ASCII by Jason Scott

Blockparty

I am not exaggerating when I say that I could not imagine Blockparty going better than it did.

Oh, sure, I could make things up and say that it didn't have a air castle or funhouse in the parking lot, or I could complain there was no free sushi cart in the hallway with a master chef flown in from Tokyo, but as one of my favorite reviews once said, "These are mostly minor, made-up complaints." In point of fact, it was just an overriding success.

I apologize in advance if this entry is scattershot. Pure delight often sounds this way.

As mentioned during the week of demoparty posts, it's been a dream of mine to be involved in a North American demoparty, and as it stands, I ended up being a co-organizer of one. This event, Blockparty, took place from basically Thursday April 26th to Sunday April 29th. The coding and preparations were taking place from Thursday to Saturday, followed by a two-hour presentation of entries from midnight to 2am in the main room of Notacon, followed by judging (vote tallying, really) and then the awarding of over a thousand dollars in prizes on Sunday. I have photos taken during the event, including some taken by Trixter when I was awarding prizes.

We had 40 entries from probably 12-15 people or groups, although there were lots of surprises. I myself entered a couple contests, although I didn't win. Which works for me! I'd hate to have to refuse prizes. It was more fun making the stuff, and also realizing I didn't really have to enter to have enough entries, which was our big fear going in. People stepped right up and did stuff.

The talks we had planned all went off, although poor Trixter had a power outage during his. Even then, he recovered and kicked ass. Necros, who was someone who blew me away in a presentation 11 years earlier, proceeded to blow me away again. Who gets the same amazement twice in a lifetime from someone doing the same stuff? Nullsleep, who is a big ol' hero of mine, was a fantastic part of the proceedings, and RaD Man goes without saying. And, once again, Inspired Chaos, a person who is the secret heart of the North American Demoscene, contributed in all manner of ways to take things to the next level.

Was there stress? Hell yeah. As mentioned last week, I failed to bring along the main partymeister machine and had to spend time getting it to work. Even there, things came out better because Notacon folks stepped in and saved my bacon with endless work and effort to get it smooth. The partymeister software worked great throughout the event once we had it up and running and it was a breeze to use for voting. I also had some sort of breakdown a couple hours before the main event, making sure all of the entries were accounted for and tested and ready to go, and there the rest of the blockparty crew took over and I could get the show on the road elsewhere.

So what IS a North American demoparty? Well, it's a lot of people hanging out with computers, it's definitely a lot of people getting together and doing technical stuff. But paired up with Notacon, it became something much more. Stuff that's a staple of conferences like Notacon add another layer of cool to the proceedings; lockpicking workshops, technical presentations, food and drink, a Wii set up on projectors... if you got bored of hanging in the Blockparty Lounge you could always wander out and hang with dozens of others doing cool stuff.

I think the biggest compliment came recently when I was discussing the surprise competition, the "rapping freestyle to Timbaland's stolen track" event we started the Blockparty Midnight Show with. (The story of Timbaland ripping off a demoscene song is everywhere, and we wanted to make commentary on it.) My buddy was talking about how we were able to pull it all off with probably minimal rehearsing and preparation, especially that last bit with the pre-written rap. But there was no such thing! It was all spontaneous, in the moment. But it felt as smooth as a planned situation. That's great.

I considered writing endless reams of stuff about the party, but that seems uninformative; instead, I'll probably bring up subjects inspired by Blockparty and ruminate on them in weeks to come. That'll yield better fruit.

Speaking of which, at the event, I made the promise that there would be five Blockparties. And we're doing it. The plans are already in place for Blockparty 2008. Perhaps you want to start thinking about it.

I am, to put it mildly, happy. Now, back to work.

Bittorrent: Solitary. Fashionable. Ethereal.

I wrote this letter earlier this year regarding a debate whether to put up a collection of talks up as one large file directory on bittorrent, or have separate "torrents" for each individual talk. I favored one large file directory, and went entirely overboard explaining why. I figured it might have some relevance for others to read, and I welcome debate and corrections.

So here's a little quick overview of bittorrent and why I prefer one big mojo torrent of a given thematic collection over a pile of tiny torrents.

When Bram Cohen introduced Bittorrent at Codecon way back when, he did the classic one-man-army maneuver of working on it in solitude and silence for a year and the dropping the fully working binary on the convention, and the world, promiting the breakthroughs he'd done but of course immediately painting himself into a corner with regards to pitfalls in his implementation.

When Cohen designed Bittorrent (as regards his speech), his central idea was critical and the motivating factor: prevent bandwidth bottlenecks. In the situations where a large amount of people want something, the Bittorrent protocol and setup allows them all to help each other while also downloading a file. If you go back to his 2002 presentation, here's his description:

BitTorrent - hosting large, popular files cheaply. Started in May 2001, based on lessons learned writing Mojo Nation, I've been working on it full time since then. Will show installation and download on a fresh machine, then show how to host files as well. Can handle several downloads at once. Integrates seamlessly with the web - users download simply by clicking on hyperlinks. Scaling will be improved to thousands of simultaneous downloaders.

This is all well and good, and Cohen's initial implementation stayed in use, and was quickly recognized for its benefits: shared bandwidth on ludicrously large files, like, oh, say.... movie files. With that, the protocol took off, much to Cohen's quite public dismay.

Part of this is because for all the impressiveness of bittorrent's debut, it also has a number of the classic problems, like "tit for tat" routines that judge how much each person is downloading vs. uploading. It wasn't hard to write stuff to ignore that. People had to then rewrite stuff to punish that, etc. But let's set that aside.

We know the classic Server-Client model. Server has stuff. Server makes stuff available, generally through ports. Client connects through port and gets stuff. This is how websites work, this is how FTP works, this is even how sshd and telnet work, although in those cases the "stuff" is interactive access to programs running within the machine. There's pros and cons to this model, but there's one which is not obvious, which Bittorrent loses, which I'll get to in a moment.

In Bittorrent's model, there's no server in the standard sense of the word. There's no central "thing" holding "stuff". Instead, there's a "tracker" that keeps track of all the clients with the "stuff". There is a "torrent" file generated, which is kind of a bit info-file, saying:

• What files are in the "collection"
• What their MD5 hashes are
• What tracker is officially "associated" with this "torrent"

The "tracker" is told via these "torrent" files what it is "tracking". The "clients" use these "torrent" files to know where the "tracker" is, and the information on the "collection".

When people are downloading, they're "leeches". "Leeches" both download, and upload. When a Leech has successfully downloaded 100% of the collection, they are a "seed". It is possible to be the "seed" for a single file or set of files, if you have 100% of them, and obviously, if you have ANY piece of the files, you can share that piece you have with the other clients/leeches, all while you're downloading.

That's the rough history and explanation. Now, my issues with it and why a larger torrent file is better than a bunch of smaller ones.

The absolutely unintended and shocking side-effect of the bittorrent model is that it has two critical points of failure: if the tracker goes down nobody can share the torrent, and if there are no seeds then it doesn't matter if the tracker is up!

You would think that as a default, following three decades of client-server technology in use, Bittorrent would have the "tracker" function as a "seed" when there were no "seeds". No. Not in the least. Instead, the tracker will report that there are 0 "seeds" and you're SOL.

This first critical point of failure (tracker goes down) was mitigated a little while after the introduction of DHT/"trackerless" torrents, where basically servers ignore the "tracker" part of a .torrent file and just ask out in the world "so, anybody connected to anything I'm connected to have this file?" In that way, the problem was dealt with a bit by at least making it theoretically possible to find other "seeds" without a specific tracker being up.

The second, however, has never really been handled.

Without the tracker-as-seed model (which is just fine as far as many trackers are concerned, since it totally frees them from carrying pirated material), it is very easy, very simple, for files to become a popularity contest.

Files, like say, an in-the-theatres movies .AVI or a version of some distributed software, can fall out of favor. Once you have the new version, or a DVD rip where you just had a screener, people switch to the better files, like a fad. Or maybe the files just get old, out of date, or otherwise fall out of whatever fad state encouraged them.

What this means is that things just kind of "die". People stop being seeds, reboot, get away from what they're up to and look to other things. Whereas on a regular file server, you can have something only get downloaded 2-3 times a year, it takes CPU power and disk space to seed things you might no longer care about, and so torrents die.

In fact, I find the average torrent barely lasts 2 months. As an example, the 2002 Codecon put up their entire mp3 collection on bittorrent, to show off the technology... and now you can't get it! The tracker is long gone, the seeds long gone. The only place you can get them... is from me:

http://audio.textfiles.com/cons/codecon2002/

Where I put them up the old fashioned way, slow and stuff, although I'm mirrored elsewhere where the connections are fast. So if someone wants the historically interesting first introduction of bittorrent, you have to go to one of my websites.

I think this problem is endemic to Bittorrent. That said, it does mean it's really, really good for high-traffic massive-interest files. New TV shows, for example: you go out, find the new TV show, download the whole crazy thing, and you're torrenting with thousands of others so it comes in zippity-quick, and then, after a few weeks, who cares? What ends up happening is someone makes a "new" torrent of the entire SEASON of that show. Later, when the show is cancelled, someone makes a torrent of the entire RUN of the show. So even though it doesn't do historical stuff well (and by that, I mean a created torrent doesn't have a long shelf life), it definitely presents the "stuff" very well for the short lifespan.

So, what you want when you present a torrent of stuff, especially a thematically-similar set of stuff, is to ensure the largest number of simultaneous users, all pulling what they want, and therefore increasing the chances of someone "seeding" multiple files, even if they later delete them or choose not to have them. Since the torrent has a relatively short lifespan, the fad of downloading a given new torrent will ensure the saved bandwidth followed by a sad and lonely death of the file availability.

The relative spectrum of clients available means that some do not have the functionality of choosing specific files. But these are in such a minority that they almost rate as science projects. Even if one doesn't have a windows machine super-client like Azureus or utorrent, there's at least one leading edge client (bittornado) which is cross platform across basically every known major unix, windows, and even OSX. It functions both as a text-only command-line client and with a GUI. The advantages of a clustered group sharing of the notacon audio/video collection greatly outweigh the inability of a number of anaemic clients to handle per-file selection, especially with such a wide range of replacement clients that do things like handle DHT, and optimize the bandwidth usage.

By splitting the torrent into dozens of torrents, even if initially distributed by a zip, you lose several advantages. First of all, you end up taking in more CPU usage. (Even if you want to "share them all", most clients will not do this, swapping between a random selection so as not to pin the machine sharing them all). Second, you can't just drop the large .torrent on thepiratebay, mininova, legaltorrents and so on, so you can't have one large and explanatory description file (and additional things like a copy of the program or logos or bonus music), but instead end up flooding the search engines with a bunch of ad-hoc singular files, even to the point of going "here's the video of the talk, here's the audio of the talk". If the point of this is to distribute the talks among a small insular group who already know what they want and where they want it, it probably could have just been handled with some per-person DVDs, or pointing them to the DVD clearinghouse.

Anyway, there's the thinking behind what I said. It's long and tedious and technically weird, but I do believe in it. So there we go.

NAC1M1

At a demoparty, there is often what's called a "Wildcard" or "Wild" competition, where entrants can basically throw in anything they want to and compete for prizes. It sounds free-form, because it is. The entry can be a movie, a performance, a program, you name it, the sky's the limit. They can get pretty out of hand. Since Blockparty was somewhat new and there was a slight concern of a lack of entries in a category, RaD Man and I made a short film called "NAC1M1", and released it under pseudonyms. (To ensure a fairer judging, maybe, although it's quite obvious in the film who made it.)

Basically, the title is a reference to the first level in Doom, "E1M1", and this little short is a 2 minute parody of Doom utilizing footage of walking around Notacon (NAC) at 5 in the morning with my camera. Here's a google video version of it. It's a little blocky on Google Video, but you get 90 percent of the "point" immediately, so no harm, no foul.

In this case, the time from "Hey, let's throw something together" to the video being ready for upload was about 2 hours. About 15 minutes of video was shot. The whole thing was improv, and RaD Man helped get the sound effects ripped out of a Doom WAD. That's sort of the point of these little projects, the speed of slapping together stuff, the lack of refinement, the "go go go" and then moving onto the next big idea.

(Just to remove suspense, the video didn't win or anything.)

Just screwing around in Vegas Video, without a long-term outlook to the project being done, is a fun way to remember how much I enjoy editing stuff and playing with footage. Jiggering things around so that the footage was funnier or lacking slow parts is the real hard part. Sometimes you have to walk away from hilarious happenings simply because they wouldn't fit, or would get you in trouble, or otherwise make things flow less smoothly for the same of a single good shot.

Inspired Chaos, another attendee of Blockparty, snapped this photo of the two of us putting this little film together. I had not slept in a very, very long time, and it shows.

Hooray for fast filmmaking.

Alex

There is nothing sordid here.

When I was a lot younger, probably in my single digits, I befriended a local neighbor, name of Alex. Actually, his name was Alexas. That's an odd name for a guy to have, but that's what he had. He had red hair, freckles, and a slightly off-kilter outlook at life. He also had a lot of really cool Atari stuff.

I didn't have any Atari stuff, and while I did have a Commodore Pet and some other stuff my dad would borrow to bring home, it didn't match up to Alex's collection, which came from magic and which was, as far as I was concerned, infinite and incredible.

I would walk the half-mile from my house to Alex's, and if I was really lucky, like super lucky, Alex would be outside in his treehouse built on poles in the back yard, or hanging out in his garage, or otherwise around where I'd get to see him first and ask if I could see his Atari. Seeing his Atari was basically my way of saying I wanted to try out some of the cool games and programs he had.

I very simply can't come up with how I knew Alex. I don't even know if my father knew his parents, or if we had mutual friends, or whatever. I don't even know how I knew he had a computer; it just sprung up, as memories from childhood often do. This all happened, I just don't know how.

Alex was smart enough not to tell this 9 year old Jason how he was getting all these programs, or why the software didn't come in nice packages but handwritten labels, or why some of it was marked to be beta or had names different than the ones on the packages they ultimately came out in. Obviously, in some fashion, Alex was connected, but he didn't connect me into that. Good for him. Instead, he just let me try out all these great programs... this space game from First Star Software, or the Atari port of Crush Crumble and Chomp. I played them and loved them and was blown away by graphics and sound and the whole deal. Alex was very patient with me.

I recall clearly when we booted up a copy of Caverns of Mars, and the usual message that was printed on the screen was instead a stream of profanity. Alex quickly got embarassed and switched games for me. He'd changed the game somehow! At the time I didn't know the single first thing about disk sector editing, and so this opened my eyes that these programs, these immutable disks, had the capability to be modified and changed. An important lesson I learned then and there.

As I said, if I was lucky, I could show up and Alex would be outside. Otherwise, I'd have to ring his front doorbell, an absolutely terrifying proposition, because statistically this would mean I'd get his parents answering the door. They spoke english with a strange accent I didn't understand, and they didn't seem to think much of me. Looking back, I don't think this was the case, but at the time it sure seemed so. They'd look at me carefully, and then call Alex from wherever he was in the house, and I'd stand there with nothing to show for why I was bothering them except for my desire to see the Atari again. It taught me well and truly what "awkward" was.

I hung out with Alex on and off, often in the summer, for probably a year or two, when I was visiting my Dad's house. I got older and he eventually disappeared, although I again don't know why. Likely he went to college or got a job or joined the army and that was that. I'd also gotten a computer of my own by this point, my IBM PC, so the world stretched out for me in its own fashion and I was no longer in need of the help that Alex provided.

Like I said, there is nothing sordid here. Alex didn't give me drugs or touch me inappropriately or make me do bad things or take advantage of a kid probably 5 years his junior. He was patient and amused and chatty and occasionally overly quiet as any teenager tends to be. Sometimes he didn't feel like doing computer stuff and we'd hang out outside and sometimes he'd be at dinner and sometimes he wasn't home at all, and I'd be standing out there, scared to press the doorbell again, listening to an angry dog barking inside and wondering what else I'd do with that summer day if Alex didn't open the door. This was my childhood, computers and odd friendships and summers with long forgotten days I can sometimes pull out from my mental archives if I concentrate a bit or see a word or a font of an Atari.

Alex was my friend. He didn't have to be at all, but he was. Thanks, Alex.

Outage

To ensure that things would run smoothly at the demoparty that I was hosting, I worked for no short time on a Partymeister server. Partymeister is basically demoparty maintenance software which allows for ease of voting, tabulation, messaging between attendees and a dozen other functions. It's really cool, but required a lot of careful, quiet setup and planning. Therefore, I set a server up locally and spent a couple weeks customizing it.

I packed up the server along with a bunch of other junk into a rented van and drove single-handledly from Boston to Cleveland in a single 10-hour trip. I do not recommend this course of action to anyone. Bring a friend. By the end of the trip, your road has turned into a cotton-candy path with unicorns on either side trumpeting "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts".

After arriving and napping a tad, I booted up my laptop and instinctually checked a couple of my websites at home. Some worked, some timed out. Weird. I checked further; all the timed-out ones were on the same machine. Weeeird. And that machine was right next to the one I had unplugged downstairs and brought with me....

Slowly I turned, inch by inch, step by step...

Yes, that's right, I'd taken the machine that hosted cow.net, bbsdocumentary.com, getlamp.com and a host of other sites offline, loaded it into a van, and driven west with it for 675 miles.

It was now in a hotel room with me instead of in my basement.. and the machine with those weeks of work was up, just fine, running in that same basement!

This is an acid test for how one approaches their websites, data, and machines. Could I recover, even though I'd removed a vital part of my setup, especially the one that makes money?

As it turned out, I was able to recover by taking the now-unused IP address of the server in my hotel room and then attaching it to the server that was still running, and then transferring my website data from the "staging server" that isn't directly on the internet onto this now-more-loaded server. At this point, I made another delightful discovery: I kind of set up the webserver wrong and had "Virtual Name Hosting" done in a way that never should have worked but which sort of did. This required more editing of the configuration files. When I finished that, I got distracted (I was at the conference, after all) and forgot to put it back up. So all in all, I gave all my websites a pretty good punch in the gut.

I was able to recover most of the Partymeister settings as well, although that was relatively painful.

I mention all this mostly to make note of the fact that I was able to recover relatively quickly, even with the complete and total physical removal of a server and myself from the basement with my machines. This was because of my approach of keeping data in several places, and being able to transfer them between each other. I know enough about the webservers and the operating system to "fake up" a second machine on top of another, to get it all working.

But isn't it interesting that we're still at a point where a person still can so easily cause catostrophic failure to their own sites, their own web services. If I'd been hosting everything major with a hosting provider, this might never have happened.

But to do that removes, utterly and finally, that feeling of strength and self-sufficiency that I feel when I know I am 100 feet from my websites most of the day. This is a strong, powerful feeling and it makes me feel good about myself. But the apparent price I pay is that being in a rushed mode or doing something new and unusual could doom it all for days on end.

Every once in a while, another item, another aspect of things I used to do by myself so long ago are being turned into pennies-per-day services I could go to a hundred places to have done properly. It's obvious where the trend is going. And often, they do it better, unless you consider being able to hear your disk drives whirring to be a vital part of the administration process.

If you do, my advice is to go record the sound now, and leave it as a running audio loop in your mp3 player while you work.

Based on this whole unexpected, stupid outage, I'll probably host that audio loop somewhere else.

L0pht, Cracked

There was an article that came out recently, describing in some level of depth and accuracy the story of the l0pht, a "hacker collective" that thrived from the early 1990s through to a purchase/merger by a rebranded security company called @stake, which for all intents and purposes killed it.

This is a somewhat jarring article to read, because I know pretty much everyone mentioned in it. Many are friends. Some are distant friends, some very close indeed. The BBS I founded, The Works, makes a mention (thanks, Weld) and the amount of facts or descriptions that are correct is quite amazing, considering the natural distrust of the press many members might have at this point of time.

I was on the outskirts of this beautiful and terrifying thing, this conflagration of technical types, weird-fits, buddies and folks who were all together the Boston-area "Scene" of the 1990s. From it came a rebirth of the Cult of the Dead Cow, the creation of the l0pht, the wide press, the cool BBSes... many many aspects of my past that have made me feel like my life hasn't been wasted.

There's been talk back and forth of writing a book. I'm a little worried at this point, with all my other stuff going on, that I may never be able to sit down and help with such a project. It would be quite neat. There's the slight problem that some people within this social group would literally jump the table and strangle other people if put into the same room, so no group photos will be happening soon without a photoshop "crop" tool. The other problem is that there is this huge set of myths and stories that accompany everything, and many folks involved are of two sides about letting hair down. Then, eventually, you get to the point that nobody remembers anything at all, without it all having some sort of translucent silk of nostalgia and unruffled feathers on it. It's a classic issue of historical narrative: the feelings are real, the hurt was real, the triumphs are real, and the protagonists/antagonists have a disinterest in dropping it all onto the page.

This entry is all too impulsive for me to sit here and write some massive narrative/historical perspective of my time on the outskirts of the Boston BBS scene and these many groups; but I suppose I can at least drop one bit of information that is relevant to the article.

The purchase of the L0pht by @stake was the worst thing ever.

I don't mean that it was bad that members of the l0pht "grew up" and went professionally into a field they'd been working in as amateurs and making waves therein. And I certainly don't mean it was bad they chose to do so under a corporate umbrella, working for a company seeking to enhance its brand by re-inventing itself as @stake (it had years of existence under some dreary, non-sexy name beforehand, which is very difficult to track down). All of this made sense for some of the folks, and their continued existence (and relevance!) in the security industry proves that it was a good move for them.

I mean that, in hindsight, the proper and right thing that would have saved an awful lot of headaches and despair (although not removed it completely) was to either to close down "the l0pht" officially as a group and have various members go off to join the professional world, or to have left "the l0pht" to the people who were not choosing to go into it professionally, so the collective could continue in some fashion, perhaps better or worse, not unlike the Chaos Computer Club which is not only still active but actually has founders who are dying of old age.

Instead, what happened was that this outsider organization, and a nexus of friendships and interrelations, was turned into a brand-name, a product for sale, a widget that could be plugged into the waiting socket of this heartless @stake company (now owned by Symantec, making it exponentially more heartless). This was because of money, obviously. The company wanted the cachet of "hackers" working for their good, thinking this would give them street cred in an industry. Unfortunately, that industry was very little interested in street cred, and in fact generally is not interested in disruption of any sort. So this backfired. And choices were made.

Because this was "the l0pht" in there, and not just "former members of the l0pht", I got to hear of a lot of heartbreak, with friends betraying other friends over (normal) corporate choices, plus to hear as it became quite obvious that only the name of the l0pht was wanted, nothing else. This was a disaster.

The thing is... this had all happened before with the situation of the Legion of Doom becoming "Comsec Data Security", a rebranded professional company intended to use the skills built up as non-professionals to work as professionals. It didn't go spectacularly well, but as far as I know it didn't result in life-long friends never speaking to each other again. Sure, the outside observers yelled "Sellout", but that happens whenever money enters an equation.

But I still contend it was a lack of drawing the curtain on a "l0pht era" and trying to usher it into an "@stake era" that was by far the worst mistake made for everyone. It wasn't evil, it wasn't someone being a jerk; it was just a poor decision in hindsight, and if people could learn one thing from the whole deal, I hope it would be that if you bring a lot of money into your friendships, they are, more likely than not, never going to be friendships again.

That's all I have until I help write a book or something. Long live the Lady of the Vax.

Diskmags

As I'm preparing to head out to the Blockparty @ Notacon event, I try to clear out my e-mail, because I'll be away from my home office and working on stuff on a stunted pace. It's always a kind of grab-bag situation, finally giving an e-mail that's been tenaciously sitting around waiting for me to act on it, sometimes for months. In this case, I'm caught up to March, so things aren't too bad.

One nice one that came in recently was a bloke from Australia who sent along a collection of diskmags. He was wondering where I'd find a place for them, and as it turns out, I already have a place with disk magazines in artscene.textfiles.com, in a directory called emags. Notably, it was a crappily-put-together, completely ignored directory... but it was a directory!

I've since run a few of my scripts in it, and while it's still not in great shape, it's in a lot better shape than it was. The year that this Australian diskmag came out, 1996, looks good and is properly formatted and described. Others not so much.

The zine in question, SHADE, is mostly a textfile zine that happened to come wrapped inside a executable. It was described to me as an "Anarchist" zine, which means that each "issue" was a single textfile talking about how to commit destruction in some fashion, headed up with a massive disclaimer that you should never do anything with it and don't come after the author and so on. The first few files are written or spelled well at all, but the later ones have nice ANSI color and proper layout; I can't verify from here if they're lifted from other sources or all written "in-house", as it were. I was told there were 19 issues completed, with a 20th one on the drawing board but never quite put out. The lifespan is basically the end of 1995 to the beginning of 1997, not a bad run.

With it just being an "executable text file", an enterprising young lad could probably extract the ANSI text inside and not really ruin/mess up the full experience of SHADE. I like to maintain the ZIP files, though, because they have both dates of creation (important in determining history, though not 100% dependable) and ancillary files added by various BBSes over the years to say "Hey, now that you're done reading that, come check out our board!!!". Here's the one included with SHADE Issue #2:

    This file was uploaded on the 12-09-1996 at 11:27pm to node 1 of...
       ________________   ___________     ___ _____________/\_______
    À  \_   ____  ¬/ ¬/___\_  ____/ ¬\  _/ ¬/\_   ____  ¬/__¬\    ¬/    ¿
    ::     /    \_/   _   /   __/__   \/   /  \_ /    \_/ _/  \__ /_  :::
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    ::::     \  /____/  /     \  /    \/__  / /    \  /    \  / ___  / ::
    ::::::..  \/   /___/       \/   __/     \/      \/      \/   \  / :::
    ::::::           .:. Chemical Genocide Australia .:.          \/ ::::
    ::::: _________________________________________ _______________ :::::
    ::::  ¬ _____\_ ¬_________ ¬\_  _¬\_   ____  ¬/ \_  _¬\_  ____   ::::
    :: _/  /   \_/   __/__   /   /  /  /  /    \_/ \_/  / /   __/__    ::
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    ! (O o)  \ oO /     ¸ running ami/x ¸ oblivion/2 ¸    \ Oo /  (O o)
      ( ^ )  / \/ \              zyz's ¸ pulse            / \/ \  ( ^ ) .
    . ~^~^~~ ~~\/~~     messiah.kickass.obv/2.setup.dude  ~~\/~~ ~~^~^~
    .               running on an p100 with 32 gig of spam ¬            .
    ­           ¸ 25oo ounces on-line ¸ flower sniff'n power ¸          ­
    ¦ .            running at 288oo hydroponically grown bps          . ¦
    ?     reality check network dist site - shade & nfc member board    ?
                                      \/

I could probably draw an entire discussion out of the combination of drug references, braggable system information, modem speed, pirate groups (NFC and SHADE) and so on. In trying to get some credentials and name for their board, these sysops unwittingly left a little postcard to the future, and 11 years on we get to peek in.

The problem with these executables, of course, is that very attribute: they're programs. And programs start to lose relevance a lot quicker than text, and as the world becomes more and more paranoid about executing transferred programs, they become treated like contraband a little more as well.

I'm delighted to play a little part in bringing this stuff back; there's so much still floating out there on hard drives and floppies, and once in a while a little time machine shows up.

This whole new collection of SHADE, some group of kids' hard work from a decade ago, was a mere 700k e-mail attachment, transferred to me in seconds from across the world. Who knows what tomorrow's e-mail will bring.

New and Old

Yesterday's mention of Super Paper Mario reminds me of a little low-rumbling theme I've encountered in the past decade or so, with regards to people hearing I do things like buy the Nintendo Wii or dump cash into an iPod or fuck around with Twitter and the like. Apparently it can be jarring to think of a "historian" jumping into the melee of the newest of the new, the Current Hotness, the Bleeding Edge, or the latest bits of fashion that spray through the internet and popular culture. Not jarring to everyone, mind you, or even a lot of people, but a vocal tad.

It actually works in two vectors: people who are surprised I like "new" stuff when they normally hear of my speeches on "old" stuff, and people who really dig "old" stuff who consider me a touchstone for disparaging "new" stuff, unaware that the "new" stuff is three feet away from me in my office.

I don't dislike new things. In fact, I really like them a lot. I only have issues or raise complaints when new things act like they're the first of their kind, or when I see people with agendas, either money or power, totally ignore what has come before in an attempt to sway opinions to a recent controversy. This isn't to say that everything old did it right... But by acting like nothing ever happened before, you throw out a chance to learn why something was done the way it was, and later obsoleted or brought back into use under a new name.

I don't have a desire to "go back" to a previous time, to eschew the way things currently are and get into some sort of time machine. That said, I appreciate good solid retroactive design - if I see someone take a 1970s design and work it into a modern piece of software, I get warm and happy. it just doesn't mean I wish I was 5 again.

I have had to sit in a lot of locations and events, in person, and have the very nice, very cool person explain to me how every single thing in the modern world is fucked up, and things should be as it used to be. I am nodded to because I am of the brotherhood of people who acknowledge there even was a past. It wouldn't help the conversation for me to praise the present and its many superior aspects to the past being aggrandized in retrospect. I now do stuff in 5 minutes that used to be a week-long drudgery, leaving me to do more stuff in a single day than I ever could have dreamed I'd find time for in a teenage summer.

I appreciate the compliment by being talked to this way; I just don't think we're always on the same page about where this history stands in context and relevance to one's daily routine.

On the flip side, I have gotten my retrotechnology interests used against me in debate. I recall one particularly juicy episode where I insulted a weblogging librarian about her self-aggrandization of spreading the breaking news about the existence of RSS and weblogs, and got back a faceful of "go back to your textfiles". Take that, Jason! (Luckily, the textfiles are absorbent and have dried my tears.) Along that line of thinking, I do see the occasional reference to the information on textfiles.com being "old" and "out of date"; charges I will happily cop to! The articles on crossbar telephone switching systems are struggling quite mightily to stay relevant.

But the core fact is this: when I collected a lot of my stuff, especially the information, it was brand new, right off the keyboard of a kid down the block or across the state. I was keeping on top of the latest working BBS numbers, the coolest software I could get my hands on, and the advertising for the hottest new computer products. I was right there in the body press of the best and the newest; I just couldn't afford a lot of it, and had to settle for playing with it down at the local store. The difference is that I kept the stuff, just like I keep a lot of modern stuff, and I held onto it until people missed it. Or had forgotten about it. Or even had the good sense to be born since it happened. History is someone else's present, after all.

But I'm still not switching to Vista.

Super Paper Mario

I've been playing Super Paper Mario for the Wii since it came out, and I finally "Solved" it, that is, I got to the part where it shows you the credits after telling you how everything ended.

I choose games I'm going to get really involved in carefully these days; lack of time and all that. What I look for is a sense that a game has been crafted in some fashion, and not just shoved out the door on a nasty out-of-thin-air selling schedule. Games that are created over the course of years are rare these days, with the obvious exception of games that are being worked on as a hobby. And there's these sets of folks within Nintendo creating games to this level, and I buy them, and I am very happy.

I enjoyed Paper Mario, Super Mario Sunshine, Thousand Year Door, Zelda: Wind Waker and Zelda: Twilight Princess for this reason; all of them had the sense of being self-enclosed worlds, slavishly worked on by people who were all geared towards making the game better. This is especially the case in the 3-D games, where you walk around and realize these "level maps" feel like actual places; I recall a couple times playing Twilight Princess, far involved in the plot and gathering of the whatsis and the rebellion of the whosis, and I would stop to admire the view.

So much cheating and hackery has had to be done in the past to make a game feel like it's bigger than it is, that I still get surprised when I find cases within the game that it's not a cheat. The idea of "well, if I do this crazy thing and pile on this other crazy thing, I'll end up in this location it never expected me to go" and then you do it and there's an object up there, basically saying "so, what took you so long"... I wonder if newer generations of game players feel that. I marveled once at an airport, watching two seven-year-olds screwing with a touch-screen tourist kiosk, and realized they had never known a time you couldn't walk up to some TVs and touch them and have it do something. The idea is neither weird nor miraculous nor even unusual to them. Maybe the kids who come up simply expect a decent game to have extended out to hundreds of locations and have nearly-fully-articulated world interaction within those locations? if so, keep yelling at the game companies; I'm benefiting.

I think the best indication to me about these high-ticket Zelda/Mario games is how the development cycles sometimes outlast the platform. At some point, this was going to be a pure GameCube game, and then they strapped on the Wii controls. For me, they work perfectly fine and seem to have always been designed for it; I especially like the pointing feature where I take the controller and aim it at the screen, turning it into a cursor that can give me more information on any of the objects in sight. The swap from 2D to 3D and back was also wonderful. All in all, a good game.

Most notably, this is actually something like the fourth game in a "series", consisting of Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, and now Super Paper Mario: Keep Buying Paper Mario. The structure used to be more like a turn-based role-playing game, which wasn't entirely my favorite but it was a lot of fun. Now they ripped all that "turn-based" part out, making it, essentially, the largest game of Super Mario in the entirety of history. With only the slightest pretension of its RPG roots, now the game's basically a really involved video game, and hooray for that. Hardcore Gamers will probably hate it, but hardcore anything hates everything.

One other thought. I remember when I was working at Psygnosis, just before the Playstation started to hit, we had one in the office. But not just any one; we had a development playstation, which was blue and had, critically, 8 megabytes of memory, just like the Playstation was going to have. But since Sony sucks, they cheaped out at the last possible moment and made it 2 megabytes. A bunch of games were stuck in the middle, where they had to completely rejigger these great-looking games to fit in 1/4th the memory. One of these was the spectacular Lomax, which had multiple backgrounds scrolling by as you jumped around on different platforms. I'd show it to people and they'd go "wow". After the Great Cheaping Out, pretty much all those scrolling backgrounds had to go. All that work, gone. Meanwhile, in Paper Mario, I see visual effects that probably eat 2 megabytes just warming up. And the multiple scrolling backgrounds that shot the old game Shadow of the Beast to the top of the charts are all over the place here, adding that flair and style just because they can.

When I found Super Mario in a crappy arcade in Carmel, NY next to a scary pet store and down the strip mall from a horrible record store, I never could have imagined that 20 years later I'd be playing variations with almost all the same game mechanics. And way better graphics. In my house. Waving a white wand.

OK, I knew some sort of white wand was going to be involved.

The Big Push Continues

Roughly three months ago I joined a gym and mentioned on here that I was doing so. I also explained my motivations for doing it and what I hoped to achieve.

I just wanted to mention, I'm still doing it! 3-4 times a week, I make myself miserable for an hour or two on the treadmill and a variety of machines that only lack wheels to be capable of taking over the city. The combination of a pill regimen and the functional quality of mirrors have kept me at it.

I haven't turned into a sexy little pineapple from this, but I at least feel like I'm undoing some significant damage from decades of avoiding exercise of any sort. For example, this week a trainer and I launched an expedition to find my biceps! I have some! Sort of!

The gym has maintained its nice quality, not turning into a torture chamber or dull sweatbox, handing me cheap excuses to avoid showing up. It's still expensive, of course, and that too has been a motivating factor (skip a session and I've thrown away $12!) but mostly, it's just feeling ever-so-better.

Now, after six months, I definitely want to see Sexy Little Pineapple or I'm busting heads.

Cold Turkey

It has been six months since I've watched television.

This is not to say I don't occasionally watch a downloaded episode of some series I'm interested in, or watching movies, or avoiding anything with a three-letter acronym attached to it. What I mean is that the act of sitting in front of my TV taking in stuff hasn't happened for half a year. I have a TiVO and a satellite connection, and I can see the little guy showing the red light recording and providing me with little bundles of joy, but I just haven't turned the bastard on.

There was a time when I was watching TV for half my waking hours, taking in every bit of trivia, entertainment, news story, or commercial I could find. I watched everything, because I was both fascinated at how stuff was made, as well as all the cultural touchstones going by in the talk shows, kids' shows, music videos. As far as my style of saying utterly random things in my writing goes, let's just credit television.

I wasn't lonely, either. I liked watching TV, going between channels, enjoying everything that went by. I didn't feel at the time that I was missing out on anything, and looking back I suppose I could formulate out of the air a thousand things I could have done instead ("start learning low-level programming and how to solder, immediately") but I'm pretty happy with how things balanced out.

Now it just doesn't happen.

I suppose I could be pithy and claim this is because of a reducing quality in television, but that's not true. I see (or, I saw) lots of shows that I really enjoyed, especially the rash of shows that were about people making something but hating each other. I love that stuff, even if it's fakery piled on top of other fakery.

No, I suspect it's because I'm making stuff.

Obviously, the documentaries are the main thing I'm making, but I also make music, and write (like this weblog) and do a bunch of similar creating. And when I'm making "stuff", I guess the need to sit around looking at other people's "stuff" becomes much less pressing. Not to say this translates completely to "people who accomplish stuff don't watch TV", but more a case of "people who are really busy sometimes choose the previously-most-time-consuming activities and shitcan it, suprising people they used to do it with". Since I don't have anyone I was really watching TV with, the need for intervention isn't there.

Man, that'd be a great intervention. "Sit down, goddamnit, and watch Monster Garage. We're NOT going to lose you. Not this time, not while we all love you!" Maybe I'd get free snacks.

Anyway, I have a list of television shows I'm supposed to be watching at some point that probably constitutes a lost month in my future. My ass can hardly wait.

The Scent of a Ware

Buried in the middle of the insane interview I did with Grandmaster Ratte' of the Cult of the Dead Cow in his bathtub, a time when I was laughing so hard I had to go out and collapse in the hallway of his apartment so as not to ruin the take, is a rather insightful phrase.

Talking about pirating, Ratte' made a mention of the "Scent of a Ware". You can hear his phrasing of it in an mp3 I made a while ago. His bathtub "interview" lasted 20 minutes or so, of which I think I used 2 as an easter egg on the Documentary DVD because it totally broke any mood built up around it.

But you know, he was right?

There really was this sense of hunting, tracking down, scoping around for whatever new software was out there. The rules have changed in the modern era but the idea is the same: you and others want something, some people would prefer you not have it, and the conflict within yields both pain and pleasure for all involved. It was a slower process in the 1980s, involving hours or days or even weeks, but all software acquisition achieves that moment when your downloaded file was booting up, and you're waiting to see whether you had achieved total victory or complete failure.

The chance for serendipity was great here, as well as people pulling some memorable pranks. But that feeling, the idea of booting something up and staring into the screen and hoping it was what you wanted and praying it won't be something you'd never want in a million years; that's a strong feeling. A lot of description of experiences are about the utility and usability of a program. There's something to be said for those heady moments before the program actually runs.

Maybe I'll find a way to recreate it artistically, or in writing, or something of the like. Another odd, hard-to-capture feeling tucked away for a rainy day...

First!

Well, probably not really the first, but a while ago I was informed that there was a BBS Documentary that came out before mine. (I thought I was the only one.) Of course, it's 8 minutes long, interviewed about 6 people, and has music that sounds like you're being offered real estate with no money down, but come on, it was 1992 and we were editing using steam engines.

Actually, they used an Amiga with a NewTek Video Toaster, one of the greatest pieces of home computer technology ever made. Once that thing hit the market, everything changed for video editing and production. And, ostensibly, for Kiki Stockhammer. (Look it up.)

Anyway, someone put this documentary up on youtube, so here comes my first youtube link:

I don't really have any "factual" corrections with this production; it's all basically correct, if with a Canadian bent. The vintage shots of a commercial-sized BBS enterprise and an actual early 1990s computer store are the real winners here, as well as a straight-on shot of a Courier HST modem. I don't feel in the least bit like "my" territory was covered here, and the BBS Documentary, being roughly 41 times the length of this production, had room to go in other directions.

Note, also, that there are things in there I specifically didn't want to do, things like having shots of people typing zombie-like at computers, scrolling shots of screens with no information on them, and a narrator. Could you imagine 5 and a half hours of that?

The director of this project now works for Discovery Canada, so everybody wins! Except for that music guy. He loses.

Demoscene Week: Link Buffet (Conclusion)

I've been somewhat sparse with links for this week; mostly, I wanted to concentrate on the writing. Also, I've been very sparse with graphics; a lot of this is simply because once you scratch the surface of the Demoscene, graphics are absolutely everywhere, and I just wanted people to have the facts.

A number of sites are dedicated to aspects of the demoscene. Use these and you'll get all you could ever want, more music and demos than you could ever watch for the rest of your life. These are not in order of importance; they're all worth checking out.

A lot of the current "scene" stuff is being harbored at Scene.org, an absolutely fantastic collection of data related to the demoscene and related scenes. They track the parties, the productions, the groups, the files. You can find so much stuff on there, it's amazing. And it has persisted over many years. On Scene, there used to be recommended files for people to get into the demoscene. This has morphed into the Scene Awards, a yearly awards ceremonies lauding the best in demos from the previous year, in many different categories. Browsing that winner list will suffice for blowing quite a few minds.

Pouet is the crazy melee to Scene.org's library. It allows sceners to see all the new productions, comment on them, and recommend stuff to each other. It's got all the usual dramas, triumphs and flamewars of any vibrant community, and if you go through their collections, you can get a real sense for how the pulse of the scene is beating on a given day. It's quite a lot of energy in one place, and worth spending a few days at.

Slengpung collects 20 years of photos from demoparties, sorts them by party, person in photo, year, you name it. It's like somebody took photos for years on end travelling the world and you get to browse their album. I can't recommend it enough.

Trixter (who is speaking at Blockparty) put together this great page a number of years ago explaining the PC Demoscene; the page is archived here and I suspect he'll be inspired to make a new one after attending Blockparty.

Since so much stuff I was collecting on textfiles.com ended up being not pure textfiles but graphics, artwork, music and programs related to either demoscene work or creative output, I created ARTSCENE.TEXTFILES.COM, which has a lot of different work from a lot of different places.

Notacon, the hosting event for Blockparty, is at notacon.org. They've got years of archives up, including speeches, photographs and schedules.

And finally, there's always the blockparty site itself.

Demoscene Week: Blockparty

I'm actually kind of at a loss as to when the whole idea for running/co-running a demo party of my own came to me, but I was likely on the phone with RaD Man of ACiD, who I have the pleasure of chatting with frequently these past few years. We had a fast friendship after meeting during the BBS Documentary shooting, and it turned out we'd both been at the NAID demoparty in 1996, although we didn't really meet there. We both really enjoyed demoparties and the whole culture of them (with him being much more involved, running ACiD and all) and we'd considered putting one on ourselves.

Of course, starting a demoparty had been one of those packed-away dreams of mine going back many years; right there with starting a movie theater or living in a treehouse. It's one of those combinations of really cool idea and really untenable idea. Ever since NAID's last event, and as the years went by, I wished the right set of events would happen so such a thing could come true, be it theater, treehouse of demoparty.

But the idea came to me in a flash around 2004: just hold one at one of the events already going on, be it LAN party, hacker convention, or hamfest. Instead of trying to jump-start both an event and the many thousands of dollars in investment and outlay to bring something from nothing, become an event at another, larger event. We spied around for a while, kind of putting it together like you would a start-up; talking about it here and there while working on other things. It was a good idea, just not one that could be pulled off at the drop of a hat... and be any good.

But in 2006, we finally decided we'd take a shot at it. We talked to a LAN party called Nor'Easter, and started negotiations with them, touring the event while it was going on. It was quite impressive, and really, if you just took away the gaming, it was basically set up exactly like a Demoparty; the attention to net connection and power and rows upon rows of machines; I thought it was very impressive and said so. (I still do.)

However, another opportunity presented itself, and after some discussions, we decided we would hold a demoparty at NOTACON, an excellent con I'd been to three years in a row, in Cleveland. I've talked about this con a lot; it's relatively small but fierce in character and energy. It's both art and technology, photographers next to security experts, musicians dallying with network engineers. Nothing else really has this spirit in it. It seemed an excellent home for the first demoparty we were putting together.

The name we chose was BLOCKPARTY; a combination of references to graphics "blocks" and to the everybody-come-on-down character of a typical actual block party. Because it was available and because we could, the website registered was demoparty.us; made it pretty clear where we were located in the world.

It's been going on for months now, the planning, the competition rules, the preparation, the gathering of prizes and the many questions answered about rules. As you might expect when prizes are on the line, the questions about the rules can get very intense. That's been part of the fun. The other has been the challenge of integrating with Notacon so nobody's stepping on each other's gig. That's come out pretty well, and notacon has a schedule up showing the combination of our speakers and the notacon speakers.

I wrote an essay about my thoughts on all the Blockparty speakers before, and that's still relevant and worth reading, but here's an interesting parallel worth noting: all of the speakers except Nullsleep were at NAID in 1996. All of us took the trip, went out to this special event. Some of us knew each other, others did not. But all of us share that time, either as speakers or spectators. In fact, that's part of my motivation in booking many of the speakers; besides knowing their subjects, they were all at that Demoparty and were part of its success. Rub some of that magic off on blockparty!

Running things is a completely different experience from being an audience member. Some of it's better, some is worse. But I'm proud that my history with demos, this line that's moved through my life, will have this new junction point.

Demos make me want to live forever; they show there's so much left to see, so much to experience; I can lose an evening just turning off the lights and downloading/running random ones. Nearly 20 years of them and I've never grown tired of them. Here's hoping Blockparty adds a few more reasons to live as well.

And that, my friends, is the conclusion of Demoscene Week. I hope you've learned a bit, or re-learned a bit, and that, ultimately, a few more people get interested in this whole scene because of it. You're in for a treat.

Next: Your Demoscene Link Buffet

Demoscene Week: The Countries

For an environment that is so critically associated with computers and later networks of computers, and which many elements can be downloaded around the world (except for the aspects I mentioned yesterday), you would think that countries wouldn't matter. But in the demoscene, they do. They do very much indeed.

Demos and demoscene folks often identify themselves by what country they're from. Demos are (very occasionally) referred to as being in a certain country's style. Flags of various countries show up in demos, a part of the effect or a passing graphic in a scroller.

The country might be in the group's name. It might be how they're identified when they stand up. There's pride in this, not much (at least that I've generally seen) of saying another country's demosceners are worse but more of saying their country (or occasionally another country) is "better". This isn't to say that it doesn't descend into name-calling against certain countries or places; far from it. But even then, it's generally nothing that would be out of place in a sports discussion. It's friendly competition.

But notable through all this, is the absolutely dearth of comparable demoparties in my own country, the United States. Where there are literally dozens held every year in Europe, the US gets almost none, with only a dozen or so in the last 15 years.

Why are there so few Demoparties in the United States? There's a mass of reasons that people have come up with, and I can only do what others have done, which is give my opinions. And like others, there's no way to really prove I'm right, although perhaps it's easy to prove me wrong. Some of these were suggested to me by others and not my original idea; I simply agree with them.

• The US is really frigging huge and it is very expensive to do anything here. Whereas you can get away with having people sleeping over in a school or facility in other countries, in the US it's a goddamned insurance nightmare, and most meeting locations would never allow anything like that.
• A lot of the energy/interest in a "travel from all over to hang out and do computers" event has been supplanted by the Hacking conventions: DEFCON, HOPE, LayerOne, Shmoocon, Notacon, PhreakNIC, Toorcon, Summercon, Pumpcon... there are at least a couple dozen major-level conventions being held in this country, all of which attract the computer-involved, the audience, the attention.
• Travel is a killer because of expense (airfares have only dropped relatively recently as potential methods of getting somewhere, and you can't easily haul your computers) and so anything that would resemble a big demo party would be unlikely to pull in crowds from surrounding states.
• Telephone charges are handled vastly differently in the US than in Europe, with even local calls costing significant money, so the advantages of trading of warez via telephone were greater than hauling out to parties. Or, the technological advantage of the US meant the main crackers were gone by the end of the 1980s. Or the ....

You can see how silly it gets. Whatever happened, happened, and parties in the US or North America are historically rare.

I could fill this article with descriptions of European demoparties, but it'd be all crap, all secondhand stuff I picked up from others' work. While that might suffice for a longer-term book or article, it doesn't make sense here. All I can say is that as someone who has only lived in the US and on top of that only two of its states, it was very easy to romanticize these faraway demo events. When you're playing these older demos and the scroller is shouting out to someone across the room and slyly talking about the power of the group, you can get sucked in. When it mentions the beauty of the countryside or the greatness of the party or how friggin' drunk the writer is, you can start to feel like you really missed out.

Subsequently, in 1996, I heard about a demoparty being held in Canada, called the North American International Demoparty, or NAID. I was 26, just starting out in a permanent career after being in the games industry for a while, and I had the money and the ability to get a day or two off. I brought this up with my buddy Jim, and he too had seen these demos for years, and that was a sold trip. We packed up in his Checker Marathon and drove north from Boston to Montreal, covering 300 miles and sending me into Canada for the first time since I was a child.

We didn't have any demos to show, any things to present; we just knew we had to be at one of these things. We didn't even know what the rules, competitions, or, really, any other detail was. We just knew we had to be there. What if it sucked? What if there was nobody there? We had simply nobody to talk to about it, no group to check with, no buddies to correlate. We were going in blind.

As it turned out, it couldn't have ended up better. NAID was absolutely amazing, held inside a college that was on break, with most of it open to the people at the event. Like a school redone as a haunted house, every hallway, gymnasium, cafeteria and classroom within the environs of the event were transformed into labs, lairs, stages, game rooms. It was attended by hundreds of people. The main stage was well-built, had a huge screen, and a great sound system. People milled around, talking about stuff, hanging out, eating and drinking. In point of fact, I never left the building once the whole time I attended. I had a bag of clothes I changed out of and used the facilities, of course, but I was a messed-up party nut by the end. Sleeping arrangements were basically blankets on a classroom floor. Food was whatever the little cafe in the place had. It was loud, it was crazy, and it was long. And I loved it.

There was a lot of potential for the actual to collide with the ideal, for me to discover that a demoparty was no remarkable affair, but yet, NAID lived up to my expectations. I resolved to go the next year... but there was no next year. After two large parties, NAID folded up.

After that, there have been a handful throughout the country, most notably Pilgrimage, a party held in Salt Lake City Utah for three years. I went to one, had a good time, but it wasn't the same thing as NAID for me; then again, I was nearly 10 years older.

It seems that with the cards down, the wheel stopped, and the pieces left where they fell, Demo Parties just aren't going to be a North American thing. That doesn't mean there won't be any held here, quite the opposite.

I decided to put one on myself.

Next: The Blockparty

Demoscene Week: The Drama

It's too easy, when recounting the Demoscene and its history and motivations, to convince yourself or your audience of a clean-room version, where it's all about the creations and the resulting programs, and little else; kind of like the image put on by game publishers. (It is here, where once it was not, and it is done and complete and nobody cried). This cuts out the most vital aspect of this culture: the people, the events and the drama. These demos we can download and view over and over are just the artfiacts. (And damned beautiful artifacts, indeed.)

To assist me in illustrating, I'm formally introducing one of the more important Demoscene websites to you. It's name is Slengpung and it contains thousands of photographs from dozens of demoparties of the last 20 years. It is blazingly easy using their interface to zoom to a specific party, a specific group, and even to specific people through the years. From this, you get the actual images of what a party was like, not just words or distant rememberances. I wish more "scenes" did things like this so slickly.

The initial demo parties (sort by year, then go to 1987 and onwards) show themselves to be exactly what they were: collections of teenagers, screwing around, drinking way too much soda (or beer), copying software, trading wares, bullshitting all into the night. This is a natural outgrowth of a bunch of kids with computers hanging out, and is where the big memories come from. There's no competitions, no money changing hands outside of paying for pizza, and tons of home computers stacked near each other as kids hang out. This happened all over the world, especially in the era of slow-form networking.

There is a worthwhile discussion point regarding why there are then dozens and dozens of "Copy" and then "Demo" parties in Europe and very little in the US. I'll cover that tomorrow. Let's keep going in the current direction.

So, you have a situation in the late 1980s where groups are releasing demos out onto BBSes and as part of pirated software (or even as additional drop-ins to mailed packages of pirated software), and also releasing them at parties. And you therefore have a case where you are assembling, more and more, parties where there are tons of young guys who are entering contests (first for beer, then later for prizes and cash) with these demos. Some groups never go to parties. Some only go to parties and never actually release demos. Some people are individuals doing both but never actually in a group. And so on, down the myriad paths.

When making these sorts of accomplishments, that is, programs that are meant to impress and which are impressing others, there's a flip side. You set yourself up for criticism, for questioned skill, for accusations. This is, after all, a situation with all the attributes of other types of "art". There are accusations of stealing ideas, of lifting music, of claiming you are hand-building something you had made for you or which you took from someone else not affiliated with the "scene". Additionally, if you spend months putting something together, or even a few short days, and especially after a few days which include drinking, you're prone to boast. The other groups who are making stuff like you do it wrong, and you call them out. Others are the ones you know you have to live up to, or who have members who were once in your group, or who generally have been great guys. They deserve recognition from you as well.

If you go back and look through the old demos (and it has gotten easier and easier to do this online, thanks to both YouTube and the incredible website Pouet), you see all of these traits come out in the demo. Most of them have a "Scroller", literally scrolling text presented in different styles that speaks from the creators of the demo to the audience. For earlier demos, the scroller will be the entire demo, with the music blasting and the text scrolling along the top or bottom while a graphic effect takes up the main part of the screen. This template is rampant; you can't not find demos that do this in any collection.

Typically, for demoparties, the scroller text is the last thing typed in before the deadline at a demo party, meaning it contains whatever was on the mind of the authors at the party. Calls for more beer, shout-outs ("greets") to people at the party or groups hanging out with them, and basically the expected quality of text that comes from a off-the-top-of-your-head rant. These are frozen forever, downloadable anytime, scrolls written by people now deep into a different world, or into the ground.

The curse of a popular scene is the number of voices clamoring to be heard. With demos becoming more and more prominent in the early 1990s, you can start to see bold attempts to be "first" with a new effect, or accusing others of stealing their ideas. Many groups are super-protective of their new demos, not wanting them to be seen until the last possible minute at a competition.

These complaints, however, are at a different level: the taunts and chiding of people actually producing demos. Much more intense are the shouts and cries from the audience, the people who don't do any coding whatsoever and who are merely there to be entertained. "Too long." "Too short." "Lame colour scheme." "Boring story." "Uninteresting girl." "Welcome to two years ago." These are less easy to find for older demos but they exist to the present day; just go to the message base about Debris and notice the criticisms buried among the accolades.

"I dont know, it looks fantastic, it's brilliantly directed, yet it's still hi-tech, german and rather boring. Probably because it's hell slow on my machine. Yet (just thinking) if you gave it a little bit of fairlightish freshy groove and sync, it'd be so much better, as i see it!"

"actually, i dislike it don't get why there is such hype about it. really, i don't think THIS responds to the scene spirit mostly. no point, story goes from nowhere to nowhere, after 30 seconds it happens to lose its initial potential and becomes repetitive, then boring. somehow, i don't think i want to see it again (unlike other demos). on the other hand, what i liked were the documentary-like shots; pitty it was all incoherent and without any conception; and the fact about the exe size. the soundtrack doesn't deserve a respect - it's average, actually."

This last comment is a treasure trove of understanding the mindset of the demoscene; the values that are important, even if the conclusions in this case don't mesh with the majority of the rest of the audience. Terms like "Scene Spirit", "Story", "Hype", "Soundtrack" get bandied about, important aspects in determining quality in films, in performances, also play here. As much as it's computer programs on a screen, so is there the idea that all hands are lifting a "scene" to new places, following a "spirit".

Watch enough of these, and you'll start to see where they're coming from. Because you will find That Demo.

That Demo is the one where you watch it and for the moments you watch it, you are transfixed, astounded, no longer thinking polygon counts or frame rate or placing in a competition, but are just watching an amazing thing go by. Obviously, the younger you are, or more attuned to the type of hardware your machine is packing, the more recent That Demo will have been made.

Understand that I have a best friend, a fellow named Trixter, who has been involved in the demoscene for many, many years. He was "active" in the scene many, many years before I ever was (and my involvement would be called tangental at best). He is a member of Hornet, an American Demogroup (rare indeed) that ran the Hornet Archive, a collection of music and demos that for a long time was unparalleled on the Internet. He also was the technical director of the Mindcandy Series of Demo DVDs, which I have praised before for their world-class quality. He is, as they say, really really good.

We also argue incessantly as soon as we stray into topics of the demoscene. We're both hardheaded perfectionists, insisting that stuff be gotten "right" with the assumption that there will be no revisions, no appeal to an authority to fix that stuff later. Subsequently, we bicker as like hens over our tiny debates, both of us intending, in our hearts, to educate and understand the other. It's great, and the only lame thing is that we can't use the energy we spend on them to heat our homes.

Subsequently, we argue: what are the best demos? What are the demos that changed everything? What makes a demo good? Where did things go right and where did they go wrong? We could down a shared meal, wreck through multiple 3-liter sodas, and shadow the incoming rays of the dawn with our flailing hands if realities of work and commitment didn't interfere.

For example, I think the splash of FR-041, or Debris, has changed demos in a major way; the small executable size, the cinematic quality, the jump in technical proficiency, the environment of its debut to a room of people in the Breakpoint 2007 party as the last shown demo... these all add up to a seminal event in demoscene history. No longer can a group simply be good; they have to be incredible, or go for the clownishness of a "funny" demo. The "pure style" video, having raged and won the competitions year after year in the modern era of DirectX, have now been pushed aside to a hybrid style and substance once more. This, I say, is my opinion. Trixter does not agree. I will not pretend to try and recount his here. The point is, this debate is very important to us.

It's a debate that is very important to anyone who cares about this scene, this idea of a place that exists in screen to screen, program to program, contributed freely and with great delight and hubris from the era of the C64 to the present day of the Dual-Core CPU, Hardware Rendering and the Precedural Texture. It is a lot of energy to pour into something like this, but it rewards us, year after year.

That's worth every drop of the drama.

Next: The Countries.

Demoscene Week: Going in Style

In yesterday's entry, I gave some background information on the genesis of Demo Parties (sometimes called just Demoparties or Parties), where you had a history of software pirates outdoing each other in introductory screens before pirated software, and these "intros" were then spun off on their own right, becoming sole productions that were then judged and given prizes at parties. These parties, once called "copy parties" became renamed to "demo parties", and that's how things started to aim at the present day, where these parties cull amazing talent and skill into productions designed only to amaze and flabbergast.

I also mentioned the intense connection to Commodore 64s that many early pre-scene folks had, due to their ubiquity, availability and ease of learning. This is critical, because at the time, amazing intro/crack screens required knowledge of assembly to do top-flight things, and in doing so, they encouraged a generation of hackers to get inside the guts of the Commodore 64 to pull out every last cycle.

However, this narrative, while true, is also missing an entire component that is vital to understanding the progression of the demoparty. That component is the Commodore Amiga.

As time goes on, and the world becomes more and more a case of "Wintel/WinAMD vs. Apple", I fear that many people will forget the Commodore Amiga (as well as many other brands now gone). What separated the Amiga from the raft of mid-1980 home computers was how its features and demonstrations were on the level of disbelief. If you'd grown used to the idea that your home computer was going to forever be a one-note sound generator, imagine hearing of a machine that could do four crystal-clear channels of sound. In 1987, IBM computers could boast of a VGA display that ran at 640x480 resolution and provided 16 colors. The Macintosh II, in 1987, gave you better resolution and 256 colors, but cost nearly $4,000 to be properly outfitted. The Amiga, however, could produce modes of 4,096 colors, interlaced video, and all while playing that wonderful music.

The Amiga was an art machine with a powerhouse behind it, and the holding pen of the Commodore 64, combined with brand loyalty, meant this generation of top-notch programmers were loosed onto what must have felt like a limitless playing field.

Intros and demos, previously of a certain size and approach, could expand out into cinematic proportions. When tricks came out, like forcing the Amiga into video modes never intended or taking advantage of the chipset to put more items on screen than ever before, those tricks got attention. In fact, this is where my own story starts, because I first heard of demos when I was in high school. A friend of mine, Andy Rubin, lent me an Amiga 500 his company had used for some video production and which they'd stored away, unused. I was all over that machine, getting my hands on programs from bulletin boards, downloading songs to play, and playing any games or pirated software I could find. And whereas with my IBM, I'd more often than not be greeted with a text screen and some 2-bit music, with the Amiga the right command would explode the screen into a pyrotechnic adventure. Other machines had art of their own, of course; both in programming skill and in writing; but the Amiga had the kind of art you could show a non-computing family member after pulling them into the living room and have them go "Wow". This was a powerful thing.

And like I said, the growing demo groups exploited this new machine to its fullest. So much so, in fact, that style started to enter into things like never before. It wasn't enough to put up music; now you had to have the best-sounding 4-channel music your dedicated group musician could write. You couldn't be happy that you made stuff float around the screen; now it had to float around the screen on a background of beautifully drawn mountains or alien tropical forests.

This is a critical change; it meant that pure programming might not get accolade for a demo; in fact, a demo that was not as well programmed but which had more flashy graphics and sound along the lines of a cartoon or music video might win over a demo that showed a never-before-seen video mode. It was a heated debate as to which was "better", a debate that rages in the modern era, although for entirely different reasons.

On my borrowed amiga, I started seeing these demos, these songs I'd never heard the likes of, these graphics I'd never envisioned, and all of it with the extra realization that the computer was doing this all right in front of me, in real time.

Through this new wave, there started to be little conventions, in the sense of traditions and references that went from demo to demo. Jokes at others' expense. Claims of being the best. Nicknames and terms for programming concepts. A style of a different nature was arriving; to this day, you can hear certain types of songs done from that era and kind of "know" it's from that era. The artists inspired each other, created schools of thought, boundaries of what was acceptable or expected, some of which were smashed to bits or improved greatly. The idea of there being a "scene", with "scenesters" within it, and the "scene" was an ongoing entity that needed both protection and promotion, starts to really take hold.

I could list them all, all the little nuances I've noticed, but they would be my list, the parts of it that I feel, and it's a unique list for anyone. When you start to download and play these demos, you might find yourself in a special mode of thinking, that "demoscene" approach. It's magical, for some of us. It's why I went to the few of these demoparties that happened in North America (NAID, Pilgrimage) and why I've always wanted to travel to Europe to go to the still-thriving ones out in the world. Which is why, ultimately, I was watching a currently popular demoparty, Breakpoint, on demoscene.tv, a site that streams video and audio from various demoscene events. And that's how I learned about Debris, the winning demo at Breakpoint; many miles away and many hours of time difference.

If you start watching demos for any amount of time, downloading them and running them on your machine, you'll start to build up expectations, ideas of what should be where, what works and what doesn't. You start to learn the names and styles of the active groups. You see groups retire out, or new ones make a big splash. And if you spend enough time over the years, you yourself probably start to feel a bit like you're a part of the scene, even as an observer. Like me.

Next: The Drama.

Demoscene Week: Changing Everything

I wasn't there, but I was close.

When the demogroup Farbrausch released FR-041 ("Debris") at Breakpoint 2007, I was watching through the demoscene.tv stream and watched it completely own the Demo category, even with new productions by Andromeda and Synesthetics, to the great cries of "HUND! HUND!" throughout the Rundsporthalle. I wasn't awake for the results, but I knew they were the winners after 30 seconds of the demo.

I'm gearing this introduction to the demoscene with the assumption that all the stuff I just mentioned is sort of unknown to you. People who know the demoscene well will probably not find much of interest except the opportunity to correct me, while people who sort of know it (in a "I've heard of it" level) will maybe get some pretty pictures out of it, so it's worth their time.

This whole "Demoscene" thing is an inherent part of my growing up, placed along the worlds I traveled with Bulletin Board Systems, Text Adventures, Hacking Groups, and Art. In fact, it's so much a piece of me that I fall into the classic situation of simply assuming that everyone around me has either heard of it (at least, lightly), was a part of it, or "gets" the whole thing the second I start talking about it. This has been pointed out to me as being a bit silly, and it is, in fact, a bit silly.

So let's spend a week on it.

Introducing someone to the concept, we immediately and completely trip over the core word: "demo". The word has an enormous spectrum of meanings, and in fact the way I'm using it isn't even one you can generally look up. We have test products, destruction, protesting, presentations, music recording... all of them use the word "demo" as some sort of term relevant to them. If someone says he has a "demo", your initial thought is not guaranteed to be the way I'm thinking of it. So let's work with that word immediately.

Demos are programs written to show off either technical, artistic, or stylistic prowess on a computer.

Dull as mud, huh. The thing is, that simple root definition fillets out all of the wonderful stuff in lieu of simplicity. It's like describing the whole aspect of music as being "the making of sounds". You're missing out on a lot of stuff, especially groupies and pyrotechnics. Similarly, you're missing out on this entire amazing culture, often called the "Demoscene", that has been a global presence for over 20 years and had an immediate effect on a whole raft of things, ranging from game design to music videos to web design to programming techniques in general.

It used to be that being a software pirate was a rather technically challenging endeavor.

I could fill your evening with discussions of software piracy and the various aspects of it that have existed throughout the year; I put in some bit of it into the BBS documentary, talking to people who were once software pirates on the Apple II. I've also interviewed people outside of the documentary, just because I find them fascinating folks. Many of them have gone on to careers in computers that use their skillsets quite handily, skillsets they built up pirating software. Once computer software went from being the utility accompanying massive machines and became an industry within itself related to home computers, it became a priority to prevent the duplication of this software. The only problem was, this software was being run on machines whose main abilities were in the retention and duplication of software. After all, the computer had to "duplicate" the program off the cassette tape or floppy disk into memory, and then "duplicate" settings in memory to be able to present the user with ever-changing variations of the program's output. "Shareware" and "Freeware" programmers really liked this attribute, allowing their works to go far and wide with very little personal time required after the initial drop onto a BBS or onto some mailed-out floppies. In the case of commercial software, however, a complete copying of the entire program would result in a lost sale. Like a lot of cases involving money, this resulted in a hilarious goulash of smart and stupid; smart people spending months on a program and then spending weeks beyond it trying to ensure the program could be copied into the computer's memory but never copied out again, often by completely breaking aspects of the computer's speed and efficiency to do it.

In the same way you might live in an apartment and are thankful you're never required to slaughter a goat, so should you use a computer and be thankful you never have to conquer spiral tracking protection.

But the people who did conquer crazy computer protection schemes like spiral tracking (which involved reprogramming the step motor of a disk drive to make it general one single track on a floppy in a spiral!) did so and were really smart about it. Super smart, totally honed in the skills needed to undo the protections and memory access control and every other barrier preventing them from making duplicate copies of this software, returning the machine to its designed state of easy copies. And with these skills came two types of personality; the quiet get-it-done utilitarian software cracker, and the Oompah-Band-Playing Showboater, who would be more than happy not just to crack the software but tie it into a little bow, fixed up and optimized, and better than when you found it initially. At the risk of a totally silly analogy, imagine a car thief that returns your car a day later with better shocks and fuel efficiency. And photos of all the women he picked up in your car. Including your daughter. That's hubris, that's in-your-face. It's rude, crude, but it contains panache.

Software pirates would speed up games. They'd repackage the game so it was in a smaller space, loaded faster, could fit 10 games on a floppy disk instead of 10 floppy disks with a game apiece on them. And they signed their works.

This is critical. They actually signed the resulting crack, leaving a note that it was they that broke the protection, and were making it available. They'd include an advertisement for the BBS they ran. They'd include messages to other software pirates not to screw with them. A program that once held a simple title screen would be completely redone, a trotted-out pony with the pirate's name shaved on its butt. "Enjoy the steak," the pirate would be saying, "but remember who rustled the cattle for you in the first place".

This is enormous hubris. It turns some people off immediately, disgusted at the combination of "wasted talent" and "outright theft". I won't debate that; I've never been good at it. In the same way that there is endless romantic tale-spinning of the pirates of old, so the same it is with these software piracy groups. Sure, there's lots of examples of simple smash-and-grab types who used industry backup programs to snag copies to trade around school, and there were folks who lacked even that skill and would shoplift or "borrow" friends' disks and not return them, nothing more than outright thieves in the true dictionary sense. But there's something about gazing at the breathtaking variety and messages of these groups that a range of people have found fascinating.

Things have lessened up somewhat in the ensuing years; the introduction of the CD-ROM meant enormous amounts of data were available very easily, and the lack of real "protection" on them meant easy copying for people willing to sustain the mass of data that this entailed. Cracks still happened and in fact a piracy "community" in the sense of "groups putting together stuff in a repackaged fashion that was once for sale" thrives quite handily in this age of peer-to-peer and bittorrent. But more often than not, you are simply receiving the data in a compressed form "ripped" directly from the DVD-ROM or CD or movie in question; the "pirates" are glorified copy machines, quite happy to throw stuff up onto the web and let the fast pipes of the world glom down the massively over-puffed result. It is, as to be expected, a different world.

But this original hubris, this willingness to create a "show" patting oneself on the back before sending the user into the software package, is where the demoscene feels its roots.

The Commodore 64 was really frigging cheap.

This may seem like a bit of a departure of where we were. But it's not. The Commodore 64, the longest-running manufactured computer in history (it was manufactured by Commodore from 1982 to 1994, an astoundingly long run), was, to put it succinctly, the first computer for multiple generations of children and adults. At a price tag in the range of hundreds at the same time others were over $1000, it was a relatively low-cost way to enter the computer age. And what wonders the computer held! Graphics, sound, programming that could adapt to the needs of whoever the user was. If you wanted only to place your disk in and play a game, the C64 could send you right there, joystick in hand, never worrying about a byte or a command. On the other hand, if you could brave the learning curve, your C64 was ready for you to do your worst in manipulating the 6502 chip within into insane backflips, calling out to the graphics and sound chips in new and amazing ways, each more and more convoluted (or elegant).

The C64 was big in the US, but it was unbelievably huge in Europe. So big, the closest analogy for Americans is probably the original Nintendo Entertainment Systems, in terms of uniformity of hardware and width of distribution. But the important thing to realize, is how very well-known this computer, this collection of hardware and software, had been. It too was subject to the same situation of the Apple II: pirate groups, brilliant programmers taking on other brilliant programmers to both duplicate and improve commercial products. And again, there were these signatures, these "splash screens" announcing the group's prowess in making the duplicated software available.

There became a bit of a competitive spirit over these splash screens.

In many ways, the pirate groups that would crack and make various software available would spend more and more time on these opening splash screens. They'd add in messages that scrolled. (Scrollers). They'd add starfields, They'd make stuff happen that wasn't supposed to happen. And all this to get people to be impressed with the programming prowess they had. I know that might sound weird, but it's a core situation. it's part of what made this all what it was. Again, this generation of kids who were raised on this (relatively) cheap hardware that they knew inside and out were given a stage to present their skills not just in cracking software, but demonstrating their programming prowess in general. Demonstration. You see where this is going.

So, there were these things called "Copy Parties".

Obviously, transferring disks, even highly-optimized, cracked-so-that-10-fit-on-1 disks, was an expensive proposition, especially in places like Europe where the phone bills could be crushing. For a certain range of software traders, it became easier to simply mail stacks of disks, or get together in person and copy stuff. Held in homes or at schools, these parties became known as "copy parties". They happened all over the world, but for whatever reason the European parties started having names, and were held in a more public fashion. They began being "hosted" by pirate groups. And, critically, there began to be competitions. Competitions of a programming nature, and with cracking groups needing to keep up by bringing in dedicated art and programming members to just work on the splash screens. And the splash screens became not just more elaborate, but more communicative, more taunting.

Somewhere in the late 1980s, things shift. The portions of the pirate groups dedicated to creating graphics and sound for these splash screens start becoming entirely separate divisions, not at all related to cracking software or splash screens. Instead, they begin releasing their works completely and separately. Sometimes a piracy group would still have its name on these separate programs, but they weren't affiliated with any software; they stood on their own.

These programs would demonstrate programming skill.
They would demonstrate artistic, and music skill.
And they would demonstrate stuff that, for the life of you, you could not figure out how they were accomplishing it.

They were, in a word, demos.

We've travelled a long way today, and we've not explained the statement at the top of the entry yet. Here it is again:

When the demogroup Farbrausch released FR-041 ("Debris") at Breakpoint 2007, I was watching through the demoscene.tv stream and watched it completely own the Demo category, even with new productions by Andromeda and Synesthetics, to the great cries of "HUND! HUND!" throughout the Rundsporthalle. I wasn't awake for the results, but I knew they were the winners after 30 seconds of the demo.

"Breakpoint 2007" is a party that was held in Germany just this past weekend, attended by over a thousand people, for the pure and total reason to show demos, these programs rooted in crack screens, Commodore 64s and generations of computer users. "Farbrausch" is a reknown "demo group", dedicated to releasing better and better demos. They have competitors, including groups with names like "Andromeda" and "Synesthetics". There is such an interest in these parties that the competitions are broadcast over internet TV (demoscene.tv). And with a dozen categories of entries, there were contests held all weekend, in an arena, a literal arena, called the Rundsporthalle.

And the demo, the program written to impress that won the demo competition, was called "Debris".

Here is the page with the demo for download to a Windows box. If you do not have a windows box, it is possible to download a video recording of the demo playing, so you don't need to find the right hardware.

When you do play it, if you have a machine that can play it, you're in for a ride.

The program is in real time.
The program is generating the scenes as it goes.
The program is 176 kilobytes.

176k. Probably one-half the size of this entry I've been writing for a few hours. And it does that.

"How is this happening?" was my initial reaction. "How are they doing that." Research, study, investigation, and I learned. But that's the way it is with all magic tricks, really; spend enough time staring at them in cold regard, and the secrets will likely fall. But hopefully what will never fall is that memory of the initial dropped jaw, the opened eyes, the created work whose only point was to entertain, to boast, to delight, to compete, to win.

That is the core spirit of demos.

Next: The Style.

Hark! Kibble!

A lot of discussion has gone by about the website twitter, with the now-usual overloaded amount of meta-criticism, distaste, praise and pontification. Ostensibly this will be the case in the future for any website that claims to have come up with a new type of communication, or at least, a new interface to an old type of communication.

Anyway, I looked it over, and did the only logical thing.

I connected my cat to it.

The little guy's really taken a liking to it, so I'm glad I could at least get this new website hooked up to its natural audience: housepets.

As for my own, serious consideration about the site, I have none. It's someone's pet project, it's gotten attention, it's a lot of fun, people are making derivative sites like twittermap, and really, all told, it's a cute toy and I had fun doing the 15 seconds of searching to find a perl script someone whipped up in probably 15 minutes to interface with it. Life works at a new level of speed now, And I like it.

Meow.

Next week is an all-demoscene week. Brace yourselves.

Amateur Decade

In the previous entry Amateur Night, I talked about websites that don't want to think of themselves as websites, but little tiny kingdoms with special data that can be completely protected and uncopyable by massive "terms of service". It occurs to me there's a historical precedent for this on BBSes (and after a while, someone would have mentioned it) but it's actually not the same at all.

In 1986, the United States passed an omnibus law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (TEXTFILES.COM Copy). It basically increased the definition of wiretapping to include electronic communications, adding penalties and language around networks that were not just voice. The resultant effect was that electronic messages suddenly had the potential to be considered the same sort of communication as voice communications with fines and jail time for "intercepting" them.

What all this activity did was get the attention of some people who were also bulletin board system operators, and a little crisis presented itself.

To give better historical context, realize that the process of starting a bulletin board system was mostly one of financial outlay and little else in the way of "hurdles". There was the occasional guff given from phone companies as you ordered a second phone line (this was unusual enough to cause some trouble), and especially if you indicated you intended to have "data" on it. (One interpretation by The Phone Company and regional divisions was that a phone line intended for "data" had to be qualified, since that's what would happen with businesses and banks and so on.) But once you attached your machine, installed the software and started up, you were pretty much on your own.

Some BBS owners were asking for money to use their BBSes, while others were running it at a significant loss. The business BBSes were naturally concerned with paying taxes, covering costs, maintaining quality, and acquiring content (although nobody called it "content", they called it "files"). Others were just doing it because it was fun, or to get pirated software, or to support a group they were with, or... well, you know, the reason people run websites now.

Throw into this whole mix the concept of Fidonet, which was, by any measure, a true and honest "network", where communications were bouncing between hundreds and later thousands of machines, stored and forwarded, and worldwide.

This leaves you with a very diverse group of people who all are nominally "BBS Sysops" or "BBS Operators" but they're all over the place in terms of awareness of laws, interests in profit, age, and so on. For a swath of that group, the sudden passage of an "Electronic Communications Privacy Act" that talks about carriers and network messages and so on seemed to fall squarely in the domain of bulletin board systems.

Then, as now and before, there were a group of people who preferred to take the position with regards to law as one of "when they show up at the door, I'll give a shit". This generally works, but when it doesn't, it really doesn't. It sure makes life a lot simpler, though; run your board, do your stuff, don't be a dope, live free or die. This approach is not for everyone.

There's another group who, hearing of a new law being passed or a new statute being implemented, immediately rush to be as absolutely compliant under all circumstances, even if it means self-immolation. They're the ones who freak out that a poker game at their house might violate gambling laws, or who stand, patiently, at an abandoned crosswalk until the little light goes from orange to white and they can cross. They're playing it safe, even safer than the original lawmakers might have intended. To this group within bulletin board system operators, the ECPA was a terrifying harbinger of doom.

Thrashing occurred as to what to do about it. Here's a contemporary view of this law and its applicability to Sysops from 1988 from the textfiles.com collection. As the author (Michael Riddle) warns you, his conclusions are that of a layman, and as it turns out, a lot of his conclusions aren't on the mark, but Riddle's essay serves as an indication of the conflict occurring over this incursion of law into the BBS world.

The ad-hoc solution taken by the more concerned BBS operators was to put a massive disclaimer when you signed up for the BBS. This "New User" message would dump a bunch of law onto you, explaining that the e-mails on the system were not private and that no effort was being made to protect them or keep them from being made available due to bugs, crashes, and so on. Once you agreed to this "term of service", you would be allowed on.

Unlike the insane fairydust-and-unicorn terms of service I quoted before, these were done out of a fear, a fear of the BBS being subject to prosecution and lawsuits, misunderstandings where the board might go down or be ruined because someone had an expectation that simply couldn't be fulfilled. The ECPA disclaimer was a hack, an attempt to short-circuit further conflict by making it clear that the BBS wouldn't be a place to expect privacy. While sysops may have taken user privacy very seriously, the ones who were following laws knew they could never promise full compliance.

This isn't the first mainstream crossing of law and BBSes; probably the Tcimpidis MOG UR BBS Bust of 1984 really got national attention (and is mostly forgotten). But the wave of fear and reaction of the ECPA of 1986 was where things started to go a tad wonky, and really paved the way for some truly embarassing and boneheaded law-technology intersections through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Amateur Decade.

More on all of this later.

Warning! Amateur Night!

From lauralevine.com:

All photographs, text and html coding appearing in the Laura Levine site are the exclusive intellectual property of Laura Levine and are protected under United States and international copyright laws. The intellectual property MAY NOT BE DOWNLOADED except by normal viewing process of the browser. The intellectual property may not be copied to another computer, transmitted , published, reproduced, stored, manipulated, projected, or altered in any way, including without limitation any digitalization or synthesizing of the images, alone or with any other material, by use of computer or other electronic means or any other method or means now or hereafter known, without the written permission of Laura Levine and payment of a fee or arrangement thereof. No images are within Public Domain. Use of any image as the basis for another photographic concept or illustration is a violation of copyright.

From livestrong.org:

This Website, its design (including HTML code) and layout, and all text, web pages, graphics, pictures, documents, button icons, images, audio clips, video, information, testimonials, letters, articles, other written materials, and other content found on this Website (collectively, "Website Content") is protected by U.S. copyright laws and may not be downloaded, reproduced, republished, sold, displayed, copied, transmitted, distributed, or otherwise used or exploited except as provided below without the prior, written consent of the Lance Armstrong Foundation ("LAF"). All photos, images, videos, and personal testimonies and stories on this Website are not subject to the license granted herein and may not be downloaded, reproduced, republished, sold, displayed, copied, transmitted, distributed, or otherwise used or exploited without express, written permission of LAF.

From mcachicago.org:

Except where noted, images and texts on the MCA Media website may be downloaded and reproduced only by members of the media for the sole purpose of timely reporting in newspapers, magazines, television, radio, web publications and other media. Use of media images and texts for any other reason and at any time after the close of the exhibition or program may be subject to additional permission requirements. Media materials may not be downloaded or reproduced by commercial stock houses or archives or by members of the general public.

From nem5.com:

While it is impossible to stop any real thief from right-clicking and stealing the work off websites, part of the purpose of the statement guidelines of use on this site is to help new-comers to the internet who may not understand that what they do when they take images, literature or other work on a website without permission of the author/artist is considered theft and is punishable by fines and imprisonment. Any site that has permission to use the work on Nem5 will have a link to the site that has permission listed on nem5.com. Any site using the work without a link to nem5.com does so illegally. Any person/website using any work from this website without permission agrees to pay $500.00 for each individual work (ie: 1 image or 1 poem or 1 short story) to Maggi Norris plus $500.00 to the original artist/author of the work, if not Maggi Norris, plus any fees recognized as the fine for copyright infringement. If the work is changed in any way the user agrees to pay $5,000.00 to Maggi Norris plus $5,000.00 to the original artist/author of the work plus any fees recognized as the fine for copyright infringement per individual work taken from this website per instance of change to the work. This payment does not grant any rights of the copyright to the person who took the work without permission. Stated payment will be considered compensation for the illegal temporary use of the copyrighted work. If an agreement for future use is not agreed upon by Maggi Norris/Nem5, the original author/artist of the work and the person who took the work, the time for use ends upon discovery of its unauthorized use. On the date of discovery a notice will be sent to the contact email of the site using/showing the unauthorized Nem5 work. Any use after that date shows agreement to pay charges of $500.00 plus $500.00 to each individual owner of work Nem5 does not hold copyright to per week for each individual work plus any and all fees incurred due to prosecution or other methods of stopping unauthorized use including any and all legal fees and/or court costs incurred due to improper use.

People like the internet. They like the ease of communication, the simple markup language that creates what used to be a thousand-dollar brochure for pennies, and the world-wide reach granted each and every entity within it. This is fantastic! They can finally sell their shit to people they don't have to corner at parties and harangue for 20 minutes.

But they don't really like the internet. They hate the ease of downloading, the copy/paste keyboard commands so many machines come with, the speed at which that special photograph of a bee can be repurposed, remixed, redone and put up elsewhere without their knowledge or consent. In fact, it's possible it could be done dozens of times and they'd never even know it or could even recognize their own stuff if they found it.

So they do the natural thing: they go psychotic. They put their stuff up, and then add a contract to their website that you implicitly sign onto when you browse them. They don't hold you back from viewing it until you explicitly agree. That's hard! Also less people would browse, and more people browsing is good. So basically, they kind of make up this sort of mirror-world law that they think they have.

I get letters occasionally; people explaining to me how the world works inside their heads and what amazing forces they have at their disposal to stop me from doing what they think I shouldn't do, with regards to my various websites. Occasionally they're right and hurt feelings are repaired, but other people would be much more interesting to me if they threatened me with some sort of dragon-lion mix that they claimed was going to come through my window. That has zest.

We truly live now in the age of the true amateur; the amateur scholar, the amateur lawyer, and the amateur law enforcer. I can say one thing about amateur night: it's pretty damned entertaining.

These flexible curtains of text, like the ones I pasted from above, are draped all over the place online right now; they're hastily nailed-up NO TRESPASSING signs with no ability to enforce the demands behind them. Not to diminish the honest concerns behind the people who use them, but I can vouch that my immediate and instant reaction is to hit the 'Download All' button.

...so if you lose your website, give me call; I'll give you my backup.

Notacon and Blockparty: Deadlines Approach

If you were on the fence about attending my demoparty being held at Notacon at the end of the month, this is the time to jump over to the light. The hotel is filling, the preparations are being made, and it becomes easier for everyone to know how many folks are showing up.

Naturally, you can wait until the last moment (assuming the event doesn't sell out and you can still get in when you show up), but it'll make for better planning if you pre-register now.

I've really gone crazy-go-nuts trying to assemble a great set of speakers (this in addition to the already-great lineup that Notacon put together), and I'll be running a few events, and I'll even be punching Wikpedia in the face live on the stage! Who could ask for more?

Towards the last week of April, things heat up for me as I'll be putting the final touches on various projects and then driving to Cleveland from Massachusetts for the event. I'm sure I'll have pictures galore, but I'd rather you be in them than browse them.

See you there.

Fruit Flavored Power

Within digitize.textfiles.com there's a chipper little sales catalog for a line of fruit-themed power connectors. Really!

The name of the company was Electronic Protection Devices, Inc. They produced power cables, power splitters, and power monitors during the early 1980s. As part of my endless writing away for catalogs and "more information" from computer magazines, I got a hold of their 1983 mailing and put it up for the benefit of the world.

It's the fruit theme that makes this collection of power equipment stand out: The "Lemon" (a six-outlet surge protector), the "Lime" (the "Lemon" with a switch and a 6-foot power cord), the "Peach" (a three-outlet version of The "Lemon" with EMI-RFI filtering), and the "Orange" (a six outlet verson of the 'Peach".

Jeez, now I'm hungry.

Of the 12 pages of the catalog (not counting separate price list), roughly seven of them would fall under the now-well-known advertising approach of "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt". You're warned of the terrifying fluctuating electric world we live in, w