ASCII by Jason Scott

One-Two Quote Punch

My cubicle at work is completely bare except for a single quote hung on the wall next to the computer. A lot of people have heard this quote, but I don't mind being yet another person quoting it, just in case you haven't.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

It's from a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt in called 'Citizenship in a Republic: The Man in the Arena", which he gave in France in 1910. It was given a year after he left the presidency, and after he'd spent about a year on safari, gathering specimens for the Smithsonian institution. Nine years later, he was dead.

The whole speech is very good; it's just that the whole "Fuck the Critic" idea resonates with everyone who can't get a lot of shit done for all the nay-sayers. The rest of that particular passage is worth quoting:

"Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier."

Take that, critics! Teddy says put up or shut up!

Old Dead Guys: When You're Tired of Arguing.

World Expert

As far as I can tell, I am the world expert on dial-up Bulletin Board Systems.

A statement sandbagged with such hubris has to come with some caveats, of course. Anybody can kick my ass with minutiae about the specific geographically-centered "scenes" they were part of for months or years. Employees of certain BBS-oriented companies can whip out more dirt than I was ever able to dig up, as well as specific dates that aren't written down anywhere but in the memories of those who were there. But going from "Hey, let's put some teletypes in downtown Berkeley" to "Synchronet just hit version 3.14a", I'm probably your go-to guy to get information, either directly from my memory or from the archives I've built up.

Remember, the documentary wasn't just about filming; it was about research. And, of course, there was no "TIme-Life series of the Bulletin Board System" that I could find when I started thinking about a documentary, or really a comprehensive archive to pull from, beyond the grab-bag of crap that textfiles.com represents. So I had my work cut out for me, and it was work. A lot of reading, a lot of e-mails, a lot of phone calls, and a lot of acquiring of other peoples' collections to create some place I could then use to leapfrog up into working on a filmed documentary. One could argue I was "researching" since my youth, but that was more "observing". Textfiles.com was up around 1998, and I started seriously doing "research" probably August of 2001. To help this work, I built up some tools to keep track of stuff, tools which became timeline.textfiles.com and software.bbsdocumentary.com. Even with just a few years passed, stuff was decaying from fact to rumor to insinuation to misspoken legend.

I have, lying around, literally thousands of e-mails of discussion with people, 250 hours of videotape footage (and I am still getting that stuff on archive.org, slowly), hundreds of gigabytes of collected digital material, and even audiotapes and flyers that are stacked up/boxed/protected. Believe me, I got The Stuff. The mistake people make is that they looked at the documentary and thought that was all there was, and that I'd intentionally left stuff out or avoided things to, well, I don't know... exact revenge? Some people thought I was doing it to favor some conspiratorial bias I was intentionally trying to pimpslap the annals of history with. Then again, some people think I'm a federal agent, too, so there you go.

The purposes of a documentary are not in line with the purposes of a researcher and archiver. A documentary wants to put everything it can into a linear narrative. A researcher and archiver wants as complete a history as is feasible to build, from which infinite future narratives can be constructed as needed for purposes as yet unknown. The documentary takes a knife to the history meatloaf and slices out a nice thick juicy slab for you to enjoy, but there's a lot of meatloaf left untouched. This leads to broken hearts.

I got a lot of broken hearts when I did this film; people who were pissed I didn't mention them or their favorite BBS or their favorite software or their favorite whatever, some of them gleefully slinging mashed potatoes from their easy chairs while I spent endless nights and days writing letters and making phone calls. In some cases, I did speak to people who were historical figures or experts in a sub-heading that I was researching, and they wanted nothing to do with the project. In other cases, I made arrangements for a future interview, called, and they were gone, either dead or hiding from me (that sounds exaggerative and it isn't) and only popping back into contact when they ordered a copy of the finished work.

But even if the pet subjects and people were not baked into the final DVD set, the information is still in my archives, the e-mails and essays and collected materials. Some of it is easy to find and some of it is only where I can get at it, but I definitely have a metric ton of it. I don't intend to throw it to the four winds, shred it or eat it.

I was reminded of this when I was checking Wikipedia to study references to my documentary and how they were handled, and I stumbled on this revision where an IP address basically lifted the entire "script" of the "Compression" episode on the documentary into a semi-coherent narrative. After a handful of wiki-fiddles (adding minor changes to link it into Wikipedia style), someone blands it out so that it's not about people anymore, and then it's more wiki-fiddles to the present day. I did a lot of research about the subject of this controversy and was sent a lot of primary source material to get as close to the state of things as I could. Striking a narrative balance was very difficult, and I did a lot of triple checking of facts to get where I did. I also conducted a lot of conversations, either in-person, on-line or on the phone. You know, journalism and research. The fact that someone can stumble onto the (mostly cribbed from my efforts) Wikipedia entry, add a completely unsubstantiated line like "In retrospect, SEA vs. PKWARE was larely a non-issue to most BBS users outside of Fidonet" and walk away unscathed reminds me why I'm such a critic of the enterprise as it stands.

But the fact remains: what I should be doing is providing better access to all that work I dumped years of my life into, far beyond offering a nice DVD and the current offerings on the documentary and textfiles.com sites.

If I was smart, I'd take on an apprentice and just start throwing crap at him until he finally bursts out from under the weight of asshole Master Jason Scott and becomes a huge name in his own right, until one dark stormy night we fight to the death on the rooftops of London. The most likely candidate for this position is Kiel Bryant Hosier. There's probably others.

What I think makes the most sense in the short term, however, is to use this weblog as a place to put up essays and narratives that didn't make it into the film, writing, in bits and pieces, the book that a lot of people think I should have written and which, as a grand project, I have no actual energy to write. Putting together a pile of stories and compiled facts, which then will go into the BBS History site I have or into the other collections I'm running... that seems doable.

So expect, over this year, a bunch of essays, jaunty travelogues into BBS history, which will likely go into the mass of information online, get messed up by Wikipedia, quoted by Usenet, and riffed on by a hundred "web forums" asking if anyone remembers the "old days" before everyone else links to a bunch of O RLY GIFs.

Casting the Woz

As part of the Wozipedia project, I decided I was going to take advantage of various collected Wozniak speeches and presentations he's made over the years, letting him speak in his own words instead of paraphrasing him. When left alone (and given lots of time), Wozniak spins amazing yarns.

For reasons I still don't quite fathom, Kevin Mitnick was tapped to host the "Coast to Coast" radio program, which is normally a lint trap for conspiracy theories and blown-out pseudo-scientific ponderings, in April of 2006. For reasons I entirely fathom, he pulled in a favor and had his buddy Steve Wozniak come on the show and basically be the subject of the show for a couple hours. I had gotten recordings of this, because hey, Wozniak and Mitnick, what could be better.

The first hour has Wozniak sitting in but not really contributing a whole ton as they cover spyware and a few other computer subjects. But the second hour, Mitnick basically puts The Woz in gear and lets him go. And go he does. Woz covers a ton, from childhood, to his high school and college educations, to life at Apple and his thoughts on everything. I decided this .mp3 should really be transcribed.

I'd heard, on and off, about a service called Casting Words that basically utilizes the Amazon.com Mechanical Turk system to get you a field of transcribers who would go through your mp3 and turn it into a couple of useful formats. I decided that one hour of this radio show would be good. They charge by the minute, so the cost after I calculated the length was $29 dollars.

Is that a good price? Well, it is if you're submitting something useful to your needs that is loaded with information. A lot of presentations and a lot of shows/podcasts are not, in fact, loaded with information. They tend to be speculative, meandering one-sided conversations, poking gingerly at complicated ideas and encouraging you to "look into it". The desire to pay to have these shows (essentially spoken link blogs) transcribed is pretty low. But to have Wozniak at full clip for 45 minutes turned into an essay? Speaking about something he's an expert on (his biography)? And considering how much time I'd have spent doing this and then not being able to work on other stuff? Yeah, it was worth it. I'd put it around having a particularly nice meal; not something you'd want to do all the time, but good for special occasions.

Of course, you get it for free. On the casting words site, here it is in HTML. Here it is in Rich Text Format. Here it is in text format.

Here's a choice paragraph from it:

Transistor radios came out. I think my most valuable thing was my transistor radio. It influenced me. I thought, "Wow they made a device that I can sleep with and hear wonderful music all night long every night. Turn it on and carry it with me." It was so personal. It was mine. It wasn't somebody else's. It wasn't my parents' radio. I could listen to it. And I could listen to whatever channel I wanted. I loved that thing. My Dad, he was working for Lockheed. Only the military could sponsor this early transistor companies in Silicon Valley and the early chip making companies because, for the military to launch missiles, they needed low weight and low weight was to put in six transistors on one chip instead of six separate transistors. So that was early it got me an early education to the whole chip thing and I said, "Are they are going to do that so they can make smaller better transistor radios for us people?" and he said, "No, they are going to make it for the military." I was disappointed. I really really wanted them to be making the best technologies for people at home.

Enjoy the Woz, my treat.

Timeout

This week, I had had a pretty cool plan: Go to California, do an interview for GET LAMP, then go to Hawaii for a few days with family. This past Sunday, the day of my flight, I woke up with another kidney stone. Well, I should say I woke up from the extreme pain of a kidney stone, and then had to cancel first the California leg of my trip, and then the Hawaii leg of my trip. This was a bummer.

So if you wonder what I've been up to this week, it's mostly been:

• Sleeping, in pain.
• Writing up the occasional weblog entry, so I keep consistent.
• Reading a lot of books.
• Sitting up for a bit and then deciding that's a bad idea.

I hate this situation; it feels like living death. I was able to do a little bit of editing at my video editing setup this week, but not for very long, and that's work that really needs doing (about a dozen GET LAMP interviews have been culled, giving me roughly 400 "clips" to work with so far). I can't really lift or move anything worth mentioning, I can't shovel my walk, I can't clean my garage, and I can't go to my gym to do the whole self-improvement thing. This is not a situation a personality like mine handles very well.

It's one of the reasons a lot of suicides piss me off; I could use that labor! I wish there was a craigslist-like situation for suicidals, where they could come work for me as interns before offing themselves:

College graduate out of bad relationship, 60wpm, planned overdose in 14 days over unreturned phone calls from girl of dreams; available M-F, require 2-3 hours per day for aimless ranting/crying.

I used to be a temp myself; I know how to work around specific employee issues. Additionally, if someone complains about the quality of the job, I can always say "Yes... that person felt the same way... and now they're gone."

My Suicide Workforce would be especially good at these projects of mine that have been taking a significant amount of turnaround to finish, like categorizing contributed textfiles or scanning in the pile of printouts near my desk. As it is, I need to do a lot of prioritization, and that can sometimes lead to odd lost afternoons of going deep into rescuing a file from the briny blue that people might not care either way about. I mean, someone will likely care eventually, but sometimes it's weird which direction I go into, like when I added gigabytes of handgun manuals. Way to save computer history, Jason! On the other hand, it would probably be a bad idea having one of my suicide temps working on that project...

The pain index this time around has been handled nicely, between proper dosages of painkillers and not going through the Emergency Room to get things done. Instead, I actually went to my primary doctor (Dr. Feelgood) and actually got a scheduled scan and medicines and otherwise have spent the time in my own bed with my own stuff and my laptop, so I'm not sitting far away in a scary room cut off from my stuff. So I'll give this entire go-around a "thumbs up" except for the whole not-going-to-Hawaii thing. I'll get you next time, Hawaii!

Update: Hey, it got out! click here if you're all hot to see what one of these little bastards looks like.

You Are Fuel

Last year, I got a sudden burst of referrer links to my Great Failure of Wikipedia speech. In fact, the links were all variant amounts of criticial attacks, some strong-willed, others mis-informed. I started to respond to a few until I realized that they were doing it for a class, a class in Blogging, actually.

As it turned out, the class was being held within a couple hours of my house, so I called the teacher and asked if I could show up to that evening's class and talk about my speech. He accepted.

The whole dynamic of this is probably worth going into; here people were just posting stuff according to the class's requirements, writing their dashed-off thoughts on a speech, and suddenly the asshole who gave the presentation is there in class. I wish I knew what went through their minds about that.

Well, obviously I know what some of them thought about it, because they weblogged it (blogging class, right?) one of them even decided to speculate on her weblog about my lack of a date for the prom and got a response from me disputing her guesses. Her helpful response? Delete the entire weblog entry. Luckily, there's such a thing as a browser cache, so I saved her entry for posterity. Isn't the client-server model great? The best part is that she's a schoolteacher; great lesson there for your students!

Luckily, I followed my own rule of never speaking in public without having a digital recorder going, and I have the entire exchange recorded to MP3. It made it a lot easier to refute someone saying 'He interrupted people" to go "Well, I have the tape, and that never happened."

It was a great time (for me, anyway). I think it's a case that as I get older, the face-to-face dynamic is becoming just as enjoyable as the online one, and brings different joys. During my "face-to-face" time, however, an exchange happened that shows my (perhaps overly cynical) take on things. Let's throw that out there.

The teacher was also, when not teaching a class on blogging, a radio show host. There's an exchange in there where we were discussing using Wikipedia, and he mentioned using it on his radio show during breaks to be able to look up something quickly. After all, he said "My job as a radio show host is to inform my audience."

No, I said. Your job as a radio show host is to keep your audience listening steadily through a number of commercials and keep their numbers large enough to allow your station to charge more for those commercials.

Maybe people know this, and maybe they don't; I see a lot of different reactions from people that imply that they don't. The purpose of a television channel is to make you watch that channel's advertisements. The purpose of a newspaper is to make you read the advertisements. The purpose of a radio talk show host is to keep you listening long enough to hear the advertisements.

This is a critical thing to understand if you're listening to, say, a show in which there is "controversy". Media that is commercially driven has no incentive to end controversy. If it is required to do horrible, illogical things to maintain that controversy, it will do so. If two sides came to an "agreement" at the end, and could see each other's side, why would you keep listening? There's no sparks, no attacks.

When watching entertainment, the entertainment's job is to keep you satisfied long enough to have thought you got a good deal. If you are seeing the entertainment for free, then that entertainment is likely doing "stuff" to ensure its existence; either selling commercial time, or gearing the activities into a direction of worth for a commercial entity. (Product placement comes to mind, but there's also Opinion placement and other "placements" in effect).

You are, essentially, Fuel that is driving an engine, an engine that has no interest in stopping. To maintain you as fuel, it needs to keep your interest. Keeping someone's interest is not the same as working in their interest. Once this understanding is clear, you can save a lot of time: of course this talk show host is going to be skeptical and stupid about internet technology! Of course this interviewer is going to ask unfair questions to get a rise out of the interviewee, or, ask insane softball questions to get the interviewee (who you can't help but look at because they're famous or beautiful) to sit there longer so the audience will stay around longer. Holy crap! We're all fuel!

There is nothing wrong with being fuel! Just don't act all surprised when you're treated as such.

Smarties and Dumbells

Sometime in my later teens, after being raised on the "mean streets" of Bulletin Board Systems, ASCII Express lines, and the occasional Diversi-Dial, I got myself onto the Usenet posting boards. It was stunning to me, because I didn't know people could write online like that.

For a quick comparison of what I'm talking about, take this message base from the South Pole BBS in roughly Winter of 1984.. and see the difference in this random discussion on a Usenet board in 1988 about getting a Commodore 64 to read Apple II disks. Or, if you feel a need to be more organic, here's a discussion about the importance of honesty in a relationship, also from 1988.

The difference could be staggering; you had full paragraphs, full ideas laid out, almost essays in form. Spelling was many times better, not to mention grammar and the general thesis being put forward. My initial reaction, which I'm sure wasn't unique, was wow, these are all the smart people.

And without a doubt, you're seeing pedigrees of university education in these messages, with youth generally teeming on the side of the BBS messages I posted. But I'm starting to think it's a little more than that.

With BBSes, you had a very strict time limit; in many cases, you were given less than an hour a day, possibly as little as 20 minutes, to read all the new messages and post any responses, much less play some door games or download files. So time was of the essence. Without a doubt, the introduction of QWK packets, multi-line BBSes and other factors changed this time limitation, but it was there. With Usenet, you were posting locally, always able to read at your leisure, able to post at same, and when you put something out, it would warn you of the weight of your words.

Actually, that little factoid might be forgotten; it used to be when you used a Usenet client, it would often print a message warning you about consequences of your action. The message would read something like this:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]

That's the warning that the rn (readnews) Usenet news client would print before you could post to a large group; I'm sure other clients had similar warnings. Were it the case that modern posting clients had warnings like this!

This livejournal entry you're writing, where you describe in excruciating detail how poorly your ex-boyfriend performed in bed, will be not only world-readable and publically commentable, but will cause your name to show up in search engines when people look for a combination of your first name and "rotten lay". Please be sure you know what you are doing. Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny]

We're now living in a wealth of community posting interfaces; certainly forums and "BBS-like" software have to be some of the most recreated-from-scratch programming in existence. Everyone wants a shot at making it, and they all bring entirely different goals to the table. As a result, some places consider good conversation the vital spine that links their website together, while others consider it a quaint afterthought, enabling a little more "sticky time" by forcing people to re-check if anyone else also posted.

Even this weblog has the posting software provided by SixApart, who make Moveable Type. It's pretty basic stuff, letting you post a few easy lines before the window starts to scroll and you kind of lose track of what you were saying in the beginning. One solution is to write stuff out elsewhere, like Notepad or VI, and then copy and paste your completed thought into my anemic little form. In other words, a hack. Right now, ASCII has its little group of posters (Flack, Leah, Shii, Stacia, hello) who live within this particular confined user interface and work with it, but the style of the overriding thing is somewhat dependent on how posting is "treated" by the site.

...here's where I'm going with this. If you browse around, different websites treat user postings differently. And it feels like some of the interfaces appeal to a certain aspect of people while shutting out others. In other words, the interface is driving the conversation.

Let me show an example. The excellent comic XKCD mentions the issue with Youtube postings, but he's quite on the mark. Take, for example, this Noam Chomsky video. Chomsky's a divisive character, able to cause people to take sides. But look at the structure and style of postings this commentary gets:

hughtub:
a REAL educational system might do wonders.
The Framers, nor the ancient Greeks, EVER thought that an ignorant populace could govern itself successfully.
[We've proven them right.]
*** Why do you THINK the neocons have gutted education and funds for education?
[Hint: It IS a way to get a controllable, malleable, knee-jerk populace that'll put up with the "Patriot" Act and other measures to castrate liberty and give up all of our hopes.
It's working.]

This individual may or may not be making a useful point regarding the quality of education towards creating a proper citizenry of a republic, but if they are, it's lost in a hash-stew of e.e. cummings-like poetry, bizarre (and short) shifts in logic, and the as-yet-unexplained use of three asterisks to mean... a paragraph break?

In the case of the community called MetaFilter, let's go with another article about Chomsky, in this case a two sentence link to a bunch of letters about an interview in the UK Guardian. There are still postings with no capital letters, or punctuation, but then a weird thing happens: the longer the conversation goes on, the "smarter" it gets... although a lot of this is because a guy named "russilwvong" grabs the conversation by the sack and starts steering things. In the case of the metafilter interface, pretty much all the posts are on one page (you can look back and forth to them), you are given an account primarily aimed towards posting text, and it's possible to reference individual comments in the thread by a URL (like http://www.metafilter.com/46414/Chomsky#1096166 or similar).

I could eat your day/evening up going from community to community and comparing how they handle this aspect of things, but what I'm essentially describing is this:

• Forum and user interaction is often considered to be an afterthought.
• Since it's the most-quickly-modifiable aspect of a site, it ends up being the most vital and reflective of the site.
• The User Interface (including the treatment of postings, the ease of browsing older postings, and the ability to make new postings in an easy refined manner) has a majority percentage effect on most forums' quality.
• We appear to be doomed as an online race to re-learning all this over and over until another Usenet-like messaging standard makes an appearance.
• I'm sure Danah Boyd has covered this to some extent in front of multiple rooms of people for years on end.

Could it be, I'm asking here, a case that some of these places that have absolutely atrocious forums (like YouTube) should consider the design of their most dynamic and representative component more important? That maybe they should look at what makes one website seem jam-packed full of Smarties and the other packed full of Dumbells? While it's fun to say "Well, that's just the sort of people who would be interested in that website.", I think it's a cop-out. I think there's a science here, a skillset that could stand to be expanded. The working real-life examples are there. I just wish they were used more.

The Beautiful Boot

What I think has impressed me the most over the years I've worked with computers are the times I've come to an expectation that a computer acts a "certain way"... and then along comes a programmer, hacker or tinkerer who proves that no, in fact you're wrong and it doesn't have to be that "certain way".

One of these situations was floppy disk load times. Having come from cassette tapes, where it could literally be 20-30 minutes of load time before the program was ready to go, Floppy Disks were by far both superior and blindingly fast. But people are what they are, and it never takes that long for the mind to adapt to the increased speed and then find fault with it. In the case of disks, it could be anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds to load a program via floppy, depending on what was going by.

I didn't own an Apple II at the time, but the Apple II was what the schools dealt in and that's what the kids would trade programs in. If you were lucky, your school had kids who had access to programs/copies of disks outside of the district, and then you'd have even more cool stuff. It also gave whoever had these new programs the pride of showing off their latest wares. (Softwares. Wares. Warez. I'm sure you get the etymology of this by now.)

Again, the way that programs (especially commerical programs) being traded around "worked" is that you'd put the floppy disk into the drive, then power on the machine, and then let it "boot" into the program, taking about 15 seconds to do so, chugging away, and then it'd show a graphic splash screen and there we were. This was the "certain way" that floppy disks on the Apple II would boot.

However, that changed for me when I ran into "Beautiful Boot" by the Midwest Pirates' Guild.

You never forget your first time, or more accurately you occasionally do forget your first time if it's the first time encountering a file selection menu. But I remember mine clearly. I was in a computer classroom at school, and there was a movable cart with a large (regular) television serving as a monitor at the front of the room, and someone shoved in their latest "wares' disk to show off what they had. They turned on the Apple II, and in one click of the disk drive, there it was:

The screenshot shows several things clearly and a few things not as clearly. First of all, the font was great: instead of the basic Apple II font, this was an easy-to-read style that could been seen across the room. The selections were all right there, waiting for you to type in a letter instead of the commands BRUN STOLEN.PROGRAM.I.DOWNLOADED or RUN "CRAPPY BASIC PROGRAM". And the minute you did, off they would go, chugging away quickly and your program would be up in no time.

Additionally, it had a soundtrack, albeit a simple one: plinky little dots of noise, not unlike the starfield that was scrolling in the background, which was also amazing to watch... all of this in one disk chug! How did this happen? It was basically magic.

This was a quantum leap from anything I'd seen before. I got a copy of the disk that had this menu on it, but it was years before I got my hands on the actual program to generate this menu. The documentation for Beautiful Boot is here in my archives, and you can see the excellent work done on this program's instructions to make it easy to use.

Here's screenshots from the generation program (called Beautiful Boot, of course):

So, how did Beautiful Boot boot so quickly? Well, by simply working hard at the programming, of course: being on Track 0, it highly compressed the program that would do the actual menu, and had a very reduced version of AppleDOS that could fit in that track. One click, one read, one run. And so in doing this, they proved everything could be improved about the Apple Boot process.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mini Appler (and Sinbad Sailor) of the Midwest Pirate's Guild as part of the BBS Documentary. When the opportunity came up to interview them, you can bet I was going to move heaven and earth to make such an interview happen. As it was, it only took a round-trip by car across Wisconsin to Minneapolis, Minnesota, a few extra hours on an insane trip that will always be thought of as the "Midwest Run". (I went to 8 states in 10 days, driving thousands of miles and doing well over a dozen interviews).

Here's the Mini Appler (get it? Minneapolis?) from one of the photographs I took during that interview.

What a great guy he was; photogenic, articulate, and with a good memory for the BBS days. Naturally we discussed Beautiful Boot, where he told me how he'd gotten the starfield routine from a Broderbund game of the same time (he'd lifted the assembly routines, then changed them from side-scrolling to vertical scrolling). It was great to finally, ultimately, thank him for blowing my mind a mere 20 years earlier.

This magical situation, where a well-written program does something that nobody previously thought was possible, has only happened to me a few times in my life (most recently would be the 8088 Corruption demo that Trixter did in 2004). When they happen, you have to treasure them, and they remind me how everything is possible, and cynicism gets me nothing but a slow load time.

BLOCKPARTY UPDATE: Speakers List is Finalized

That Demo Party I'm co-organizing for April, Blockparty, now has the speakers list finalized. These are people who are speaking specifically about demoscene and scene-related topics, as well as the dozens of others speaking at the hosting conference, Notacon. Here are my own personal takes on the speakers; the speakers page has more generalized information and biographies.

Andy "Phoenix" Voss: Allow Me To Demonstrate

To start off, we snagged Andy Voss, who's better known as Phoenix of the group Hornet. Hornet is sort of a dormant group these days (they refer to themselves as "ex-members" occasionally) but during the early 1990s these guys quickly established themselves as the go-to-group for keeping track of the latest and greatest on PC Demos, and demo music. The "Hornet MOD Archive", for example, was just an amazing piece of work, and if you were a musician (and I sort of was), you weren't anything until you get your music on there and it got rated by the staff. Andy is considered to be one of the top experts on the history and knowledge of the demoscene in North America, so it made sense to ask him to speak about the subject and provide an introduction to the whole idea of why we would have a party like this.

Jim "Trixter" Leonard: 8088 Corruption

Trixter's become one of my best friends over the past few years; in the Jason Scott League of Extraordinary Compulsive Disorders he's known simply as the Eye of Doom. The reason for this is that I can drop a montage of video in his inbox, and he will respond with feedback like "It appears you changed the framerate of the second shot, and your autofocus kicks in at 00:32:22." His eye for detail and his wide-ranging audio, video and archiving skills make him the most Jason Scott-like person in the planet. Surprisingly, we still get along.

Jim's talents with programming and his incredible eye led to a demo called "8088 Corruption", the details of which are over here. Basically, he got full-motion video and audio on an original IBM PC. I'm not making this up, and I'm not exaggerating. Obviously, this got a lot of attention, won awards, and was one of the big mind-blowers of the previous few years. At Blockparty he'll be bringing the original hardware he ran this demo on, and explaining how he put it all together. And maybe even a surprise or two. (He's got an eye for surprises.)

Andrew "Necros" Sega: Taking Tracking Mainstream

I'll just explain why Necros is in this speaker list from the most memorable experience I had regarding him. Back in 1996, I had the pleasure of attending the North American International Demoparty, also known as NAID. He was giving a presentation on "tracking", which is basically the use of a computer program to make music, using samples and programmatic references to samples to generate songs. This is how I used to make music in the early 1990s and so did a ton of other people. But Necros was considered to be one of the greats, and I stood in the back of the presentation hall to listen to him speak.

At one point, he said "Let's say we have a baseline here..." and he just hacked in a bunch of numbers, as quickly as if you were typing your own phone number three times. When he was done, he hit PLAY on the program, and a perfectly formed, well-done, intense bass-line was playing. The effect on the room was instantaneous; hushed, amazed silence. If this doesn't sound impressive, imagine a guy giving you some tips about drawing portraits and he talks to you about using proper pen technique, looking at you, and his hands idly sketch out a perfect rendering of your face. It was just friggin' amazing, and I still remember that 11 years on. Andy has since gone into professional music creation, and it's going to be quite the presentation.

Christian "RaD Man" Wirth: Building Character: ANSI from the Ground Up

My man, my buddy, my close friend Rad Man, co-organizer of the Blockparty, will be presenting a primer on the idea of ANSI and the creation of ANSI artworks. He's given speeches on the "Artscene" and on running an Art Group, but this is more focused on showing how to work in the medium, because the problems and solutions that came up in ANSI art creation are in many ways similar to problems that exist and have always existed when you want to express yourself creatively with a limited medium. Since he's in town anyway, it made sense for him to flex his knowledge and skills in this direction, so he'll be giving a presentation as well. It'll be great.

We've been kicking around the idea of making a "mini-doc" about Artscene History, using his built-up presentation he's been giving the last couple years. There's always something new for us to work on.

David "Polaris" Valentine
Beausoleil "BuZ" Samson-Guillemette: Techniques for 4kb Intro Development

Northern Dragons are currently the most active and premier Demoscene group in North America, so of course we'd be quite amiss if we didn't have representation from these fellows at the event. So, both the founder and one of the members of ND will be presenting at the event, and hopefully entering some of the competitions as well. In this presentation, they'll be talking about 4k demos, which are what they sound like; entire graphics and sound productions that are taking up a total of 4096 bytes. If that sounds insane, that's what the demoscene is all about! Insanity, rubber ducks and blowing your mind. These guys are also doing the invitation demo for this party, which will be coming out at the end of the month.

Nullsleep: Squarewave to Heaven: An introduction to the Chiptune Music Scene

What self-respecting demo party could pull itself off without a representation of the currently-hot 8-bit scene? Nullsleep and I have been interacting on and off for years now, since we both remix old stuff into new, and spend time tracking down both old examples of cool stuff and finding new contexts to put them in.

If you've not heard of "Chiptune" music or the "8-bit scene", then let me send you over to 8-bit Peoples and take a shark-bite out of your productive workday. A lot of this also shows up in a documentary that is making the rounds as we speak. Again, you're in for a treat.

I know how it is for people when they're planning trips; they usually wait a couple of months before the event to even start thinking about scheduling or arranging things. Well, now is the time. This is going to be a great party, at a great con, and I'm going to personally ensure you have a fantastic time. Get over to the Registration Page and sign up!

The February Goat Update

I know people are probably wondering how that whole replace a popular image with a less popular one experiment has been going. While I doubt I'll be doing many more "updates" unless something really cool or interesting happens in the future, I might as well give some hard statistics for the people who were wondering what the addition of Goatse did to dissuade users on Myspace from using the art.

Well, I'm happy to report that only a mere 18,000 people were goatse'd in the month of February, plus another 3,000 who saw it in conjunction with the article on here.

So wait, you're saying, people still haven't gotten rid of the grim reaper picture on their pages? Still?

No, in fact a good amount of them have done something worse.

Many of them now have their backgrounds set up to download the grim reaper pic, then immediately download a black background and overlay it over the picture.

As hard as I may try sometimes, you just can't make this stuff up.

You win this round, clueless Internet Passengers!

A few of the kids have simply shifted from the Grim Reaper image over to the other cool images in that directory, so it does mean they took the time to really browse around and find something else to hotlink to. I thought that was nice.

I suspect I'll just quietly kill hotlinking for artscene.textfiles.com, since it's just causing too much trouble bandwidth-wise, but not quite yet. I thought it ironic that while writing the Peter Hirschberg entry I posted recently, I ended up having to make local copies of all his stuff because... his server forbids hotlinking. That'll show me.

Anyway, onwards to real content tomorrow. I take requests, by the way.

Generation TEXT

In case you're wondering, I do actually get fan mail, non-ironically, thanking me for the various projects I've done. I get hate mail too, but the fan-mail outnumbers it 20 to 1. So what I'm really saying is: Get cracking, you bastards.

In recent years, however, I've been receiving a type of fan mail I didn't expect to get, but I should have. It reads, in various forms, this way.

"Thank you for being such an important part of my growing up."

TEXTFILES.COM was founded in 1998. (October 8, 1998, actually). This means that it's starting to edge towards 9 years old. It also means that it's been possible for a kid to get online (let's say, when they're age 11 or 12), stumble upon the website, and then read it, off and on, until they're in college. Since a lot of these files were written by kids between those ages, that means we have a case of a generation of teenagers leaving essays and thoughts to the next succeeding generation of teenagers, through my site.

I guess if you stick around long enough, you become an institution. The mail that comes now doesn't have the tone of "good luck with your project", but "I hope you can wish me well on my project." Instead of "Where did you get these", it's "Thanks for having these." In a few uninformed cases, I've actually gotten 'Thanks for writing all these."

Speaking of writing these...

When I put textfiles.com together, it was meant to simply be a collection of files that I knew people had worked hard on or which I was worried were going to disappear, even though they'd played a big part in my own youth. I figured I'd gone through all that trouble back then of saving them onto floppies and printouts, so I might as well put them online. That was 1998. Later, I realized that a few "BBS textfile-like" files were showing up, but I didn't want them to end up being in the same place as the BBS textfiles themselves, so I created web.textfiles.com, which handles all the files made after 1995.

But an interesting thing happened. People started contributing new files to me directly.

And I don't mean that they starting finding old BBS textfiles I didn't have and sending them to me, although that did happen. I mean that people started writing new files in the style of BBS textfiles and then contributing them to me, directly, to be joined with the textfiles.com collection and "keep it going" even though there weren't the same sort of dial-up BBSes to upload to.

Not wanting to shove them into web.textfiles.com, I created a directory, uploads, and started saving them in there, so they'd be a part of "the collection" without being relegated to "something I happened to find on the web".

And here we are now, with over 550 files sent to me over the last 8 years. Quite a lot!

There's a few people in there who have been contributing files to me for half a decade. I've actually watched their writing styles change, their focus and priorities shift, and in some cases, they disavow and hate previous works. It's kind of fun to watch this progression in others; I certainly recognize that in my own works and growth.

So what's it feel like to be an institution? Like I shouldn't waste too much time in front of the TV, actually, and get myself in gear. High gear. I have to do it for the fans!

Getting Jason to Endorse You: An Example

I've bitched out a few people who've tried to get me to "endorse" their little messy get-rich-quick schemes, especially when they do so in a way that shows they neither know me, care to, or even tried to understand why I do what I do and work with that.

Finally, I got a letter that succeeds! So here we go:

 Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2007 18:59:46 +0000
 From: Bogart DeJoint 
 To: Jason Scott 
 Subject: Uncle Bogart wants YOU...
 
 ...to join the Free Internet!
 
 We crazy mofos at the FreeNIC (freenic.org) have started an alternate DNS
 root for non-commercial sites. In a nutshell, that means no ads, no spam,
 and no fees for being listed in our top-level domain (.free). We want to
 bring back the anti-corporate spirit of the BBS age, to return to a way
 of life where Internet users are not viewed simply as consumers to be
 exploited for financial gain.
 
 Now, normally we wait for people to come to us and say "I want my free
 domain. Bitch best recognize." But in this case, we think your site would
 be such a tremendous asset (not to be confused with a tremendous asshole)
 to the project that we're making this request the other way around.
 Really, we're nothing like those 247 WhoreMedia douchebags. Nobody is
 trying to profit off your work. We hate profit. We just see that
 textfiles.com provides enormous amounts of interesting content without a
 single ad, and that's exactly we're looking for on the Free Internet.
 
 All we'd like is to point a .free domain (be it textfiles.free or any
 other domain/s of your choice) to the textfiles.com servers, and then for
 you to post something on your weblog along the lines of "I'm on the [Free
 Internet] (linky-linky to freenic.org) at textfiles.free, and wouldn't it
 kick ass if more people joined us. It's free as in freedom *and* as in
 free weed!" Now that you're on a six entry a week schedule, surely there
 are slow news days where you can fit in this kind of stuff? Surely an
 Internet root that says "fuck the corporate world, biaatch!" deserves a
 mention on your weblog?
 
 Well, there you have it, that's the pitch. With your help, the Free
 Internet can get past the concept stage and on to the "free porn" stage.
 We have an IRC server at irc.freenic.org, where we answer serious
 questions (#free) or generally monkey-ass around while getting high
 (#hash). If you dropped by, you'd at least get some free virtual pizza.
 With pot. Which you know would totally own, so come on, help us take back
 the Internet! NOOCH!
 
 w3rd, I'm out.

What wins here:

• Humor.
• No attempt to get me to put "ads" up on textfiles.com.
• No attempt to make it sound like they're doing me a "favor" instead of the other way around.
• Profanity. (See: Humor)
• Drug references. I don't do drugs but I do do drug humor. (See: Humor)

So there you go, there's this alternative NIC thing running which is apparently run by toked-out hippies using their nameservers as a bong but also giving you essentially free DNS for your trouble. If this attracts you, go for it. Otherwise, relax; smoke some of this.

Peter Hirschberg

If you haven't been following the accomplishments and style of Peter Hirschberg for the last decade or so, let me repair that major mistake immediately.

He is a true modern renaissance man, combining art, programming, and industrial design. His style is impeccable and pervades all his work, and at various times he has lit up my online life with his craft and creation. I have not had the pleasure of communicating with him or meeting him in person, and one day I hope to rectify that.

Hirschberg's big effect on me is being inspiring in the realms of emulation, arcades, and style. Let's cover them.

At some point I had considered doing some sort of book or similar project around Emulation, specifically Arcade Game Emulation, because the whole subject fascinates me. In point of fact the Arcade Documentary will be covering emulation and I have a number of interviews with emulation program authors sketched out or planned. Emulation as a concept and technique actually goes back many years, but the "mainstreaming" of arcade game emulation occured in the 1990s, with machines powerful enough to emulate arcade games from years before without stuttering or freaking out. It's a little hard to believe that this would now be old history, but it's getting on 10 years for some of the events. One of the facts that's starting to get obscured is that before MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) basically flattened the market, there were a bunch of single-game or small-group-of-games emulators out there. A emulator might just do Dig Dug II, or Pac-Man, or a small collection of Midway games that happened to use the same chip. During this time, Hirschberg released a multi-game emulator called Vector Dream. The link I just gave has a lot of information about the program, but I'll put out my own thoughts on top of them.

When emulator authors were putting out their works, they tended to focus on the basics. The programs would be command-line or have a simple enough GUI, and then you'd be playing the game. The cool part was that they worked, and worked quickly. This was quite sufficient for a first wave of "Holy Shit It Works" which is what was basically going on. at the time.

However, Vector Dream upped the bar. And by upped the bar I mean that our instruments were last able to track the bar going past Saturn before we lost contact with it. Where previous emulators had been comparing each other based on framerate/speed of the emulator and accuracy of the sound generation, Hirschberg's Vector Dream attempted to give you control over aspects of the arcade experience you didn't even know were a part of it. The vectors, previously quite happy in an emulator to be drawn accurately, could now be translucent. They could show a glow radius. The sound was accurate, but he added an optional mixed-in sound of the deflection coil. Of the power supply. When you dropped in a "quarter", you heard it go in. You saw the start buttons blinking. Little things, you may say. Minor additions. But it was a level of craft not seen before.

Hirschberg maintained Vector Dream for a while, then pulled it down when he started working on the relatively-shortlived Retrocade" project, which was meant to be the be-all end-all of emulators. It was like a supergroup of emulator authors, and was an attempt to follow many of the credoes and ideas we'd seen in Vector Dreams. Like Vector Dream, Retrocade was stylish, accurate, and filling with nice touches. Both Vector Dream and Retrocade have backgrounds for the video games that used the "45 degree glass" trick to give black-and-white games some implied color. It had Hirschberg's style all over it.

MAME, the current dominant arcade emulator, uses a lot of these ideas, and is very well maintained, adding new games or game variants every few weeks. It also utilizes digitzed sounds, backgrounds, and even scans of control panels and marquees to give you more of the flavor of the place they came from.

Peter Hirschberg, meanwhile, got quiet as far as fans like myself were concerned, but I always kept an eye out for him. A number of years back, he released the beautiful and stylish LEDHEAD, which simulates the old Mattel handheld LED games like Football, Baseball and the like. When I play these, I'm playing with this thing, I'm immediately transported back to hanging out at my dad's house on visitation, playing LED football while resting against his shoulder as he watched TV. This was about the time that he was quite happy to have his kids around, and if that meant the son was going to be banging away at the dumb little piece of plastic, fine with him. I loved that thing, and this simulator captures it perfectly.

His other simulators will get your attention too, like Vertisim, which simulates a helicopter toy from the 70s, and Adventure: Revisited where he dragged Adventure kicking and screaming into the modern day. Just his description of the process is worth the price of admission.

Am I indicating how much I respect this fellow? I see his name, and I endorse the result immediately.

I was pleased, therefore, to find out that the arcade documentary "Chasing Ghosts" had Hirschberg on as a consultant and artist. This is the fellow you want on your team when you're going for the extra mile, and all reports I have seen (I have not had the pleasure of seeing this film yet) indicate that the artwork and animation is impeccable. Additionally, there was a bonus to this, worth noting because it will fade very quickly into history.

You see, when you're trying to get attention and attendance and possible buyers for your as-yet-unsigned film, you will often do a Dog and Pony show to attract all these potential folks. I don't like that people have to do this, but I can certainly respect the quality of the Dog and Pony show, and the amount of effort some will put into them.

To that end, Hirschberg has put up an excellent scrapbook of the "Chasing Ghosts Arcade" which was created near the Sundance festival to attract people. In there, you had all sorts of classic machines, the design of said arcade being the result of Hirschberg's skill, including a new poster and artwork referencing this "Arcade".

As my friend Trixter commented, "But what happened to it?" And the answer is, of course, that it was all torn down and scattered to the four winds; that's what you do with publicity stunts.

But fear not.

Outside his own home, Hirschberg has basically built his own arcade... filled with the games he owns, and having all those touches of craft and wonder I have come to expect from him over the last decade.

Tell me, when you see this photo, that you can tell it's in someone's home:

You can see what I mean by craft here. The galaxy rug, glowing under blacklight. The raised wooden railing separating some of the games. The checkerboard floor. The change machine, the little signs, the scattered arrangement. This is mastery.

Were the world filled with more Peter Hirschbergs, we'd be dumping all our money into medical research to ensure we lived to see all the great works they made.

Will he sit down for an interview for my own arcade documentary? Maybe.. I hope so. Maybe this year, maybe next year. But either way, he's inspired me more than almost anyone to capture that feeling on film.

A Breath of Air (Housecleaning)

So here we are, roughly 40 weblog entries into 2007, and I might as well take a moment or two to go meta-critical and describe what's going on.

This is the year of discipline for me. Whereas before I've slacked off or otherwise misdirected energy and avoided certain necessary things, this is the year I finally follow my own advice and either admit I'm never going to do something and move on, or do it.

The weblog shifted from 5-10 entries a month to roughly 24. (Six times a week.) In other words, I've either doubled or quadrupled the output, and turned this weblog from an occasional bit of musing to a consistently updated flow of thought. This has the potential to lead to either dilution (my 5 good thoughts a month are now smeared like peanut butter across 24 entries) or excess (people find that they simply can't take that much Jason Scott in a single month).

Obviously, I wish for neither of these potentials to be achieved, so I hope to include a mix of what I think people enjoy (theoretical essays, travelogues, filming diary, meta-discussion, highly-recommended links) while trying to avoid what I think are major pitfalls (content-less posting of links, lowering the bar of "weblog worthy" to noise levels, being not funny). We'll see how the mix goes and I encourage people to feed back, because I really do occasionally listen.

I personally don't think that having a single reason to do something is adequate for a long-term commitment to a project, the outcome being that your brain/personality can then devote time to overcoming that problematic "reason" until you're convinced you don't really need to do it anymore.

I had three reasons to do the documentary: 1. I really did believe I was saving important history and information for posterity, getting stories and interviews that were in danger of being lost. 2. I could actually meet people who were heroes or legends from my youth, personally, and hang out with them. 3. I could make a cool film and maybe sell it. By leveraging these different reasons on different days, I could avoid shelving or delaying the project because "the reason" wasn't grabbing me anymore. And trust me, there were a few times this came in handy: during multi-hundred-mile drives resulting in a minute of usable footage, or the multiple times I was barred entry because a spouse spontaneously decided This Was All A Bad Idea. By simply concentrating on the other reasons that this latest fiasco or painful process didn't change, I could slog through.

Similarly, I have multiple reasons to step this whole weblog thing up. One is that it increases readership by being frequent, and a readership means better feedback, more interest in my projects, and more contact with folks who can help those projects. Another is that I sometimes overcompensate for not having adequate opportunities to express myself and 24 essays/entries a month oughta calm that issue down. And finally, I realized I needed to start training myself to write more frequently and understandably because it's just about time to finish some book/writing ideas I have or admit I'm never ever going to do them.

I had a great mentor, name of Clive Smith, who did nothing but give me incredible life advice throughout my late 20's. The relevant phrase here, which he passed to me during one of our many phone conversations was "Work is Fractal". Often, the more you work, the more you find an increase in your ability to do work. Part of this, I think, is because you build up skills at things like referencing information or composing replies, and you can eventually jump into tasks with all the cylinders going at full instead of painfully ramping up every time, which makes you feel like every future endeavor is going to be equally as tough. If you've ever run into someone who seems to have boundless energy, who can fire off a 5 paragraph response to you and then still put in a full amount of work that day, you know what I mean. I'd like to be one of those people, and that'll hopefully assure all this stuff in my head gets out of it, where it belongs. Lock your doors.

In terms of the workouts and gym sessions I'm now doing 3-4 times a week, there's multiple reasons there as well. First, I was really starting to get worried about my general health, and a doctor told me a few things about my future lifespan that aren't so hot to hear, so I can mitigate that by being generally more healthy, taking medicines, and eating somewhat right. But as has been proven countless times in the story of people, that's not entirely useful as "the" reason to work out. So on top of that, I've been using these workout sessions to listen to podcasts and speeches of subjects I'm supposed to be "up" on, so I can comment on them more intelligently. Finally, I have this germ of an idea for a documentary/film/narrative that will have me be on screen, and I'll be damned if I end up looking some sort of Hog God onscreen. So, between these three reasons, I can shift the blame while all the time getting some level of healthier.

I found a bug with the comment moderation, and 50 comments from the last year were being held in no-man's land until I released them. Some included really old friends, so please forgive me everyone. This shouldn't happen again, but promises of this sort are rough hedge bets against the future.

There is now, finally, a couple photos of me and a bio on the right column of the website, thereby officially making this weblog a complete sales-job for All That Is Jason.

Now let's see if I can make it worth visiting.

Computer Camp

Summer camp was a requirement for me and my two siblings because the divorce settlement gave each parent a month with us and there was just no realistic way for my dad to take a month off of work to watch us. The first year of this, we were sent to a place called Surprise Lake Camp which was such an unmitigated disaster for me that it borders on cathartic even mentioning it, as one might idly mention the time they watched a pet killed before their eyes. While Surprise Lake is 105 years old and I am perfectly willing to say it had an off-year in my case, I'm sure it was me: the camp was mostly geared towards city kids and my father's suburban home was 11 miles from the place. I got into fights, was the victim of insane, almost pathological pranks, and spent a lot of my time plotting horrible and nightmarish scenarios to either end my own life or a convenient, ever-shifting handful of nearby bullying maniacs. I often threatened to walk home and one of the counselors mentioned to me towards the end of my time there, "Holy Crap, you really could have done that." I suppose I qualify as an "alumni" of the place but my attendance of any function there would end in fire. Lots and lots of fire.

My father reluctantly agreed with my preference to never go near that camp again and the next year, 1983, I instead went to Computer Tutor Summer Camp, in Williamstown Massachusetts. Every day I spent there made up for the entire punishing summer I'd spent at Surprise Lake the previous year.

Computer Tutor was one of that breed of Computer Camp that rose up in the 1980s, this freakish combination of outdoors activities and honing of programming skills that was often the result of a previously all-outdoors summer camp building a "lab" near the administration buildings and holding haphazard "classes" there. I choose Computer Tutor, although there were actually a whole selection that I found, including Old Acres Computer Camp in Indiana (which I've scanned the brouchure for) and the holy grail, the Atari Computer Camps at Club Med. This 1983 Time Magazine article gives a sense for the weird, almost opportunistic vibe these places give, looking back. Being 13 at the time and totally down with the wonders of computers, it made total sense that there'd be camps all over the country with computers at them. But it's quite obvious that in many cases it was just a matter of strapping a "computer" theme to your busted-out camp with duct tape and then hanging up your new cyber-shingle.

Computer Tutor, however, was a little different. It was basically a summer program being held at Williamstown, Massachusetts, within the confines of a college: Williams College, to be exact. So no weiner roasts, no musty cabins, no hikes down to the latrines. When I was brought there by my dad, my suitcase brimming with clothes and books but very little technical gear, I was checked into a dormitory. Space was so huge that I didn't even have a roommate. There were a total of about 20 of us, mostly boys but with a couple girls to balance things out. We didn't have a mess hall; we ate at the college cafeteria. And let me diverge off into a segueway here: We were given meal plan cards.

Imaging being 13 years old and suddenly given not only your own room in a beautiful campus (and the campus was very beautiful, especially in summer), but given a little card that would allow you unlimited food forever while the magic Food Building was open. Anyone who knows and hangs out with me has seen how fast and how much I can eat if I don't watch myself. I am quite positive this is where it came from: endless sodas, mountains of entres and desserts, side dishes by the truckload. To be thirteen years old and have a beautiful dorm room, unlimited meals, an environment of summer college sleepiness, and a requirement to play with computers each and every day... where's the downside here?

I might as well drop in the picture I have of the 1983 group that was taken, likely as a promotion, but which I've cherished ever since:

That's me in the middle, second row, just under the guy with the beard and the afro. He and the fellow with the black beard to his right were the main counselors. There's a counselor all the way to the right, and the rest are the kids of the camp. It's nice to have mementos like this. The moral of this is take more photos. I look like the dictionary definition of "geek" and we're all wearing the camp shirt but I'm one spectacularly happy motherfucker in this photo, even if I look like I'm scowling. Trust me.

The kids at Surprise Lake, besides being either bullies or indifferent ghosts, were also not blazingly smart, or hid smarts so they'd fit in. At Computer Tutor, they all were smart. I thought I was smart and then found out, watching the other kids in action, that I was actually the keeper of a sort of intelligence fog, a general sense of understanding things well but with no focus. There were two kids who would play chess games. During our occasional outings. In their heads. They'd call the moves out at each other and then keep walking around or hanging out, considering their next moves. This blew me away. Similarly, some of the kids were doing stuff on the computers that I just had no idea could be done. They'd use variable name conventions or graphics functions or whatever else they'd learned elsewhere and I was flat-footed. I realized I knew shit from shit and the only way I could have previously considered myself good at computers was because I was comparing myself to squirrels.

The town of Williamstown was rather small, and for a kid with very little in the way of money (why would I need it, after all?), there was very little to do. I remember when I found the local arcade, a hole in the wall affair that was gifted with a half-dozen machines, of which I can clearly remember Xevious and Tron. I spent some time there but not much at all, considering how much else there was to do.

I could fill the pages with memories of all those little things that happen at camp; the glances at girls, the solitary walks through new locations, the triumph of a learned phrase, the tears of laughter from an incredible joke or prank, the sorrow at a missed opportunity. I think anyone who's been a youth and stayed over somewhere knows these things. I'll confine myself to two memories, both related to computers.

The first is that piracy was rampant at camp. When the alpha counselor wasn't around, the sub-counselors would let the kids whip out their pirated games collection and "warez trade" right in the lab. The alpha counselor had hurt her leg in some fashion and required a cane to get to the lab, so when she was in sight, there was plenty of time to stash away the disks and return to "normal" before she walked in. She didn't walk over all that much. At the end of camp, she gave a very moving talk about the things we'd learned and she stressed the importance of ethics in using computers, of not pirating software and not taking advantage of others. I still remember the glances from the sub-counselors at us, almost as if to say Well, unless you really have to.

I didn't have any floppy disks, so I couldn't be a part of the copy parties, and when I went out to see if I could buy any, the place nearby wanted fifteen dollars for two floppies. And people ask me if I wish we could return to those times!

The second memory is more exact: the most popular game, by far, was The Bilestoad, which was a game for the Apple II created by "Mangrove Earthshoe", and which featured a top-down view of two walking knight-like creatures who would slice and dice the living crap out of each other. This game was jaw-dropping. It had scrolling over a massive playing field, and when the two characters were not near each other, it would flip between them. I saw that game, at my young age, and I realized these crazy things could do anything if you tried hard enough. I never ever forgot that game, and even though I didn't have an Apple II, I remember buying a copy of it in the store and keeping it in my collection, where it stays to this day.

"Mangrove Earthshoe" was the pseudonym of Marc Goodman. An excellent interview of Dr. Goodman is here. He mentions having never met someone who had official copy of the game. Maybe I'll fix that.

Like I said, I have hundreds of memories from my two summers at Computer Tutor Summer Camp. By the time I was 15, I'd moved fully into running my own BBS and all sorts of other activities, and I didn't go back. Possibly, there was no Computer Tutor camp to go back to... a lot of camps simply dried up and left when the home computer boom flattened out and you didn't need to go "somewhere" to learn about computers. I'm glad I got my time with them, and the dorm living and eating totally changed how I looked at the world; I knew there were places out there that you could be your own person, respected as an individual, and trusted to take care of yourself. For some, 13 would be a little late to learn this, but it's never too late to learn these lessons if you haven't already.

Computer Camp... Life never was better for me than those two summers.

You've Ruined Everything

Many times, the roles that are taken up in an online community that's based around a "thing" are so structured and expectant that you could almost fashion carved wooden masks for them. You'd choose to wear that mask and then hop on stage and do the dance that so many have done before you. I don't have direct evidence for this but I suspect it goes many many years back, those conversations lost to history.

There's similar templates for offline communities but that's someone else's job to describe them, and I suspect academic libraries are jammed full of those descriptions. Come to think of it, they're probably jammed with descriptions of online communities too, but here's mine, subject to refinement. Consider it a rough first shot at these definitions, with you getting what you paid for.

Let's start with the roles themselves.

The first is Very Communicative Person. VCP is the main motivator of conversations, and will jump into all of them if they have the time to. Sometimes they know what's going on and sometimes not, but they're not hostile about it. In fact, you kind of feel bad telling them they're wrong, because they're being so nice about them. If a community is lucky, they'll have half a dozen of these folks online and your new cycle (a week on BBSes, an hour on web forums) will reveal another round of insights. Without at least a couple VCPs, your community is very very dead-looking, and not likely to attract new people.

The Flighty Tourist is someone who doesn't normally go into the community but who might stumble upon it due to a weblink, or (in the BBS era) an index card on a bulletin board at a computer store, or a phone number a buddy gave them, or any one of a hundred opportunities. Unfortunately, they don't really know what all this community is, what it's about, what's cool and isn't cool, and so on. But they do know how to post! So post they do, either contributing an already-long-answered question or misunderstanding the fundamental nature of things. The FT is useful for the same reason that it's good to occasionally get the flu; a little crisis now and then will rally the troops and make people understand the tight-knit nature of the community (or, on the other extreme, the insularity of it). Some FTs even become community members, which is even greater because they feel like they have slowly earned respect from humble beginnings. Of course, too many FTs coming in at once and the whole cabbage goes to rot.

The Tiresome Contrarian is universally hated but somehow doesn't let that universal hate stop them from constantly posting the fact that everyone else is not just wrong, but personally flawed. Imagine a big purple rolling ball that belches and throws up. Imagine that you're working on something in your room and every once in a while you see the purple ball roll by your open door. Damn if you don't want that ball to roll in where you're trying to get something done. And if it does, then that sinking feeling you get is quickly followed by having to clean up the vomit. Same with the conversation or piece of the community in question. TC shows up and the party just went from happy dancing to two people facing off with broken bottles. Sometimes, like an FT, a TC can be a good way to bring the strength of the culture up to a higher level, but that's playing with fire.

The Power-Imbued Elite can either be the person who runs the community, or someone who is given administrative powers by the owner, or, in a few rare cases, someone who dominates the whole shebang by sheer force of will. Once the PIE enters a conversation, it can warp the thing as easily as a magnet dropped into the back of a TV. Look at all the pretty colors! People, it often seems, like having an elite, or at least a benevolent leader, who they can communicate with and whose word is, ultimately law. It helps settle arguments pretty fast, and it's a kick when they weigh in in the middle of a discussion. You sit up and listen, as does everyone else. Naturally, if the PIE is always popping in and being a constant contributor, then they can often revert down to a VCP and you kind of forget they're a PIE until something whacky happens and then they grow wings and shoot lasers out of their eyes and you make whatever sound for you represents "woah". Too many PIEs flexing their muscles and the same problem as the TCs taking over: chaos, then death.

The House Organ Grinder does not always make an appearance in a community, but when they do, the whole place benefits. A HOG will keep track of the file sections, or suggest doing an introductory textfile, or will archive all the old messages for easy perusing later. They might run a newsletter or a support group or handle where the pizza parties go. They don't "own" the place but they can sometimes have more than a passing voice of authority if they decide to. Often they won't, however, and they'll simply pipe in to tell everyone they've been working very hard and they have something to show you that you'll like. HOGs are probably the easiest members to burn out, since they're sometimes doing even more work than the PIE.

Matrix across these roles the following critical events that happen in most communities. These are the myths, the stories that these masks then assemble into to provide a dependable show and often a predictable outcome.

The Loss of Important Infrastructure can be as simple as a hard drive dying or as complicated as a unexpected lack of compatibility between required-but-dodgy modules in years-old program code. It can rise from a network outage, or a disasterous upgrade attempt. However this happens, the result is the same: a mad scramble among the members, statements of what the community means to them, a call to arms, and a declaration/offering of support. The community is in danger of disappearing! If we just band together and show the world how strong we are, we'll survive this unexpected bump in the road. Sometimes the PIE causes the crisis themselves by deciding not to go on, and others might offer to take the community out of their hands. And sometimes it's just a matter of everyone chucking in $10 and a new drive is bought. This critical event can often be the first time a community realizes that it really is a community. It can also be the first time it realizes it is not. This is also an excellent time to shoot the TC, hide the body and plant a bush over it. By the time the smoke clears, nobody notices we're down one asshole.

The Radical Change in the Makeup of the Place can occur with the influx of money, the spontaneous leaving of a lot of VCPs, the shifting of PIEs, or even the HOG burning out and not uploading a newsletter any more. The software, the hardware, it's all fine. But the makeup of the people has shifted, and maybe you find out that you weren't showing up because of the cool door games or the flash animations or the porn uploads but because of the people, people who are now gone. When a community is sold off or merged or otherwise affected by outside parties who want to squeeze it for a little street cred or even cold hard cash, they can often find out that they have been gifted with an empty shell and the crab has crawled away overnight. Either way, it is often the sign of the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, or the beginning of a new beginning. When you look back from the perspective of years, you can tell that something changed, something deep. Please bear in mind, this is an absolutely unavoidable occurence and people constantly think it's something that can be protected against, but you can't, as long your community is actually composed of human beings.

The Ruinous Hatred can happen after the Radical Change or the Loss of Important Infrastructure, but sometimes it happens on its own, due to events far outside the control of the PIE. Someone sleeps with someone else. Someone owes someone money. Someone punches out someone else at a party. Maybe even within the community, an act as simple as a message/file deletion or banning of a person sets it off. The point is, people are forced to take sides and when that happens, when a civil war erupts within the community, there is almost no chance for it to survive unscathed. The PIE can rush in and declare a stop to it, the VCPs can explain it away, but what really happens is this is the TC's time to shine. They jump into this like vultures on a corpse and go to town, making people speak out who otherwise would have been wisely silent, and old minor disagreements come back to haunt the messages, strengthened with this new spilling of blood. This is when someone will say my favorite phrase: "You've Ruined Everything", blaming the people who took the side they don't like, or blaming the HOG for reporting the facts, or the PIE for not being more firm. Often this person is a TC, but sometimes it can be a VCP who's having a bad evening or a headache. It's often as bad as it can get.

The Death represents the final days when the community is well and truly gone. The artifacts are still around and if people point out or reference the artifact, a VCP or HOG or PIE or even a TC can step in and go "yeah, I used to be there, it was great/horrible/nice", but when you ask they why they're not still there, they can point to the time of the Ruinous Hatred or the Infrastructure Crisis and say that it wasn't the same after that. The only surprise here is that people debate what could have been done to avoid this situation. And the fact is, there often isn't one.

Communities are born, live and die, just like the people in them. We hop on the stage, wear our masks, and play the acts out. Some of us don't want to bow and admit the play is over, so we just walk away and never get our goodbyes in until it's too late. That's a choice each person makes, but if I may, I'd like to suggest the recognition that each community is a floating bubble, imbued with the power given to it by its inhabitants, and that all these bubbles pop. Treat them, when you can, like the amazing parties they are, the magical miracles of coincidence and interaction that we ride in, and then remember to take our bows gracefully as it scatters to the wind.

Sorry about Boston

I live outside of Boston, but generally everything within the confines of the 95/128 ring road/interstate is considered "Boston" by the outside world. So let's just say I live in Boston.

I actually have lived in the city proper, and a bunch of other towns with silly names that sound vaguely English and sometimes not, like Cambridge, Belmont, Waltham, Medford. I first started living here when I was 17, having been given a limit of about 150 miles to move away to college by my parents and shooting for the upper limit. I moved here for my freshman year at school and I never moved back, so here I've been since. That's about 19 years, which is almost 20 years, which basically makes me a resident, and not some errant drunk tot belching out his undergraduate studies and considering himself a part of the elder gods of Beantown.

So let me say, for myself, speaking for whatever portion of the population I belong to: I'm really fucking sorry about this whole Lite Brite Bomb thing. Really sorry. Please accept my apology, my personal apology for this tornado of dumbassery and overreaction and move on.

Boston has some very, very stupid things about it. It's terrified of 24 hour activity, so there are only 3 (three, I am saying) 24 hour eating establishments within the city and surrounding area. It is rife with corruption and misappropriation, and it's almost impossible to negotiate its streets, even on foot, unless you're a hardened veteran of hedge mazes.

And I fully admit that this place is totally capable of some very stupid "controversies" indeed, although I can't remember the last time it got millions of dollars out of a company and the head of its president besides. In fact, as a measure of goodwill, I will remind you of one: the Super Soaker Scandal.

Back in the summer of 1992, a report went by that some kids in Boston were putting bleach or urine inside Super Soakers and squirting victims with them (Note to young readers; Do not do this). Additionally, there was a tragic case where a 15-year-old died when some waxbrian pulled out a real handgun during a supersoaker fight and shot him. There's various ways a city can deal with these sorts of tragedies, from tracking down perpetrators to calling for programs to redirect youth violence in positive directions. Boston, of course, immediately sought to ban Super Soakers. Some stores voluntarily pulled Super Soakers off the shelves in a show of support for this misdirected hatred of big plastic squirt guns. (I, for what it's worth, immediately bought 4.) It got as far as legislative bills being proposed before, you know, summer ended and nobody gave a shit anymore. We moved on.

So Boston has a history of this. It happens. I'm sorry.

BoingBoing has been particularly fanning the flames of insulting the city and slowly moving towards shifting those insults to people who live there, and as someone who has benefited to the tune of thousands of dollars from BoingBoing's attention, I still have to say, it's getting way overboard.

This is part of the problem with Boingboing's structure, which often serves people well (consistent updates, strong characters of main contributors, mix of technical and organic subjects), but sometimes does not (almost no fact-checking apparatus, promotion of 3-5 year old stories as brand new, over-the-top black-and-white reaction to somewhat subtle and nuanced conflicts). In the case of Boston, we get to one of the core issues I have: bullying. Having posted well over a dozen entries about all possible aspects of this event, they've now moved into simply using "Boston" as an adjective for "Backwater". "Wearing [light-up bras] in Boston could get you arrested." and the like. Mean spirited and not appreciated, and when the next stupid thing in the world happens, the focus will shift there.

Please stop doing that.

My city has flaws, my city has problems, and as was just shown by this unintentional multi-city fire drill, it can go completely over-the-top bugfuck over what's obviously a stupid misunderstanding. I'm sorry that everyone had to see this; it's like having a drunken relative get into the paper. It's just a shame it got all this attention.

I promise to stay my hand a little bit when it's someone else's turn. And, again, I'm sorry.

Small World

If what you want is an hour of me dominating a podcast to talk about myself, then you're in luck. I'm the most recent interviewee on the Small WORLD podcast. It's been mostly interviewing musicians lately, but someone was nice enough to suggest to the host that I be interviewed. We conducted it earlier this week between 11:30pm and 12:30am, and to the credit of Joseph, the host, he asked me a metric ton of off-beat questions and got me to launch into arcs involving childhood, temp jobs and my documentary style.

I'm always up for a good interview. Hell, it's me talking about me, and as the quote at the top of this page says, I'm my own favorite subject. I've been interviewed in person, via Skype, and over my cell phone. It's a great time, and I like the different ways different hosts have to handle the problem of I never shut up. Some stammer, some gently interrupt, and some just let me go off the handle for 45 minutes and then edit things down to a human-sized amount.

Anyway, great show, worth listening to if Jason Scott is a subject you can't get enough of.

Hey, come back!

Arcade Documentaries

You might have heard I'm making a documentary about arcades. I'm pretty excited about it, although obviously the work on the text adventure documentary is a little more pressing.

That said, I have been doing the occasional bit of work on it: conducting some interviews, gathering some data, getting names, e-mails going out to the right parties. All those bits of back-channel work one needs to do. I have five interviews in the can and two of these are of actual arcades. I wrote weblog entries about both of these, the Pinball Hall of Fame and Lyons Pinball. Still, it's at only about a dozen hours of shot footage and GET LAMP is past 40. So it's definitely the second-tier work.

But more notably, it's not a subject that hasn't seen some amount of attention. In fact, shows, documentaries and fictional works that encompass arcades or at least games in arcades are pretty plentiful. I realize this and I am simply going about my business of interviews and footage-grabbing hoping that what I end up with be unique, special, and worth watching. People are always sending along some pretty enjoyable ruminations on arcades; Rob Flack sent me this excellent essay by Wil Wheaton on the emotion and history of the video arcade, posted just this past Wednesday. There's still quite a bit of traction going over the history of those places!

So I figure I'll occasionally pepper this weblog with thoughts on arcades, events or likewise, related to either my documentary or the idea in general. I expect, actually, to do this a lot. But right now, I wanted to mention the other arcade documentaries you can see shortly, instead of waiting the years for my own.

There are five that I am currently aware of. Three have broken loose from the madhouse and are running around the world's yard, while two others are locked in the basement, screaming about the bugs. (I'm not counting my own in this tally.)

The current front runner is Chasing Ghosts, which just played at Sundance and is likely going to hit art theatres and DVDs in the coming year. Here's the IMDB entry, here's the Sundance brochure, here's a review, here's a review, here's the hometown angle, another review, and one more half-ass review. With that much verbiage out there about it, I probably don't have more to add other than to say that it's a catch-up with the 1982 video game champions, and one that bridges the heady times of 1982 with the present day perspective on same. I found out about this documentary when I was talking with a fellow who had some old arcade photos and he said, basically "Cool, I don't mind helping you or those other arcade documentary guys." This was an excellent way to find out about it.

As a side note, this documentary already gets my vote because it uses the master-level talents of Peter Hirschberg. I will talk about him next week in his own entry, which he deserves. He is, without question, one of the most astounding people I've never met, a failure on my part I hope to correct.

The chipper "other" arcade documentary making the big push to the screens this year is The King of Kong. Here's the IMDB entry, the loving GameSetWatch mention, the local angle, the boring Cinematical mention, and the dorky mention at the end of this breathless rant.

Neither of these suckers needs my love, support or mention; they're both sure-fire-sold things, with King of Kong not only purchased but possibly about to be remade (into a fictionalized version, I'm sure). So you go, guys.

There's a third documentary out there called High Score which has actually been out there for some time, basically last year. It tells the story of a man and his Missile Command machine and the urge to become the world's best. I just linked to the website for it, and here's a review, here's an overview, here's a short interview, here's a fun screening that happened.

As for the other two...

Well, there was a film that was supposed to be out some time ago called The Joystick Generation, the director of whom I talked to for tips and to bounce off ideas on before I even started the BBS Documentary, so you can imagine how long ago this was. Here's the website, here's the synopsis, here's the production company broadsheet, here's the director's biography, and here's the director's website. Is everything OK, Andrew?

And I guess the last film, Bang the Machine, is technically finished and out... but good luck finding out where to see it! I'll leave that one as an exercise to the reader. I repeat what I said just this past Monday about films with no firm plans on how to make money from them: RELEASE IT OR GIVE IT AWAY.

Zelchenko for Alderman

Peter Zelchenko shows up to deliver a single line in the totality of the 5.5 hours of BBS Documentary. He didn't even want to be on camera, actually, but I had him sit down to ask me something and I started peppering him with questions and the next thing he knew, we had a little interview that I ended up using.

We first came into contact almost the same day that I announced on Slashdot that I was thinking of making a documentary about bulletin boards, back in 2001. More accurately, he came into contact with me, insisting that I not make the mistake others had made in cutting the midwest and especially Chicago out of the story.

Pete is Chicago, through and through, and he wanted me to not end up making a documentary that started with the WELL and ended with Wired. BBSes, after all, were "invented" in Chicago, and Ward Christensen and Randy Suess were both in the Chicago area. The Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange (CACHE) is the second-oldest computer group still running, and was founded in 1975. In fact, members who were there at the founding of the group still attend!

I found this all out because of Peter. He was my man in Chicago, getting me a hold of names, of places, of information I'd need to tell the full story. He got me into meetings, he got me to the Northeast Levy Senior Center for a CACHE meeting, where I interviewed a number of people (and snuck one in with him).

Realize, if you will, that Randy Suess didn't want anything to do with this production. BBSes were done for him decades ago, and he'd well and truly moved on. But Pete didn't want Randy to be just a face, a photo and some narration. He wanted Randy in there. And I have to say, it was Pete who made it happen. I still remember sitting in a bar, waiting until a roughly appointed time, talking and discussing stuff with Pete and then him making the call and solidifying, for that day, the interview with Randy. He midwifed a vital interview, and did it in the Chicago way: phone calls, bridging gaps and a dash of toughness.

After we got things done and the documentary came out, Pete and I naturally drifted apart and he's gone on to other things (as have I). I saw some time ago that he'd made a book called "It Happened Four Years Ago", which was a non-fiction recounting of political insidership and corruption. I bought it, and enjoyed it. (By the way, the book is available for purchase or digital download, however you prefer.)

I idly browsed his website today, and saw that not only has he continued loving Chicago and fighting to improve things, but he's also a father, and running for Alderman in his Ward. He's gone ahead and made a cool pamphlet, and his website and weblog have all sorts of thoughts on the political nature of things and life in a city. It's great stuff.

Zelchenko's one of the patron saints of my documentary; it'd not be the same without him. I'm glad to see those skills are going to a good cause.

There are a bunch of stories like this from the production of my BBS Documentary. With time, maybe I'll recount them all.

From the Mailbag: Archiving Yourself

 Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 00:40:07 +1100
 From: David Dean
 To: Jason Scott 
 Subject: article request
 
 Do you get many (any?) of these?
 
 Anyway, I figure as an obsessive hoarder, you've got some great system
 for storing your old files - notes about projects ideas, half
 completed code-bits, word files that you might just want in six months
 but have no use for currently .. etc etc.
 
 I'm in the process of copying everything off my desktop right now, and
 I figure someone who cares so much about storage must have a better
 system for this than me - I tend to just lose everything every few
 years when I upgrade computers.
 
 I think the fact that I've not once rummaged through burnt discs
 looking for a file means that my system works for me .. but maybe
 you're using tricks us mere mortals can learn from?
 
 Thanks!
 David

Thanks, David. Since I'm now up to a six-times-a-week blogging schedule, I have the space to take specific requests from folks who have questions and then ruin their opinions of me by answering them. In your case, I'm reading the question this way: how does one keep track of their own old shit? Or, to be even more specific, how do I keep track of my own old shit?

There's entire courses in this, but here's what I do, basically.

• Decide if something is worth saving, and dispose of it immediately if not.
• If something is worth saving, encapsulate it.
• Encapsulate the encapsulations.
• If possible, keep many copies of the encapsulated encapsulations.

This sounds a little weird and general because I use the same methodology for computer files, papers, books and magazines, and artifacts. At this level, it works for all of them, and it's generally what I do.

Honestly, a lot of it comes down to realizing what you're going to save and what you're not going to save. If you're storing it, you're saving it. If you're saving it, you might as well take the effort to save it well, or throw it away. I am reminded of a story by an old associate of mine. He'd moved from one apartment to another, and then to a house, and then to a house he was buying. In the basement, he found about a dozen boxes he'd packed while moving from the first apartment. He'd not opened them in six years. His decision? He threw them away, sight unseen.

I would never do this, but I understand his thinking. If he hadn't needed the stuff in six years, he would likely never need it. But this pre-supposes that he would have a need for everything he owned at least once every six years. But there's stuff that doesn't fall under that: old medical records, family heirlooms, baby photos... basically, nostalgia and historical items. He'd decided he wasn't a historical person, and moved accordingly. I have decided I am and therefore I save a lot more and continue to.

Assuming you're a historical person, then, the goal is to take a few steps now that are easy to do and which will give you the most leeway down the road.

Physical artifacts are probably the easiest thing for me right now; I have a pile of comic book sleeves and backing and tape, and if some old pamphlet, magazine or catalog interests me, but I know I won't be looking at it again any time soon, I bag it, tape it, and throw it into a box. After a while, I've got tons of these things in boxes. The boxes are in my attic. Maybe I'll end up regarding them later and throwing them away (unlikely) or sorting all the catalogs into one pile and the magazines into another (very likely) and then sub-sorting the magazines by a specific issue set like Spy or Mad Magazine (also very likely). What happens then all depends, but I'm leaving my options open here. I don't have an impossible-to-go-through-without-ripping-something pile of old magazines in the corner, and I don't have the task of re-sorting things again and again because I keep leaving the piles untouched. This method also works for old video games, business cards (I have a special case for these) as well as CDs (I have cases and cases of old CDs, labelled "Shareware" and "Personal).

So we'll leak over here into "files". As I mention in a talk I gave at HOPE one year called "Saving Digital History" (which, I may add is itself, saved digital history), I think there's a little too much stress put on getting things "perfect" than just saving things as best you can. If you can take the time to demarcate and describe everything going in, great. But if you can just drop things into general stuff like "Photographs", "Audio", "Movies", and so on, you end up with piles that you can later go through quickly. For example, it used to take many days to browse through JPEG files; it would take up to 30 seconds to "render" one to the screen. Now you're faced with a default thumbnail selection rendered instantly. Who's to say it won't get even faster, which recognition software that you can say "return every photograph with this car in it"? But the best thing to do is just drop them into massive directories and then subsort from there.

There is the potential to lose ethereal data, like "The reason I have this file is because my buddy steve told me to hold it" or "this was a girl I slept with and then never saw again", where anyone but you seeing it will not know "the story". There's ways to attach these meta-descriptions to files, and if you can, good, but if you can't, you can't. I'd rather err on the side of data than not.

In the case of hard drives, we're often very lucky that hard drives have increased so much that you can actually take an entire old hard drive and drop it in the new one as a folder. I have this situation, with a "Old Work Hard Drive" I have from my game industry days, as well as later computers I found. I have zipped up directories, collected images, and documents ranging from love letters to games I never finished. Some of it still has meaning and some has lost all meaning to me, but because disk space is so cheap, I just keep shifting it around.

And there we get to the final bit of our little sketch: backing up. I use a number of programs to back these things up, notably Synchronize It! and rsync to keep multiple copies across multiple machines. I also, when I have time, burn DVD-ROMs of everything I can, although who knows how well that'll hold up.

There is data I consider "vital". These are financial records, writings, and of course my documentary data. In those cases, I have a rule of "three hard drives, two DVD-ROMs". The data has to be in those five places or it's unsafe.

Could I still lose data? You bet. That's the risk of being alive: of dying. You have stuff, you might lose all your stuff. Not doing your best with what you have because it can't be perfect is no way to go. Sometime you'll find an extra weekend or a bored evening and you'll sift through your old crap and make it a little better. The key is to make it so the jump from "wow, a lot of crap" to sorting it is very short. This is why I have the magazines in bags and the files in folders. I just go in and make it "a little better". That's all we can ask.

I'm not perfect; I just discovered a day or so ago that some of my old macintosh disks are actually getting moldy. I'm going to go get them transferred off where I can and save the data from them... then encapsulate them... then encapsulate the encapsulations....

Not Finishing your Film in 5 Easy Steps

Being someone who finished a film, I get a lot of nice e-mails and discussions going with people who are working hard on films and want advice from me. Naturally I do my best to give them whatever I've learned along the way on both the previous and current productions, so that I can help them finish their films.

Unfortunately, there is occasionally a miscommunication. My advice and ideas about finishing your film are just that... geared towards helping you finish your production. It has turned out, however, that in some cases people are seeking advice on how not to finish their films. They're hearing me talk in all these big sweeping manners about things they'd never do because it might actually cause them to get their work down and out the door. In doing this, I might have gained a reputation along some people as someone who isn't flexible, who can't see the trees for the forest. What about never actually completing your work? Huh?

So to help these folks, who also might be too shy to ask me how to kill their little seedling in the bud, I offer the following 5 pieces of advice. Get stopping, guys!

• Realize in your heart of hearts that your film isn't real unless it's on a large screen.

  This is killer advice to shoot your pony right out of the gate. See, there's this fantastic virus of an idea by filmmakers that only if their work is projected on a screen larger than 55 inches can what they've created be considered "real". That candy-colored rainbow, that demand that they be shown in "movie houses", "art houses", and "cinemas" is something that a lot of directors will glady debase every single last aspect of their work for. They'll change the title, hack up the timeline, remove characters, add sex scenes, and do everything they can for that chance to get it on a screen. A lot of this begging goes on at "Film Festivals", where you run around like a bright-lights-dazed teenage whore offering yourself to anyone who promises you that they can get you into a a theatre. Oh, the things you do, the promises you'll agree to, the places your puckered lips will go. The best part, of course, is that it doesn't always work. You might go through all that and nothing will come of it! Bang! Instant death, because now your project is "old" and "out of date" and you'll have no chance of convincing anyone it can go on the magic big screen the next time around. And since you're convinced that's the only way your film could ever be shown, you'll shoot it in the head and go onto the next long project. Joyous Stoppings unto you!

  I have nothing to do with these guys, but you can see the creator of the Blair Witch Project go crazy drool over himself because his film didn't go on the big white screen but only got onto DVD. He was paid to make the film, given basically free reign over editing, got to shoot it the way he wanted to, and they're even distributing it for him! But he failed, in his eyes, and is heartbroken at how things came out. What a fantastic attitude! Take inspiration from this approach to things, and you to can be well on your way to not being well on your way.

• Treat your first film like your fifth film.

  A filmmaker embarking on his fifth project has been through a lot. He's seen things that would make a war surgeon cry. His production team is like a well-oiled machine, knowing what he wants often before he does. He's seen how the differences can happen from what's on the page and what's realistic at 2 in the morning shooting in that abandoned subway station after a full day doing the library scene. He knows how pacing is going to end up in the editing room, and shoots for that. And when things go all gaflooky, he knows what tricks he can do in the editing room to help a disaster become a triumph.

  To ensure your project slows down, act like you're capable of all this already because you watched a lot of films, and you know your own script by heart. Assume that if everything then doesn't go as well the first time through, you did it "wrong". Don't compromise; wait weeks to get the next perfect shooting time down with all your actors and people so that they get bored or change hairstyles or otherwise yank out of the project. This is the genius of this advice: by aiming for this idealized perfection in your head, you turn a passable production into a completely mediocre one. And since a mediocre one can get even worse, eventually you'll give it up entirely. Voila! Instant stoppage!

• For that matter, treat your first film like your only film.

  Even better than rushing headlong into your project with this impossible vision in your head is to act like every single thing's the end of the world. The idea that maybe you'd use this current work as a learning experience, not try to maximize its revenue-generating potential, and avoid compromising everything because you hope it'll go on the magic screen and into those festivals... that's the good stuff... uh, I mean the bad stuff. You don't want that; you want to treat life like every single thing is an all-or-nothing, shoot-for-the-moon deal because all those burned bridges and idiot decisions you make will be that much more justifed, since there's no chance you're doing this again. And stop watching things like Evil Dead, where Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell shot the movie over three times before it became what we think of as the classic Evil Dead II. Be sure to forget how Spike Lee made nearly a half-dozen films before She's Gotta Have It, including an aborted film that devastated him and which he bounced back from.

  I should note I'm horrible example myself, having made 6 short films (Headrush, Incubus, Incubus (16mm) Mr. Lazer Guy, Conspiracy Rock, Blessed are the Filmmakers), aborted two others (The Pie, Mr. Lazer Guy Meets the Evil Person), and worked on a couple productions by others before I ever started BBS Documentary. Don't make my mistake! Please think you'll only ever do this once! Bet everything on red!

• Interact in any way with a record company of any size and shape.

  This is a sure-fire way to slow things down to a crawl, and if you really want to, kill things entirely.

  Don't let it be said I don't follow my own advice: I spent nearly a year talking with a record company, and by a record company I mean a miniscule record company, trying to get the chance to put a single song on the BBS Documentary DVD set. Originally I was going to have it be credit music, but then I decided it would be menu music, because they were taking time getting back to me and I had to keep editing. Now, to really get a feel for this, you have to realize that the artist of the song, who wrote and recorded it, was all for me having it in the documentary for basically nothing. He'd get a small royalty per disc, but that was a-OK with him and he was glad to see his song, which at this point was 5 years old, show up somewhere appropriate. (The song mentioned BBSes, you see.) Well, his record company wouldn't have any of that. First they would take months and months to get back to me, and then, with prodding, proceed to give me fantastic terms like demanding thousands of dollars for the temporary rights to use the song, with them disappearing if the songs ended up anywhere but on the DVD. That is, I'd have to renegotiate if it went on TV or Film Festivals or anything else. And as a bonus, this was all cash to go to the record company; they weren't even negotiating for the artist, and told me clearly I'd have to negotiate a second contract with the artist, who might have a completely different set of terms. Wow! This sounded so great, I wanted to stop hitting myself in the face with a toaster right then and t