ASCII by Jason Scott

need your guidence sir

 Subject: need your guidence sir
 
 To Jason,
 
    Sir, I am sunny from India. I have grown up in
 science fantasies and watching movies, but when I grew
 up I learnt that I loved science and reality more. We
 friends worked on some movies and projects at local
 and state level, but atleast I wish to make
 documentery. My vision is to make some films for
 Discovery channel, and Net Geo.
 
    Sir, can you guide me what kind of preperation do I
 need? What kind of hardship will  I have to face? What
 are the advantages and disadvantages of being
 documentery director? How hard is it to become a
 documentery director?
 
    I have learnt all the basic skills about working on
 special effects, editing, sound editing,even i direct
 one short movie (ofcourse not hollywood block buster).
 I am doing Msc in physics.
 
   Ask u frank question, how is your life being a
 documentry director?
 
                             Yours faithfully,
                                   Sunny

Hello, Sunny. It's good to hear from you.

Bear in mind that I'm not a full-time documentary filmmaker; I have a day job, a bunch of other projects not related to documentary filmmaking and I don't have a salary related to it. So while my advice may have some amount of use to you, none of it will get you a job in an industry and it certainly won't get you a job working for a documentary farm like Discovery or Net Geo.

I am not a big fan of working on documentaries based on assignments; while there are people with more journalistic instincts than I have in the way of "a story is a story", I specifically want to talk about and spend time filming stories that I think nobody else was going to tell, as opposed to trying to do my own version of something that has been done many times before. This sometimes means I spend more time trying to explain what I'm working on than working on it, but I don't mind that trade-off. Your preferences might be different.

Assuming you do not wish to have your subjects "assigned" to you, as would happen if you were working for a production firm or a documentary channel, then I say that you will know, rather soon, the sort of subjects and approach you wish to take. My films take years; other people will be able to shoot and put together a film in months. Your subjects might not want to be covered. Others will work side-by-side with you to tell their story. But even though you might get sick of your subject halfway through the production, the intensity of wanting to finish it right will pull you through.

My life making these films has been wonderful. Before I started work on my BBS documentary in 2001, I suspect that I'd not travelled more than 30,000 miles before my 30th birthday, and most of that would be a stretch of road between my parents' homes and my current residential city. It is likely that, if you count air travel, I have travelled another 30,000 miles to places I'd never been, and only read about. It is one thing to think you know people, when all you're doing is assembling distant sets of like-minded people to chat lightly about. It is another to drive for a hundred miles and walk into the home of someone you've never met who has lived an entire other existence separate from you and talk about their life with them. I am not the same person I was when I started this new hobby, and I am many times better for it.

As an example, I found that I had spent a lot of my life not listening; treating whoever came near me as a personal audience, waiting to recieve one-way communication from me. I still do this often. But as I started work on my documentary, I learned that I would have to train myself to listen, to understand what someone was trying to say and to not interrupt them when they said it. Initially, I still had this problem in some interviews, but now I have a "listening mode" I can pull into where I am in fact not trying to dominate the conversation. This is a skill worth having in life in general.

I would say that my "hardships" have been absolutely minimal, the rewards are greater than I could have dreamed of, and when all is said and done, I like to go back and play my old films and watch them anew. That's not a bad life at all.

The Wiz

Lately, I've been concerned with some weighty issues; concerns of law, procedures of licensing, the capturing of history and the pain of network/system administration. But one question has been gnawing at my soul for the past month or so, working its way into my quiet times, and threatening to take over all my attention if not aired for the world.

Why is "The Wiz" such a bad movie?

I never saw this movie in the theater as a kid; it didn't play in Fishkill, NY and all my movie experience before I was 12 came from either the theater in the Dutchess Mall or from the local drive-in. I read about it in a magazine about how much work was done on the production, how they used all these great locations in New York City, and what cool stuff they did with special effects. I figured it was great.

Recently, an episode of the show Family Guy obscurely referenced the song Brand New Day from The Wiz, and this caused me to track down the source of the song and acquire a copy of the movie. I watched it through, figuring I'd finally give some time to a classic.

Oh man, was I wrong. I'd go off on it for 10 paragraphs about why it was so bad, but someone scooped me and did so brilliantly, I will yield the stage to him. This review originally appeared in IMDB.

Sleaze on down the road...

17 September 2004

Author: Merwyn Grote (majikstl@aol.com) from St. Louis, Missouri

THE WIZ is a bad movie. It is a very bad movie. It is an extremely very bad movie.

To watch it is to be infuriated by just how much potential it has and how far it falls from even vaguely achieving success. A black, urban version of "The Wizard of Oz" is an intriguing idea. The musical score is okay and at least three of the songs are better than average. The budget was obviously substantial and a lot of effort was put into transforming New York City into Munchkinland, the Emerald City and points in between. But rather than being in awe of the spectacle, one is more likely to stare in disbelief and ask "What were they thinking?"

Sidney Lumet, a fine director noted for making small, dark and often depressing dramas (12 ANGRY MEN, FAIL-SAFE, THE PAWNBROKER, etc.), seems ill-prepared to make a big budget musical based on a series of children's books -- and, unfortunately, he proves it. I don't think he makes a single intelligent directorial decision in this entire film: the lighting is gloomy, camera placement consistently ineffective and the editing clumsy. His choice of soft, grainy imagery over crisp, clear pictures makes the atmosphere oppressive. The set design, art direction and costuming, while impressive, still look numbingly cheap and tawdry. Scenes filmed on location at New York landmarks look like they take place on cramped soundstages. The film is just plain ugly to watch.

Worse, Lumet seems to have directed the actors to perform in a soap opera style that is embarrassingly overwrought: the prevailing mood is of whining self-pity. Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell and Ted Ross get in a few good moments as The Scarecrow, The Tin Woodsman and The Cowardly Lion, but there is not a single honest moment to be found in the performance by Diana Ross. To accommodate Ross, six-year-old Dorothy from the book (played as 13 by 16-year-old Judy Garland in THE WIZARD OF OZ), now is a 24-year-old Harlem kindergarten teacher. At 34-years-old, Ross looks more like she is pushing 50, yet displays the emotional maturity of a three-year-old.

Ross' miscasting is legendary, but her inappropriateness for the role pales in comparison to her actual performance. In rewriting the story for Ross, Joel Schumacher's screenplay changes Dorothy from being a winsome, wide-eyed child to an emotionally unstable adult. In Ross' dubious hands the character seems both mentally and emotionally retarded, yet she somehow manages to avoid making the character in any way sympathetic. Strident, always on the verge of hysterics, it is, simply put, one of the all time worst screen performances.

Richard Pryor fares little better. Instead of the lovable charlatan played by Frank Morgan in the 1939 version of the story, the Wizard is now a cowering little fraud, devoid of wit or charm. Why hire Pryor, known for his bravado and cocky attitude, then make him play against type? The filmmakers decided that this Wizard did not just have to be exposed as an illusion, but had to be humiliated and degraded as well. The scenes where Dorothy confronts and belittles The Wiz illustrate the mean-spirited cruelty that permeates the entire film.

The most curious aspect of THE WIZ is trying to decipher just who it was intended for. Obviously, the material was meant to appeal to children, thus it's strangely inappropriate "G" rating; yet the mystical, magical land of good and evil from earlier versions is transformed into a foreboding world of terror and despair. Oz seems to be an extended slum, populated by the homeless, vandals, hookers, bookies, druggies, various street people and gangs; while the Emerald City is a superficial place for shallow, pretentious phonies. While the tone of the film is juvenile -- almost infantile -- it all takes place in a seedy adult world that is almost prurient.

THE WIZ doesn't just avoid childlike innocence, it seems to hold it in contempt. Garland's Oz was basically a beautiful place where evil could be conquered with intellect, compassion, courage and the security of family and friends. The Oz that Ross treks through is basically an evil place; the message she learns is that the world stinks, so stop your whining and get used to it. The "there's no place like home" moral remains intact, but that has little meaning if the alternative -- Oz -- is seen as corrupt and evil.

In THE WIZARD OF OZ, Dorothy's Oz is a dream world version of her own life; the Witch, the Wizard and her traveling companions all have human counterparts. This makes the 1939 film a personal story. In THE WIZ, there is no apparent correlation between Oz and Dorothy's seemingly isolated home life, the people of Oz and Dorothy's family have no counterparts. Garland's Dorothy escapes to Oz, but realizes the best part of Oz is already part of her. Ross' Dorothy fears Oz and ultimately escapes from it. The inner dream world of Oz becomes an alien world of media-generated stereotypes. THE WIZARD OF OZ is a fantasy; THE WIZ is a horror story.

Obviously reworking the basic story to accommodate an all-black cast wasn't done just to utilize a different style of music. As such, the film becomes a showcase for a panorama of African-American stereotypes, many of them negative. But rather than debunking racist cliches, the film embraces them. Sleep inducing poppy fields are replaced with opium dens, witches become sweatshop slave drivers, flying monkeys are gang members, Munchkins are graffiti vandals and so on and so forth. As adult satire, such imagery is understandable, if lame, but the film forgets this is still a story specifically aimed at children. Just as the film was rewritten from the play to accommodate the adult Ross, the material is altered from L. Frank Baum's books to make it adult, but not mature. It seems to be the film's conviction that to tell the story from a black perspective it must embrace a grim urban reality, basically saying that childlike innocence cannot exist because urban living, especially for a black audience, has destroyed such a concept. A sad commentary for a children's fantasy and an even sadder assumption about African-American life.

The irony of THE WIZ is that it is ill-conceived, cheaply melodramatic and relies on trite stereotypes; in other words, it has no brain, no heart and no courage. And ultimately it found no home, being a box office flop. And what could have been a breakthrough landmark in cinema ends up being a sad relic of political incorrectness.

Pretty much says it all, doesn't it. I will write a little more about stuff from a film creator's perspective.

The movie is over-packed with songs, all of them unusually long; in some cases, a character will sing two entire songs back to back, with the full length (3-4 minutes) that comes with it and accompanied by a massive production number. This wears you down, and clocking in at over 2 hours, you really feel it getting to you. The director makes excessively poor choices of framing in some cases, which leads me to believe that there were other factors involved in the choices, like street availability and time given for shots.

There are some positives, though. One is Michael Jackson's kinetic performance. He spends the entire movie as a bumbling scarecrow, and if you watch his feet throughout the picture, he brings in a stellar display of bumbling legs, twisting feet and jerky motion. If you watch it and tune out the rest, it's quite amazing. Another stunner is the makeup, created by Stan Winston Studios. If you pause the screen and look at the makeup for all the characters, it's absolutely brilliant and put together well enough for these actors to dance and run around at top speed with no obvious slowdown or damage. That's really something.

The Wiz's shadow movie is Little Shop of Horrors, an example of taking a Broadway Musical, playing to the strengths of the cinematic medium, and producing something greater than the original. Played back to back, the differences in how to work with similar material are striking.

....uh, I do not actually recommend this.

Get Out Of My House

Over time, I've tried to move textfiles.com sites out of my house. My connection can't take it and it slows down my 24/7 leeching. The big one was CD.TEXTFIILES.COM, which is extremely popular among the "I will now bear down with the awesome power of this fully functioning T-3" crowd.

Finally, tonight, my hosting provider Tranquil Hosting assisted me in installing a 750gb drive into the main textfiles.com machine, and after just a little downtime, the system is back up running CD.TEXTFILES.COM at a much greater speed and availability than before.

Shortly, I'll port up the scripts that notice untoward amounts of downloads and that lock out said leechers. You may be surprised that I do this, but I'm not kidding when I say I've watched people initiate 30 or more high-speed connections simultaneously and saturate whatever network the machine is on. That ain't cool, and unless anyone's not gotten the memo, textfiles.com has no advertising. So if you want a copy of the whole site, do what a bunch of people have done and e-mail me about sending over a hard drive for me to copy it onto. I honestly do it.

Before we shut the machine down, we checked the uptime. 665 solid days of textfiles.com. Not bad, not bad at all. Thanks to Mark Price and TQ Hosting for that; it's nice to be able to focus on the important stuff, like copyrightable dances and text-adventure-referencing rap videos.

Now fire up your browser; we got some history to share at modern speeds.

Pinball Perfection

Travel for the Text Adventure Documentary put me in Pittsburgh for a little of the Memorial Day weekend; I headed down on Saturday, did a great interview on Sunday, and got back into town on Sunday night.

But of course I'm doing two documentaries, and when I don't have extra text-adventury stuff to do, I see what I can do about the Arcade documentary. To that end, I ended up doing a quick web search on Friday for "pinball" and "Pittsburgh", figuring I'd get something or other.

And I did. I got a site called Pinball Perfection, which said it was a museum and "gamer's club" for video and pinball games. I figured hey, looks OK, a little over-active on the web side of things, but so be it. I called and got Dan, the owner and operator. We talked a short bit, and I mentioned I was doing a documentary, and I could stop by the next day, would that be OK. Dan said I was certainly welcome to stop by.

Now, let's let drop a little bit of hard-won knowledge I've gotten in 6 years of doing documentary interviewing: it is very, very bad to try and arrange interviews based on cold calls within the span of a week. You are not giving people enough time to mull over what you are doing, who you are, what the project is about, and so on. If you do it within a few days, you can go from very very bad to absolute disaster if you don't watch it. Trust me. This is hard-won knowledge culled from multiple tearful, screaming, wish-I-could-use-a-modified-bug-zapper-and-remove-from-my-brain episodes. And I knew this, talking to Dan on the phone and preparing to stop by.

I found Pinball Perfection with not much effort at all; located a few miles north of Pittsburgh, it's in a hilly, laid-back area full of small shops and industrial-looking buildings. It's actually quite industrial itself, spanning multiple floors and entrances.

Inside, it was basically astounding.

That is, astounding if you're the same kind of person I am, and that's a bit of a leap. A lot of times people say "this is really important/incredible/amazing" and what they forget to say is "if you find that sort of stuff at all interesting, and you're like me".

So let me say: if you like pinball machines, and by pinball machines I mean the idea of them, not just "The Addams Family and The Simpsons and nothing else", then this place is a critical junction in your life's path. It's so good, so amazing, I would suggest a flight or drive to Westview, PA just to see it. Yes, that good.

Imagine a warehouse, a multi-floor warehouse. In the front are rows of restored, working machines, with notes on them indicating age or facts. Beyond these rows are more rows, of stacked, waiting-for-repair pinball machines. Beyond them are even more stacks, this time of machines waiting to be sorted. You realize very quickly that pinball machines come in two pieces, because you are looking at literally tons of these pairings. 100 machines are playable, ranging from some of the earliest examples to very recent productions. Hundreds, literally hundreds more are standing in rows, waiting to be repaired or fixed, many of them rare or even one of a kind. You can walk the rows like a true museum patron, standing inches from historical pinball machines designed and assembled by people long gone, with art that follows its own unique spectrum throughout the decades.

Dan showed me games that he believes are one of a kind, some of which he had to spend countless hours restoring from flood damage or the ravages of time. He gave me two pennies to play a game of pinball on machines from the 1920s and 1933, before they'd invented flippers. We sat and talked about pinball history, about where one finds old pinballs, the love of the art and the craftsmanship, and the motivations for having such a huge collection.

I took neither a photo or a frame of video.

Now, the reason for this is important; bad experiences are in the past with Dan and people coming in hauling cameras and recording equipment and promising the moon or demanding access by dint of their ability to film. And the goal I have always shot for since I started doing this thing seriously is to never have someone regret having been interviewed or filmed by me. I could not guarantee that with 24 hours of warning and no time spent getting to know Dan or his museum, so filming will wait.

This is another reason I'd be doomed working in "the industry".

One day I will return, and I will film this place. Until then, I implore you, if you are a fan of pinball machines, a person who considers himself a student of history, to consider a trip this summer to Pinball Perfection to see a unique and amazing place.

Goodbye, Stuff

When I was about 9 or 10, my parents were living in separate homes, newly divorced, and both took on new hobbies to try and reboot parts of their lives. In the case of my father, it was Wok cooking. That is, he was engaged in the hobby of cooking various meat and vegetable dishes in a huge bowl that had oil in it, using wooden tools.

This meant that he had the bowl, the oil, the tools, and the cookbooks, and the fridge had a bunch of meat intended for cooking.

I was supposed to be in bed, and wasn't. It was something like 1-2 in the morning. Hungry, I looked around the fridge for something, and found a big ol' bunch of meat under cellophane, and ate a bunch of it raw. Well, probably a handful. I noticed it was pork. It was pretty good, although I didn't feel entirely well.

Looking for something to read, I leafed through some programming books and, more importantly, one of the wok cookbooks.

Somewhere in the beginning of the book was a warning about the handling of raw meat for the purpose of cooking. It explained how pork, raw or not cooked right, could contain diseases or parasites or a host of other bad things, and that eating such unprepared food could result in extreme sickness or death.

Bear in mind I was 10.

I concluded I was now going to die.

I was quite positive too, that sort of cold realization when you're out of fuel or faced with a thing hurling towards you or flipping over in your car; you just know you zigged when you should have zagged, game over, man. I didn't understand things with full clarity, but the book was pretty clear that this eating uncooked pork thing was almost certain death, and so, even though I didn't feel particularly sick or dying, I obviously was never going to wake up again.

Death's kind of an odd thing to a 10 year old; at the time I just considered it a lost chance, a kind of ended trip; whereas later I would just have panic attacks. At my young age, I thought I'd just really messed up and felt bad about that, disappointed I didn't do the right thing.

I didn't want to wake my dad, because he was generally cranky if it wasn't something really important. I didn't think this was important.

I knew I wasn't going to see any of the house again, so I went around saying goodbye to all the stuff.

Goodbye, favorite radio on the little cart. Goodbye, cool fireplace with the air-blower that could blow heat into the room. Goodbye, really cool hutch with little doors I liked opening and closing and trying to understand all the weird silver serving utensils in it.

Stuff has always meant a lot to me; still does, if I think about it. Stuff I collected, stuff I was near, stuff I did other stuff with. I read recently about people having stronger emotional connection to objects rather than people, but that wasn't the case with me. Although, I should note, there was a lamp fixture that absolutely fucking terrified me and caused me never to go to one part of my home, and there was a specific sink I thought disapproved of me.

I knew I was going to miss the stuff, and I was going to miss my dad, and all over eating the wrong thing. A real shame.

I went to bed, sorry for screwing up, hoping my dad wouldn't be mad, waiting to die.

Since then, I've been trying to make the most of my second chance.

Electric Slide Lawsuit: Jason Schultz Responds

Jason Schultz, attorney for the EFF, was kind enough to post a comment in my weblog regarding my opinions and commentary in yesterday's entry. Here's his comment, unbroken and verbatim, with my response below.

Jason,

While I appreciate your interest in the lawsuit and the passion for your legal position, I wish you had reached out to us here at EFF before speculating on the good or bad of the settlement. I get emails all the time from folks who are curious why we do what we do at EFF and I would have been happy to answer your concerns if you had written me. I'll do it now, but just for future reference, don't hesitate to drop us a line if you want to engage in this sort of debate.

As to the merits of your critique, I think you might have misunderstood the terms of the settlement. No where in this resolution do we concede that Ric Silver has any copyright in The Electric Slide. And as you correctly point out, one leading commentator (and several additional cases that we'd uncovered that I'd be happy to share with you) suggest that social dance steps that are not part of a dramatic storytelling are not copyrightable subject matter. As such, we were more than eager to prove in court that Mr. Silver had no copyright to the dance, and we would have done so if we had been given the chance.

The "problem" arose after we filed our suit when Mr. Silver quickly and immediately capitulated from his earlier threat against Mr. Machulis. He made it clear that he no longer thought our client's video was infringing and was willing to withdraw any allegations of infringement regarding its use. When a copyright owner does this in litigation, it can potentially kill the case. Cases in Federal Court require under Article III of the Constitution that there be a "case or controversy" between the parties -- an actual dispute for resolution. Since Mr. Silver had withdrawn his accusations of infringement, his attorney could have argued that the issue of copyright infringement (and thus copyrightability of the dance itself) was no longer present. Moreover, his willingness to then promise the world (via the Creative Commons license) that he would no longer threaten any non-commercial user for performing it essentially guaranteed that he would never again abuse the copyright system against our client or anyone else under these facts.

So what about commercial use? Well, as I mentioned, we would have been more than happy to take Mr. Silver to court over this issue and challenge his copyright. However, courts do not take kindly to parties who manufacture disputes in order to seek court rulings when there is no real dispute between them. In this case, there is no indication that Mr. Silver will be sending any more take-down notices or threatening folks like yourself for performing the dance, even commercially. To have pushed on that issue in front of the judge when there was no clear and actual threat to our client or to any other identifiable individual would have posed a serious risk to the credibility of both our client and EFF. At best, it would have encouraged the court to dismiss our case out of hand (with no settlement and no CC license) and at worst, it could have lead the court to find some way to rule against us to teach us a lesson for wasting its time and judicial resources. As Officers of the Court and public interest advocates, that's just not a risk we're willing to take, either on our own behalf or that of our clients.

Moreover, it is important to remember that we are a non-profit with limited resources. The Machulis v. Silver case is hardly the only case we're fighting at the moment. We have also been heavily engaged in copyright battles with Viacom, UMG Music and Uri Geller, battles over warrantless surveillance with AT&T and the DOJ, Patent Busting, FOIA work, etc. Thus, given the unlikelihood that a court would have ruled on the copyrightability issue (let alone issued a precedental ruling in our favor) and the high cost of litigating such issues, we felt we could do much more to help our clients and the public via the settlement, which ensured victory for our client, 100% litigation-free use of the dance for all non-commercial users, and strong support for Creative Commons, an organization in which we believe strongly, and at the same time freed up our legal team to focus on other cases and issues which deserve just as much attention.

That said, I can completely understand your frustration with the thought that Mr. Silver might come back and threaten someone who performs the dance for commercial purposes or lacks attribution. However, I honestly think we've seen the last of Mr. Silver and his campaign to go after any kind of individual who performs his dance, even for commercial purposes. If he does, though, please do not hesitate to give us at EFF a call or shoot us an email. We'd like nothing more than to finish the job.

Sincerely,
Jason Schultz
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Thank you for the extended and informative response, Mr. Schullz.

My opinion, which I will maintain, is that it was a major mistake to go from "he has dropped the lawsuit" to "he has agreed to license his work under Creative Commons". I still maintain that Creative Commons is an absolutely dysfunctional tool for this situation, that the copyright law's stated ability to license choreography is still rather unclear and untested for anything useful, and that bringing CC into the mix just confuses the issue terminally.

I do not accept "we have limited resources" as an excuse under any situation. Don't offer to carry water if you don't have enough buckets. I entirely understand "we found what we thought was a good resolution with minimal damage for all parties involved", which makes total sense; you file a complaint, Silver immediately capitulates, everyone waves happy flags and Machulis goes back to making Teledildonics. All well and good.

I question whether Mr. Silver, who was happily issuing DMCA takedown notices against YouTube and against a number of dance websites for any mention of his Electric Slide, truly understands Creative Commons and what exactly he's done here. I would think that he would be under an impression, bolstered by this action, that he is the generous "owner" of the Electric Slide, allowing "his" dance to be used. I think that postings and articles about this case using terms like "public domain" show exactly how confusing the situation is to people not intimately scouring through essays and case law like I had to for the last 48 hours.

In other words, I think Silver still thinks he owns the Electric Slide. And I think that this was not handled well.

Like all good high-energy activist organizations, you step into a lot of situations and defuse or engage them as needed, making decisions that are both what you perceive to be what is the common good and what is good for your chosen clients. Sometimes those two goals are at odds. I think this is one of those cases.

You did right as far as Machulis is concerned. You did not do right as far as Creative Commons or the overarching situation is concerned.

- Jason Scott

P.S. I'm sending you guys $100 for the time taken to write a public response to my weblog entry.

Update: Here is a fairly incredible post about the disagreement Jason and I have. (archive)

How the EFF Dropped the Ball on the Electric Slide Lawsuit

Yesterday, I wrote a relatively angry, rambling weblog entry about the whole Electric Slide situation, and the EFF's handling of it, and where I believed they were wrong. I wanted to back away from that entry.

Now, I know they were wrong. They totally messed this one up and it brings up a really bad way things can go south when important issues are being discussed or handled.

To recap:

A guy named Ric Silver created a dance move he called the "Electric Slide" in 1976, and in 2004 he copyrighted this "dance", or so he claims. He has then gone after many appearances of this "dance" on the web, ranging from home videos attempting the dance, music videos, or even folks talking about how to do this dance. The "blogosphere", which easily slips into the role of whiny court jester, made fun of this and complained about it. Things started to heat up earlier this year, specifically.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation then mounted a lawsuit against Ric Silver regarding his "takedown" of a video that had ten seconds of an Electric Slide-like dance on it. In it, they made a lot of arguments and said he was doing a bad thing.

Then, a breakthrough! There was an announced "settlement" between the EFF and Ric Silver over the status of the "Electric Slide", and it was announced that Ric Silver would be licensing his dance Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 3.0. All parties rejoiced and the jesters jingled their bells and the world was bright and happy again.

Except over here. I contend this entire thing was a farce, and that by doing this "settlement" the EFF has made things worse, not better. I know, I know, I must have left my jester hat at home. But the fact stands: this settlement should never have happened.

I said that I was considering doing this dance, calling it the "Jason Scott Slide" and selling it for a dollar. Current signs are pointing to me doing this very thing, releasing my new product either tomorrow or the day after. I'm pleased to announce I already have some pre-orders, in fact, from people who believed I'd be in the right to do so.

Here comes some law!

It turns out I was partially wrong yesterday. You can copyright choreography. This provision was added in 1976. Here's the current statement by the US Copyright Office about this specific copyright:

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl119.html (archive)

The salient lines, from that page, are here:

Choreography and pantomimes are also copyrightable dramatic works. Choreography is the composition and arrangement of dance movements and patterns usually intended to be accompanied by music. As distinct from choreography, pantomime is the art of imitating or acting out situations, characters, or other events. To be protected by copyright, pantomimes and choreography need not tell a story or be presented before an audience. Each work, however, must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression from which the work can be performed.... For choreography, the work may be embodied in a film or video recording or be precisely described on any phonorecord or in written text or in any dance notation system such as Labanotation, Sutton Movement Shorthand, or Benesh Notation.

This is, in fact, what Jason Schultz of the EFF referred to in a news.com story (archive) about this subject. Here's his salient lines:

Some may find it odd that a dance could be copyrightable, of course. But according to Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dance moves can definitely be protected under copyright law. "You can copyright the choreography for dances," said Schultz, "and then enforce the copyright against anyone who publicly performs the dance." Does that mean that everyone who giggles their way through the Electric Slide with the wedding videographer shooting away is violating copyright? No, but the videographer could be at risk. But Schultz said he believes Silver's claims against Machulis and others who have posted videos on YouTube may be questionable. "Someone who performs it noncommercially or adds their own artistic flair to the dance has a pretty good fair-use argument that their performance is noninfringing," Schultz said.

Wow, so open and shut and no Jason Scott Slide, right? Wrong.

There is such a marked dearth of actual case law involving copyrighting choreography as to be nearly imperceptible; specifically, it appears there are a total of two cases, one of which was settled out of court, and neither of which really apply to this situation.

The definitive essay which researched the very subject of copyrighting choreography and lamenting the dearth of solid case law/directive in this field was written by Julie Van Camp in 1994. Called Copyright of Choreographic Works, she gives a well-researched history of the institution of a choreography copyright, the implications, and the specific and distinct accompanying documentation where congress intended to not include "social and recreational dances"!

Let's make that nice and big:

Choreography Copyright was not intended to cover social and recreational dances.

Here are some additional excellent discussions/coverage of the whole idea of choreography and copyright, and this electric slide case, a lot of which was discussed well before the EFF got involved:

• The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions by Nancy McClernan which gives a (one-sided) overview of the 2005 lawsuit. (archive)
• The other side, Edward Einhorn, wrote his own essay, A Case for the Stage Director's Copyright (archive). In this and the previous case, the issue at hand is the blocking of stage directions across an entire play, and not a specific, multi-step dance move.
• Choreography and Alternatives to Copyright by William Patry. Mostly talks about how choreographers tend to sort these problems out internally in tight-knit communities. (archive)

But why listen to me? The EFF itself, a month after Schultz indicated that Silver had a case, registered a complaint on March 1st in which they claimed he had no case:

15. Upon information and belief, the Sublevel 3 Video does not infringe any copyright owned by Silver due to Silver's failure to properly register his copyright, the uncopyrightability of the "Electric Slide" dance steps, the lack of similarity between the Silver Video and the Sublevel 3 Video, and/or the fact that any similarity between the two videos would be non-infringing selfevident fair use under 17 U.S.C. - 107.

I happen to agree with this, strongly. The Electric Slide is a social dance, a small set of dance moves, composed of smaller obvious dance steps pushed together. The fact that you can execute the entire move in less than 10 seconds falls under not just fair use, but well beneath any standard of "choreography" as intended in the law. This was an uncopyrightable dance, being used improperly in a takedown notification to YouTube and a bunch of other websites.

So what happened?

Creative Commons happened, as far as I could tell.

I don't know who initiated settlement talks, but the fact that the request was then to put the dance into Creative Commons, likely (I'm guessing) portraying it as "You can still protect your dance, but people doing it for no commercial gain can still have fun", tells me the EFF probably retorted after a mea culpa from Silver. I could be entirely wrong on this.

But for all the dearth of real case law surrounding the copyright of choreography, Creative Commons has even less. It's rather untested in court, and certainly not as a methodology for copyrighting movement. I question whether it's even possible to license any choreography under Creative Commons, let alone a 10 second dance.

So no, EFF, you messed up this one. You do good work, but you shoved this one through the door and came to an "amicable" solution which in fact implies a lot of bad ideas about copyright are valid. And they are not.

---

Therefore, unless I get the most amazing e-mail or communication ever that convinces me otherwise, I have to start practicing the Jason Scott Slide, pick out the right silly hat from my collection, and set up a sales page. I'll let you know when that's ready.

I've also decided which charity will get any cash that comes in from my Jason Scott Slide video sales: Childs' Play, which provides books, toys and games for hospital-bound children around the world.

At least some good can come of this.

Stop Me Before I Do The Electric Slide

I can't help but feel, thinking back to the last 400 weblog entries I've done, that I made some promises regarding this weblog. One of them was that I would refrain from being a mere link weblog, using some other event to be a sort of pithy Empathy Tourst before moving on with nary a consideration. I don't know if loading on a bunch of paragraphs along with the links entitles me to some sort of "out", but let's try it anyway. I promise to add content. In fact, I'm threatening to add content.

This "thing" happened recently. Basically, a guy named Ric Silver, who created a dance move called the "Electric Slide" in 1976, copyrighted the "dance". He then has gone after anyone showing videos of the "dance", whether they be home videos, music videos, people talking about how to do the dance, you name it. He's done this under the DMCA, which is its own level of Satan's Tool.

So this was going on, and the EFF, our guardians of freedom and justice, sued the guy back on the behalf of one of the takedown "victims". As a result of this snap-back, Silver and the EFF negotiated a "settlement", in which Silver agreed to license his "copyrighted" dance Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. This has been hailed as a victory and wonder for all involved, a dashing collision of web 2.0 thinking and backwards dance-hall misguidedness.

I just don't agree, on two levels.

The first is that this somehow legitimizes the entire idiocy that you can "copyright" a dance. I understand that you can copyright your tapes showing how to do the dance. I understand you can copyright your movie in which your dance appears. I understand that someone could ask you to be the choreographer for your movie, and that you sign a contract, and if they go use your choreography and don't pay you, you can sue their Stealy-McStealerson asses. I also understand that you can "trademark" a name that represents a product. That is, if you have a dance tape business and you sell a product called "The Electric Slide", you can then go ahead and sue someone who comes out with a dance tape called "The Electric Slide". That is, if you have a trademark. If you have a copyright for the "Electric Slide" video, and someone comes out with an "Electric Slide", you can maybe, possibly, assuming you have a good lawyer, convince a judge somewhere that the "Electric Slide" video being sold is being made to be confused with your Electric Slide Product. But again, you're going to rely on your trademark. This is, as I understand it, how the whole thing works. You can't copyright a fucking dance move.

Second of all, the EFF license makes no sense because after submitting a legal brief in which they claim the copyright is entirely, completely unapplicable to people just fucking dancing in a video, they then tacitly agree that they do agree by agreeing to settle with it being licensed under Creative Commons. But that makes no sense; how the fuck do you Creative Commons license a dance move? Again, I understand you can CC license a video of you doing the dance move, CC license your description of how to do the dance move, and CC license photographs of yourself doing the dance move. But the dance move itself? If I weave a basket, and every few loops I cut a nick into the wicker in a distinctive pattern, can I copyright or CC Licence my hot-rockin' Wicker-Nick move? Can I "allow" people the right to remix, share, and attribute to me the Wickernick maneuver? Is that even sane?

One of the initial complaints with regards to the Creative Commons was the creation of a "Creative Commons Public Domain" license; which said, basically, it was in the public domain. You can understand the argument of the Creative Commons, which basically was "Well, this way it's very clear and legally sound when a person makes the declaration." But on the other hand, maybe you can also see the issue where other people went "Why the fuck are you branding your own form of "Public Domain" and using that exact term for your contract?" They could called it the "Absolutely Free" license or something else, and it would have effectively been Public Domain, but they had to go ahead and use a generic term and brand it, even ever so slightly, for themselves. And that blows.

And again, this is not a release of this idiotically un-copyrightable thing into the "public domain". As a CC-SA-NC 3.0 licensed item, you can now "remix" it. (So I guess you can do it "wrong" or add some moves to it or totally mess with it) You can now "share" it. (So besides being able to freely share it to people, you can also share... the moves?) And it's "Non-commercial" meaning you can't sell it, so you better not have any adword ads, banners, or anything else on your webpage with it! Actually, to be honest, this last part has, to my knowledge, never really been worked out. If you click on a banner and it's near a CC-NC work being shared... are the people hosting the CC-NC work violating the license?

Naturally, people are praising all this shit because it has the words "Creative Commons" and "Settlement" in it. But it is, as far as I can tell, Grade A Bullshit.

As an example, Wired Blogs gets it wrong, claiming that the dance is now "in the public domain". No, it really isn't, if you believe the claim; it's merely licensed for non-commercial use along the substantial license language in Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. I fear a lot of people are going to make this mistake. And, of course, fail to "attribute" Ric Silver in all their videos of the Electric Slide as per the license. Fail to do that... and he can sue you!

So, here's where you come in, faithful readers (there's a couple thousand of you, by the way). Talk me into or out of the following thing:

• I put up a video of myself doing a very "Electric-Slide-Like" dance, wearing a very silly hat.
• I do not call it "The Electric Slide" because I heard some asshole has the copyright on the name.
• I will copyright it.
• I will charge you $1 for it.

I'm mulling over my plan, looking for the positives and the negatives. I see the massive advantages in the rainfall of electronic dollar bills coming to me from around the world as the Jason Scott Slide makes its ways into entertainment centers and movie-olas. I see the upturned hands of a million new fans, all taking an interest in computer history because if that area of study can produce such amazing dancers, surely it's worth a closer look. I see, in a nutshell, global domination.

I will donate the money to a charity other than the EFF because as far as I can tell, they're being tards about this today. I donate money to them regularly; I consider it a retainer.

Tell me your thoughts. In two days I make a decision.

Go.

Podwaste

I've had a mind to do a podcast/audio show for some time. The reason there isn't one yet is because I want it to be good.

This minor hurdle doesn't stop a lot of people; they're doing it for themselves and for the people they think are like themselves and so they kind of go for it. In some cases, they've already had audio/radio experience... in fact, some podcasts are simply syndicated collections of already-extant radio shows. I'm not sure if those "count" by some standards.

Mine will not be live, it will be edited. It will have interviews, music, and a bunch of stuff, but hopefully be about a solid hour. I would be unlikely to do it more than once a month. I would be shooting to make it a sort of timeless work, which would still be listenable for years afterwards.

Obviously, I have a lot of priorities ahead of it. But I do think it over occasionally.

Here's some of my promises of stuff my podcast wouldn't/won't do. Maybe it should be a pod-listeners' Bill of Rights.

• I promise that my podcast won't start and stop with a complete song, as if I've got some sort of syndication deal and the music is providing a buffer for all my syndicate stations (which is why most syndicated shows do this). There's a number of words I feel go by in my mind when a 40 minute podcast has a 4 minute song at the beginning and a 4 minute song at the end; those words include unnecessary, bloat and wasteful. Do people who do this seriously think the listeners are queuing up for the show while the music plays?
• I promise to never ever ever read directly off a newswire or weblog posting. I realize that by doing this, I end up being mildly annoying to the people who play podcasts at double speed, and actually sucking the life out of others who don't. I realize that if all I do is tell you the day's top headline, I am foolishly hoping my voice training is better than a syndicated radio announcer's and inevitably failing at such, meaning now I'm just some guy in your headphones reading the paper over your shoulder, out loud.
• I promise that if you hear the microphone "pop", hear rushes of wind as I move stuff around in front of the mic, or hear papers being shuffled around, you can have one of my lungs as a cat toy. I took many classes in audio production. I would use what I learned.
• I assure you that I will take advantage of the medium and not set myself up to be easily replaced with a text-to-speech converter. It will be in stereo and need stereo, and have multiple tracks and need them.
• I promise not to use commercial music, making it needlessly sketchy to store copies of my podcast and demonstrating to my audience that I can't even talk a good game about using 'free culture" material with my own stuff
• Holy shit I would never use Skype ever. Or interview people over the phone. Or interview people over skype. The intense irony of people lauding the future and the wonders of technology and then having their interview subjects sound like their aircraft carrier is under attack wears off after a few minutes. In its place it leaves a sort of entertainment black hole.
• I promise I will have fun.

And yes, this comes from listening to the hundreds of podcasts and "shows" I've listened to over the years. A few were simply amazing. Others have literally caused my hearts to dwindle down, like a Zelda game.

I'll keep you updated as to this side project's progress.

Zoo

On Saturday I saw Zoo, which is the gentle, artistic documentary about a guy who died having sex with a horse.

The guy dying was all over the place when it happened in 2005, and this film takes the approach of making such a lyrical, prettifying movie around the subject that you will at least listen to the side of the members of his community, even if one might find the whole circumstance abhorrent.

I saw it on video, basically, in the video theatre at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. This movie shouldn't be seen on video, or at least, it should be seen in high definition video if film isn't available. It was obviously shot to be really, really, pretty. I wanted to see it in a theatre because that way some amount of "voting" came back to the distributors that I appreciated the film being made. I happened to speak to one of the staff about the showing being on video when the movie was obviously shot on film, and he said the distributor simply didn't forsee crowds justifying the cost of a print being made. And he was right, in a way, since our Friday evening showing was less than a dozen people. The "minimax" theatre that shows video holds less than 15, anyway. So there we go.

I hadn't been to the Coolidge Corner in a while; holy crap did they do amazing work on it! I used to be very annoyed with how they gave their lobby over to a pizza parlor years and years ago; you could see, obviously, where they'd just closed the inner doors, put a refreshment stand in front of it, and then drilled a hole in the side of the building for a new lame entrance and ticket window. I went, of course, because the main theater was great-looking and they had great lineups and all the rest of the "real" reasons one goes to a revival/art-house location. But since I was there last, they've totally redone the place so beautifully that you would be absolutely pressed to think it wasn't always this way, that it always looked this beautiful and open and art-deco and the rest. I mean, I'm not being superlative when I tell you it went from banged-up showgirl to stunning world-class diva in terms of presentation and layout. I'll be going there quite a bit this summer when I have time.

So, two reviews, related and not related.

Zoo, itself, pushes the envelope for me as to what a documentary is; as a radio, "This American Life" episode, it would have had the real voices of the people involved (it only has roughly 4 people who were "there" in various ways) without having to resort to the legion of actors completely re-creating the entire event from the ground up, which is what happens. The film, in other words, serves as "illustration" for what is essentially an audio collage. Now, make no mistake, it's fuckin' beautiful and there's amazing shots, setups, and music there. (It's also paced a little too slow for the audience I was with and was pushing it for me.) But in the end, you really can't tell what was there and what was real and what was not "real" and so on. Even if based in reality, doing shots anywhere but at the event as it happens means a lot of artistic license can be taken, and so it's barely a documentary on that front. I think the distinction can be made between a pleasant cinematic experience and an accurate/realistic film. I think that distinction is harder to make when the whole production is called a "documentary".

The second review is a thousand times more petty: the red-haired guy working the ticketing/lobby was a dick. I've dealt with this guy before; he's bitter, nasty, and he makes up rules. Tonight's made up rule was "Jason can't stay in the lobby marveling at the improvements to the lobby but has to immediately go wait outside in the rain, even though Jason's buddy was waiting for 15 minutes in the lobby for Jason to arrive." It's a tough but fair rule, I guess, inside the guy's head; but if the issue was that I was talking too loud, it's not without precedent to ask a patron to keep it down during showtimes, even as they're heaping accolades to his movie buddies about how great this theater has been renovated. Especially if, as was my case, hundreds of dollars were donated by that person into the Coolidge's renovation fund over the last 4-5 years. My name is etched on a seat, actually.

My buddy who was going with me was in the process of buying tickets to a charity event at the theater being held in June, and he later confided to me he nearly stopped the sale watching the guy's attitude and treatment of me. That's not a good situation for such an amazing theater, but it does show an important lesson: it doesn't matter how nice the car is, if the chauffeur's a jerk.

Brickapedia

While at Notacon this past April, I gave another speech about Wikipedia, probably my last one unless specifically invited to do so by an organization or event. It's called "Wikipedia, Brick by Brick" and I've added it to the archive.org TEXTFILES.COM audio connection at this location.

It's about 40 minutes, and man am I tired during it; if you know my voice, that's what sounds a little off. I had gotten a total of 2 or 3 hours of sleep, working on the Blockparty webserver and other such considerations for the demo party, and then had to give a talk at 1pm on the Friday of the event. The good news was that after this talk and a second one I helped present at 3pm, my time requirements shifted to being able to focus on Blockparty for the rest of the event, but the price I paid was very, very little sleep.

All in all, there's no "finality" about the piece, just further observations of funny crap and interesting memories of research on Wikipedia from the last year. A few good laughs, a bunch of declarations, dramatic pauses... my usual stuff. Plus, if you follow some of the advice, you could probably cause a bit of trouble on Wikipedia... or really, anywhere that encourages user-generated content.

Again, it's here.

And Then It All Goes Crazy

From this moment on, my next 5 months are spoken for. I'm travelling to New Jersey, Las Vegas, California, Seattle, Chicago, and a rash of other cities. Some of them multiple times. I'm also going to a bunch of events, ranging from pinball expositions to classic gaming expos to computer festivals to just driving endlessly.

Meanwhile, I am going to be editing this film, filming more interviews, and trying to get any of a bunch of things done.

It's almost paralyzing, how much is before me. But I wanted it, I asked for it, so down I go.

Let's see what breaks first, and how fast this thing goes.

Goatse II: The Widening

Life drapes accolades and fame and celebrity on you with very little consultation beforehand. You might do crazy stuff for years and then you do it and a camera catches it and suddenly you're all Mr. Crazy Guy, known worldwide. I'm definitely not the only computer historian, and I'm definitely not the only weblogging pundit, and most critically, I am not the only person who has dropped the sacred image of Goatse onto a hell of a lot of people. Granted, the fact the number is well over a quarter of a million IPs would probably get me a key and membership card to some relatively exclusive club, but none of it is unique. Right place, right time, right gaping ass.

And so instead of going "no, no, I have done so much else with my life", I'll handle the whole "Yes, I'm that guy who Goatse'd MySpace" mantle with pride and aplomb until I become famous for something else, like, "The guy who went across the table and strangled Brian Dear". And to be honest, having Renderman, who I greatly respect, come up at the Shmoocon event to personally accolade me for it was a high point of my year so far. It's good to be the king! Well, Goatse King, anyway.

So naturally people come to me with "somebody Goatse'd a lot of people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" type letters, which happens a lot less than you would think. But it was definitely this thread on livejournal that caught my eye. Not so much for the new attack vector, which is quite interesting, but the unique livejournal-y responses it has garnered and what can be learned from that.

Quick Summary: Guy creates a "livejournal meme", which is a slightly inaccurate term now in wide use that means "quiz or game or questionaire presented to people to try out, and which others can post as well". This meme, however, eventually goatse's you. Shock! Surprise! Gaping Ass!

Now, like a proper guide, I'm going to tell you to keep your hands in the goddamn boat - they bite! Also, I'll be making use of my new favorite friend, WEBCITATION.ORG, which is most vital in this particular situation, as one of the things that happens when you shed light on something like people writing lots of stuff is that those people quickly hie up their bags and run out of town. Most won't, but are there words more annoying than "This post deleted by author"?

As was mentioned in the entry that inspired me, the prank involved creating a fake quiz/questioning thing, which can be posted on a livejournal. First, you are presented the bait: the opportunity to indicate people you dated or people you're interested in. Then, after you answer the questions, you are shown an image of Goatse. Pretty simple!

As a nice additional touch, the disclaimer for the page, before you enter anything, says "By participating in this quiz you agree we can do anything with the collected data and resulting result image we like, including publishing it publically or hotlinking to an image of goatse."

The prank is vaguely hilarious to me, but I want to get beyond that. Obviously you can come down on a "side" about this prank, about pranks in general, about levels of pranks, of what represents a good or bad prank, etc. Pranks are intended to get emotional reaction from the victim, and in doing that crazy deed, they often result in having completely crazy, unintended effects. So instead, let's discuss context and result. HEY! HANDS! IN! THE! BOAT!

An important thing to note is that, based on observation, Myspace and Livejournal are very, very different environments. Part of this is the software; MySpace's is horrible, and Livejournal's is techy-wonky. On Myspace, you have to constantly, unendingly reload and try to negotiate things, and the main reason you're on there is because your friend is on there or potential customers are on there. Since there's a way to host "music" on your page, this works out for selling/promoting your music to your potential customers. And since you generally don't know any better, you end up using MySpace for things that a weblog would do much better for you. It also encourages the leaving of beloved "hey how you doing" messages on other's pages, so if you look at the average page, it's mostly filled with one-liner HOW YA DOIN' along with some sort of photo or web knick-knack. So basically, the whole place looks like a high-schooler's ugly-ass bookbag.

Livejournal, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up for messages, specifically day to day postings of events, with the ability to handle multiple postings a day. It also has very simple ways to bind users into networks, either based on calling each other "friends" or creating "communities" that sets of user accounts can join. As referenced in my "shit-gun of terror" hypothesis in my Goatse entry, this means that you can both assemble groups of people who think like you do, or unintentionally link together people who would kill each other in the wild.

Also, there seems to be a natural lack of awareness of just how public each posting is. More aware/burnt-fingered users know about the "friends-only" posting ability, where only those in your trust networks can add messages, and some are additionally aware of "filters" that can be applied to sets of livejournal users so only they can read your messages. But a pretty large number don't.

Subsequently, I've had lots of fun finding someone discussing the BBS Documentary on a livejournal posting, dropping in with my account, and commenting on their accolades or criticism. Sometimes people say "Wow, I can't believe you've been reading my journal", or its evil twin "Surely you have no life to be posting a response to my criticism of your suck-ass movie." In both cases, I've merely taken advantage of a RSS feed on technorati.com. My little client occasionally goes "Hey, someone said something with BBS and Documentary in the entry" and off I go, simple as that. Believe me, we're not taking many cycles in the Jason Operating System for that one. Either way, the shock that something posted public is in fact publically posted gets some neat reactions.

One of those, unfortunately, is the re-discovery of the "friends-only" option, or even worse, deletion of the entry in question altogether, making future references to Dumb-Ass(tm) a little more difficult. But not impossible.

So, speaking of Dumb-Ass(tm), the debate raged hard and fast on the whole Livejournal-Goatse situation, many of the usual positions being taken up. For a quick recap, here's all the usual positions:

• Ha ha!
• I spilled hot coffee in my lap YOU BASTARD
• Good one, mate, I used it immediately on everyone including my sister!
• This is illegal!
• This is horrible and I will now speculate for paragraphs about you and who you are for doing this.
• How do I do this myself, preferably using copy and paste functions?
• Dick-suck cock-bear fuck-bag ass-munch douche-licker

All in all, the perpetrators claim 60,000 goatses throughtout the prank. By the way, I goatse'd 29,000 sites in April and we're somewhere around 14,000 this month. Unlike them, I kept it going; they chose to instead link back from the prank to their explanatory livejournal entry. This has two consequences worth mentioning: it encourages the curious to investigate and then let them comment, and it throws together a mass of variant sub-networks/cultures within Livejournal.

Again, Livejournal encourages creation of networks, but in doing so, it also encourages closed-circle networks that might recruit or might not but end up not growing after an initial burst. So it is possible for you to use Livejournal and not bump into anyone else outside your little group of comment-y friends. Until something like this enters your stream, and suddenly you're given a journal in which it is now your chance to bitch.

This is covered, within livejournal and weblog culture with the all-encompassing term "drama". I don't like the term at all, never have. It's way too general a paintbrush to paint any heated discussion. Sometimes you have two people who will never agree locked in a message base like two cats in a bathroom. The only way things are going to simmer down is to distract them with shiny things, kill one, intervene as a system operator (mere insults from other users won't do it) or close down that discussion area (locking down or deleting the topic). That's certainly dramatic, but I wouldn't call it drama. On the other hand, a situation where the discussion topic is augmented by a there's-no-way-you-could-know-it ancillary event that is the actual problem at hand is definitely drama. Without the "reveal", it's just heated. But if you find out the two participants used to sleep with each other, and broke up over the subject being discussed.... well, then you got something.

Drama is also now thrown at any heated soliloquy, before any discussion begins: you're causing drama to potentially begin. It's a great term, "drama"... once you put it in there, people say "well, to engage in further discussion would make me appear to be a person incapable of rational interaction and so I will not be involved". So while I am sure it is shocking when someone launches into an over-the-top manuver in the middle of a debate or topic discussion, I have a hard time using the "drama" label. So let's go with a more accurate term: goes completely bugfuck.

When someone goes completely bugfuck, now you have something worth watching. Light and heat. Because of the nature of online communication, and assuming the person does not realize how crazy they just went and deletes/attempts to delete all evidence they did something, you can have a pretty nifty show.

Consider, then, the reaction of two individuals, kenjr and beckyzoole, who go about things a most interesting (but done before) way:

• First, become completely horrified that this was done to 60,000 people.
• Then, speculate on the possible laws or rules broken by this act. Kenjr postulates that people who end up with goatse in their browsers or cache will either be fired, or worse, go to jail. That'd be quite the bail hearing, let me tell you. There is also the theory that were these people to be subject to termination and/or arrest, the perpetrators of the prank would be immediately subject to the exact same punishment.
• Next, assume that something must be done. This is key, because otherwise you are simply being a sympathy tourist, reading about something and not lifting a finger to correct the action. Along one school of thought, inaction to a perceived wrong is the same as not just supporting that wrong, but letting the wrong use your couch and eat your TV dinners until the wrong is back on its feet.
• Since you're not a Sympathy Tourist, you can instead be an Internet Hero. An Internet Hero uses the Internet to do heroic acts.
• Beckyzoole then writes to LiveJournal to complain about this situation. This may or may not work, but Internet Heroism is very easy to do (hence the lack of will you show by not doing it) and so it is done.
• Naturally, Beckyzoole insists that the New Zealand Authorities get involved. This is an interesting, "take it out of town" solution. She also goes far enough to link to a "HOWTO" to get the personal information of the pranksters, with only the "dun dun DUN" missing from her "and you'll know what to do" kind of message.
• Finally, she sits back, opens up a pint of Ben and Jerry's, and wonders what new adventures will come down the way to the Internet Heroes' League.

This is all spectacularly fucking fantastic, but the days of when you could get someone banninated from the Internet are mostly over. You might be able to get them arrested, but you're going to have to show them a crime was committed. You're especially going to have trouble if the crime being committed was others linking to your site, as in my case of Goatse'ing, or where people are voluntarily visiting the site in question. Oh, sure, they could probably have found some way to commit this "crime" so that they might actually be criminally liable, like shooting a baby every time someone hit the website. But that didn't happen.

Anyway, the point is, this situation highlights the "dark mirror" I've spoken of before, where this networking facility allows people to go from 0-60,000 displays of a stretched rectum in just a couple days, where that same period of time can lead to hundreds of people "discussing" what is essentially a prank, and the bell-curve of likelihood of "Internet Heroes" reaching out in all directions until finally, ultimately, someone's calling the Kiwi Kops to get you booted off the Web.

This is new compared to BBSes because we never had that critical mass. It's worth exploring, in a future posting, the situation of the Mars Hotel and other Internet BBSes when they came on the scene in the early/late non-commercial Internet and what amazing stuff happened then...

..but not today. I'm almost done watching the third season of House. Now that's drama.

Microthingies

Some small ideas, probably to be developed in future entries.

Dear Guys Who Purchase the BBS Documentary From Other Lands: I love you very much and I feel a bond with you, but when you request that I list the "value" of the documentary set to be $10 and the designation of the package to be "gift", you are requesting that I commit a federal crime, mail fraud, which will result in a jail term that I myself will have to serve and not you. So don't request that I do that, or, at least, be surprised when I don't.

In 1988, one of my college teachers at Emerson college wrote up a note in my permanent record (I found it later doing a search) in which she talked about my suspicious behavior and her worry that I was cheating in her class. What was I doing? Bringing a laptop to take notes. She was unable to find a way to knock back my grade, however, so no harm, no foul.

It has been over a year of filming for GET LAMP. I better finish that up. A smattering of letters goes out this week and then I will have hopefully scheduled and initiated final discussions for remaining interviews (others inevitably pop up but these will be bonuses).

It is a major problem that people both laud the wonder of the internet's ability to spread information, and are quick as vipers to turn on information they don't like because "it just some crap on the Internet". There's money and power to be made in reputation systems, or maintaining a gold standard on specific websites. Of course, once you do that, it stops being cheap and it can't just be one or two people anymore. But until this schizophrenia is addressed, we're kind of in a bad way because everything is going online.

One side effect of being a collector is that you tend to want things to 'end' because once they do so, they're more easily collectible. This is somewhat incompatible with people who generally want something they appreciate to never end. I'm going to stick with the 'end' crowd because nothing seems to be worse than something that hasn't ended but kind of really has.

I was diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) about 7 years back... but it's workin' for me!

Catching Flack for the Philez

My man "Flack" O'Hara and I were having a chat about this whole "Where Have All the Philez Gone?" thing I mentioned last week. He goaded me into writing a letter to 2600, so I did, which was generally a good thing (we'll see if I get into HOPE in a year and a half) and we kept discussing the fundamental issue. Here's some excerpts from his latest letter.

The former journalism student in me died a little when I read the article. You and I are old enough to remember the days of, you know, LEGWORK when it comes to writing an article. When you've read so many BBS-era text files, there's this thing ... it's hard for me to describe but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. There's this voice that people use that, when you read it, you can instantly tell they didn't do any research. Key phrases stick out, like "I'll bet" or "probably" or "I'm guessing." The real red flag is when you see two or three of them in the same sentence. "You know, I'll bet that at least half of the people probably don't think this." It's a way of writing that lets your audience know that you did absolutely no research on the topic you're writing about and you have no confidence in your own opinion or stance.

I think you saw this a lot in old BBS textfiles because, let's face it, doing research meant actual work back then. To be a good journalist you should know or at least comprehend the topic at hand. To be a real journalist, you need to know more than your audience does about a topic. In other words, on a scale of 1-10, if I know 5 and my readers know 3, that's okay because you are still conveying new information to them. If your readership is a 5 then you had better be bringing a 7 or an 8 to the table. The thing is, back in the BBS days you could often get away with a 1 or a 2 because people were not going to go out and research whatever it was you were writing about. But now, thanks to sites like Google and Wikipedia, you can. It's like that scene in the Matrix where Trinity learns how to fly a helicopter in seconds. We're not there yet, but we're close. I can appear knowledgable about any topic in minutes thanks to search engines. So if you're writing an article, you had better AT LEAST have used the web at some point, because your readers will, and any bullshit fluff is going to be caught very quickly.

On a slightly different tangent, does this not make you weep for the readers of 2600 a bit? It's like one moron making up stories and spreading them to a bunch of morons. There must've been at least a few people who read that article and went, "huh?" I don't know, man. The whole revisionism angle bothers me as much if not more than the shitty journalism. I guess people are used to just walking on to forums or into chatrooms and spewing bullshit and hoping that enough people will just believe them. It also makes me really, really sad about the state of 2600. Are there really no hackers left?

I dispute across-the-board quality of the files, of course, but the ones that stand out, which I laud freely, show signs of research. If we start out with a early file, say 'To All Who Dare, The Black Box", you have a well-presented work, talking about a neat circuit that can give you something neat (free phone calls, or free phone calls to people who call you), with a clear presentation of how to do it, what it achieves, and the theory of operation. That's pretty well-put together. And to the end of my days I will promote the incredible quality of Bioc Agent 003's series The Basics of Telecommunications as one of the highest watermarks on BBS textfiles. Meticulous information, beautiful presentation, world-class layout. (Number 7 is particularly well done.)

On the other hand, even the utopian, freewheeling era of the 1980s gives you scampy articles like Masturbation Techniques and Info, which reads more like a random-riffing stream-of-consciousness typing test than anything else ...and the 1990s give us random-direction-filled files like How 2 Make Free Copies, which fails to alight the audience about specific copier models, context for the way copiers (and copy machine coin boxes) work, and a razor, razor-thin justification (you need a lot of copies to plagarize properly).

Perspective might come from this article from TAP magazine, a 1982 issue. For historical context, TAP (Technological Assistance Program) was the proto-2600, or you can think of 2600 as the new-school TAP. By 1982, things are starting to fall apart a tad for TAP, and there was a one-two punch of a firebombing (!) of the office and "I'll help you" staff not quite up to the task of keeping the endeavor together. As a result, quality controls are starting to slip a little, and you get an "informative" article/textfile that reads like a guy you're in a line for the bathroom with who's struck up an unwanted conversation with you:

"In Berlin, I purchased ten grams of hash on the street for 8 German marks per gram. For those who are not up to date on the exchange rate of US dollars to Marks, the price is translated into $3.85 per gram! But how good is the hash you ask? Well, a friend and I smoked a rolled up cigarette laced with a small amount of hash while on the return flight to New York and in a matter of five minutes, we were knocked out. When the plane began to fly upside down, we knew we were stoned off our asses. Incidentally, one should smoke hash in the lavatory of the jet, not in one's seat!"

Not exactly a spectacular piece of journalism.

The spectrum test Flack suggests is the jewel here. The idea that someone who is only nominally ahead of the learning curve than someone else but able to construct a decent explanation of where they are, could still be of use to them, is the fundamental idea behind science. You learn a bit, you explain yourself properly and clearly, and then draw the best conclusions you can, which give others the inspiration to research further, and hopefully adding their own bit.

This works well for journalism. Doesn't work as well for entertainment.

In entertainment, you don't actually want people to learn too much, other than you're good at providing them entertainment so they'll come back. You don't look into stuff too deeply, because you're basically telling a good story, and reality gets in the way of a good story. Instead, you're trying to be funny, you're exaggerating where needed, and if you think that people will buy in if you paint it with a slight amount of "authority", it'll work better for your interests and those of your audience.

Once you regard articles like How to Kill Santa Claus: DEAD! as nothing more than entertainment, you're relieved of expecting important information from them, and on the side of people looking for "meaning", the pure inherent destructive evil of a little story-telling jaunt like this fades away. Entertainment is easier to write, too, so when you read something like the "drug" file mentioned above, you realize it doesn't matter if the guy is right or not; he's just spinning a yarn and drawing silly conclusions and the editors are letting it sail through because who can it hurt?

It's only when you try to play the game that some of your articles are journalistic and others are entertainment, and pretend you're only journalistic, that us "old-timers" get a little cranky. Not because we haven't seen the work before, but we don't like the implication that a half-baked blog entry printed on actual paper gets the same regard as a slaved-over textfile written 20 years previous.

And yes; the web has made the world into one gigantic cheat sheet, enabling you to get through 2 minutes of reasonable conversation on a subject without having to excuse yourself early to get another drink. But it sure won't enrich either side of the endeavor. And while entertainment is a great thing, it's not known for nourishment.

I think it's being able to distinguish between the two that's the real lost skill, not making heaping plates of either.

Wikipedia Templates

Friends, both old and new, like to do the ol' Wikicritic a favor by pointing out to him any little flame-up of wikipedia discussion that hits a prominent or not so prominent weblog or website or newspaper or the like. Almost none of these recent whorls of discussion expound on how great Wikipedia is; that's old news and not interesting. Instead, a lot of them are making declarations of faults in Wikipedia's setup, which is up there with reporting an occurence of drunken binges on college campuses to me, but apparently a novel enough angle to still get attention.

So yesterday I was aimed at this clusterfuck of a blog posting and comment collection, which has fallen into a template so firm that I feel like I should be able to type CTRL-W into an editor and generate it automatically.

Here's how the template works.

Blogposting, by Blogger: Wikipedia. I am not completely fucking in love with it. I either hate it or am unhappy about some aspect of it. Here is more detail than you could possibly want about my specific thing that pissed me off about Wikipedia, and from this I'm just saying, I am not completely fucking in love with it.

COMMENTS:

• The thing about Wikipedia is that it is not perfect, that's true, but it's good enough for my needs. Just like I'm quite happy to have Beef Jerky instead of steak, and to crawl on broken glass instead of riding a monorail, I get by using Wikipedia for subjects I don't know because somewhere in that thing there must be something accurate. Also, please ignore the fact that I act like I am actually eating steak on a monorail anyway. Signed, Don't Give a Shit.
• I agree with you entirely about Wikipedia and let me take this time to tell you a very long and equally involved story about an incident I was part of, including this one Wikipedian I hate so, so very much. If we only got rid of that one Wikipedian and anyone like him, Wikipedia would be perfect. Signed, I Know a Lot About Geology.
• When you really sit down and think about it, absolutely no facts are really true, nothing is real, all things are variant, there is no objective final answer, and so Wikipedia accurately reflects reality, which is itself variant. Signed, I'm Writing This At Work.
• The problem for most people is they don't realize Wikipedia is a work in progress and even though it's the first match for everything on Google and is now cited in legislation, patents and newspaper articles, and is one of the top ten websites on the Internet, we should treat it like it's some kid's high school project and give it an award. Signed, I Occasionally Wear a Seatbelt.

As a bonus, this one included Cory Doctorow in the mix. If you haven't figured out that most of Cory Doctorow's opinions are formed, formulated and delivered as one delivers an analysis of a country from a moving train car... you're not reading very closely.

A worthwhile endeavor, which I'm not in the mood to enumerate tonight, is to read the Wikipedia edit/discussion records of advocates of Wikipedia when they're actually dealing with it. Go look up danah boyd, Xeni Jardin and Cory. Mix well. Enjoy. Bring a cup of tea.

But more than all that, I've lately been focusing less on Wikipedia's problems than the problems of collaborative websites in general. What works, what doesn't work, how different places handle this. While it's fun to concentrate on a place that is unusually popular, that very popularity is causing such a crowd mass that the architectural flaws of Wikipedia are being stretched into all-out cascading failures. It's become very hard to tell what's a case of actual problems with the site's setup, and what's the result of an endless assault of Dumbass Torrent breaking the fort walls.

I will say, however, that right now the only thing that really makes me angry in the whole Wikisoup is the pride and joy of deleting articles by the truckload, daily. Not newly-created articles with names like "BONER MUNCH" and "I MADE A THING YOU SHOULD BUY", but articles that last for months and months are are maintained by the work of dozens and then a random set of do-gooders go along and send it to oblivion. This is, in my humble opinion, the Web 2.0 equivalent of hunting elephants for tusks or killing buffalo to extinction using a few cuts of meat and letting the rest rot. It's a nearly-unfathomable waste, one we'll probably look back at with horror and regret; the realization that when the internet was relatively free and a lot of people were united in working on a project, a ton of effort was squandered. A shame.

So yeah, still not buying in, sorry.

The closest real-life metaphor for Wikipedia is the American Red Cross. Nobody dislikes the idea of the Red Cross. What a fantastic idea it is. However, if you look at a lot of how the Red Cross operates, it's ugly, has had issues of corruption, waste and poor management, and does some pretty hairy scary crap in the operation of its business. While it's entirely cool that people want there to be a functioning Red Cross, right now it's not doing so well, and it would probably be a matter of a few minor but important shifts in policy to get things back on track.

I have no doubt that when Wikipedia inevitably moves towards a beta-release system, where you have a page that anyone can edit and a page that is the official "last good" one, that a lot of the current noise will cease, with regards to the issues of vandalism, edit wars, and the rest. That it hasn't gone to that system yet is merely a case of the right people not feeling the pain yet. Eventually they will, and it will be portrayed that it was always a good idea to do this. Because it is.

But the endemic disregard for people's effort, the inherent dislike of people who actually have experience in a subject, and the bushel of bad decisions masquerading as brave choices tell me that when I walked away years ago, I made a pretty good choice.

Make a template for that.

Leet

I don't know why I care, but I do.

The sudden web-mainstreaming of "LOLCATS", or "Image Macros", inevitably leads to a discussion of the genesis of this weird way or writing stuff, which leads to some mention of "Leetspeak", which then collapses into a pile of speculative jelly as to where the hell all this weird writing style came from.

"LOLCATS" itself has one general goal at this point: to drive traffic towards advertising. Good luck finding any site that isn't caked around the little bastards with ads of every stripe; I sure couldn't. Even BoingBoing, which resembles a NASCAR entrant these days, gets a bit of the tasty pie. Personally, I dig the whole fucking-around-with-images-and-adding-text thing; it's been around for a very long time in various amounts and when it's funny, it's really funny. Like any fast food, it's not good to make it your steady diet, but it doesn't hurt to jump into the stupid and make stupid angels every once in a while.

But the whole "Whence does come the Leetspeak" question is always handled kind of oddly, although I'm happy to say that it appears the knee-jerk response is no longer that it was invented 5 minutes ago. People harken back to 2001, to 1995, to 1988... not bad! Wrong, but not bad.

Boing Boing links to an essay by David McRaney which links to the Wikipedia article which then links to this article by Anthony Mitchell. In it, he basically pulls a theory out of thin air:

The cultural attitudes and some of the early slang behind leet can be traced to the 1970s and early 1980s, the heyday of the phone phreak era. During that era, individuals and informal groups sought to explore the public telephone system in the U.S., often to make illegal long-distance telephone calls. The most proficient individuals in the phone phreak subculture received recognition and status that enabled them to become cultural bellwethers.

When computer bulletin board systems (BBSs) became available in the 1980s, phone phreak culture gained a written medium in the online exchanges that were often so slow and clumsy that users would shorten words or phrases to be able to send messages more conveniently. For example, 'you are' or 'your' could be shortened to u r or ur.

Short leet forms are commonly observed today in SMS Latest News about SMS (Short Message Service) text messages composed on mobile phones. The popularity of leetish truncations on SMS is driven by the keyboard designs on most mobile phones. While computer users have access to full QWERTY keyboards, on most mobile phone keypads each button is shared by three letters. Little keypads encourage leet.

Uses of leet that substitute numbers and punctuation marks for letters can be traced to the 1980s when bulletin board administrators sought to discourage the use of BBSs for the storage and distribution of pornography and stolen software. To circumvent BBS restrictions, spellings and words were altered by some BBS users. Enduring relics from that era are the leet terms pr()n and pr0n, which signify pornography.

Another relic is the translation of the word hacker, which was banned by some BBS administrators. Initial leetspeak translations to hack0r or h4cker led to filtering and bans on those leet terms, pushing leetspeakers to develop more obscure, less recognizable translations such as h4x0r and |-|^><()|z.

To his credit, this is listed as an "opinion" piece, not an academic work, and so he feels absolutely no responsibility to cite any sources for this belief. The fact that Wikipedia then cites this speculation in a manner that makes it look like it's an informed statement shouldn't be a huge jaw-dropper either.

I care about this because I spend so much time collecting BBS stuff, and to watch someone randomly make up sources for these things and reasons that I've never heard of ever, it's just a tad frustrating.

I've got an entire directory of printouts from circa 1980s BBSes, early stuff, which shows that nobody was trying to get around any sort of filtering system. Crap-ass ideas like trying to regulate your users to that level are spotty at best in BBS history. And it certainly didn't stop people from talking in that way.

I traced the meaning of "K-Rad" some time ago. I found the specific place it came from. Watching the entirely made-up histories of the phrase show how tenuous a connection can be drawn between history and speculation when reading about where stuff "came from".

LOLCATS, in case you want to play history tracing games, definitely links back to Amos and Andy and 1800s-era renditions of black language. Directly? No, but it exploits along the same lines of pseudo-infantile language portraying complicated (and not so complicated) concepts in a messed-up manner. And done right, that shit is funny! Done wrong it's insulting and boring. Actually, sometimes it's done right and is BOTH insulting and funny.

And you can cite that!

Anyway, I can definitely tell you that the weird "1 for I", "0 for O" stuff was already a cliche by 1984, with the Real Pirate's Guide by Rabid Rasta mentioning this:

REAL PIRATES DON'T SAY "K-K00L", "K-AWESOME", "X10DER", "L8R0N", OR ANYTHING OF THE SORT.
REAL PIRATES KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BE- TWEEN "F" AND "PH" (I.E.  "PHILES", "PHUCK", "FONE", ETC.).
REAL PIRATES NEVER USE TEXT GRAPHICS IN THEIR MESSAGES.
REAL PIRATES DON'T SEARCH FOR NEW WAYS TO SPELL "WARES".

I spent an enormous amount of time six years ago annotating the Real Pirates' Guide, so go enjoy that if you haven't seen it.

The point is, primary materials abound. Stop making shit up, it drives everyone putting the primary materials online nuts. LOL.

Locks

An interview conducted with an IF author put me in the Providence, RI area, 40 miles from home. While in the short term it might seem to be efficient and businesslike to zip in, do an interview, and drive back, the day was beautiful and Providence can be lovely if you squint. I ended up walking along a nice area of shops and found myself in an antiques store named What Cheer that had a fun little assortment of old stuff. Items are plentiful and often well catalogued, although it would have been multiple days to truly find the gems I'd normally want.

In a card-catalog drawer set they keep of tiny and interesting items was a slot for old locks, although only one was resident that day. I bought it handily. It looks like this:

My current plan is to donate it to the lockpicking village, which is a travelling set of locks that follow along to various hacker events and which I've never partaken in. Why? Not quite sure. You'd think I'd like it handily, but for whatever reason I've always demurred. It's definitely not because of the event: the people are friendly, some of them I've known for years, and the arrangement of materials is always top notch:

Lock picking, like a lot of other activities, can imbue you with a sense of power and ability due to the skillset that provides you access you might not otherwise have. The groups that have followed hackers around for years now have given untold hundreds a chance to understand more about the theories behind lock creation, and for reasons I can't quite fathom this appeals handily to technical people of a specific stripe. My own lack of understanding aside, TEXTFILES.COM has an entire section on lockpicking with Master Locks coming under strongest scrutiny. M. Groves, a particularly cranky commentator on my weblog entry about the mystical number last Friday, will be glad to know that Master Lock sent out threats to people for printing how to undo their locks, even though what these files represented was research using items they had purchased, and which revealed pretty insane flaws in the Master Lock system.

Locks are, after all, event consolidators, in that they prevent a range of events from occuring by consolidating them into a specific event; the triggering of a mechanism within the lock that causes it to release its hold on whatever it is attached to. The flaw or deeper issue, known for thousands of years, is that this in itself is not the sum total of required variables to prevent another event from happening. The strongest lock on a door won't protect against a window next to it, or exposed hinges, or the key being accessible to the wrong people, or the wrong people being able to imitate a key.

This particular lock, an old Yale one, was either used for railroad switchboxes, or maybe just someone's shed. Naturally, I assume it was used to secure some sort of gate of Hell, long since undone and now leaving a brave band of heroes the task of gathering up the demons to return them from whence they came. Maybe they need their lock back!

Seedy Textfiles

I got another nice letter today along the lines of "I'm sorry to bother you... oh god, don't hit me... please, what's going on with CD.TEXTFILES.COM?" Sure, there's a lot of people who write to me like I'm the Super and they're getting no heat, but others write with an overarching deference and politeness. So here's what's going on.

When I moved textfiles.com to colocation, everything went except for ascii.textfiles.com, bbslist.textfiles.com and cd.textfiles.com. This was mostly, in the case of ascii, because of programming setup, and in the case of bbslist and cd, because I just hadn't gotten around to it. Later, I didn't move cd.textfiles.com because there's no room.

Right now, cd.textfiles.com is rocking along at 216 gigabytes of data. That's larger than the space on the www.textfiles.com machine, currently. I know, behind the times, but that's what the current situation is.

So, some time ago, I thought about getting a little more drive space installed into the main textfiles.com server so I could move cd.textfiles.com up there. But I kept putting it off, because hey, it worked great for me.... I had to put a bandwidth limiter on the site, you see, because it was getting ugly. Way ugly.

The interaction people have with cd.textfiles.com brings great meaning to the term "tentacle rape". I've seen people open fifty, again, FIFTY, 5-0 connections to cd.textfiles.com to yank it dry. I feel like I could go downstairs and watch the server implode like a kid's juice box while this is going on. And they would do it for days and days and days. Endless attacks on all sides.

Also, because there are well over a million files (I think the number's around 1,200,000 files or thereabouts), I would always, like, 24 hours a day, have spiders downloading stuff from google, yahoo and the rest. People might say "Hey, you should stop them", but kind of the "point" of cd.textfiles.com being on the web was people looking for stuff. So if I didn't have it searchable, I'm being a dope.

Anyway, I got a really nice letter from a guy, and he pointed out an interview in which he said this stuff:

Basically, my site could not exist without cd.textfiles.com. That site, I am not kidding, is the greatest website of all time. They've uploaded hundreds of shareware and freeware compilation CDs, archiving thousands of games, utilities, applications, and anything else you can imagine. It's shovelware paradise. The quote on the first page explains it perfectly. "Who knew that the companies looking for a quick buck through the late 1980's and early 1990's with "Shovelware" CDs would become the unwitting archivists of the BBS age? No one did, but here we are, looking back, muttering thanks to these souless (sic) con artists as we plunder the very data they themselves took from a time now past."

"Their data, of course, isn't categorized and catalogued like my site. You can't just go to the site and browse through games by publisher or genre, find specific version numbers, purchasing information or declaration of freeware status, links to the author's website, or read in-depth reviews. cd.textfiles.com is a library. If you're willing to search it, you can find almost anything."

"There are very few websites that I trust to take my downloads from. I have to be sure that every zip file is unaltered, meaning that no files are missing, have been added, no config files have been altered, the version number or copyright information hasn't been hacked or hex-edited in, and no saved games or high scores are present, which is almost impossible to guarantee on other websites. Each file has to be exactly the way the publisher released it, and free from viruses, malware, or corruption. To be sure, some of the zip files on the shovelware CDs have been altered. Sometimes the BBS guy would play a round of the game, then re-zip the file before uploading it to his BBS. Perhaps he or she played the game in order to write the file_id.diz description. So some of the zip files will have high scores or saved games, or add an advertisement for their BBS into the archive. The wonderful thing about cd.textfiles.com is that, having so many sources, I can usually find several copies of each version of each game, and I compare them to make sure that I have an unaltered original. True research requires the citation of multiple sources. Some of the CDs only contain altered archives, so I've learned which CDs are trustworthy and reliable sources of unaltered zip files. cd.textfiles.com is one of the few websites that I trust as a source of downloads for my site. Without them, I would be able to offer the most recent version of most games with confidence by taking them from the publisher's website, but I wouldn't be able to archive entire version histories, which is what sets my site apart as a preservationist and archival society.

"Like any library or museum, they don't even know what hidden gems they have in their archives. I found multiple copies of Major Stryker v1.3 on their site, a version which Apogee claimed was never released. My discovery changed the official Apogee FAQ. If you know what you're looking for, you can find incredible things."

So that's really cool. I'm going to go buy a 750gb drive, get that installed in the colo machine and we'll see about returning cd.textfiles.com to full accessability. Amazing what a kind word can do.

Where Have All the Philes Gone?

There's an article in the Autumn edition of 2600 called "Where have all the Philes Gone?" It's horrible. I'm sorry I only became aware of it recently; I don't read 2600 much anymore. I don't understand why 2600 doesn't have a PDF version of itself available for a subscription fee or otherwise downloadable. I wish they'd spend a week or two over at the Escapist Magazine for information on how people put together a magazine (with text-only version, web version, pdf versions!) in the modern era. As a result, I didn't know about this article until over half a year later.

Again, the title is "Where Have All the Philes Gone" and discusses BBS textfiles, their place in history, and thoughts about what the present holds in contrast to the peak of the textfiles. It gets everything nearly completely wrong. It was written by "Glutton", in case the search engines needed a way to match "glutton" with "gets everything nearly completely wrong".

Riddled with mistakes and worthless speculations, I defy the core thesis of the article: that BBS-era textfiles are no-longer available in any number or being written in a useful fashion, and this supposed state of affairs is a result of newly heightened fear of accurate information being printed for fear of lawsuits, arrest or, I assume, taxidermy.

For one thing, he makes it sound like BBS textfiles are scattered to the four winds, barely able to be found if you use "filesharing sites" and "search engines". Well, I know where a few are lying about, so that's pretty silly in itself.

The article constructs a pretty cramped and inaccurate presentation of the last 20 years, painting a false paradigm about information along the lines of "everything was open and new users were treated with respect, now the government and law enforcement have killed free speech and expression and new users are mistreated". It's a pat construction, very easy to swallow, almost sounds informed and wide-thinking.

But it's not; it's the kind of stuff you write because you need to fill a couple columns of space and you sort of remember you had a good time on BBSes and so let's talk about how current forums seem to suck.

Current forums don't suck. They're capable of a lot, and when they fail or don't do things well it's instantaneously knowable, as opposed to BBSes of yore where if something sucked you had to wait months to really be sure it sucked. Things move faster now. They grow faster and they die faster.

But through it, we have so many more avenues of accessible information. Textfiles are still being written. Some are in PDF form, some are in HTML. It's not as portable as text, but it's still pretty damned portable, considering. The fact is, there were a very small amount of bulletin boards compared to websites, they often allowed a single user at a time (meaning maybe 100-200 people total for usage) and the quality was about the same, just in a smaller area. Nowadays, you can have response to a written file within minutes of posting it, not days and days. Things are different now, and better now. Even cursory study of the exhibits reveals this.

But apparently doing more than writing a couple column inches that say nothing, and say it inaccurately, counts as useful information in 2600 these days. I'm sorry to hear that. Here's the article, all nice and poorly scanned like it deserves to be.

Posted by Jason Scott at 07:12 PM | Comments (5)

Five Days a Week

I'm knocking the weblog schedule back from six days a week to five, basically posting on weekdays, with the occasional huge honker on the weekend if something important comes up. I'm having trouble maintaining that jet-setting, here-and-there lifestyle of a computer historian and dependably posting entries on the day they were written. Twice I've had to go into bouts of back-dating entries and that's wrong.. it's just lying for no good reason. After all, it'll eventually work out that I'm writing an entry describing an event that hadn't happened by the time of the "date" of the posting and then you'll kick me to the curb. So let's depressurize the situation now.

A part of this is that I'm not interested in being a link/comment weblog, where all my weblog entry does is tell you to go somewhere else. I think that's boring and can be done by a script. Instead, I insist on giving context, commentary and insight into an event and use links to bolster it. This has turned out to be hard work. Hooray for hard work!

So five days a week, and I will note in an entry the actual day it was written if I mess up. Historian's Honor!

Note: This was written on Sunday, May 6th.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

I think of it, and I laugh.

I consider the implications, and I laugh harder.

It's a deep laugh, the laugh of realizing that you locked your lockpicking set in your car along with your keys. The laugh of the fact that I spent $70 on a digital sundial. And the laugh of remembering that asshole manager at the multiplex in 1988 who was using a goddamned bullhorn to direct people into lines to see Batman and how I not only let him do it, but happily sat for an hour inside a theater waiting for the movie to start. To see Batman!

In other words, it's the ludicrousness piled on top of the stupid, the hilarity baked into the self-obvious bad idea, the on-its-face clarity of the totally untenable plan accompanied by the energetic, totally-cognizant shout of "onward to victory!"

To think we let things drag down until it got to the point that any entity, any entity at all considered itself the owner and protector of a set of 16 hexadecimal numbers, and not just the beloved guardian of this precious collection of letters and digits but one which would then attempt to cow and bend all the world to its will to remove all trace of this combination from the internet.

That they would do this isn't a big surprise; groups do stupid things. But the fact that there's a law on the book they could point to that would allow this to even be potentially actionable is what stacks on another layer of Moron Flapjack into the breakfast plate of this event.

In case this event hasn't made itself to your corner of the world, the string in my entry's title does something. I'm not even entirely sure how, but if you do all sorts of insane shit and plug it in the right place you can copy a movie. Maybe. The resultant movie is then going to be gigabytes huge and probably star Hugh Grant but damn, you now can have a copy. If you use this number. Somehow. Again, I don't even know entirely how and I really, seriously don't care.

Most people wouldn't care, actually. Copying movies happens; it certainly happens to my movies, and it has been going on since... wait for it... forever! Movies used to be duplicated back in the "play it in a tent" days of over 100 years ago, and there were companies that would pirate/dupe these reels and then send them to countries or districts without copies of the movie, and make money at it. So yeah, that's been afoot for a bit of time.

But what made people care was that there were actual lawyer letters sent out, threat-o-matic missives saying that this number was totally and utterly illegal and you should stop printing that number because there's a law on the books that says that this thing is a device and method for circumventing copy protection and that's illegal and hey stop it and oh shit you painted it on a wall.

The closest I could come up with to this happening in recent memory is Major League Baseball trying to copyright or make into trade secrets the score of a game. Two numbers! Ours! All ours! They were dumbfucks then and are dumbfucks now. But even that was very specifically directed at other businesses who were then selling access to those numbers, so maybe, you could convince yourself it wasn't in fact Major-League Stupid.

We have entered the hopefully-short era of the Microtheft, the smallest possible unit of larceny, the atomic level of sin. We've boiled down the act of being immoral to one string of numbers being in your possession, one collection of digits representing you being bad and worthy of punishment. And the punishment is fucking crazy. Do I hear years? Years for printing this string?

Bring that shit on. The resulting fireworks of all these are delicious, like a ice cream sandwich on a ferris wheel in a breezy August afternoon. This is something that people get, they understand. Maybe this is the wedge where a critical mass hits and laws are changed. Stupid, stupid laws that get in the way of good laws that help the world.

Here's the letter that's been sent out to places, in case you think all those stories were fake.

Bring it on! I brought cake, fuckers!

A Little More Front, for Context

It occurred to me to mention a couple more things about this video shoot from the previous entry. People who are shooting stuff might make assumptions about how I did it, and those assumptions might be quite wrong because I didn't give information out. So, here we go.

• The video cost me roughly $50 to shoot, because most of the infrastructure was already in my possession, such as the camera/av equipment, set and props. I'm already shooting a film, after all, so this was something shot entirely on the side while the "main" production was going on. If I'd had to rent equipment and a location and decorate it and all that, it probably would have been around $3,000-$5,000. This is my case for re-use of available materials! Cost included lamp oil (no kidding!), and beer and gas and so on. All minor stuff.
• I did roughly 10 test screenings with various people, to get feedback. Shots were removed and others added based on this. One glaring example was that I did a "shaky-cam" shot with Frontalot rapping that I liked and which I thought really fit in. Nobody else thought this, they all thought it looked amateurish and crap. So out it went. On the other hand, I had one of the crew (Oliver) note how there was a lack of a computer screen shot during a sequence when it really could use one. When I threw one in, it was like watching gears engaging. That was Oliver's doing. So while I'm the director, and likely the final word, all ideas did not spring from me; they sprung from many other folks.
• I have watched this video over 500 times. I would just let it run and contemplate it, see where it felt smooth, see where my mind hiccuped watching it, watched just the background, just his eyes, just his mouth, and so on. Nothing beats careful study of the actual thing you're working on. This approach is also why the BBS documentary took 8 months to edit.
• There are shots of Frontalot typing at an Apple II from the Apple II's perspective. To get this shot, I removed the monitor, mounted the camera low on a tripod, zoomed, and stuck a really thick book underneath the Apple II so it was aimed up at a ludicrous angle. I.e. the entire thing is unbelievably faked up. It's amazing how much you often have to fake stuff up to make it look "real" on screen. There's nothing wrong with this, but I sometimes wonder how much nascent filmmakers see things and try to do it like they think it's done, instead of how it's actually done.
• I am a completely spastic director working with people towards a goal, in this case, to be lip-synching to a rap song. I can hear myself going nuts on the recordings as I'm shouting out directions. A lot of this was just to not waste Frontalot's time, but when you're in the heat of trying to make stuff seem spontaneous, you say whacky crap.
• There were three people helping me on the night of the shoot, and three others who helped clear out the space for the set. So that's six people (plus Frontalot and myself) working on this project directly, plus the dozen people who were given the opportunity to give feedback about the project. A good project is almost never done as a solitary project, if you expect it to interface with other people.
• I have now had G4/TechTV, Deth Vegetable, MC Frontalot, and Mark Hosler of Negativland in my basement. Someday I'll let them out!