

I got sleepy somewhere, and pulled into some sort of parking lot full of construction equipment, next to a 100% automatic/non-manned gas station. Kind of weird, that was; no place to buy soda or snacks, or a sad looking person sitting behind a cash register: just the pumps, bright lights, and the infinite darkness in all directions. Street lights get a little rare out there.

I slept fitfully for about an hour, my little tank of a truck nestled near a landmover, then shook myself awake and refilled my gas, just to be sure in case I never saw a station before my destination. You can never be too sure, and the fate of James Kim was too fresh in my mind; I had water and 5 cell phone batteries with me, not to mention extra food and clothes.

The snow got worse as I moved from an Interstate to 80 miles of Route 20; it started doing that thing where the flakes come at you in hypnotic, shifting patterns, where putting your beams to high give you slightly more view in the distance but also bring more of those dancing hypno-flakes. I had to start slowing down. 40mph, then 30. My 3 hour trip estimate started to seem slightly off.

The snow gathered on the road, and nobody else was driving around at 2am. The edges of the road were now gone, with a faint yellow line appearing below the white. I started driving on it like a Hot Wheels car, using that yellow line to guide me. Curves and hills started happening.

I tested the brakes each time, and each time the SUV slid a bit. Nothing crazy, no imitation of Curling, but definitely a sign that abruptness would not be a watchword.

I found that out when I finally drove through a populated town, that is, one that would be populated if it were daylight. It had actual streetlights, a number of hotels, and a lot of landscaping. Coming over a hill, I saw several things I didn't like: a steep grade, a long distance down, and another car slowly going down both. I hit my brakes, and as expected, I started sliding.

I was now dangerously approaching the back of this car. I swerved into the oncoming traffic lane, which was luckily not living up to its name at the moment. I was no longer applying any gas. I was braking. But I wasn't braking, I was a sled. So was the other car.

The two of us slid down the hill together, at 3am, in a silent ballet.

I gained control somewhere towards the bottom, and gassed it slightly, getting back into the intended lane. Another lucky shot, another disaster averted.

I landed in Scott Adams' tiny town at 4am, found a hotel, and decided to avoid finding Scott's farmhouse that night. I rented a room for the 6 hours I'd need it, and got all my stuff up the stairs somehow. Plugs awaited me for my camera, my laptop, my cell phone, my storage drives. I set the technology in motion, ready for the next day's interview.

Scott Adams ended up having to drive into town to pick me up and haul me to his farmhouse; the roads were simply too impassible for someone doing a first-time drive into the area, and Scott was kind enough to make the effort to take me and all my equipment for the interview.

The interview was wonderful. I forgot how I got there, what had gone on. I concentrated on getting the story. Scott is not into interviews all that much, but he opened up a lot to me, gave me answers clearly, and helped me brainstorm some more. He was a perfect interviewee. Total footage: about an hour and 15 minutes.

The trip back, made in daylight and sans falling snow, was much less harrowing, and merely the 3 hours it should have been on the way out. Total driving time: roughly 8 hours. Total miles: roughly 390. Total for the weekend: roughly 500.

This is the secret part, the part you won't see on the final GET LAMP movie. You don't see these hours spent, these risks, these distances. You'll just see Scott Adams say something, give some nice insight, and then off to the next shot, the next interview, the huge distances compressed to seconds, the hours of conversation compressed to a few lines.

The result, of course, is all worth it, every second, every slide.

TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball

I can't exactly remember the first time Greg Maletic and I traded e-mails, but I do remember what it was about: an in-progress documentary he was doing on the story of Pinball 2000.

If you missed the whole Pinball 2000 thing, the short form is this: faced with lagging sales and a stagnation in the industry, Williams (the video game and pinball people) went for broke and came up with a video-pinball hybrid called Pinball 2000 that would allow interchangeable playing fields, tons of mini games, and a very entertaining experience that would distinguish this "new generation" of pinball games.

Greg owned one of these machines, and at some point he started to wonder about what the story was behind this machine and how things panned out. He started working on a documentary and a couple years later, he had a rough cut, which he was kind enough to send me to evaluate. I loved it, scoped out his phone number, and then yammered at him for well over an hour. Since then, I've been keeping track of the production and helping him when I could. For example, I got him in touch with the Vintage Computer Festival, where he was able to show his rough cut for people and get valuable feedback. He's been polishing this thing for over a year and a half, tweaking music, edits, and putting together bonus footage. He's had a handful more test screenings and has been interviewed a bunch of times about it.

And now, I just got the word that he's taking pre-orders for it.

He's selling "basic" and "complete' DVD versions, although anyone who reads my weblog couldn't possibly settle for the "basic" version. It's got hours of bonus features, lots of extras, and is just $30. It has an interview with Steve Kordek, for example. Who's he? Oh, just the guy who invented pinball flippers.

It's that kind of effort and detail that shows in this project, and Maletic's amazing graphics arts skills (which you can see clearly in the website) bring it all together really well. I strongly recommend doing a pre-order of the guy's work and getting into that first burst of sales, rewarding someone who didn't settle for throwing out a sub-par product into the world. We need more guys like that.

Check it out.

Free for the Taking

So, with just a little less than a couple years between the release date and the present day, you can grab free copies of the BBS Documentary DVD set online. For example:

All eight episodes were put on Google Video.
Legaltorrents has a copy of ARTSCENE.
Mininova points to a few of the episodes on Bittorrent.
Torrentspy has the Infofallout 2.3gb AVI collection.

There's a bunch more out there, all of variant levels of quality and usefulness depending on what you're looking to get out of the whole thing. The resolution of the original work was 720x540. The Google Video ones, for example, are 320x240... a savings of over 50%!

The re-encoding and resolution reduction also means it blurs in places and sounds washed out. And you don't get the subtitles or the bonus stuff or any of that "extra" crap. But you do get the movie!

So the question is, does this bother me?

And really, it doesn't. There are people who would never buy a DVD who might watch something on Google Video. And there's kids who can't afford $40 for a film, who are interested in whatever the hell this BBS Documentary thing is, so there I am, just another thing, easily downloaded, easily watched.

I'd love it if everyone who has seen the movie bought the DVDs. But that's not how it works these days, and the energy I could spend being an asshole, I'd rather spend making my current films. Well, OK, I'm an asshole regardless, but I mean a miserly asshole versus an oblivious asshole.

And just one step back, I'm kind of delighted to be one of those huge things you stumble upon, looking around for "BBS" and finding this whole movie online. You don't know the story, the guy, the reasons, it's just this film you found... and it's pretty good! Especially for free.

So hey, enjoy. And throw me a few bucks if you had a good time.

That Guy

I love that guy. He changes his name all the time and he comes in from all different e-mails, but I just assume that's because he's busy. I know, in my heart of hearts, it's just one guy.

That guy is always very concerned about my projects. He's not so much concerned that I'm the one doing them, or that I don't have the energy to put into them, or that I'm spread around doing many of them. But he does think I could use some improvement, that I've perhaps been clouded (by my incredible talent, he hastens to add) from the true potential of my work.

He has lots of great ideas, and wants me to have them, free of charge, and with just some sort of acknowledgement that he helped me see the light.

One of them is that I should coat everything with a sticky layer of advertising, ad-clicks. Another is that I should focus my documentary-making on subjects more "mainstream". Another is to take my already-made documentary and run, naked and wearing a sign, into the nearest cable channel office begging for them to play my works on their lineup, for whatever pittance they wish to provide and in whatever way they want to chop it up. That guy thinks, with just a small tweak to my grand plans, that I will finally "make it" and be a "true success". That guy then explains how he does this charitable bit of advice because he believes in me and thinks it could be beneficial to "all concerned". I usually surmise this includes that guy.

Sometimes I forget this is all one guy, so I respond negatively. That guy doesn't like that.

When I respond in one of my creative ways that shuffles down to "no", he lectures me. He lectures me a lot on how I "don't get it". He gets very angry, very quickly. He begins postulating about my sex life, the methodologies my parents implemented to raise me. He is quite stern, and very annoyed both that I can't see the light and that I'm walking away, literally walking away from the golden path that guy has beaten from my door to assured, incredible success. Sometimes, when I sleep, I can hear that guy sobbing at my foolishness.

I wonder if that guy is just for me, or if other people get visits from that guy. Maybe anyone who does "stuff" has that guy contact them, also willing to give them advice on how to make their accomplishments "better" and reach their "true potential". I wonder if they take that advice, or if they also say no and get that guy writing them.

I feel for that guy. It's tough work, wandering into someone else's efforts, hat in hand, and trying to choose just the right phrases to tell this person that what they've really created is an incomplete puzzle. A puzzle, coincidentally, that that guy has the final piece to. That guy must end up on his ass, puddle soaking through his pants, on the outside of a lot of big projects. There must be almost nobody who really understands how important that guy is to their success.

What gets me the most is the boundless energy - that guy just keeps coming back to me, from a new address, calling himself somebody else, and is ready to tell me how he found the secret potential he could hook me up with. He never gives up.

I guess as long as I'm doing stuff, that guy will be around. And I wish that guy well, but no means no. Sorry, guy.

Five Better Heroes

I was going to rip someone apart today.

Believe it or not, I do actually have safety valves; friends I talk to who sometimes dissuade me from extraordinarily suicidal or at least ill-advised acts. This was one of them. "No point," was the thought. "Why kick someone for no good reason," "The fans will just attack you and you'll convert nobody", and so on. And they're right. Life's too full of haters, I won't achieve anything by being yet another one using his sitting position in front of the Square Eye as a bully pulpit.

No, instead I'm going to go in the other direction and suggest five people who are, to me, worthy of cult hero status who don't generally have it. They have a bit of it, of course, because I'm being a fanboy in my descriptions of them, but I don't see them being invited to speak at conventions, I don't see people rushing for their opinion on every little thing, and I don't see them being heralded outside of relatively smaller groups. The ones I chose for today are alive, smart, funny, and worth knowing better. Take a shot at it.

EUGENE JARVIS. Videogame programmer extraordinaire is one thing; there's a lot of guys like that. But beyond that, Jarvis is an incredible speaker and an amazing personality. He lights up the room, and he shares his thoughts freely. He created or co-created the classic videogames Robotron, Defender, Stargate, NARC, Crusin' USA, and a ton of other similar projects. People who go to classic video game shows know what I know: the more you hear from Jarvis, the better off you are.

AL KOSSOW. Start with me. Make me much less of an asshole. Make me a couple decades older so I actually accomplished stuff. Replace "documentaries" with "radio shows". Replace "BBSes" with "Video Games". Double my skills, half my self-aggrandizement. You will end up with someone similar to Al Kossow. Curator of bitsavers.org, which is just a great historical archive, and now recently a curator at the Computer History Museum, Al is truly a technological hero. His efforts at preservation of computer and video game history have been vital keystones in what we all have available to us today. He forgets more in a week than most "old-schoolers" could ever begin to talk about. Hero.

NEAL E. WOOD. This is the guy who thought it might be a good idea to cut small indentations in the shoulder of highways, causing a vibration through a car and waking the driver who was dozing. Called the Sonic Nap Alert Pattern (SNAP), it's also been called a "rumble strip". This guy's invention saved my life. Get him in front of a camera or a podium. At the very least, realize it's these guys, who come up with little simple ideas and get them implemented, that change the world for the better.

STEVYN IRONFEATHER. Don't worry, it's a pseudonym. Stevyn has been a Zine guy for nearly two decades, and blends all the best parts of that culture into one person. He lives in Denver, where he has a nice Book and Zine shop. The editor of the Iron Feather Journal, a staple of Zines since forever, and the template that a lot of people trying to be "interesting" should pick up. Makes the world a much more interesting place, and the more of people like that the better.

BENJAMIN FRY Ph.D. from MIT, Benjamin Fry makes things clearer. Much clearer. And cooler. Everything he touches, he seems to make into an even cooler thing than before. He takes things like Mario or paper airplanes or code layout or differences in programming and makes your eyes bug out. He's a creator of the graphics/coolness program Processing, whose job is to make everything you see and know cooler. In other words, Ben Fry created an infinitely tireless Ben Fry you can download. Were that everyone else so cool did such things!

I welcome other suggestions of heroes.

Fillet

Compared the slow tank-like progress of the BBS Documentary, GET LAMP is like a shopping cart aimed backwards going down a hill. On fire. The schedule is heavily bumped up, and since I've been through this process before, I have a much better awareness of limits and needs and the rest.

As a result, I've already been getting in soundtrack music. I've been communicating with other music artists to bring songs into the project. I've been in contact with the cover artist. I'm beginning discussions with my duplicator. And I've begun filleting.

Fiction films have the advantage of a general idea of what's being aimed for, what script/context is at the other end. Granted, you can have an unexpected event change everything, or an incompetent director, or a mid-production script change, but even then, you replace a set of scripted events with another set of scripted events and keep shooting. The goal is to have it look and sound good, be enjoyable to watch, and fit in with the rest of what you're shooting. So you generally shoot 2-3 times the footage you intend to end up with. More, of course, if you're a perfectionist director and want something just right. But still, it all comes down to: you are working toward a set script.

Nonfiction or documentary filmmaking can be split down further: you have scripted non-fiction and unscripted non-fiction. In scripted non-fiction, you again have a script, even though everything's coming from truth this time and not somebody's fantasy or made-up story. You then gather photos, audio, and artifacts to shoot footage from, and then anything you can't find that kicks into your script is either brought in with interviews or shot as a recreation, which fits all the puzzle pieces into place. The ratio of shot footage to final footage is again relatively small, since you know exactly what you want, and when you go to people to conduct interviews, you hit them up with 5-10 questions of a specific nature and include what they give you.

But then you get to the stuff like I did before and am doing again, where you basically sit down with people and talk to them on-camera and get "the story" as you go. At the end you have a pile of footage and then cull it into something else, where the final work is something you didn't really know you'd have at the beginning of the production. This approach is comparitively expensive because of the insane ratio: I shot 250 hours of footage, resulting in roughly 5 hours of used footage. That's a 50-1 ratio. And I'm just on the low end: some documentary filmmakers will do 100-200 hours for each hour they end up with. A contemporary example of this is the movie Hoop Dreams, which followed two boys for five years, amassed 250 hours of footage and got cut down to around 3 hours. (They shot on Beta videotape, by the way). That's a lot of time with little variety in the shooting; I at least got to travel a lot and meet different people every time.

(I should mention, by the way, that because of all this open-endedness and months or years of shooting, it is therefore very likely for a project shot like this to "fail", to come out the other end with all sorts of footage that is of no real obvious use or narrative potential.)

So somewhere in there, you have to take the hundreds of hours of footage and knock it down into editable pieces, properly marked off, that you're going to try and piece together into a narrative. That's where you have to go through a process that I call "the fillet", although I've seen it called logging or clipping, and probably a dozen other names. Here's how this works.

First, you stare at this 12 hours a day:

This is the user interface to my editing software. From there, you listen to an interview, and when the person makes a statement, shows some emotion, reacts, or otherwise does anything that might potentially go into your documentary, you cut out that clip. I happen to do all this wrong: I clip out the entire answer, and render it into a new clip in a lossless fashion (i.e. I don't "re-render" it, adding needless compression or introducing extra artifacts). I name this clip in a highly descriptive manner, like this one I just did: "Moriarty - KEEPER - The period of success for Infocom was very brief". This tells me it's from the Brian Moriarty interview, that he talks about the success of infocom, but also does so cutting it down to just a few peak years. I then put all these cuts into a folder set, where this would go into a further sub-folder called "Infocom". That way, if I need to pull "Infocom" stuff, I go in there and there's a set of clips from people talking about Infocom.

Does this sound boring? It can be. I literally have to listen to every interview I did at least once again, and occasionally multiple times, carefully pulling and marking away every possibly relevant clip. But the result of this hard work is evident in the final film: everything seems to weave together. I'm able to pull together commentary from many different interviews over years and people almost complete each other's sentences.

The amount of clips any one interview yields varies greatly. In BBS Documentary, I'd have one hour interviews that resulted in one used sentence.. Others went on for an hour and I used 10 or 20 minutes of that hour in the final works. Obviously, I can't predict how it'll go this time, but I am finding a pretty high ratio of "usable" clips to choose from, so it's going well.

This is what I have to work on during days I'm not filming folks. I'm creating a library of thoughts and concepts, the bricks that I will eventually use to build my little house of documentary before inviting others inside. It's definitely not for everyone, but it's a necessary step if you wish to reveal the narrative buried in a hundred interviews.

Before I go, a little math problem:

The high definition codec I'm recording in requires 4 gigabytes for every 10 minutes. I have recorded 35 hours of footage. How many shares in Seagate should you buy?

The Big Push

Things are actually kind of nice in my life. Interesting projects, good day job, good friends, tens of thousands of new goatse-loving fans, and a general happy demeanor. Only one problem: weight.

Ah yes, that last frontier, that one bit that no amount of studying, debating, excusing or justifying will get away from: personal health. That's my next thing to overcome, and then I think I'll be one pretty joyful motherfucker.

Happily, it's not been a downward trend the last 4 years or so:

But going from roughly 230-something to 210-something is merely a case of dropping endless snacks and junk food into my head. Cutting out something and then not adding other activity is just a recipe for disaster, waiting gingerly for something else to go wrong and then you're back to square one.

I finally joined a gym this past Tuesday, and I've had workout sessions on Thursday and Saturday, with professional assistance in doing so. I'm using an interesting methodology to ensure continued attendance: I joined a stupidly expensive club. Like, where you expect Geishas to be holding your free iPod for you breathlessly until you return that day. This is the heretofore-unknown Capitalist Health Program: Spend a Lot of Money and feel like you're totally blowing cash if you don't go. I'm signed up for a year and I even read the contract. What a great piece of work! When your year is up, if you don't send a registered letter saying you're done with them (or sign up for another year), they start charging you even more. The best part is I knew this and signed it anyway, which gives me even more incentive to pay attention. (Other bonus: If you move away and there's another club in the chain within 25 miles, you can't drop the membership claiming you're not nearby).

I'll never forget this kid: he was on IRC, a little trash-talking knobjob who worked out obsessively, had a lot of photos of himself up flexing his muscles, and generally added to the general quality of online life. Picked a lot of fights as a matter of course, and one of my favorite memories was his challenging everyone in the IRC channel to a fistfight at the next Defcon.

All well and good, and the dustbin of history will welcome that little punk happily, except for one little exchange where I said it was my hope to improve my physical fitness.

"You will fail!" said Mister Fistfight. "You're just like all the rest of these people - no discipline, no nerve. You say you'll stick the course and you have no discipline and you go back to your chair."

Well, time to see who's right. Now, if you don't mind, I have an appointment with some Geishas.

Hacker

If you were lucky enough to have an RSS feed, you got to see a letter from a person criticizing me and questioning my psychological makeup based on my "Fuck Katie Hafner" entry. Quick research showed he was in the same faculty of a school as Hafner's current husband, so there you go. I wrote him back, and he actually wrote a lovely, contrite response apologizing for his initial outburst and promising to find out what the heck I didn't like about Hafner.

Don't you love getting a story before the webmaster pulls it down? I do, and I have the .tar.gz and .zip files to prove it. And now some of you have one of mine! What a collector's item.

Anyway, the core misunderstanding between me and the writer was that he'd found this decontextualized hate of Katie Hafner's work, and went off since I looked completely Gonzo. A certain segment of the population will go "Oh, yeah, Mitnick and Cyberpunk" and of them, there's some amount of drift because they didn't, in fact, read Cyberpunk and are simply following the flow. In other words, there's a lot of player hating and very little backup.

In 2001, I started working on a website about hacking, and misrepresentation in media and news. This went through a bunch of iterations, and it currently stands at hacker.textfiles.com. I never got around to linking it from the main site; I'll fix that shortly.

Hacker is meant to be a definitive location for "the story" when it comes to the term, culture, and historical references. I have gotten along with it, but the problem is the whole bile/methodical ratio issue. Let me explain.

There is a section in the hacker sub-site called ERRATA. This is meant to put down, in a location easily referenced, a full set of corrections, clarifications and ridicule of books by and about hackers. The most galling part of a lot of books is they contain hyperbole, poor phrasing, and flat-out incorrect facts. It would be good if someone went through and catalogued the errors. That person, apparently, is me.

You have things that piss you off. You therefore gain bile. (Think of a little meter to the right of your vision, and it says "Bile" and it's blinking red.) Now you're angry, and you want to lash out. The problem is, bile doesn't really go for the whole "measured response" thing. So you end up with a choice: lash out anyway (fuck yeah!) or hold off, get a grip, and then lay out the high road. But once you wait, the bile is gone, and the urge to take the high road is replaced with a general apathy.

I'm sure this could all be drawn with a 2-D chart. You have the axis going from Action to Apathy, and the axis going from Bile to Methodical. Here, let me do it, so it looks like I've thought about this for more than 5 seconds:

As you can clearly see, you run the risk of things being too blue (very methodical and with lots of detail, but boring) or red (you get your feeling across, but it makes you look insane) or black (you fade into the distance and are just another one-line "lol" message). What you want is for it to be purple. Oh, so very purple.

To properly work on the errata section, I have to go through an entire book, marking off potential factual or stylistic errors, and then research them, and then put up my corrections. This is the most boring thing you can imagine, but if you mess up, you miss important stuff. So it's kind of like being an aircraft controller. But not.

Anyway, the thing is, there's a lot of books out there that are absolutely horrible. An example is Confessions of Teenage Hackers by Dan Verton. I think this book is one of the worst you can stumble into; it flat-out exploits children, letting them weave their own hero-myths and portray themselves as a super-race of technological wizards, and it chokes every page with rampant hyperbole about the prowess and outcome of these myths. Additionally, it gets basic historical facts wrong: most notably, it takes the story of the 1990 AT&T Crash, where an internal software bug took out the phone system for a while and this triggered an ongoing FBI investigation into hackers, and turns it on its head. In his version, the hackers actually crashed the system. He even uses the phrase "crackdown on hackers", an obvious reference to the book The Hacker Crackdown, which tells (that part of) the story accurately. An e-mail to Verton about this got a reply to "get a life".

And that's the fundamental problem; it really does take a while to fact-check and put it all out in some way for it to be easily readable. You know, like my chart.

The first book that's gone under my knife is Hacker Culture by Douglas Thomas. I found a bunch of explicit errors, stylistic errors, and poor word choices. I feel a little bad he gets nailed first, because there's others that are even more problematic, but you have to start somewhere!

When time permits, I'll add more. And that brings us to the main question: why even do this at all?

Well, for the same reason I go bugfuck over Wikipedia architectural issues: people use these works for reference. The whole point of assembling ideas into non-fiction books is so that others don't have to do that work. If you put out a book explaining how a sub-culture works, then it's expected, to some amount, that what's in there is accurate. Of course, there should always be multiple competing books when possible, but often the books use each other as reference. They'll clearly say this in the back, of course, but that's when you get to the end and that's not always something a person will look up. So, for example, you have an enormous amount of sources that claim John Draper/Captian Crunch "discovered" the roughly-2600hz-blowing Captain Crunch Whistle. He didn't. He did not. Let's say this one more time: John Draper Did Not Discover That the Captain Crunch Whistle Included In Cereal Boxes Could Blow a Rough Approximation of 2600 Hertz. Draper is more explicit about this now, but he wasn't always and let the "error" pass, and it's everywhere. It's reasonable for a lot of people to think this is the case because there's a ton of "reference" out there saying so.

And so it goes: I want to vet and clean sources as best I can, check references, check up on facts, for the good of history. Otherwise, why bother learning all this at all?

Off the Chart

So back in November I got a Nintendo Wii. Actually, I grabbed a latte (which I don't often do), and drove around like an idiot on November 19th, Wii Day, to try and get a Wii from the stores. The first one had 140 people waiting for 120 Wiis. The next had 15 people waiting for 4 Wiis. I then found a place that had 15 people waiting for 40 Wiis.

Why put myself through that? I just like momentary madness like that. I also go shopping on December 24th and occasionally run towards and not away from danger. I'm sure this will catch up with me but not quite yet.

I will not bore you with tales of using the Wii and what the Wii does. The Internet is currently between 67% and 81% full of current-generation console discussion, no need for me to retread that part.

On the Wii, in the 5-in-1 sports pack, is a bunch of games of golf, baseball, bowling and so on. And tennis. For whatever reason, me and Tennis got off to a good start, and we started hanging out a lot, and I was entirely into Tennis for a while.

In Tennis, you get a "rating", which has almost no meaning but which I think relates to how many times you're scored against by the computer and how quickly you win, and so on. It climbs bizzarely, like awarding you "+3" for a game you might have really been into and "+109" for a game set that wasn't so bad.

There was a line on the chart, at 1000. Nothing explained in the game itself what this line was useful for. So I started playing the game, a lot, and eventually got to 1000.

In the "Wii Inbox", which is a sort of mail inbox the Wii has to make you feel like you have friends, it then announced that I had achieved 1000, and I was now a "Pro". It then put a little "Pro" after my name, and I guess at this point I was supposed to jump up and down, were I not laid flat from playing Tennis.

So, the little line is halfway up the chart, and I decide to keep playing.

The game starts throwing harder and harder opponents at me until I meet "Elisa", who is rated at "2000". I beat Elisa, because at this point I'm like a lab rat with a cocaine switch. I'm an unbeatable pseudo-tennis machine. This gave me another mail in my Wii mailbox, explaining that I had successfully beaten Elisa, a 2000-rated player. My own rating, however, was 1700. So I decided to see what happened next.

Now, after a while it was like Zeno's paradox. If I won it gave me a couple points, and if I lost it took out tens of points. What a jerk! Tennis and I were in danger of breaking up.

But you know, I kept at it, and in a few games that could be considered "epic" if you didn't know what "epic" means, I broke the chart. Literally.

So mostly, I guess, I'm confused. If the game had enough thought into it to have all this stuff of sending letters to tell me how cool I am, and to tell me how cool it is I broke a 2000-rated player, why does it appear it is completely catching this game off guard to have me become a 2000-rated player myself? It's nice and all that I've made it look like it does, but isn't this a shame?

I think what I'm trying to get across is that if your game makes all these implications that something is the unstoppable Mantle of Greatness, and you award a person with a mail and a rating for achieving 0.5 Mantles of Greatness, consider putting something at the end to deal with the maniac who achieves 1.0 Mantles. I expect this sort of short-sightedness with Pac-Man arcade games crashing at level 255, not a Nintendo Wii in 2007.

There. Now I'm a whiny geek on a weblog talking about his video games. I assume it's the late hour. Maybe I'm a Were-gamer.

Note to 247 Realmedia

• Don't ever call again. But if you do:
• If you're going to leave a message on my phone about how you can help textfiles.com with marketing, be sure to clarify to me whether:
  • you're asking me to whore out my users to whatever money-waving Johns you intend to send my way
  • you're seeking to sidle up to me like a swampland-in-Florida salesman and make me buy your services to increase traffic to a site that features ascii art nudes.
• Typing "Textfiles.com advertising" into Google reveals a weblog entry called "Why Is There No Advertising on Textfiles.com?". Since the whole point of that essay is that I don't want any advertising on textfiles.com, you were functioning at an informational disadvantage.
• Since reading is hard and you can't be expected to do actual research on a site you're hitting up, next time just ask yourself why a site that has been around for eight years has no advertising. Chances are, it's not because they are totally unaware there's a thing like advertising on the Internet.
• Avoid keeping the speakerphone on when my voicemail message starts, so it doesn't sound like you needed both hands to whack off while leaving your scripted message.
• Consider that the sudden burst in the Alexa rating of textfiles.com is because my site provided a photo of a prodigiously stretched rectum to over 100,000 people, and decide if this means I'm the type of "content partner" that's going to possibly keep any links from your clients ass-free.
• Die.

Frontalot

M.C. Frontalot, a "nerdcore hiphop" rapper who I have come to admire very much, has just let me know that the trailer for the Nerdcore documentary has been released. If you've not had the pleasure of listening to work by M.C. Frontalot, then you're in luck, because his website has a large variety of MP3s he's created over the past few years, as well as information on his performances and album for sale.

It's easy enough to throw out a rap or two (in fact, I've been known to do a rap myself), but to not only construct a song that tells a story, has amusing rhymes, is clever without seeming contrived, and going in all sorts of neat directions... that takes talent. And Frontalot has talent.

The first song I ever heard of his was called "Message No. 419", which is essentially about Nigerian Scam e-mails, and it's beautifully contructed. I knew I wanted to hear more from him, and I've not been disappointed since.

I was lucky enough to attend a performance he gave on his last tour and was impressed not only with the strength of his backing band but that he could deliver these unusually complicated lines flawlessly through a ton of songs. The bar was this little place down in the village and a bunch of old friends came along, making it just a fantastic night all around. It was also filmed for the Nerdcore documentary, so I guess there's a slim chance I'm in the background in one of the shots.

Frontalot has actually moved from San Francisco to the Boston area, meaning he's just around the bend from where I live. There's been some talk between us of collaboration, so we'll see where that goes.

The trailer's pretty impressive, and I'm sure the documentary behind it will be good. It has Weird Al! Who can argue!

Driving Yourself Crazy the Visual Way

When I finished work on the BBS Documentary and said I was going to make a couple more, one of my pithy remarks was that I liked pretty much everything about the BBS Documentary except the video and the sound.

What I meant was that I'd shot everything on the run with a Canon XL-1 which was now long in the tooth, and it had issues with recording sound via the type of microphone I'd used, so if I was going to go through the production of another documentary, I wanted to upgrade. And upgrade I did! Thousands and thousands of dollars later, I had myself a very kick-ass piece of optical kit, ready to capture the new subjects in stunning lifelike quality.

Because I did this, I naturally expected a quantum leap in image and sound quality. And I got it. But then I started wondering if it was what I thought it was.

This self-doubt enters the mind of anyone slaving away at a perfectionist idea lodged in their brain. Is what I have before me as good as the way I dreamed it'd be? Did I achieve, with this new craftsmanship, a component that will compliment and improve the whole? Am I doing the subject justice? Does it sound good?

I found that I go through periods where I look at what I've shot and think it's horrible, beyond saving, ruinous. Other times I look at the same footage and delight at how wonderful it looks, how amazing the sound is. Naturally, this makes me come to a natural conclusion: I must have some sort of chemical imbalance.

But now that I've mulled over my intense mulling over things, I've come to a different conclusion: I contracted Connoisseurs' Disease. You know it's terminal because it's really hard to spell.

Connoisseurs' Disease blows because you might not notice you have it for a while and the symptoms simply appear that everything around you sucks. You wonder why the HD TV you're watching isn't all that impressive, or why the sound system isn't all that amazing, or why your car doesn't seem to have that much power, or why your friends aren't as enjoyable as they should be. It's not these outside things, it's you. You've now convinced yourself or been convinced that reality isn't good enough, and that just around the bend is another reality, a hyper-reality, that you're being cheated out of. Or that you're cheating yourself out of.

Last year, I had a steak. This wouldn't be big news except it was very expensive steak. It was, in fact, a Kobe Fillet Mignon flown in from Japan and prepared by a Japanese Chef who I also assume was from Japan. It was expensive. Let's not go into how expensive it was, but if you say it "must have been around $100" I will tell you you're shooting low. Now, why the heck did I spend that much? Two reasons. Number one, I'm rather cognizant of my own mortality, but number two, the menu actually said, underneath, that it was "One of the finest human experiences on Earth". I mean, come on, that at least gets a couple chews.

So there I am, eating my extremely expensive steak that's essentially like chowing down a Nintendo Wii, and along comes some waiter, who then launches into a story about these truffles he has, which, and I am not being exaggerative here, he claims are picked on a special mountain which only lets these grow a few weeks a year and which go for $4,000 an ounce and which I could have on my stupidly expensive steak for a sum which was also stupidly expensive. That is, the dealer was offering to double down on my extravagance. Amazingly, I said no. I was quite content with overspending, not double-plus overspending.

As for the steak itself, could I have noticed the difference between this steak and one 1/10 the cost? Probably not. I could, after much study and comparison, have decided the cheaper steak was harder to chew, or slightly less fatty or any of a bunch of different made-up parameters I could consider vital along the Meat Continuum. But I'd be getting past the vital point: Did I enjoy eating the steak?

And as we were all taught in school, Video is Like Meat. OK, maybe you weren't taught that. But what a lesson that'd be!

If you walk into one of the huge consumer electronics stores and walk back to that candy-like Massive TV section, and then walk right up to the screens, you can find flaws in all of them. Even the ones that cost as much as a Pontiac Aztek. You can see the rendering seem odd, or the colors unusual, or artifacting, or anything along the Video Continuum. Of course, this can also depend on the source being fed in, the wires going to them, and how your eyes are doing that day.

The functional question, though, is Am I enjoying watching this?. All the pixels-per-inch and contrast ratios don't mean much if you're having a good time seeing what you're seeing.

I'm not saying self-criticism is bad. It's just that it's too easy to go from self-criticism to self-defeatism, where you start to assume you must be screwing up because you're doing it and not somebody else who you don't know but they must be experts and better than you. That's when the disease has set in.

The shots are good. They don't look like they were shot with a million dollar camera, but this is coincidentally the actual situation. I didn't shoot with a million dollar camera, but I did a good job with what I had. I think I'll focus on other things, and hope the disease wears off.

P.S. This is what the steak looked like. Yes, I took a picture. It lasted longer.

Getting Lamp

So, a little more detail on GET LAMP, with some other information on ARCADE as a bonus.

I have enough new visitors for the moment to mention that besides killing puppies and melting the eyeballs of the html-challenged, I am also involved in making a couple documentaries. I made one a little while ago, found I liked it, and am now making a couple more. One is about text adventures and one is about arcades.

People who heard about this going on in October of 2005 and then sparsely throughout 2006 are probably wondering how exactly the whole thing is coming along.

Well, very nicely. It's important, when mentioning a film, to have "screenshots", so here's one: