ASCII by Jason Scott

Snake Oil

A little side-track on the weekend; a friend of mine didn't believe me when I said this product was being sold in the checkout line of my supermarket, so I bought a bottle to prove it, and since that's $13 (!!) wasted, the least I can do is amortize the ha-ha by sharing it with my weblog audience.

There's this sleep aid product called "Rescue Sleep" that's sold, as I said, in supermarket check-out lines, in that impulse rack that has gum, candy bars, Archie comics and small booklets telling you how to predict the future. I occasionally look for new sleep aids because I am a very poor sleeper. It comes in a little spray, which looks normal enough:

Good enough, and maybe you might even convince yourself that $13 is a fantastic price for such a trusted name in such sleep aids, until you actually take the time to read the ingredients list:

This stuff is hooch!

On one hand I'm somewhat horrified, but on the other hand I'm delighted that even in the modern day and age, the world hasn't yet grown so sophisticated to completely and utterly reject the idea that alcohol in a sleep aid is an "inactive ingredient". I was recently reading a book that mentioned this very situation, except it was talking about 1897, not 2007. Such opportunities still exist for grifters, snake oil salesmen, and confidence tricksters, even if they've replaced a slick suit and a crooked smile for a hiptop and caps. The more things change, the more we still get ripped off.

That Time that I Cared

The hardest part of my "job" is neither the collecting of artifacts and information, nor the by-its-very-nature obsolesence of the things I surround my life with. It's not even the lawyer threats or the endless arranging of my time such that I can do the work of 387 meth addicts.

The hardest part, by far, is remembering when I cared.

And by cared, I mean absolutely lived for these things, these textfiles, these software programs, all these printouts and parts of computer history long gone. It has been to my dismay as I travel through my no-dress-rehearsal life to realize how absolutely talented our minds are to dull and dismiss anything we keep close to ourselves for too long. I really really care about this stuff, but it is a different sort of caring than I once had. Whereas in some ways these late-night collection runs and warez trading still bring the smile and memories to my face, I am not "in the moment" anymore.

As a youth, I would watch download progress bars like a jeweler working on the Hope Diamond. I would wait, breathlessly, for someone to respond to my sub-board posting on a BBS that probably had 200 people to its name and a single line for them to share. I would read, intensely, the textfiles I downloaded and printed out, studying them in school or on a bus or walking along the highway to and from the local diner that had arcade games. This was an entirely different form of living and in that way I was very much alive but a different sort of alive than now.

The human mind's ability to sort through its world and experiences and produce a shopping list of not-accurate-but-will-do-for-now rules to follow from them has given us some pretty amazing triumphs, as well as the occasional terrifying disaster. It is what we do, and as we get older, we change so that things we've encountered before have a warm but distant glow to them, demarcating that we can avoid the whole intense study phase and move right to the decision phase. But a warm and distant glow is nothing compared to an intense burn.

Discoveries delight; rebuttals sting. Anger flares. Secrets smolder. Like a deflated balloon looking up at a ceiling it used to knock against, I can recall a great many events in my young life that cut lines of indelible ink across previously open sheets of paper. The thrill of newness, of realizing I'd stumbled into a whole new place for myself, and the seemingly-endless chain of connected miniature revelations that these breakthroughs would drag into my life. I can see these things, but I don't quite feel them the same way, even recalling them and being the very person who experienced them.

The challenge, therefore, is for my work to reflect in itself a sense of excitement, of caring, of non-dismissive regard for the great and wonderful things that have come and will come again, refashioned. I am capable, as any readers of this weblog or patrons from nearby restaurant tables can attest, of a nuclear level of cynicism. If I don't concentrate, and this is a good percentage of the time, I can receive the gift of a fan or admirer at an event or in my e-mail and return it with a useless self-deprecating kooshball of quasi-acknowledgement that does me no favors and the other party even less.

This is wrong, as wrong as a person can be.

Yes, there are salesmen and jerks and all the hazards of human interaction, but there are, so many more times, that person for whom your own old hats are glittering new headgear, expanding their minds. I get letters all the time with this tone, of a kid who just wants to talk, chat, engage me for a while. Entertainingly, the eggs of their questions usually come wrapped in a nest of complimentary platitudes that sound exactly like someone who is sweating over every word to avoid offending me in any way.

At conferences and parties, I've caused that jolt of recognition as someone figures out I'm that textfiles guy. They're not putting on an act, they're not cynically regarding me as a point of ridicule; they're honestly surprised and happy to see me. After the first few times, it becomes difficult to give each new person that same smiling and open-faced regard. But that's what makes it difficult: I must.

GET LAMP is as much a story about the excitement of the text adventure genre as it is about "history" in the sense of "a connected series of events". I've shown the occasional bit of film to people, and the opinions range. One thing that's obvious to me is that it won't be anything like the BBS Documentary was, and will approach the subject matter with a lot of talking heads but with a ton of artistic insert shots too. (These are embryonic plans and could change, of course.)

But here's the germ of the idea: for the young, the first time they sat down at a text adventure, even one of Scott Adams' two-word-parser "Grand Adventures", I've found that people were overcome, literally washed away, with the sense that they could do absolutely anything with these games. For those who program or who programmed in environments prevalent back then, the potential horizon was a lot shorter than the player thought... but that's the skill needed with any linerar/semi-linear tale: making the reader/player feel they're in control, can step away at a moment's notice from the "plot" and change things however they wish. That feeling, which I simply cannot feel like I once did, has to show up in the film and hopefully make everyone feel washed over with a sense of possibility. If done right, that will be a wonder to behold.

I realize my good fortune in having this be the "worst aspect" of the life I live. But like any shortcoming, you can ignore it as unimportant and do so at the peril of waking up one day to find yourself not growing up but dying down.

Landscapes by the Country Gardener

I have a little brother, and his name is Brandon. He's 19 months younger than me, and where I went into film school and computer administration, he went into landscape design, snowplowing and construction. He works with landscapes like I work with textfiles, if that's any endorsement. He's really, really good at it. He's been at it for something like 10 years, and has worked both for large landscaping firms, and for himself. Currently, his company, Landscapes by the Country Gardener, is serving the lower New York State counties.

Why do I mention this? Mostly with regards to the way my dad has been trying to leverage his two sons' talents to help them both out. Since I'm the "Web Guy", there's been a project for years to get my little brother's company up on the web, available to anyone who even thinks about having landscaping done in his surrounding area, and ensure him great success. The thing is, this whole "search engine placement" situation is overloaded with way too many folks investing an awful lot of time and money into getting the attention of the endless waves of web-browsing cattle. "All I need is a few days" they say, and they steroid-pump their websites with "keywords", hidden phrases, searchbot-detecting assault scripts, and a dazzling array of this-side-of-spam techniques to make people like to them. They call themselves "Search Engine Optimizers".

The fact that right now, there are guys who get up, drive to work, sit down in an office, and have the words "Search Engine Optimizer" on their business cards makes me want to run out to my car with a wi-fi antenna, a list of IP addresses, and a baseball bat. But, looking back, it's hard to believe that someone got paid to write "Lemonade Stand" too. I'm glad the world found a place for all those people who were making $50,000 a year "coding" HTML around last century.

For my own websites, I'm not overly concerned with getting specific people (or even getting a high search ranking). Folks stumble in, stumble out, stick around, disappear forever. I'm appreciative of the letters, but I don't sit and watch the access logs and hope for just a few more folks. My place is in just collecting stuff and working on my projects, and sharing what I'm up to. I guess, ultimately, I have a product, too, but that's not why I do what I do; it's just a nice 3-DVD side effect.

Brandon's business is different. He builds walls, flattens hills, arranges landscapes, plants trees, makes sidewalks. And trust me, he's really friggin' good at it. He sits down with this pad of paper and sketches out his ideas with his customers, and they're like little intense blueprints. And then he sticks to the blueprints. Kid knows his shit, is what I'm saying. But he only needs a few dozen people to hire him in a year, and those people are very geographically special and specific. (Well, unless someone flies him somewhere to do his work, which would be weird but very welcome.)

He's mostly forced to use methods that are almost paleolithic compared to what others think should be done: he advertises in the local papers, puts up posters in the local supermarket bulletin boards, and he's even tried his hand at the yellow pages, which have continued to hold their death-grip on ludicrous charges for an ad. A few jabs have been tried for the modern internet age, including his website and a couple postings on craigslist, but that's weird to him; he'd rather be out doing stuff.

As a result, the Landscapes by the Country Gardener site got 250 unique visitors in March. I got 500,000.

"Do something", Dad says. "I'll try", I say.

What's interesting is how different two brothers can be, and how the two of us, with our skills, have built up an outlook at the world that are completely offset from each other. I love my little brother, and I'd do anything for him.

Maybe even become a Search Engine Optimizer.

It Is Pitch Dark

Principal shooting finished up last night for a side-project: a music video in support of a song on MC Frontalot's new album, Secrets From the Future. For some segment of the population, the idea of the director of the BBS Documentary doing a music video with the head of the nerdcore hip-hip movement for a song about text adventures may actually blow some sort of gasket.

Yes, text adventures. On Secrets from the Future (which you can order here), there is a song called "It is Pitch Dark", and it was written in support of the GET LAMP documentary. It is absolutely loaded over with reference to Infocom games, home computers, parsers, you name it. And it rocks.

I had two sets of friends help me with the production; one set of three (Charlie, Robin, Matt) came over on Monday and cleared out space in my basement. Charlie also made some great set suggestions that I implemented. On Tuesday, another set of three (Nick, Oliver and Fred) were crew and set photographers while I shot the video with Frontalot.

Shooting a music video, especially if you choose to do one with no on-set sound, is either wonderfully easy or stupidly difficult depending on how complicated you want things to be. From watching, oh, 69,105 music videos throughout my youth and later life, I've come up with several philosophies about what makes one good:

• Music videos should play to the strength of the performer. You should highlight what makes them compelling and unique, and study their history to know strengths they might not have.
• If the performer has no strengths and is not compelling, then you should instead surround them with compelling and unique stuff. Sometimes, you might not even want the performer in there at all.
• If you have a compelling and unique performer AND can also surround them with a compelling and unique environment or event chain, even better.
• Music Videos tend to make very bad "Film Shorts".
• The most compelling moments are often the most obviously unexpected, improvised, or bloopered.
• No video is for everyone; don't make it for everyone, or you've made something meaningful to no-one.
• Once you go in a direction, really go in that direction. Don't half-ass things.
• If your video is less compelling than Duran Duran's video for Rio, you have failed.

So, in my case, I sought out MC Frontalot's performing strengths and worked out these strengths into a video. We shot for about three hours in the basement of my home in a set that will seem familiar to some folks who know me, although it was majorly tarted up for the video. Of course, we shot in high definition as well.

The set itself had lots of space for dancing, gesticulations, and odd angles. We did roughly 8 setups (moving and readjusting of cameras and lights), although in some cases I did major zoom so that it might as well have been another setup. We ran through the song with him lip-synching roughly 12 times. We ran through the song with no lipsynching probably another 6. I shot 70 minutes of footage.

There had been plans for a second night of shooting, but I canceled it. Frontalot's performance is, to me, so extremely geeky and intense that I think shifting in a second-unit set of shots would just have diluted things. There was concern by some of the crew about this choice, but I think the choice is a good one, and Frontalot and I worked out another potential set of dates to shoot more footage if I turn out to be wrong.

The set is geeky; there's so much equipment jammed into each shot that people will spend hours combing through them trying to determine what is what. Frontalot's act includes lots of technical references, and the inclusion of such items as Apple Lisas, a 14.4k modem, a KOZMO.COM dropbox and a pile of 1982 IBM-PC manuals will hopefully do his first video proud.

I don't know a release date for this yet, and there's a lot of work for me to do in post-production, but I had a great time. Thanks to everyone who helped, and look for this in the future (and on the GET LAMP DVD, where it'll be a bonus feature).

Oh, and I'd like to mention definitively: MC Frontalot is a really, really nice guy.

Homecoming

I was chatting with one of my oldest friends, and while going over a few things, he said "TIM needs a new home".

"What?" I said.

"Let me forward you the e-mail trail," he said.

When I was 19, living for the first time in my own apartment with multiple roommates, I'd started to get into this whole phenomenon called MUDs, or Multi-User Dungeons. I was introduced to them by my friend John, who had been traipsing throughout the Internet for a while before me up at his (far-away) college. We'd been buddies in high school and kept in close touch, and while I was generally using BBSes at this time, I'd been able to get into the Internet at large via the "Terminus" system at MIT (an 8-line dialup they had with semi-flexible open access). These MUD things, which felt an awful lot like text adventures you could share with others, were fascinating. I didn't take much interest in the standards of role-playing and building, but I really did like the real-time communication and the ability to walk around in "spaces" and build my own attachments to these "spaces". That ruled!

Within a short time, John and I, who had founded a humor magazine together back in high school, found enough in these games to warrant a parody. So, in March of 1990, we used Richard M. Stallman's AI lab account (which he freely shared with people) and put up a MUD. Many games used a program called 'TinyMUD" that resulted in names like "TinyHELL", so we naturally called ours "TinyTIM".

Within an ever shorter bit of time, we were fighting with the other users of the GNU.AI machine to keep TinyTIM (TIM) up. We moved to another hosted machine thanks to a very kind user at the Supercollider in Texas, then he and I had a falling out. We in fact moved many times, had many adventures, and all of this is way too much to go into in a single entry. There's a history at the TinyTIM home page.

Anyway, I would say that for many years, my home and space was on TIM. There's a lot of people who know me that way, as Sketch the Art Cow of TinyTIM. It's a major part of me, and who I am. I probably spent 15 hours a day on it, every day, for years. Some day I will mine these stories for you.

This is also why there will be a MUD presence during GET LAMP; I've interviewed Richard Bartle, creator of MUDs, and will hopefully round out with a few others as well.

Around 10 years in, the unthinkable happened; I started to live a very different life from wanting to run TIM. Textfiles.com had taken off; I was starting to get my face into some very global/high profile places, and knocking myself out over a place that would max out at 200 attendees when I had a site getting 100,000 visitors a month was starting to be less appealing. In one of those ugly situations and cascading set of events that always seems to happen, the "Sketch Retires from TIM" got about as ugly as it could and I was both jumping and pushed. This, also, is worth mining.

From that time, people who were truly my friends and not just holding friendships of convenience have stayed in touch, and one of them is R'nice, the battery that drove TIM. A programmer, genius, and amazing fellow, he's one of my most closest friends, and my leaving TIM broke his heart. It was he who told me that the machine had lost its current (generous) hosting location and needed a new home.

So what else could I say? I took it in.

The machine arrived today, packed in a huge crate; a backup form of it is currently up and running at the old site, and this one will replace it. There's some adjustments to be made, some hardware upgrading to do, and so on. But here, seven years after I quit, the place I co-founded will be running in my basement.

How do I feel about this? Well, I never disliked the place; I just outgrew it. I had (and still have) management opinions, but I'm a different person now, with different goals and things to do. I want to make sure the old clubhouse doesn't get torn down; I'm not interested in being Lead Moose at the Lodge.

This is TIM's seventeenth year; may it have many more.

A Touch of the Shmoo

The weekend was spent, as mentioned previously, at Shmoocon, which is either a hacker conference, a security conference, DEFCON East, or The Potter Family Speech Extravaganza. Here's some Potters for you.

I'd normally go off here on a multi-paragraph description of Shmoocon, but knowing about Shmoocon isn't Shmoocon's problem. Every one of the three years of Shmoocon has sold out, often at a terrifying rate. In the 2007 round of ticket selling, it sold completely out of 800 tickets without having a speaker schedule up. This might take a few seconds to truly believe, but they basically provided no information about the coming event with regards to who would be there or what was happening, and it still sold out. There were three rounds of sales, and some sold out in less than an hour. If I recall the opening comments properly, one round sold out in less than 10 minutes.

Therefore, I instead try to get in by being a speaker. Did I mention Shmoocon pays speakers?

The original plan was to get into Shmoocon by speaking about the One Laptop Per Child project. Why choose this? Well, I'd been at an event for game designers a month previously (relating to GET LAMP, and someone brought a prototype OLPC to the event. I was playing with the little sucker, and my first thought was "this would make a really devious bomb". Why? Well, mostly it was the happy little face it presented, the fact it was going into all these countries that had nothing this powerful before, and the whole social aspect of giving millions of laptops to kids. Anyway, I'd filed it away and when I started to think of attending Shmoocon, an idea popped into my head and I submitted a talk entitled "One Weapon Per Child".

As it was, the talk was sort of accepted; what was counterproposed was that my talk be combined with two other talks being given about the OLPC, and they'd expand it out into one big event just before the closing ceremonies, collapsing all tracks into ours. Now who am I to argue with that?

As a bonus, a set of coincidences (one of the advisors on GET LAMP had a party at the apartment of someone on the OLPC project) allowed me to bring along an actual OLPC laptop with me to the event. Here's the lovely Heidi Potter modeling the thing:

If nothing else, these laptops get instantaneous attention. At the event, which is held in the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, the Largest Thing In History That Has Eaten 3 Smaller Hotels, people were constantly queuing up to see the laptop up close, play with it, and of course ask lots of questions I was totally unqualified to answer. People like the idea of this thing. They want it. They'll do whatever they can to have one, if someone just offers them one.

I never attend many talks at these events, instead going to common areas and striking up conversations with old friends, colleagues and "con buddies" i've gathered up over the past 10 years. In fact, of the many talks, not counting my own, I attended probably a half dozen. These included the aforementioned Hacker Foundation talk, wherein I got to stare at the organizers talk about all the great ideas they have and what their goals are, and then be floored by the Hackers On a Plane travel planning, which is pretty out-of-the-box thinking.

The best talk that I attended is far and away A Hacker Looks at 50, which was G. Mark Hardy's nostalgic harkening of his nearly 40 years in computers, high school, the Navy, and as a consultant. A beautiful pastiche of memories and of lessons learned; the kind of speech I love to give and to sit through. There was talk of whether this should have been the actual Keynote, but I think this sort of talk is best given to a willing, volunteer audience, and the room was well and truly packed. The recording will be an excellent purchase or download when I can acquire it.

I'm always happy to sit through the Own the Con presentation, which is a naked re-examination/explanation of the money, organizing and management of Shmoocon, held during Shmoocon. Nice! You get the funny stories of things going wrong, an understanding of the stuff nobody thinks about (for example, the carrying bags provided to each attendee arrived at the Potter home in three pallets on the back of a semi), and you get a chance to thank the group for putting the whole thing on.

So, one of the interesting situations with my own talk was that two of the guys in it (Sean and Scott) knew each other well, while I'd never met them, and none of us had met Ivan, the fourth member of the "group". This was also the first time for Sean and Scott speaking in front of a group like this, and what a trial by fire to suddenly address hundreds of people! We talked on the phone a bit, and it didn't take long for Sean to suss out my "seat of the pants" style; I pay a lot of attention to the venue being addressed, and I tend to approach things in chunks, like "introduction", "danger expressed here", "funny story about guy I know", and so on. I never use Powerpoint or any visual aids. All this said, though, we hammered out some rough ideas and agreed to meet at Shmoo on Friday.

Friday, of course, didn't happen beyond chatting a bit in the lobby. Saturday did, but with no Ivan. This was fine, in some ways, because "our" part of the talk was different from Ivan's; Ivan had facts and information; we had theory and speculation. Scott, Sean and I sat down in the pub and I gave them a crash course in public speaking and presentation, most of which they already knew. Sean, particularly, cuts an amazing profile and presence. He's tall, he's buff, and he's smart. I see many years of him winning an awful lot of arguments. Scott is Chris Elliott's previously-unknown smart brother. These were excellent team-mates to have.

For my own bit, I was quite happy to scale back (and back, and back) what my talk was going to be about, yielding the floor to the other presenters. Sean had nailed a whole ton of attack vectors to the OLPC project; I gave him a handful more to try out. Scott was going after the implementation of software itself, which is far out of my purview. I let Scott have the OLPC for most of the weekend so he could investigate; I heard it was a hit at a couple dinners Scott went to. Just to make it clear: it never got hurt and it never got broke. Good Scott.

I didn't meet Ivan until about an hour before the talk. Ivan is a plastic Silly Putty egg of brilliance and energy, holding back the incredible flexibility and knowledge within. He's also quite young, although I had to be told his age by others, so I was cheating. You would think he was in his 40s when you dealt with him. I sprung upon him our idea, to have him be the opening introduction and talk and then the other three of us punch OLPC in the face for the rest of the time. He was fine with it, and he adapted his talk flawlessly for this.

Looking at the schedule, I knew we were asking for it. Four people schedule for an hour; this almost never works, especially if you accept questions at the end. As a result, we knew we'd have to be time-aware. I took that on, and my intention was for my talk to be less than 15 minutes.

In a nutshell, my small presentation was this: I made a "One Lapdance per Child" joke, I said I would bring together the important events of Molasses, Electrocution, and Goatse, and then told a story in which each of these were the center of the story. In all cases, the events were hilarious, but if you imagined yourself in the thick of them, they were well and truly horrible; it's one thing to think of the Molasses Flood of 1919 and yet another to imagine those poor horses stuck and covered in the goo screaming their heads off until someone could shoot them. Security, I said, was just the kind of situation where you have these hilarious-sounding events but which could easily and quickly turn to ones of horror. Security, in fact, was the intersection of the ludicrous and the dangerous; people spend all their time dreaming up infinite bizarre scenarios to prepare against them, and must justify this time, and also are expected to respond near-instantaneously for entirely unexpected variations of these events. I then said we were going to do a little bit of this ludicrous speculation against the OLPC, but that underneath it ran the current of danger and horror that can potentially come with any cultural shift.

This all took seven minutes.

Therefore, I was the highest paid guy at Shmoocon.

In fact, we all came in way under time; not because our talks were short, but because we kept on track, slammed out the facts, didn't lollygag at the audience with lame self-conscious meanderings. We blasted out that info, love it or leave it. Oh, and I even managed to get one fact wrong in such a short time: The Flood was in January, not June. So anyone who eventually hears that.. remember, I really meant to say January but my mind was moving onto the next thought.

Ultimately, we had a ton of time for questions, and I had to answer basically none of them; it was almost entirely Ivan getting the shit pounded out of him; brave, brave Ivan. Dan Kaminsky complained about the overabundant security. Others complained about not enough security. One particularly beautiful Oprah moment was the woman who stood up and said "Throughout this presentation, I never heard the word PARENT." followed by those delightful golf claps that accompany any open-ended murmur that mentions family. Ivan handled all this brilliantly, I thought. In 20 years, I'm going to get free drinks when I mention I once was on a "panel" at a "conference" with Ivan Krstic, I may even get a few saying I was at Sean Coyne and Scott Roberts' first major panel, as well.

Cons get me out from behind my desk and into a world where people talk about dreams and hopes and plans and implementations. I like them for that reason, and I've always benefitted from them. And who could ask for more.

Shmoocon: Hackers on a Plane

I'll write a separate summary of Shmoocon shortly, but I wanted to highlight a most intriguing idea which the fellows from the Hacker Foundation are floating and putting together. The idea is simple enough: Hackers on a Plane. Here's the pitch.

Basically, there's the DEFCON convention, coming this summer to Las Vegas, and shortly afterward there's another edition of the world-famous Chaos Communications Camp, which a 5-day camping expedition in Germany that combines hacking, engineering, and a whole host of amazing activities.

So, let's say you want to attend both of these events, and you want to do it in a style so slick your grandkids will be talking about how cool you were back then. Well, the Hacker Foundation has done it with Hackers on a Plane.

First, let's get this number out of the way: $5,000. That's the cost. Don't run away. Here's what that gets you:

• Attendance through a special distinguishing badge at both DEFCON and the Chaos Communications Camp 2007. You're a welcome guest at both events with a badge that almost nobody else has.
• After DEFCON is over, you're picked up that Monday at McCarran airport in a specially-chartered Maxjet.
• A Maxjet is not just some run-of-the-mill pissant Jet; these things are designed to be the ultimate in comfort. Every seat is a business class seat, with 160 degree recline and a 2-2-2 configuration; there are no middle seats, only aisle seats.
• The normal carry limits are out the window; you will be able to haul a lot more stuff than you ever could across international lines. No drugs and weapons, of course, but the limits are a lot different than you've ever experienced before.
• On the flight, meals and alcohol will be served, all completely included. (No $3 beers, etc.)
• Previews of presentations to be given at CCC will take place on one end of the plane.
• This is a nonstop flight directly between Las Vegas and the location of CCC 2007. You will walk off the plane and "be there".
• 50% of your $5k is a tax-deductable (!) donation to the Hacker Foundation, a registered non-profit that provides financial and advising assistance to groups working to spread knowledge and seed hacker spaces (labs) throughout the US, attempting to duplicate the situation of such spaces in Europe.
• At the end of your time at Chaos Communications Camp, you will be flown, business class, from the location in Germany back to wherever you're located in the US.

So basically, we're talking a full-fledged travel package (minus hotel in Defcon) that will give you a unique way to enjoy both of these events in high-life style. These guys have worked hard to come up with a fundraiser that will be long remembered. It's a killer.

However, they need people to sign up, not just folks who think it's a good idea. Spread the word, please. If you have a company that expenses trips, or you have extra cash and want to make a charitable donation while living like a king, here's the big chance. Contact the Hacker Foundation for more details about it.

I'm always happy when people think out of the box like this. I know they only have a couple weeks to pull together deposits. If you were thinking of attending both events, this is the way to do it.

Headrush: My First Film

Under the "humble beginnings" department, I present to you my first film; "Headrush". Created in 1986, this was the final project for a film class I took in Sophomore year at Horace Greeley High School. It was shot on 8mm film, and required the soundtrack to be played on a record player timed to the beginning. I knew this was a tall order, so the soundtrack is a (copyrighted) piece of music that had a lot of notes and beat changes, ensuring that it would be more likely to synchronize to whatever was going on.

I described the film as "What it would be like to go through Horace Greeley High School after you hit your head." Some kids were impressed. Some were not. My film teacher hated it, and as I recall, she gave me a C. (I still have the graded paper around here, and maybe I'll dig it up one of these days.)

There's only a dozen physical cuts in the film. The rest of them are done "in-camera", with me basically painting scenes using the available light and background. This was, I contend to this day, a way to get around the limitations of the medium; cutting was hard work and the effect was jittery bounces in the film. I employed stop-motion shots in some locations, have two subliminal messages (one easy to spot, one harder to spot), and feature a cast of dozens, including my friends and my little brother. At one point you see a shadow running along grass. That's my "director's cameo".

I apologize in advance that I only have it lying around in DiVX Format. The file is here and is 32 megabytes:

"Headrush", by Jason Scott (1986)

I had a lot of fun making that thing; it was shot in about a day. If you know the place, it almost functions as a home movie. A very weird, surreal, screwed-up home movie.

I don't think it deserved a C.

Shmoocon

Today, I leave for Shmoocon, a security and hacking convention held in Washington, DC and brokered by the Shmoo Group, members of which I've become good buddies with. I'm co-presenting with a handful of people on Sunday, a talk in which we cover aspects of the One Laptop Per Child project. This project is basically an altrustic experiment to make a low-cost laptop (originally quoted at $100 but currently a bit less than $200) that can be sent out by the thousands to countries in "need" of technology, enabling generations of schoolchildren to have access to computers they'd never otherwise touch.

I'm doing a short historical perspective before the real fun starts; a backward-looking monologist feathering the crowd with related tangents to the OLPC experiment. When I'm not doing that, I'll be doing what I love doing: socializing, attending the occasional talk, enjoying a little time around the nation's capital.

If this is a strange jibe with the whole "I'm shooting a music video" from yesterday, the performer isn't available this weekend and this event has been scheduled with me for months, so there you go.

Shmoocon sold out, literally within hours, so there's no easy way to get in there, but the hotel it's being held in has a huge (almost obscene) lobby and lots of places to hang out that aren't the actual shmoocon location. I'll be around all weekend, so stop by, capitol residents!

Music Video

So, next week I'm shooting a music video. Not too many details to give right now about the content itself, but I did want to touch a little bit on things involved in making one, because it might be of use to people.

Music Videos are basically short films that accompany music; they can range from being exacting performances of the lyrics of a song, or they can be entirely unrealted creations that are essentially using the music as background. A spectrum of quality arises as well, when you compare them to each other.

Thanks to our achieving the era of the Microtheft, here's a few music videos that come to mind:

• Cylob - Rewind, in which one thing happens, but it's a really neat thing happening.
• Carpark North - Human, in which you see a lot of strange things happen.
• Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar in which one strange thing is happening, even thought it might take a little while to figure it out.
• Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be, in which a strange thing keeps happening so much that you eventually completely lose track of it.
• Flock of Seagulls - I Ran, in which... come on, dude, it's FLOCK OF SEAGULLS!

Talk has gone back and forth about doing this music video for a while, but now it's gotten the green light. I have 9 days to shoot the principal photography, after which the performer will be unavailable. I have had a demo version of the song for some time, and now I have the finished song. I am funding this video. I will also be staffing it, and co-creating it with the performer.

I bring this out into the open to just discuss the thinking process; most critically, as a person putting together a project, I find it best to design something that is within your means. A more incredible video that you ultimately can't pull off is even worse than not making one in the first place. You end up wasting everyone's time, and money, and have nothing to show for it.

Therefore, I am working within my means to ensure the resulting product will be good, even if a certain number of things go wrong during production. I expect to shoot something like an hour to two hours of footage, which will be cut down to 5 minutes. I expect a week or two of post-production beyond editing. I also expect to do at least two shoots without the performer, what's commonly called "second unit" footage, although I will be playing the part of the second unit as well.

Currently, I'm planning for three sets, one of which will be in my attic, and two in my basement. There will be a sequence shot outside in a "run and gun" fashion, and one inside a college on a similar "run and gun" fashion. I will visit the college campus before shooting commences and take some snapshots to ensure what's in my head fits with what is there; the same for the sets in my home.

The biggest budgetary concern has already been bought; my HD camera I'm shooting my documentary with. I've already got lights, already got props, already have a bunch of other materials one would normally have to rent or buy.

Next, I contact a couple people I've chatted with over the years to see if they want to be entirely unpaid crew members. I start yanking stuff out of the "sets" to build them up as I expect them to look. And I wonder, as I go to do this, what could possibly go wrong, and what I can do to prevent it.

Stay tuned.

Creative Common Sense

If you're stumbling onto this weblog entry without any other context, be aware of two things: first, I wrote a very large love letter to Creative Commons a ways ago, and I took a 4-year project/documentary and released it under one of the most liberal Creative Commons licenses available: Attribution-Sharealike 2.0. So I put my money where my mouth is.

This is speculative, anecdotal, and unsolicited. So you know it'll be good.

I'm a big fan of Creative Commons the variation on US Copyright Law that allows for a greater range of freedoms to created works. If you've not heard of it before, the website they have gives a pretty good overview of the thinking.

Creative Commons is an interesting side hack. Instead of just trying to fight the various embarrassingly overarching copyright laws and have creators feel they only have the choice of releasing things to the public domain or locking everything down forever, a group of lawyers and activists created alternate copyrights. These sets of copyrights range from essentially releasing to the public domain all the way up to pretty restrictive lock-downs, although lacking some of the more egregious aspects of "standard" US copyright law.

It's essentially a "fork" off of the copyright tree, just like people do with software, where someone comes along and goes "I'm going to concentrate on security" or "I really hate the asshole who runs that project" and off they go. Occasionally they focus on security over usability and sometimes they're an even bigger asshole than Original Asshole, but still, this is in many ways a sensical response to madness or poor choices: make new madness and new poor choices. The question, really, is if the new madness and new poor choices attract enough of audience to be a going concern. Creative Commons has, in fact, done that.

Not only has it done that, it's really done that. It's almost a matter of incredulity that Creative Commons is only 6 years old. There are, at this point, literally millions of works available under Creative Commons. Photos, songs, movies, writings, weblog entries... if you know where to look, you could spend the rest of your life traipsing through media under Creative Commons License and never run out.

But as someone who launched into a major project that was ultimately under Creative Commons, I spent a lot of time actually going through the process of using it, of reading it, of dealing with people I'd never met and will never meet and using their stuff, and I had some conclusions about it.

But first, a little bit on contracts.

Buying a house is a harrowing experience, especially if you're in an inflated real estate market. You're dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars into something, and it's probably the biggest purchase you'll ever be making. It's also one where a lot of hands get into the pie: agents, lawyers, banks, and so on. For my own case, there was my lawyer, the sellers' lawyer, the real estate broker, the real estate broker's boss, and a representative of the bank all in the same little room a half-mile from my future home. There were somewhere between six million and fourteen million (I've forgotten exactly how many) places I had to initial, sign, place my ass-print, etc. If you've ever rented a car, they make you initial a bunch of stuff as well as signing it. Well, it's a lot worse with buying a house.

So I'm sitting there reading the contracts one more time, and I saw this one clause buried in the middle of the mortgage contract, which read, basically:

"You hereby grant The Bank limited power of attorney to effect minor changes in the contract for the purposes of correction, typographical errors, etc."

It took about a paragraph to do this, but that's basically what it said.

"Hello, what the good goddamn is this?" I politely said. "I'm not going to sign that."

This broke everything. The seller's lawyer was nonplussed, my lawyer was pooh-poohing it, the bank guy was shifting in his seat. Everyone indicated, in their own way, that this was no big deal, just sign it. Well guess what. No.

The ceremony and wonder of a bunch of people in a room and a big stack of papers I was signing was not going to sway me to spontaneously look at something that I considered horseshit and sign my name to, just because there was some sort of reward, i.e. a house, at the end of it. I was renting an apartment and if need be, I was going to buy another house, elsewhere, where I wasn't granting limited power of attorney. The bank guy had to call back to the home office to get permission to strike this, while my own lawyer person was explaining this was no major issue. "If they have to make a minor change, they can call my cell phone," I said. "And THAT's no big deal."

And you know what? They struck it. If they decide they need to make a "minor change" (or, more accurately, the bank of the sub-bank of the hedge fund of the clearinghouse that no doubt bought my mortgage needed to make a "minor change") then I'd get a little ringy-dingy.

It's been 4 years. No ringy-dingy.

There's a moral or two in there. I'm sure for some people it's Jason Scott is an obtuse dickweed and you should never do business with him, but I hope that for the majority of the folks reading it's Jason Scott honors contracts and he can only do that if he understands the contracts he's signing.

And my thesis is that an awful lot of people are signing Creative Commons deeds without understanding a whole lot about them.

So, back to Creative Commons.

Creative Commons, like I said, lubricates the process of not wanting to put draconian copyright law on your works but also not wanting to release things into the public domain. It does this because a lot of law students and lawyers worked together and crafted an architecture out of contract law to provide you a ready-made, EZ-bake deed. They've been very meticulous about it, too. Not only do you get the actual contracts out there, but you also get tools to publish your works and the equivalent of sitting down with a team of lawyers to give you the chance to indicate what you want. Of course, the questions are rather simplistic, like "Allow modifications of your work?", but all of those have little clicky popups that will elaborate, if you so choose.

And make no mistake, Creative Commons tries very, very, very hard to make sure everyone understands what they're getting into. The "Think About It" page is nothing less than a waiting room where you're meant to mull over things carefully, understand the ramifications of this stuff, realize what you're ultimately doing. Creative Commons is not evil.

I intended to sprinkle my documentary series with Creative Commons-licensed works. After the documentary was finished, I intended to do a thousands-of-units production run of it. And when you're about to dump $30,000 into duplicating a bunch of plastic and cardboard that would be relatively expensive to re-duplicate, you want to make sure that every last thing on there, that you can possibly double-check, has been double-checked. That goes for quality of image, that goes for sound clarity, and that goes for your rights to duplicate and sell those things. Granted, it is basically impossible to create any work of any length and not technically infringe on something, somewhere, somehow. But you can certainly do your best to not close your eyes and backflip into a pool, hoping some other guy did that whole "filling with water" part.

So when I found music to use from something called the OPSound Pool, a website whose rule is that you have to license your music under the Attribution-Sharealike License (one of the most liberal), I went and researched every band to verify they were the ones who put the music up. I would also, in most cases, contact the artists if I could find them.

What I encountered a couple of times is that artists would be on Opsound or other locations, and while they were "licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Sharelike", every vibe I got from their sites was that they were doing no such thing, in their minds.

I'd see things like "I'm licensed CC-BY-SA" and within the same paragraph, I'd see "You may not sell copies of this work." Well, that's wrong. You can sell copies of the work if you want to. You can remix it into a rap song about abusing women. You can turn it into a ringtone and sell it at a buck apiece. You can take a movie under CC-BY-SA and then play it forever in a movie house and charge $10 a head to see it and pocket all the cash!

The BBS Documentary was licensed CC-BY-SA 2.0. Here's some of the things that people have done that I know of, all of them implicitly allowed by that license:

• Translated the whole thing into Chinese and subtitled it.
• Uploaded it to Google Video.
• Uploaded it to YouTube, in pieces.
• Shown it to students of a college for a networking class.
• Shown it to high school students for the hell of it.
• Given it to a library.
• Made it part of the selection at a video store.
• Bittorrented individual episodes, and complete DVD-ROM .ISOs.
• Uploaded the whole 18gb of data to Usenet.
• Burned dozens of copies for your friends.
• Kept a copy of the whole thing on your central server so anyone at the house could watch it.
• Taken an episode that has you in it and left it on your website so people could get your story.

In most of these cases, I don't see a dime even though more and more people are seeing it than bought it. In some cases, hundreds of people are; thepiratebay showed thousands of downloads of the episodes when it was still a hot ware. Do I feel cheated, used, abused?

NO. THIS WAS IN MY CONTRACT. AND I READ MY CONTRACT.

One case that sticks out in my mind was this guy who had his stuff up on Opsound, totally claiming the license of CC-BY-SA, but also including "you may not make any changes to the work" in the description of his band. His music was pretty good, and I was considering using it, but that dissonant line got my attention. So I wrote him, and said "So are you licensing it Creative Commons, or is it copyrighted? Because you can't have both those lines in there." His response, somewhat crankily, was "No, it's definitely CC licensed, but you can't change it." My ill-advised response was "Well, yes, yes I absolutely can." Things went downhill from there.

There's an interesting tangent to the story; of course, sensing danger, I didn't use any of his music. I figured "Obviously, this person signed up for Opsound to get more distribution, but he didn't want or understand what all those crazy rules meant." I went on with my production, about 9 months passed, and I suddenly had 5,000 copies of the BBS Documentary in my basement. Wonderful! I was then giving away dozens of copies: people who'd given me cash, people who pre-paid, musicians and others who had provided me stuff either directly or through a CC license.

Somewhere in there, I had the guy's name in my "musicians" list, so I sent him a free copy.

At some point later, the guy mails me, explaining to me how he'd gone through the whole five and a half hours of the documentary, and he hadn't heard any of his music; where was it? So I went through the e-mail trails, and discovered it was that guy and mailed him and went "Oops, sorry, I didn't use you and I sent it by mistake. Enjoy the free copy."

Well, from the torrent of profanity, hatred and criticism that I got back, I can now report to you that the BBS Documentary series is not very enjoyable if you're going to be doing nothing but listening intently for your own music to appear and it never does. If you're in that group, please, reconsider buying or acquiring a copy.

To make the music work in my film, it was often necessary to do insane surgery to the original files. In one case (the Fidonet episode) there are cases where I mixed together five separate songs, usually solo guitar pieces, cutting out all the singing (which tended to be terrible and distracting) and just using the strumming (which was generally good background). If you were to see the cuts in my video editor, it'd look like someone's evil science project; or a railroad track. Cuts were as short as one second and as long as thirty seconds. Except for the fact I listed them in the credits, there'd be no way for most people to pick out any song out of that goulash. But damn if it didn't work!

As an illustration, here's an MP3 of the guitar trickery from the middle of the Fidonet episode. (2mb MP3, 04:23) If you concentrate on the guitar playing, you'll notice the repeating themes, the copies of smaller clips, and the way the music changes. Once I draw your attention to it, it's hard to miss. I can do this, because Creative Commons attribution-sharealike lets me.

I think that as time goes on, and the ease by which Creative Commons is integrated into things like Flickr and weblogging software, a lot of people are being given the push to license their works in ways they haven't thought through, just like a ton of people click through End Use License Agreements without thinking them through.

I get calls from people to seek permission to "do things" to the BBS Documentary. I've had schools call me for permission to show it to classes. I get calls from people to use clips from it for presentations. I get e-mails where startups who want to stream video offer to buy the "rights" to my films. But the answer is always the same: I already gave permission. Do anything you want. Forever. For free. But what you do with it has to also have the same permissions to let anyone do anything they want, forever, for free.

I watched a young lady who put up modelling photos of herself demand they be taken down from the Internet and never distributed again. Apparently she didn't like the attention her photos had earned. Well, guess what. She licensed them Creative Commons, and she was over 18 at the time. Sorry, nice lady. Your image is everywhere. Forever. For free.

As people see their stuff show up in commercial works, remixed like crazy, and their names in tiny print or off to the side, I wonder how many are going to stand there and complain that they didn't in fact license their stuff to be that way. That they licensed it creative commons, but not THAT common.

And the real fun hasn't really started.

As time goes on, the chances of there being a "money" situation increase. And there's going to be a money situation at some point. Something where $10,000 is at stake, the difference between being paid a royalty for something and not. The difference between a work being a part of a major motion picture, the artist compensated, and not. And through all this Creative Commons hasn't been tested to a large degree in court.

Make no mistake: my next documentaries will both be Creative Commons licensed. I read the contracts and I like what I saw. But I actually read the contracts.

I wonder, from my own little observations, how many companions I have in that.

The Mess Phase

I try to keep my environs as clean and orderly as possible, partially because it makes me feel better, and partially because I like to fight the stereotype of a nerd trapped in endless boxes and papers, unable to keep track of anything, dying quietly behind one of the piles. It's a good goal, in general.

However, the good and bad news is that I can't do that at the moment. Now, as GET LAMP heats up, as the shipment of Apple II material is being sorted, as scanning has re-commenced, the "stuff" is winning once more. If you came into my office right now, you'd assume I ran a bookie operation or my startup had failed.

There's already fruits of my labor, though! A nice scan of the original 1982 Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner (rest in peace) which in some ways is a vital link of the chain that started the First-Person Shooter genre. The documentation I scanned in even has a German-to-English dictionary so you can understand what the digitized voices are saying! (Although, generally, you should run like hell no matter what it is they're saying.)

Not surprising, a lot of the Apple II disks I'm scanning have bad sectors or are dead. In a few of those cases, the bad sectors have long ago been avoided by the software on the Apple and I was able to rescue them anyway. Happily, I can report the acquisition of at least two dozen new textfiles circa 1982-1983! They'll be on the main site shortly as well. (Just to explain how I get the data off, and then take the data and get the text out of it, I'll just quickly link to Apple Disk Transfer, the AppleWin emulator, and Ciderpress).

Editing/culling continues for the movie, of course, with a bunch of interviews gone through and a bunch more scheduled for this summer. I suspect I'm going to spend a week on the West Coast, probably around the Penny Arcade expo, and go crazy traveling up and down the coast doing interviews. But not in a car with California plates!

The mess will probably last the rest of the year. It's the mess of a busy workbench, not a neglected one. Let's see what comes out of it.

Mindcandy 2: Buy the Goddamned Thing

I first heard about the demoscene group known as Hornet not by their demos, their music, or their graphics - I heard about them because of their incredible archiving ability. In the early 1990s, when disk space was not cheap at all and yet many people were creating demos and music of great quality, it was hornet that swung together the Hornet Archive. The Hornet archive was the go-to place for all manner of scene-related materials, especially music, which they not only slavishly collated and allowed additions to via an easy-to-use interface, but who also would take the time to rate and quality the music whenever possible. Five stars from the Hornet Archive and you felt like you were two steps away from a limo and penthouse hotel rooms.

Affiliated with cdrom.com (the Walnut Creek CD-ROM company), the Hornet Archive was hosted on a fantastically fat pipe and was eventually turned into an actual product, a collection of music and MODs with great art and content called Hornet Mods 1. And when I mean great, I mean fantastically great, the kind of attention to detail and quality that meant that everything on that Disc was being given the right treatment deserving of the man-years of work behind them all. Trust me when I say that I browsed this thing after buying my copy and I thought "Wow, this is how things should be presented". Later, a sequel disc (Hornet Mods 2) was equally top-notch, with even more of that great music I'd fallen in love with, and even made a little of myself.

I bumped into the Hornet guys at an event called NAID in 1996, where they had copies for sale that I bought. I didn't get much time with them, but there's actually pictures of me with some of them (while wearing a cow suit) and I've become good friends with some of the members over the years.

Naturally, when I found out that they had created an actual DVD of demos, called Mindcandy Volume 1: PC Demos, I was right there in line to get my copies. (I bought a couple.) I hadn't heard much from Hornet since the 1990s and here it was 2003, years having passed. But I suspected they'd put as much effort into making a DVD as they had doing the CD-ROMs before, and was I not surprised when they'd done it. The thing absolutely ruled. With an amazing attention to detail, history and completeness, they'd assembled in DVD form pretty much all the biggest influences in PC demos from the previous years, going back over a decade in some places. The colors were clean, the menus cool, the bonus features and commentary tracks impeccable. As I had hoped, they'd outdone themselves.

Four years have passed since the release of Mindcandy, and while many people who had bought the first DVD knew a sequel was coming, things started to look a little bleak after a couple of years. And then, out of the blue, the Hornet guys have released Mindcandy 2: Amiga Demos.

If by some weird trick of nature you've gotten this far into this review without knowing what exactly I mean by "demos", then I will reward your perseverance. The short-form story is this: way back in the 1980s, pirate groups would "crack" software so that you didn't have to duplicate the whole disk to transfer programs across modems. In doing this work, which often involved meticulous work inside machine language, they would reward themselves not with money, but by adding a "crack screen" before the program started. The program would start, say "This game cracked by the Eye of Argon", and then when you hit a key, it would start the "actual" program, that is, the cracked program that used to take a disk.

Over time, these "crack screens" became more and more elaborate, involving not only music and graphics, but harder and harder trickery to impress the viewer before handing off control to the program. After a while, in fact, pirate groups had to have people whose only job within the pirate group was to make these crack screens. Somewhere towards the latter half of the 1980s, these programmers of effects and music for crack screens started making standalone versions of their programs, to demonstrate their skills - "demos". And from there it just took off. Demos come out by the droves even in the modern day; a website called scene.org keeps track of them. And yes, the parties where these come out are called "Demo Parties", and I'm hosting one myself.

Here's the thing, however: as time has gone on, the ability to play the demos as they were intended is rapidly disappearing. "But what of emulators", you cry, unaware that emulators are not always great at capturing the exotic aspects of the hardware and software. In the case of demos, the problem is especially an issue because these programs would use every secret trick culled out of the hardware to achieve their looks. In this world where we install a separate card to do the heavy lifting of graphics and 3D processing, demos of 10 and 15 years ago had to rely 100% on software-based rendering. While that might automatically make people think the demos were slow and broken, in fact they were as fast as lightning and truly amazing - on the original hardware. That hardware is nearly gone.

So the importance of something like the Mindcandy series is that they work so hard to make sure that these now-historical programs are captured as perfectly as possible. Frame rates, color hacks, video signal noise... the Hornet guys concern themselves with issues that you as the Person Who Wants To See These Things should never have to deal with. That was reflected in Mindcandy 1, and it's even more the case in Mindcandy 2.

The menu system of Mindcandy 2 immediately tells you you're in for a quality ride.

The menus are clean, slick, and peppered with quality animations shifting between them. Normally I hate that stuff, but that's for static films containing nothing worth the sound and fury of background music in menus. In this case, it works great because it gets you in the mood; thumping bass and classic sound.

As mentioned above, the first volume was for demos that appeared on IBM Compatibles/PCs, but this volume focuses on the Commodore Amiga, which was a powerhouse graphics and sound machine that came out in 1986. Very quickly, people started creating crack screens and demos that put anything else out there to shame. The 4-channel sound, the high-res graphics and pallette of colors, really blew folks away; I remember arguing with someone I played some tape-recorded amiga music to. "That's not from a computer, that's some album." So, as you can imagine, the demos that starting coming out for the Amiga were unstoppable, and only got better.

On the DVD are many of the "canonical" demos of the past 15 years, demos that won competitions, wowed kids who downloaded them from BBSes, and which pushed the limits of what the machines could do year after year. They're methodically captured from the original hardware, using techniques covered in detail in production notes. You know when people are capturing uncompressed video from hacked converters, you're getting the best quality you can achieve.

All of the soundtracks to these demos are recorded in both "original" mode and, in a nice fit of hubris, Dolby 5:1 Surround. The audio tracks have another quality bonus - commentary tracks from either the original coders of the demos, or experts doing their best to describe the context and techniques involved. It's one thing to hear the soundtrack in 5:1, but a whole other to hear how little time the coders gave themsleves to do some effects, or what part alcohol played in the proceedings.

The demos themselves, of course, are just great to look at. Here's some screenshots I took of some of them:

On the Mindcandy 2 DVD is also what I consider the crown jewel: a documentary about the 2005 Breakpoint Demo Party, Shot over the weekend of Breakpoint from the point of view of an attendee. Impeccably edited, beautiful, and full of the energy of how these parties go, it captures a lot of the feeling of the parties that have given birth to demos. It's even got its own commentary track from the director/editor. I see techniques in there I intend to steal shamelessly for years to come.

What I'm saying here, if it's not clear, is that if you have even the slightest interest in demos, in old computers, in graphics as an art form, this DVD is for you. I'm proud to have it on my shelf, and my only regret is that there aren't more of them in the series. Two is not enough; I hope they keep doing these forever.

40

40 interviews have been done for GET LAMP. I'd hoped to do 100 for this film, but that was a rough guess and when production wraps up later this year, I'll have what I have. It probably makes more sense to say I'd be perfectly fine with doing 100 interviews or more, and that we'll see what comes of my efforts.

My documentary is mostly about things that happened, not things that are happening, so as a result it ends up being a case of tracking people down years or even decades after the fact. And people have different opinions about going in front of a camera to talk of such subjects.

I've had a couple people flat out say no. A couple people don't respond to me even though I know they've been told of what I'm up to. Others have said they'll think about it. On the flip side, I've been contacted out of the blue by people, been introduced to folks by others, and successfully tracked down and gotten interviews with dozens.

With the BBS Documentary, I was spoiled because besides the "top figures", I could also interview "anyone who used a BBS". That makes less sense here, and I'm mostly going for people directly involved in either creation or observation (academic, review, journalistic) of text adventures. This is, you will be shocked to hear, a relatively small group of folks.

The interviews themselves, now that I am culling through them, yield wonderful insights. I'm lucky to have gotten a hold of some very brilliant, well-spoken people. They know what they know and can articulate it beautifully. When you're conducting a (good, non-scripted) interview, stuff goes by that you don't notice because you're formulating the next question. Now that I'm listening to them, some of the things people have said to me are exquisite. I hope to string these jewels together in a pretty necklace indeed.

As I progress down the list, as I contact people and get back responses and talk about what I'm doing, one thing is clear: I chose a good project. How much justice I do it is another situation entirely, but the subject is there, is worthwhile, will have been worth the two years of work. I don't get bored of it, never feel it's not worth doing, and look forward to each and every interview.

Life could be worse, now couldn't it.

Tracing DNA

Every once in a while, I'd like to point out the historical/archival efforts of others, and encourage you to take some time to check them out. We'll start out simple, but well: DNA Lounge.

The DNA Lounge is a nightclub/club in San Francisco. It has a range of shows it puts on, including touring acts, local bands, and nights with just a lot of people and music blasting over the speakers. Running this whole show is a guy named Jamie Zawinski.

I've never met Jamie Zawinski, but I've certainly used stuff he programmed as a result of working for Netscape in the 1990s, I've played with the really amazing screensaver project he's been involved with, and I've been a rabid reader of his jwz website for many years now. He's a complicated person, with interests I don't share and opinions I don't share but many that I do and a method of describing things in the world that I enjoy reading.

He resigned from Mozilla/Netscape/AOL in 1999, loaded with some cash, and unaware that he had gotten out before things really went downhill in the tech world for a while. So he kind of disappeared there, and then he announced he was opening a nightclub. This struck me, at the time, as spectacularly weird, tangential and strange. But it was his money and his time and he was still updating his website, so that worked for me.

But Jamie is a programmer and engineer, and so he approached this new phase of his life with lessons and outlook he'd used before, and this is where it gets interesting. He kept a weblog of the entire experience, telling you sometimes day to day what was going on with the DNA Lounge project, the money, the hassles, the heartbreak, and the sleaziness of the San Francisco political machine.

The journey starts here, with a historical background of the building his club was in, and then it follows through the present day.

It is, in a word, spectacular. Every weblog entry is a joy, with the elations, depressions and brutality of following one's dreams. And not to give anything away, but the club does ultimately open, take in acts, and he just keeps weblogging, giving you a unique perspective as a club owner and chief bottle-washer. I find it magical.

As an extra bonus, when he opened the club, he added audio and video livecasting to the club, so that you could see and hear the whole event from your desktop! In fact, some acts told him they wouldn't perform unless the cameras/feeds were turned off. Result? He wouldn't let them perform. For years, I'd be working on my projects, and plug into these video/audio feeds so I could be "at the club" while doing my archiving/describing.

During the production of the documentary, I found myself with an extra evening in San Francisco, staying at a buddy's place but not having any interviews lined up. I had been reading the DNA weblog for years at that point, something like 3 or 4, and I had always hoped I could go there. I figured out the address, made my way down, and walked right in.

It turned out the club was closed, but the front doors were unlocked, because a couple people were borrowing the club space (with jwz's permission) to do some final sorting/stapling of a zine that was about to ship. I stumbled around into one of the people there, and she was kind enough to give me a tour. It was glorious: there were the welds I'd heard about, the stairs he'd had issues with, the stage layout he'd chosen, the missing walls, the bathrooms, the televisions... I pointed out everything as we went, and she was able to show me where each of the cameras was located. I also saw (but couldn't enter, obviously) an amazingly cool private space jwz had built for himself within the club so he'd always have a great seat. Good for him!

I bought my DNA t-shirt, bought a few other items, and walked out into the night, forever linked.

It'll probably take most people days to read through the weblog entries, but I promise you, they're worth it, all of them. And it's absolutely true, and absolutely free. A treasure.

The Tadros Collection

I'm always acquiring new computer history in various forms to add to my collections. Sometimes it's as simple as an e-mail attachment, and other times it's physical artifacts. In yet other cases, I get sent stuff in the mail in great and terrifying piles:

These come from an Ebay auction held by a Mr. Tadros. 120 pounds of Apple II related material, including a monitor, two Apple ][+ machines (one loaded with cards), a pile of printouts, a pile of software, a pile of books, a pile of manuals, and a pile of other related material.

We talked a bit on the phone about all this stuff. He got the computer in 1979 and for a machine that is basically 28 years old, it looks brand new. He also added a bunch of cards, and kept the original boxes for a lot of this stuff, so it's currently still packed in them. As for machines themselves, it's interesting to see all the little tricks and hacks done to the Apples to make them run better; a mod for lowercase, a card to add 16k of memory, connectors for serial cables, all stuck into this old casing that Wozniak designed for people to do just these sorts of things.

So what happens to all this? Well, everything scannable will be scanned and put on DIGITIZE.TEXTFILES.COM; the disk images that aren't private material will be scanned in and put online, with the textfiles specially removed to go on textfiles.com; the BBSes mentioned in printouts and in textfiles will go on the BBS List, and I will carefully make a place for all this stuff in my lab. So, I like to think, this has all gone to a good home. More will be told about stuff from this collection as it comes to light.

Blockparty UPDATE: Blockparty Invitation!

The Demo Party I'm co-organizing in April just got a boost: the release of our official invite, which gives you some details about the party and hypnotizes you into wanting to go. Please go ahead and download it. (Requires Direct X 9 and Windows).

There's a tradition that's now many years old of a demoparty putting out an "invite" in the form of a program, which contains effects and music and tells you to go. It's like writing a song that invites you to a song-writing contest. In fact, a number of the interactive fiction (text adventure) competitions over the years have included invitations or ballots in the form of text adventures...

The production was done by Northern Dragons, who are attending the event and entering a few contests; and you can see the general "scene" getting their shots in at the Pouet forums.

If you were only idly thinking about BLOCKPARTY and NOTACON before, this is your time to jump in. Pre-registrations are still cheap, it's a fantastic event, and I'm going to be working my butt off to add a layer of fun on top of the already-existent fun that the Notacon folks pack into their conference. I promise you... a fantastic time awaits.

Goodbye Dutchess

It's amazing how a place could be the source of so many memories, especially when that place is a mall. A dead mall.

By the time I had moved away from Fishkill, NY in the late 1980s, the Dutchess Mall was already "The Dead Mall"; the superior and awesome power of the South Hills Mall of nearby Poughkeepsie, which was many times bigger and had started to suck other smaller plazas into itself, ensured that it would never again get the critical mass it needed to survive. Once, however, it thrived handily.

Conveniently located by Interstate 84, Dutchess was a short car ride both from my original home in Hopewell Junction and from the condo complex in East Fishkill we moved to after the divorce. I had to beg for a ride from my mom to go there, and it was not a case of it being a place I could go hang out at via a short walk or skateboard ride; to go there was an event. To me, it was the Biggest Thing Ever, both in terms of size and grandeur.

It had two anchor stores: a Macy's (later Jamesway) on one side and a Service Merchandise on the other. In between was probably something like 25 stores, ranging from such steadfast mall fixtures as a Radio Shack, Spencer Gifts, to a 4-screen movie theatre tucked in the back. It was where I got my taste for a drink called an "Orange Julius", which was sold at the mall from an odd little space, and which had a logo of a devil sitting on an orange which is long since gone from that franchise. Most importantly, The Dutchess Mall had an arcade. My arcade, the one from which I form probably 70-80 percent of what I visualize a "videogame arcade" was and should always be. It's where I first saw Frogger, Zaxxon, Atari Football, Hercules, Donkey Kong, Fire Truck, Xenon... probably a dozen others that I encountered, during that true golden age of video games when it felt like every game was completely new, nothing was cliche', magic factories in faraway lands producing these incredible boxes of fun waiting for my quarters and my time...

As an aside, It is quite amazing that I can sit and really see, with sparkling clarity, the first time I encountered many of the classics of video games. The place in Poughkeepsie I was standing at when I saw Food Fight. The Ground Round restaurant I stumbled around in and found Ms. Pac-Man. The Nathan's hot dogs in Yonkers New York that was probably the largest arcade I ever set foot in, where I saw test versions of games that disappeared forever, and others that ultimately went everywhere like Q*Bert and Crystal Castles. I am there, right now, as I speak of them, a crazy little kid with really big messed hair and ill-fitting clothes, loving these games.

The other huge draw for me was the Service Merchandise, which was located on the opposite end of Dutchess from the arcade. Service Merchandise was one crappy enterprise, obvious to me even at that young age. But one thing it did have was home computers for sale. Lots of them. The computers were in a sort of electronics-and-complicated-crap section of the store, near the mall entrance but away from the jewelry and accessories sections, which I think is where they made most of their money.

This was more than a store. This was my lab. My mother could not afford a home computer in that period, and it would be 1981 before I had an IBM PC dependably at my father's house. So from 1979 to 1983, Dutchess was how I experimented with all the other brands of home computer that were out there. It's where I saw the Atari 400, that odd membrane-keyboard laden alien workpiece, and the laughable but fascinating Timex Sinclair. It's where I saw a TI 99/4a play the cockroach game, where I could leaf through all the different software for sale for these brands, and where I could dream of owning them all. The marketing was designed to attract forward-thinking families and businesses. I was, whether they planned this to be the case or not, absolutely hypnotized and fascinated with it. When the Atari's packaging made promises, I believed those promises. When the signs above the TI told you it was capable of so much power, I crackled with that implied power. I was indoctrinated into the dream, utterly and completely, and I've not woken from that dream yet. When I do, that's how I'll know I'm dead.

Obviously, all of this wraps into the work I've done as a nostalgia and history person, scrambling around and trying to capture as much of this history before it disappears under our feet, yesterday's news, last decade's thoughts.

The Dutchess Mall is slowly disappearing now, with the center of it flattened and replaced with a Home Depot. The portion of the mall that had the arcade is now gone, ripped down and turned into blacktop again.

What got me thinking about this is that there's a new documentary that's come out called Fish Kill Flea, which takes place at the husk of the Dutchess Mall, where until recently, there was a flea market that ran inside the old Service Merchandise. I have no doubt this film has it's own merits and pitfalls, but I know that I will be the first in line to buy a copy of it on DVD; just to see people walking around the room that held my original home computer dreams makes it an instant win. The name of the documentary plays off the town name (Fishkill) which means "River of Fish". (Kill is dutch for River). I'm sure it's weird for people to see that name; for me, it's coming home again.

Bad Ingredients

Unfortunately, I have succeeded in crashing my machine twice, losing two revisions of a weblog entry. At that point, the third would have been destined for a hash-slung version of what came before, my tired eyes attempting to gain magic easily lost and replacing it with something quite inferior. So, I'll do something else, and just make a small observation.

More and more, there are food-like products on the shelves, sold to be pure versions of a type of food, but in fact a somewhat horrible non-version of it. For example, there are fruit juices for sale that have no fruit juice in them, or a laughably small amount, say 5%, with the rest primarily being sugar and water. I'm always kind of wondering who buys these things, willingly purchasing something that contains very little of what that product supposedly is. It can't be healthy, and maybe it's just a matter of the product being less expensive, or maybe they don't know any better and don't think about it. Either way, you end up with bread that has little grain, juice that has no fruit, seafood that has no fish, soda that doesn't have anything. One side of me thinks this is a company that hates people, giving them the worst possible iteration of something for the purposes of greed. But another worries me even more: that they went out, asked people, checked up on things, did studies, and found out this is precisely what people want and wish to have. In that case, they are entirely doing what they're supposed to be doing: satisfying customers. If this is the case, I feel very lonely.

Similarly, there's a trend that's been around a very long time that I hate: using movies as historical footage. I've seen American Graffiti used as historical footage of the 1950s, Apocalypse Now used as historical footage of various American-involved wars, and now Hackers is being used as footage showing the history of computer hacking. Movies are never made with the intent of being all that accurate; they're made to entertain and often use a historical situation as a backdrop to a character-driven drama in the foreground between made-up characters. Often these characters are combinations of real people, or derivatives of a real person, or say things that someone else unrelated said. The whole thing is a blender of reality, designed to take you from one end of the movie and lay you down at the other, belly full of popcorn, eyes full of lights. To use this material (as news programs often do) as representative footage of events and places referenced in the "story" is on the same level as using songs by Chubby Checker as replacement "footage" of a Martin Luther King speech. Yet it happens constantly. Radio programs, even supposedly journalistic ones, do this as well.

So the question is, do they simply hate and disrespect their audiences? Or did they go out and ask and find out this is exactly what the audiences want? Is a sleepy-eyed Angelina Jolie going to be the iconic representation of computer hacking for the next 15 years, as it has for the last 15? Can't we do better?

The Big Theater

Back in September, I talked about the Little Theatre. I still haven't gone back there; and I may never again. I figured I'd talk more about The Big Theatre, which is where I go, and why.

The Big Theatre is located in Woburn, and is a part of a chain, so indistinct that I sometimes forget what chain until it shows up on the screen. I think it's changed owners a few times, although they've done almost nothing to affect it in any interesting fashion. It's pretty fuckin' huge, as far as these things go. You can look at a satellite picture of it here. One thing you'll note is that it's huge. Another is that it's in a huge parking lot, which I've never ever seen filled ever. On summer nights, a carnival rolls through town and takes up the space on the left, but even with a full carnival on the parking lot, there's lot of space left.

So the Big Theatre has, basically, three things going for it over me just seeing stuff at home.

It has first-run movies. Yes, I can download stuff if I'm lucky, but at the end of the day, it does all look better on a big screen with the sound blasting, so if the movie I'm interested in seeing is playing and I want to see it in a big theater, this is the place to go. Obviously if I can wait for it on DVD or for a download, I'll do that.

It has very late showtimes. In an anemic little town that is lucky to have showings past 10pm, even in the middle of the goddamned city, the Big Theater has showings after midnight. It's not uncommon to have showtimes of midnight, 12:10, 12:30, and even 12:45am. This works for me because I'm always cranking on projects and get wrapped up in them. I look up, go "oh crap" and see it's 11:30. With a showing of 12:30am, I really have no excuse; if I couldn't get the night's work done or at a cutoff point by midnight, then I'm seriously screwed up anyway and the inability to see the movie is the least of my concerns. This point, alone, probably is responsible for half of my interest in The Big Theater when I'm looking to see a film.

It is totally in the wrong place. Or, more accurately, someone long ago decided this was the place for a movie theater that was the size of a ocean liner sitting on top of a home depot. Whoever he was, he was totally wrong. The Big Theater gets crowds, but not of any notable size. As a result, I often cruise into my 12:30am showing and there is nobody else there. In fact, with very few exceptions, I am almost always the only one in there, unless my buddy Mark comes along with me. It's like my own private theater, and that automatically obviates any of the usual complaints about going to see a movie in the modern era: cellphones, chatty people, kids, poor seats. I'm it! I can whip out my cell and call people incessantly and talk to them about kids, because hell, it's my theater.

So what doesn't it have for going for it? Quite a few things, of course.

It's expensive. 9 bucks to see a film. So it better be one hellishly good film; I'm not going to go wander in and "hope" the movie I'm seeing is good. It better be something I'm expecting to know is good, or be something that I'm "required" to see, like a specific cultural touchstone or film covering a subject I'm supposed to know about. Additionally, going to see these movies automatically costs me twice as much because I live under the credo of Lessig's Challenge. There's a lot of stuff I don't agree with Mr. Lessig about, but there's a lot I do, and the challenge to give as much or more money to organizations fighting for more freedoms than organizations taking it away stays fresh in my mind every time I give the Big Theater a ten spot. So really, it's very expensive.

The projectionist is either a robot, a prisoner on work-release, or a show pony with a stick. While the advantages of having a theater to myself and being able to go late in the day is great, they don't have very good people working the boxes. I've seen quite a few flicks slightly out of focus, or with the side sound channels not turned on, or with the volume a tad low, and so on.

Nobody gives a shit. The guy who takes my ticket is totally zoned out. The people who walk around are zoned out. The rare families I see are talking among themselves. There's a "social space" of tables near a snack bar, but the snack bar is always closed, and really, nobody would want to sit over there anyway. There's even an arcade, full of about 4 games I don't care about. The decor is "hey, look what the central office mailed us this week". The people at the snack bar are so zoned that they make the other zoned people working the ticket booth seem like royal guards by comparison. It's just not a happy place. That can be kind of a downer.

The lack of people is kind of eerie. I have had times where I walk out of the theater and there is literally nobody there. I mean, absolutely nobody. I suspect the manager's in his office or someone's cleaning another screening area or whatever, but the illusion of it being only me (or me and mark) and nobody else is pretty whacky.

I have theaters I go to if the movie is so utterly critical, I want the experience of being in a room of people, or if the attendees I've been invited to go with don't feel like driving out to where I usually go. There's a nice theater downtown which I will go to (I saw Lord of the Rings and Snakes on a Plane there). But otherwise, it's the ol' Big Theater for my occasional movie jaunts.

If I give the impression my interaction with movie theaters is kind of tenuous, well, it really is. If the Big Theater burned down, it wouldn't overly ruin my life, and based on its size, it'd burn for weeks. The best it can really do is "Hey, it's late", and "Hey, it's sort of like being home". Not overly compelling, but a nice little addition when, well... when it's late.

Thinking Out of the Box

Well, my recent post about the death of the container for ethereal goods got some people stopping by with ice picks, and they knocked a few chunks of additional ideas out of my Brain Iceberg, so let's go over that.

First, let me be clear in saying that I wasn't going "bwa ha ha, goodbye packaging and good riddance". If you can make something worthwhile that deserves packaging and which contains things that are nice to have, it makes sense. But if you're going to just drop in a DVD with a single-color label and an amray case with a dropped-in color-duped paper, then what the heck? In the case of a lot of the products out there, especially the poorly-maintained "classics" I alluded to, the packaging is doing almost nothing relative to the product. If, however, the package is contributing to the overall usefulness of the product (say, a DVD combined with a book combined with something else), then it makes total sense to sell the package form. (An example of this that comes to mind is Guitar Hero II, which has the game and a guitar controller and some stickers.) I myself intend to do this, so yes, I totally see doing packaging as a worthwhile venture.

Additionally, I'm not ruling out the possibility of ARCADE coming out in a box. If I do in fact release it in a box, it's also going to be a really nice box. It will also possibly be as much as 4 DVDs, plus who knows what else collected inside.

All I was saying was that I have the opinion that by 2010 a "box" in a "store" or "mailed to you" might not be the best methodology for distributing whatever the final work is. If it is, then of course I'll do it. Trends, however, make me feel like there's going to be a better way in force by that time. And that's what I felt walking through the store.

Flack made the assertion that I was probably thinking more along the lines of consoles, where the "vertical integration" is now in such a locked turbo mode that you may not be able to buy your console games any other way. There's a good point there, and I think that games on consoles could likely become these open-ended new-content-everyday sorts of games where you have this initial insane download that goes to the machine followed by daily or weekly updates of stuff, so you suddenly find out there's a new track or a new level and your account was just debited by $5. In these cases, boxes won't be around.

Robb Sherwin points out that the downloads inevitably come encumbered with restrictions and are often tied to the continued operation of machines that are not your own, meaning that if they die, your stuff dies. While it's possible to go and play Mario from a cartridge 20 years old and have it work, once the Nintendo Wii service goes away some day, that's it for all the "channels" you bought. Good point for him, too. Obviously, just like I don't put out crippled DVDs with Macrovision and region encoding, I wouldn't put out anything that "phoned home" or otherwise demanded it "be" somewhere to function, so you can watch it on your holo-headphones or whatever with impunity, forever.

The thing I didn't bring up in the previous entry is how much of a long-shot bet boxes are.

Bear in mind that for the BBS Documentary, there was a $27,000 bill associated with the packaging and duplication. That's just duplicating DVDs and the cardboard case and putting it together and getting it sent to me. The rest of the documentary budget had already been spent and this nearly doubled the most obvious expenses for the project. GET LAMP will have a similar bill, I'm sure, possibly worse because of some of the tricky stuff I'm already in negotiations with that's being worked out. That's some scary money, and it scares me to even idly think of it now. This was the driving force behind aggressively pre-selling the documentary the last time, because I can't just blow out that kind of cash out of my mad money. I made that money back, make no mistake, but that's the inherent risk. (You can also, perhaps, see why making the whole thing Creative Commons seemed a bit of an additional insane risk as well, although it ended up becoming a selling point.)

I still hold that the shift will be gradual but distinct; a heavier and heavier reliance on a network component to recieve new "stuff", until not getting "stuff" that way is the exception. I have no problem being the exception, if it makes sense to be.

TEXTFILES.COM 2.0

Someone did it! They took what I do and "Web 2.0-ified" it!

The name of the site is SCRIBD.COM and it's got all the now-cliche aspects of Web 2.0: the reflective, this-side-of-children's toys logo, the insane flash doohickey interface to everything, the half-assed message posting aspect, and of course the link-in to a bunch of "convergence", i.e. money-making things, like linking to a print service and then having "yahoo this", "digg this", "reddit this", "send more traffic to us so we can have ads up". Additionally, you get the classic "profile" as Web 2.0 sites like to do it, with a photo and a bunch of dashedly written sentences about nothing in particular.

Does this make me happy? Well, I always have mixed feelings about this. There's a part of me, for example, that wants me to shoot myself in the face in the ER of a hospital, so they can revive me, so I can shoot myself in the face again.

The other part of me, however, is always fascinated by little toys when they show up, and the fact that this toy is dedicated to documents and writing instead of video, and then potentially the quality of the artifacts being uploaded could be better than what they have on YouTube, hey, never let it be said I'm against a little browsing.

Unlike YouTube, however, where you often have copyright violation of items nobody cares about (snippets of 20-year-old public access cable and rare recordings of commercials of companies long dead), I can't help but feel that people, and by people I mean copyright holders, are going to care about things like the entire O'Reilly Library, 'Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt, and the Amber series by Roger Zelazny. Even in its relative youth, this website is loaded over with people uploading straight-up books and magazines and novels. The term often used by parties duplicating written works without authorization is "bookwarez". Maybe they should have called it 'Bookwrz". and made a pretty logo. Oh wait, they did, but they spelled it SCRIBD.

Also never let it be said that I'm against a little copyright violation here and there; the copyright law in the US is a little over the top right now and covers all sorts of things that should probably expire a lot sooner than up to 90 years after the death of the creator. There are probably a few things on textfiles.com that could stand to be removed, although I do my best to keep that under control and make hard choices along that line. But here we have a case that a company is basically set up as a rape-tastic "bookwarez" fest, and is trying the old Napster/Youtube/Bittorrent trick: build a company that permits wholesale copying of a type of data, ignore that a lot of that data normally comes up for sale in stores, and wait for someone big to buy you out. If you ever read the book "All the Rave", which is about Napster (and who knows, it'll probably show up on Scribd any minute now), it's pretty clear that the business plan of Napster was "keep ignoring everything until we're so big a music company buys us out" and it was only greed on the part of some parties with Napster that made this fail. YouTube kind of ignores copyright (although they got better about responding to takedown notices) and they got bought out by Google.

I am a child of Ascii Express lines, of pirate BBSes and "legit" BBSes that had secret sides accessible by password or a different phone number. I claim no moral high ground here, and there is a lot to be mined in that relationship I and others had in our youth with regards to computer software and "warez" trading. But you know, the general sense of it wasn't to look at it as a business model. I think that's sort of what makes it icky for me. The fact that they would have a currently-in-stores book up there and then have a service where you could use a print server and pay to get the PDF printed... there's some line their little moneywagon just crossed.

I must state again that their little tools are neat: things that will transfer a book into MP3 (i.e. read it using a text-to-speech converter) and analysis/statistics of the book that show the wordcounts and how this compares to the "average" item. You can download these items as textfiles and as PDF files, although they screw the name up pretty badly to make sure the filename is unique: the 2006 Taschen Catalog is renamed to "fwcrv8q7y1iac.pdf", which doesn't really give me a sense of what's located inside.

One tool that I actually like a lot is the "analytics", which watches who downloads/view a given document and shows maps of where they came from, logs of who came from where, and so on. That sort of stuff is neat. I wish it wasn't some locked-away piece of a bookwarez site, of course.

And so we come again to my main reaction. How neat, how weird, how doomed. Fascinating, some interesting ideas, but surrounded by lame little messages, whack-ass profiles, and complete copyrighted works held up for the taking. And it's not even in Sweden.

I don't think I'll take textfiles.com down yet; I think it still has a niche that SCRIBD isn't fulfilling. As you might expect, I get the occasional suggestion that I should turn my site into something not unlike what SCRIBD is; more user interaction, ability of people to upload textfiles, to have "profiles", to comment on each textfile, and so on. To these people, I can now point to SCRIBD and say "And this is what it would look like." A gigantic, farting zeppelin of web 2.0 lazily rising into the sky to grab a little piece of the money sun before exploding in flames. Will they make it to the safety of the moon before they're caught out for facilitating book piracy as a business model?

The race is on. Good luck, bastards.

Life in the Time of No Box

I stopped by the store today because I needed more disk space. I walked out with 1.5 terabytes of disk space. Perhaps this is a sign the world is not the way it's always been.

As I wandered around the aisles looking at other crap for sale, I found myself in the various sections that sell "software", that is, stuff you shove into something else to make that something else do something. That includes computer programs, CDs, DVDs, console games, and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. And I think it was then that it really hit me: this is all going away.

Packaging serves two purposes, maybe three. It provides protection for the product inside from rot or abuse or water or whatever. It can function as enticement for people walking by it or seeing it somewhere. And, I suppose, it could also make it easier to contain lots of that object for shipping/transport.

Let's confine ourselves to considering books, record albums and computer software, because otherwise we'll be here all day.

Take the packaging of a book. A stack of papers, printed with words and pictures on them, bound up using a bunch of different methods. The quality can range from amazingly crappy to thousands of dollars of rare materials. In this case, you're not protecting the stuff inside: the words and pages are not that overly fragile, although it's nice to have them all facing in the right direction. Instead the packaging (the cover and surrounding material) is often the first line of attraction for the casual passerby, telling them that the words and pictures inside should be looked at. Thought goes into the design of the cover to make people want to pick it up, otherwise it doesn't matter what quality the words are inside, because nobody's going to read it. Placement within a bookstore helps sell it, but even when there's stacks of these books with just the binders sticking out at you, they're still designed to summon you in some way. Books have been around for hundreds of years.

We don't do record vinyl anymore, but when we did, they were large cardboard squares which contained records inside, and the front cover would show you a picture of the band inside or maybe a nearly naked girl who didn't know the band at all, and the back would be a bunch of words telling you how fantastic the music was or indicating what songs were located inside and how long the songs were. (Naturally, there were variations to all this.) In the stores that carried records, you'd have huge bins of the cardboard squares and you'd flip through them or ask someone who spent a lot of time flipping through them to find something for you.

Computer software comes relatively late in all this, showing up in the mid 1970s in stores. In the case of the packaging for software, you would generally get a box or a bag. Actually, at first it tended to be a bag but later it was a box and then later it was a very large box. Inside would be a cassette tape or a floppy disk or a bunch of floppy disks and a big printed manual. When computer companies had a lot of money, everything would be in color, otherwise it would all be in black and white or single-color. The box changed shapes over the years, ranging from looking like a record sleeve to a piece of folded cardboard with the manual and floppy shrinkwrapped together. Recently, the computer box has gotten small again, containing a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM and a behest to buy the hint book, and with a small flap on front so you can open it up and see someone beating the crap out of someone else, just like you will when you buy the game.

Let's just say that this summary of packaging is a tad brisk. But for all its briskness, you have a running theme: a thing you hold in your hand that then gives you access to something more ethereal (ideas, music, the right combination of set bits in your hardware so it does something involving Pac-Man).

You'll notice I didn't discuss the Internet or webpages in any of my examples. That's because they utterly and totally destroy all of these situations as being the most efficient way to get the central item to you. If you want a book, you can get a 200k textfile and that sucker can be an attachment to an e-mail. In fact, it could be in a PDF format and maintain basically 100% of the formatting, fonts, photos and structure of the original intended pages, and that can be an e-mail attachment. Music is now such a ubiquitously available item that you kind of have to make an effort to avoid it while web browsing. If licensing issues annoy you with MP3, OGG format or FLAC format are hanging around to pick up the slack. An awful lot has changed in the past 10 years, when 56k modem access was the champagne elite for the home user and now people regularly get megabit speeds if they live even vaguely near a city center. People who make books, music and computer software have ranged in reaction from "See You On the Net" to "Hurble Burble la la la la la I hear nothing". But at a point when nobody, no magazine, newspaper or television show, has to explain what a webpage is and often merely gives a domain name and leaves it at that, you know this Internet thing is pretty much ubiquitous.

People play the "Oh,