ASCII by Jason Scott

Greetings Internet Warrior: To Mirror the Past

The leaves turn color

The forums await your skill

To prevail is all

As we wind down our time together, Internet Warrior, I will show you one last technique. It is insidious, a rampant virus that can pull down not just a thread but all further discussion on that sub-board. It is to be handled carefully, as one carries a multi-faceted knife. This technique is to mirror the past.

In any discussion, one must merely bring up the past; wistfully, happily, as one recalls all good things in one's history. Then, standing back, your victims will too recount their own pasts, sharing a smile at the times that have passed between them.

Boy, we've come a long way, haven't we? I remember when it was just a couple people who know about this... now the entire scene is filled with people who don't know where we came from....

So insidious is this technique, warrior, that you should only consider it a last result, when all other attempts to dominate have failed. Your enemies will fall upon each other with vigor, each working to outdo each other in nostalgia and memory, of details and ideas they'd thought no-one would have cared to hear, until you designated it the coin of the realm.

I wish you well, Internet Warrior, in all your studies and in all forums you will dominate and destruct in the pursuit of victory.

What is that, you ask?

No, it is merely some dust that has caught itself in your teacher's eye.

Now go.

Greetings Internet Warrior: Blur in Clear Sight

We have come so far in so short a time, Internet Warrior. Your deft appraisal of our lessons and the skill which you have shown in using them brings to mind the memory of xxMartin56xx, who could drag a conversation regarding beekeeping into a forum-destroying political meltdown. Perhaps you too will be spoken of in these halls after your passage.

As our teachings progress, Internet Warrior, so too do the subtleness of our discipline and our techniques. The best Warrior appears to be a contributing member, willing to share his information and attention with his opponents, until it is too late to have known otherwise. A mis-step will lead to your discovery, but a sure-footed stance and deftness of touch will ensure victory.

To Blur in Clear Sight is to become the ultimate double-agent; appearing to be the most productive of a forum while quietly ruining it. Beyond the destruction of a thread, beyond the lifting of heads away from the matter at hand, to Blur in Clear Sight is to render the entire idea of conversation moot and mortally wounded.

I see you shift uneasily where you stand, unsure where to begin. This is normal, for it is a mode of thinking so insidious that you are lying nearly to yourself in your efforts to control and fling the conversation into blessed and enveloping darkness. Watch carefully.

Hey there, first time poster to this movie board. Some quick thoughts.

Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors. I've seen everything of his I could find, from the Lodger up through to Family Plot. I am having a lot of trouble finding some of the other early works on DVD and perhaps someone can tell me some of the more reputable DVD firms to purchase copies of them (I've gotten burned on some of the resellers at conventions and would prefer to "buy honest", as it were). I've also read a bunch of biographies of the man and he just gets more fascinating the further and further I look into him; I'm especially tickled pink by his escapades under the studio system and his television appearances. I wouldn't mind discussing some of the more controversial statements he made, either. There's a sense of wonder in the way he planned his movies and the approach he took to the composition of the frame. I've made the occasional home movie to try and replicate this approach (mail me if you're interested in having a copy of some of them; VHS quality only, sorry). I don't know of many other movie directories who've planned their works this extensively any other time in the mid-20th century, but wouldn't mind hearing of them, should there be some films I should watch. Properly addressed, I should get to everyone, thanks so much for having this forum!

Your eyes unfocus reading this paragraph, Warrior, and that is how it should be. It is tiring, sapping of energy in every turn. It provides a number of opinions but then requires facts, endless seas of facts that would require research and effort on the part of the community to fulfill. In a deluge of queries and statements, the reader must divest themselves of points uninteresting to them while struggling to find points worth pursuing. All indications are that answering your queries, time-consuming they may be, will result in yet more cascades of topics and investigation. In this way, you drown your opponents, not in a deep and avoidable lake, but in a consistent six inches of wet, slippery mud.

Left alone, your messages will signal a poison, carefully hidden within a gleaming fruit of energy and enthusiasm. The forum's topics will blur, lost in a haze of your messages, until no enemy who knows his territory will venture there further.

You smile, Internet Warrior... you see the masterstroke in this. Take a walk with me; we will ponder the endless and shifting forms of nature and compose these quicksand paragraphs together. None shall stand against you once you have mastered them.

Greetings, Internet Warrior: The Tangential Sweep

We rise again with the passage of the sun and toil upon our lessons until the moon shines brightly. We are Internet Warriors and no fight shall be too great to triumph and prevail. Through Words, Dominance.

Your lesson today concerns an easily misunderstood technique, Internet Warrior. When you wish to guide the conversation away from subjects you do not already master and enemies you do not wish to strengthen with attention, you must provide the topic new direction without appearing to do so. This gentle wind, blowing the topic adrift and off course, is called The Tangential Sweep.

Lesser schools teach of the Thread Hijack, a dull and blunt stance that attempts to shift gears by a direct stab at the heart of the topic and a twist in a new direction. It is obvious, easily discerned and quickly vanquished. We will not stain the day with further regard of it.

The Tangential Sweep exerts its influence as one who sprinkles thumbtacks across a hallway; the message is peppered with considerations, phrases that will cause your enemies to fall into the trap of changing the topic and either succeeding or bringing the weight of criticism upon themselves. You are rendered innocent of any suspicion, ready to seize upon the topic change as you see fit but safe and protected should the tide turn.

Let us practice.

The newest model of video card is definitely a top choice; between the default amount of RAM and the driver support, it should work well for any new applications coming up. I recently moved my computer from my NY apartment to the Cape Cod estate so that I could edit my films during lobster season; and with the new monitor I got, I was looking for a card capable of driving a 30" behemoth. This card does the trick.

Ah, you have gotten the general idea, Internet Warrior; a video card posting becomes a reference to New York City, Cape Code, Lobsters, and that you own an unusually large video monitor. Any of these may trip up your enemies into moving the conversation outside of the thread. Let's see a more intense approach.

There's nothing wrong with the main argument being presented here, but I'm worried, as someone who struggles through the day with pressures I don't want to talk about, how this might be perceived outside this forum. I think this begs the question, though - is this the best way to go about this? I'll see if I can come up with a better example of what I'm talking about after physical therapy.

Even better. Now you have wrapped the discussion into a flowing, majestic stream of references to yourself. Curious posters need merely inquire to your pressures, your physical therapy, and your "discussion of the discussion". Any of these carefully laid traps will ensnare an unsuspecting combatant into a tangential discussion, and as the sweet smell of success, this discussion will be about you. We recall: There is no finer conversation than the conversation others shall have about you. Very well done, Warrior.

This is a most difficult technique; many of our brethren have been spotted in the open attempting it. But the rewards are great, and should you master The Tangential Sweep, you will know a pleasure of victory few are lucky enough to know.

I hear the bell for dinner; run as fast as you can, to get the best portions.

Greetings, Internet Warrior: The One-Word Strike

As leaves fall from a tree in Autumn, so fall the many possible lessons we may teach each other this day, Internet Warrior. Let us grab one leaf, and regard it, concentrating on the colors it seeks to provide us instead of the myriad others we could spend our existence chasing, for naught.

Today we shall use the popularity of the internet forum against itself, to our own glory. We shall sit and attend to The One-Word Strike.

Where once the postings of a forum were few, precious, and standing as glittering stones in a desert, now our most popular forums know nary a passing second or moment before a new message falls to earth. A blink of a man gazing into the sun is all the time needed to yield a torrent of words from all lands.

Quickly, hence, come the messages, some of poor quality and some of the highest craftsmanship. Yes, your enemies are subtle and many, and therefore any gambit you attend to must claim the shortest of preparations. A one-word message will enable you to contribute without contributing; making the most important part of your message known to the others: your username. You are a part of the groundswell while spending the least amount of time on being so. Your name will reign in the heaven of early posts instead of the underworld of me-toos.

Let us prepare our litany of one-word posts, Warrior. Repeat after me.

Brilliant!!

First!

Pass.

Cool!

Nah.

And finally, our most effective strike of all:

.(A single period, as to indicate an agreement)

Yes, Internet Warrior, you catch on quickly; in this momentary passage of effort, barely the cost of a breath, you have taken the conversation by the neck and made it your own. The warriors who follow you are lessers, contributing whatever may come, but who only serve as a cacaphony of geese honking deliriously after stumbling past your zen-like attendance.

As such, we see we win with barely a move.

Well done, Internet Warrior. Please help yourself to a second can of cola.

Greetings, Internet Warrior: Infantalize your Quarry

It is an honor and a personal pleasure to serve you today, Internet Warrior, in the guise of teacher. I may be called the teacher, but we are both teachers, and both students. Learned and learning, known and yet to know; this is the circle of the education that we will dive into, with vigor and respect.

I will make you aware, as you might already be aware within you, of five deadly techniques of Internet Warriors, passed down from generation to generation. As the screen shields our faces from the harsh light of observation, so too can it be a channel to strike your enemies from lands both afar and within arm's reach. We will discover one technique a day.

Today's technique is infantalizing your quarry. This is one of the Internet Warrior's most tried and true techniques, dating far back, far before the Internet Warriors first struck out online, far past the day of the nascent motorcar and the era of the crafted item, prepared for sale. It is truly a classic, never to even know the idea of "style", much less be influenced by it or be considered in or out of it.

To infantalize your quarry is to immediately frame your opponents as being naive, unaware, adhering to their choices and beliefs out of a fiery passion of youth instead of the strength of logic and the mind. As such, the position taken by your opponent is designated as poisoned ground, unworthy to grow the seeds of belief and the stump from which to take a stand.

Let us practice together.

Nothing makes me laugh harder than to hear the fanboys spout off about shit they don't know the first thing about. If you'd put down your little fanboy sunglasses, you'd do a little research and buy some real equipment. Until then, enjoy your little toys while the professionals get the job done.

Excellent, Warrior. You block off the opponent before they have a chance to speak; all their words are wasted defending the tools instead of beginning to declare their skills. A wise and patient person will realize that to defend tools with words instead of deeds is a vacuum from which no tasks will emerge; the warrior has deflected them from their own skills and they are forced to defend the skills of those who made the tools, who need no defending at all.

Let us try a more insidious infantalization.

Jesus Christ, not this crap again. I thought we were here to get something done and be a community, not waste our time going over the same old arguments. I'm unsubbing until this place grows up. If anyone needs me, e-mail me.

Yes, yes! Your moves are harsh, swift, and deft, Warrior. Note how you declare the nebulous enemy around you as the source of the problem, declare the battleground a lost cause, and walk away unscathed. You have had to expend no effort on the bridging of communication with others; instead you have succeeded in filtering for the opponents who will follow your directions, and come hat in hand to your doorstep. Well played, well played.

One more for today.

Does anyone else even HAVE one of these? It's getting a little tiring talking about this stuff without anyone being able to post a picture of their stuff and what they're up to. I've been using one for some time now, and at least I know I have more to learn. If you don't know, don't post.

Perfection! You have cleaved off the users who could possibly stand up to you by indicating that unless they fulfill a set of requirements you have designated, they are not properly prepared to engage you in conversation. You are the driver of the thread, the warrior who stands unmoved at the head of the table and who will now declare what portions your less-worthy companions are entitled to have. You have made them children, mute lessers who will be considered crybabies if they question you.

You have learned well today, Internet Warrior. Commence your supper and mucking out of the floppy disk piles and then you may sleep and await tomorrow's lesson.

The Sad Tale of the 5.25" Disk Drive

This entry was filed on August 30th.

Sometimes, stuff just sneaks up on you. You see the previous examples, know the trends, and yet still you get caught out in the rain. That's how it is for me and being able to read 5 1/4" floppy disks on a PC. I can't. I can read them on an Apple II and I can read them for a Commodore 64 or Amiga, but I'm totally out of luck, currently, with taking these disks from a PC and ending up on my main workbench machine.

I should have seen this coming, of course; this is what happened to cassette tapes, to many types of data cartridges, and all manner of magnetic media. The Thing That Reads It goes away, and all you're left with is a stack of Stuff That Needs Reading.

The way it's supposed to be is that people send you stuff to get read, and you read it for them and send the data and the material back. It's a good life, it feels like you've accomplished something. But somehow 5.25 fell between the cracks. I was absolutely positive someone, somewhere, would have a for-sale 5.25 floppy disk reader that was USB connected. Hook it up, throw in the disks, and go to town. They definitely have them for sale for 3.5" floppies; do a web search and you can find them for sale (I'll be buying a few myself). But 5.25 never got that second wind.

I guess the USB craze just barely missed those floppies; considering the absolutely-insane spectrum of USB devices out there (fans, coffee warmers, Christmas trees, serial ports, humping dogs), I was positive I'd be 5 clicks away from porting my sent-in floppy collection to relative permanence. Shows what I know.

There's been the occasional burble, the ever-so-swift discussion of someone hacking something on a breadboard, but I'd really hoped I'd have something basic and commercial for sale, even for a small-run electronics group. Nothing yet. Plan B is just to find a machine that can bridge the gap between running a 5.25" floppy drive and run a linux/freebsd variant. I don't like Plan B, but it's there.

Meanwhile, the stack grows bigger. Never again!

Thanks, Web 2.0

This entry filed on August 29th.

So a while ago, I wrote an essay about problems I saw with Wikipedia. Later, I gave a speech with the same name and some of the same general ideas, but in a different direction for a lot of details. It was well regarded.

By well regarded, I mean that I got a lot of positive feedback from people in mail, and I got a lot of weblog postings about it, and I got a lot of discussion that cropped up when I went to events. Because of it, I got flown to England to give a similar talk, and I've written some amount of stuff afterwards in the same subject and people said they would listen because here was the guy who wrote the previous speech. One of my buddies transcribed the speech and so it reached a lot of people that way. Anil Dash said some nice things about it.

This is all subjective, but it seems to be a pretty okay little speech.

The Internet Archive page is the easiest way to listen to me giving the speech to the audience. It has the audio file in a bunch of optional methods, including streaming it and downloading it. It went up there about April of 2006. It's been downloaded over 4,000 times.

So over the course of the last year and four months, people have utilized the "review" function on the Internet Archive version 4 times. Once in December of 2006, and then three times on August 20, 2007.

The three esteemed reviewers of 20th the August, honors "clumpy", "Don't listen", and "6JJJJJJ", each provide a different insight into the talk. Here they are:

Reviewer: 6JJJJJJ - 1 out of 5 stars - August 20, 2007
Subject: No. it isn't

Not really very good, as reveiwed, Jason doesn't come across very well, kinda half baked. Best use your time for something else, I wish I had.

Reviewer: Don't listen - 1 out of 5 stars - August 20, 2007
Subject: Dumb

Jason Scott is great? I don't think so.. anyone that uses swear words, bad analogies and labels
("Spain exports this crap...", "liberals say this...")
He tries to use an analogy that "superviruses" are developed through the use of anitbiotics, and they can;t be killed. Maybe he should use Wikipedia to find out that antibiotics have NEVER worked against viruses, only bacteria.
The orator is a clown, with flawed reasoning, poor thinking habits, and a potty mouth.
Skip this if you have a brain.

Reviewer: clumpy - 5 out of 5 stars - August 20, 2007
Subject: Wikipedia is no good!

Here is why! A must listen for any person with a brain that can read this sentence.

Fantastic. I'll say it again. Fan-fucking-tastic. I've read a lot of verbiage involving criticism of the talk. I've read some stuff that does a pretty good job of tearing it apart, although often it's because they don't agree with my base premises instead of finding faulty logic within the actual construction of the speech. But here, on the speech itself, we now have three numbnuts who get to have the final word and commentary, right on the same page.

I say three because even "clumpy" isn't doing any favors to my "side"; his declaration that this thing is good for everybody is about as ill-formed a declaration as saying my speech was filled with flawed reasoning and I'm a clown. But guess what! They're on there, I can do little about it without being a complete mail-the-admins asswipe dork that any reasonable website hates, and there we go.

Contrast this with the amazon page for the BBS Documentary which contains 19 reviews of the work, with variant amounts of stars, and also ratings for the reviews themselves; top-rated reviews bubble to a prominent location, less-well-rated ones go to the side. Additionally, commentary is allowed on each of the reviews, a feature I utilized myself for one of them. The criticism was well-written, and my response treated it with the best respect that I could while fundamentally disagreeing.

Maybe it's Amazon's need to think of liability while balancing input from the audience that makes their forums feel better. Maybe archive.org's just been focusing on handling the torrent of data and hasn't had the resources to consider the implications of anyone-can-blort with regards to the items in the library. But when I spend weeks preparing a speech, deliver it to a crowd, and then go through the effort of cleaning it up and getting it uploaded and properly demarcated on the archive.org, the ease at which "6JJJJJ" can just say assery and walk away is a slap in the face.

The thing is, "Don't Listen"'s criticism about the "superviruses" versus bacteria mistake is accurate; it was a clear mistake, which I have been known to make. It doesn't kill the underlying argument, that a hotbox environment for trolls produces more sophisticated and insidious trolling. But unfortunately this nuanced observation is wrapped in a useless review that represents the only one made by the person, using an account called "Don't Listen" that doesn't inspire confidence in further reviews of items.

The concept of "Web 2.0" is apparently here to stay for a while. I can live with that, quite happily in fact, since I'm a fan of forum communication. But advances that are obviously being made across the field are not becoming default expectations for vital user-interfacing aspects, like commentary and reviews. That's a real shame; we've learned a lot in the last 25 years and I think it's time to start expecting more from people jumping into the fray.

Archive.org can expect to continue to get the items I've been preparing to upload to it, of course, but it's a small stab at the heart to consider how easily a 24 hour period can turn a work of pride into a platform of abuse.

Chicks

This entry filed on August 29th.

A while ago, I got an e-mail from somebody. It was pretty short. It went like this:

To: Jason
From: Guy
You should have more women in GET LAMP

I love these sorts of criticisms because the complaint is right there, the sum total of the communication. No hemming or roundabout language; just the clear directive that documentary needs women.

I get some snide commentary over time, along the lines of how many guys are in the BBS Documentary and how many guys are in the GET LAMP interview photo list so far. This is said derisively, as if I'm either avoiding women, or this is all a commentary on women, or that the documentary wouldn't be worth seeing if it didn't have more women.

I would hope this would be self-evident, but I really don't choose or not choose people based on what their genetic makeup is, any more than their income level or favorite OS or whether they ever rode a roller coaster. There's just no point to that approach. In fact, I take it further and wherever I can, I interview people who others tell me I shouldn't. Either their personality is known to be abrasive, or they're considered to not be in sync with the outlook on subject matter, or whatever. I still interview them, if I can. I've had "critical" interviews turn out to be zeros and last-minute sessions turn out to be the source of amazing material.

So when I don't have a lot of women in the documentaries, it's just a case of there not being a lot of women that my normal research and communication has brought up. I'm not avoiding women, but I'm not ignoring all potential interviews to only interview women, either.

My completely-made-up estimate is that a lot of the videogame industry now is a 70-30 split of male-female, with the ratio getting more male-oriented as you go towards "prestige" jobs, like Lead Designer and Person Who Gets On the Cover. In contrast, my made-up estimate was that it was 90-10 in the early 1980s. You have prominent game designers like Roberta Williams, Dona Bailey, Carol Shaw and Anne Westfall, and then six billion guys. It's just how the thing rolls.

I think making up ratios and quotas that have to be held to in a documentary would be even worse than a failure to include specific voices from a group. (But still better than intentionally avoiding groups simply to make something more marketable or because of some internal bias against that group.) It's a sticky situation, but I can promise that whatever the ratio for my next couple of films, it will not be because of some internal goal-set of getting more of any group in there to be "fair".

I hate talking about stuff this way, but there you go, nobody's plotting over here to kick the ladies out of the clubhouse. And nobody's kicking guys out of the clubhouse to make way for any potential ladies, either.

Presentation: Shmoocon, One Laptop Per Child

Well, if we're going to talk like I should give lessons on presentations, I might as well show what one of mine looks like. This is the shortest presentation I've ever given, a 7 minute whirlwind I gave at Shmoocon 2007, on the One Laptop Per Child panel presented on the last day. I've blasted it into Youtube, again, because I don't particularly care about the quality being perfect. If you want the full presentation in MPEG4 quality, just head over to either the shmoocon 2007 video collection or my mirror of same.

The circumstances of this situation were that I proposed a talk to Shmoocon, and they responded with whether I'd like to co-present with two other guys. I said yes and then they added a fourth guy, and we were assigned about an hour and change to present. Because of that, I collapsed anything I had into the 3rd presentation, and instead gave a short introduction to why anyone should be spending time punching the One Laptop Per Child project in the face when it's trying to do so much good. This is useful to know because I wanted to keep good time so we didn't run over, and so I was rather rushed in how I dropped stuff in. I expected it would be 15 minutes, and it clocked in at less than half that. All of us did similar, and I think it's great how we ended up doing that.

In my presentation, I give at least one wrong piece of information: I say the flood happened on a summer day, and in fact it was just an unseasonably warm winter day. So don't write in. Also, I cut out a lot of the intermediate steps of the AC-DC war for time reasons. Otherwise, it is what it is.

Introducing us is Bruce Potter. Bruce is a fantastic speaker, a perfect alpha-male voice combined with a solid sense of timing and riding the audience, which is not coincidentally what I do as well. When either of us talk, you can hear us react to the audience, blowing out to tangents as needed but then snapping back as quick as we can.

So here that is on youtube. Again, these are just the parts with me or referencing me.

Several things to note about my talk (other than what's above):

• The opening joke was on my burner with an alternate opening if I thought it wouldn't fit. I decided it fit and went with it, but I had a backout plan for a more "appropriate" line of statement.
• My list is intentionally weird and unexplained for a while. This was to draw the audience in and the "mystery" of why these three things are mentioned is meant to bring the audience through the boring parts, if any.
• A portion of it is unscripted; I hear the joke the same time as the audience. The whole line starting from "As soon as you see one of these" to "muffin of Africa" is complete improvisation and I heard it for the first time as I said it. Similarly, wrapping it up with "muffin of your lands" was me revising the talk as I went to end on such a positively-reacted-to turn of phrase. I had a different ending.
• Compare how much I spend checking my notes with looking out at the audience. This is the opposite ratio I see in a lot of speeches and it's probably my least favorite thing to watch.
• I also have no powerpoint or any accompanying presentation for the screen; it's all me. This is my style but that doesn't work for everyone.
• The mooninites joke and the barbie aside were improv as well, reading the "feel" of the audience. And again, I heard them at the same time the audience did.
• Also note that when whoever it was who interrupted me finishes, I don't engage them in conversation but go right back on track. They shouldn't have stopped me midflow and any additional time I spent engaging them in talking was wasted time for the other hundreds of attendees (I believe there were roughly 600-700 people in the room).
• The whole talk started with the words "fatal hilarity".

One last thing. I presented on this panel with Ivan Krstic. I think that in 20 years I will get free food and drinks because I will be able to say I presented on the same panel as Ivan Krstic. I also presented with Sean Coyne and Scott Roberts, and I'll probably get at least a few drinks off of saying I presented with them as well.

The Delightful Overload

The wave of interest in my Arcade Manuals collection has not subsided; in fact, it's kind of held firm the last few days, to the point that people are complaining about a general textfiles.com slowness. Over 200 gigabytes of arcade manuals have shot into the hands of over 20,000 people. That's crazy.

Crazy good, I hasten to add. It's amazing how many people were curious, wanted to read these manuals, maybe just wanted to see what one was, to get a copy of it and maybe immediately throw it out. Some, I've noticed, have begun just downloading the full-on pdf.textfiles.com site, apparently worried that it's going to disappear in a few days and so they better get the shots in. You nutty kids, things are going just fine and I don't expect any trouble for some time to come. The fact that there were so many people who wanted these things, for whatever reason, and I was able to bring it to them, that's pretty amazing and makes me very happy.

But here's the thing; none of it is particularly special.

First of all, there's a better organized arcade manual site out there, arcarc.xmission.com (the ARCade ARChive). It's been around for years, and except where a couple companies made them take crap down, they've got stuff really amazingly arranged. If I ever get my hands on the DVD images, I'll mirror it, but still this is their bag and they're great at it. Along a similar vein, the arcade manuals I have scanned are named according to the TOSEC convention and were obviously part of someone else's collection; I don't know if it was browsable but it likely was and is. With a modicum of effort, I stumbled onto sites that offer this stuff in Bittorrent form as well. In other words, I added a bunch of stuff to my site but I definitely didn't add anything new to the network at large. It was there before and now it's still there.

What happened, though, was that I got publicized in a few places, those places got linked from other places, and I won the "lottery". But really, it was nothing special, just what got the attention of the herd that day.

Similarly, I got some attention for an entry I did on the 1980 Coleco Catalog, which was a caalog intended for distributors to choose the toys for the coming season. I got it from a flea market, haggled for it, and thought here, I'd saved something from oblivion, I'd done new work.

But no! There's this site that totally kicks my catalog's ass. Granted, it focuses entirely on the handhelds and not the other toys, but they do the handhelds really well. From this page, you get a link to this page which has a rare prototype for this promised game that never materialized! That's dedication. But meanwhile you can do a google search for "Coleco" and my scan of the catalog is on the first page, right next to handheldmuseum. I don't deserve that!

But this all highlights the cool part: this happens all the time. Instead of there being "the" handheld site, or "the" scanned catalog site, or "the" arcade manual site, tons of this stuff is everywhere. Even when one becomes a "hit" on the aggregate sites, that doesn't preclude the fact that often the information is in tons of places, ranging from easy to rather difficult to suss out.

And beyond that, there's stuff that you might want that, except through randomness, serendipity and coincidence, you will bump into.

For example, here's a scanned book of the week weblog, which is basically a review and background for a scanned book available. Once a week, they've been shoving in these reviews of books, many of them around for months or years on archive.org, but now presented to you to find anew, for the first time. And when you find a book, you find a full book, dozens of scanned pages from all throughout history. Stuff you probably didn't know you would even be interested in. And so it goes.

This is a miraculous time, that we are swimming in all this input. I have my preferences for technology of the 1960s and onward regarding bulletin boards or consumer electronics. But throw a well-scanned turn of the century tome at me and I'll browse that sucker too. Heck, show me a well-scanned anything and I'll probably give it a few minutes of my time.

This is constant, this incoming river of stuff. It's torrential, truly a wall of information and images being scanned and attached to the huge ball of Internet Stuff. Sometimes it gets highlighted, other times it lays dormant for years before someone "discovers" it for a larger audience. I can never hope, in my lifetime, to even begin to even be aware of a small piece of it.

I guess I'll just have to live longer. Good to have a reason!

GET LAMP Teaser Trailer - And YouTube

About a year ago (maybe it was longer, I forget) I was to speak at an event called OSCON about GET LAMP, the documentary about text adventures you may have heard I was working on. I took what I could of the roughly 10 interviews I'd done up to that point, mixed well, and produced a teaser trailer. I played it during my presentation to whatever the reaction was, and then left this thing to languish.

The funny thing is, it captures the sense of what I'm doing with this documentary even better than I expected, so I uploaded it to YouTube and will put it on the main site shortly.

I'm sure you'll have your own opinions about the tone, approach and direction of the trailer, but bear in mind it was done in July of 2006, and also bear in mind that youtube's version is really lacking in detail; considering the original footage is in high definition you can imagine the difference (and will, shortly, when I put it up on getlamp.com). Most striking to me is the second Steve Meretzky shot, where he just stands there looking at you; in the high-def you can see the camera rack focus, bringing him into focus and showing him in great detail. I have to be careful about that, making sure something doesn't lose all meaning when knocked down to standard definition.

Music is Beth Sorrentino, "Beautiful Day". Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial, which means this trailer is licensed similarly. I've gotten a lot of questions about the water; that's Long Island Sound. I'll leave the rest of the questions up to you.

Timing

One of the more tedious but important jobs with regards to my film is that all footage is kept on two hard drives, and additionally burned to two DVD-ROMs. This takes a lot of time but gives me a lot of grab-it options for the footage. Remember that 4 gigabytes of disk space gives me 10 minutes of HD footage, and we see what a mass of space/backup requirement is at stake here; a typical interview I conduct with someone relatively talkative will be about 30-50 gigabytes. On two drives, and two DVDs. Times 12.

While I burn this footage out, it's not too good to excite the machine too much with other tasks. I occasionally do anyway, since I'm here, but often I answer e-mail, do artwork, write weblog entries... you know. Stuff.

I tried the last couple of days to throw some footage together from the clips library I've been building for GET LAMP.

This is not what I did with the BBS Documentary, but things are a little different this time around, if for no other reason than interviews are paced out by the week instead of the day, and I've been trying to live a full life along with doing the shooting, so I don't feel at the end that I missed out on my late 30s. It's a little strange to spend 3 years recounting 30, but that's how it goes and I minimized the life impact this time around.

So what I did last time was shoot ALL the footage, then spend 5 months culling clips out of the footage, and then 3 months editing these clips into episodes. This time around, I've been doing culling while interviewing, so I have a pretty OK clip library so far: 520 passages from 14 of the 50+ interviews. You can do a lot with that, although obviously right now there's a bias across whatever these 14 people said.

So I started throwing like-minded clips together, and I'm reminded, after a couple years since I did this intensely, how important timing is in editing. Like, down to individual frames.

With the Frontalot video, I just synced up 4 layers of him lip-syncing to the song to be able to turn on and off various layers at will. In other words, even though I did have to pay attention to these spans, I could choose half-phrases or middles of words or whatever I wanted and it'd match up; the soundtrack was already done, and these additional video streams were augmenting that. Not so with the footage.

With these clips, I can wait too long to cut and you hear the person breathing for the next word. You can cut too short and the person is right there, in your face, no split-second for the eye to adjust. Knock it over a frame and it's perfect.

It helps that my clips are filled with smart people saying brilliant things. BBS Documentary had that too, but this time, even more than BBS Documentary, nearly every interview is brimming with brilliant statements made within a section of history, theory, implementation and philosophical musing. In many cases, it's obvious I will have to decide among a not-small-set of stupefyingly insightful comments and choose the one that flows, rhythmically, with what comes before it or after it.

Everyone should have my problems.

Dates on this production are slipping, mostly because of finding those last few folks I want in on this, and making sure I don't randomly miss huge names for no reason. A couple names are not interested and while I wish they were, footage has been shot to allow working without them. The amount and variety of folks who are either interviewed or signed up is still quite something, and I have no complaints.

One frame forward, one frame back. I'll get this right.

A Future Possible Project: How to Present

I've had this rattling around for a year or so; I'd like to consider making a video on how to give presentations. I generally (generally being the key word) get good reviews on my talks, and while my specific style of spun yarns and profanity-laced rant might not be the most useful template for any given talk, the general approach I take to my speeches might have use.

I've sat through some pretty horrible speeches; speeches given by friends, by unknowns, by first-timers, and by what are supposed to be hardened veterans of presentation. I've also sat through electrifying speeches and monologues that leave me in a dreamy, energetic daze afterwards. It can go either way, but when it's bad, oh boy is it bad.

I totally understand speeches given to get the presenter into the conference for free; that sort of chicanery is the job of the people choosing speeches to suss out and if the person gives a sub-par presentation, it's up to the organizers if they want to invite that person back to speak again, ever. But if the person up stage honestly and truly wants to present something to the audience, and actually believes they have something new and compelling to present, then a lack of good speaking style is that much more tragic.

I would want it to be video, because it's the visuals of a presentation, even of the presenter, that play a part. If you're not paying attention to visuals, you're essentially doing an audio broadcast and there's not a lot of compelling reason for people to be in the room with you. What I find with the shows I'm involved in are that people don't attend because the recording is more than adequate for them to get the entire "point" of the talk. If the people don't regret missing it, then you've failed as a presenter.

Naturally, my calendar is chock full of day job, documentary, editing and other fun stuff, but maybe if I have time I'll put something together. That is, if people tell me it's worthwhile to do. I'll ask around before I run the camera.

STOP YOU'RE WRECKING IT

Another day, another digg. Waxy's mentioning of my posting of arcade manuals got someone inspired to put it on digg, and then it got enough traction on digg that I provided 24 gigabytes of arcade manual PDFs to 8,500 guests, for a total of 29,000 manuals.

I never approach these with the terror of the webmaster who has an anaemic connection and realizes that he's gotten a horde going through his directories; I put these files up for people to browse and now they're browsing them. Note the difference between this and my take on hot-linking. In the first case, people are now arriving by the thousand to see what I'm offering. In the second case, people are decontextually yanking a file by the thousand as background decoration for their websites.

What fascinates me, and will probably always fascinate me, is when something like this "goes large" and I am face to face with opinions and outlooks entirely foreign to mine. What an opportunity!

Browsing sites that linked to this page, I see incredulity that there are arcade manuals, speculations on the sexuality of people who read manuals, wild-eyed joy that such a collection is out there (there are tons of other arcade manual collections, by the way) and just plain crazy-talk from reaches beyond the stars.

I have to stress, as I have before, that I didn't do the hard work of scanning them, getting the pages aligned, naming the manuals correctly, correlating against different arcade game models. Many people worked together to accomplish this, and all I've done is create a collection online under my textfiles.com site. Other collections abound with these exact manuals, and other sites add even more data than I have (so far). But the wheel of fortune fell on me today, and it warms my face.

Naturally, I wonder if the same will happen for my later projects, but that's a concern for another time.

Maybe the day will come where my every move, every entry posted will be visited upon by a 10,000 browser strong horde, and this will all seem run of the mill. But that's certainly not the case now, and for the people who are checking the rest of my entries to see what the hell else is going on, I say welcome. I hope you stay awhile.

A little update: In point of fact, within 48 hours I had served roughly 61,000 manuals to 14,000 people, for a total of 60.2 gigabytes of arcade manual delight. Thanks, folks! Especially the ones complaining it was "very slow" while they downloaded the entire collection after reading about it on Digg.

Joybubbles

Just a few days ago at DEFCON, in the middle of my speech, I said "If you think you know hacking history and you don't know the name "Joybubbles", then you're wrong."

Joybubbles (he legally changed his name from Joe Engressia later in life) was a phone phreak. And not just a phone phreak, a legendary phone phreak; blind since birth, he could whistle 2600hz tone into the telephone, bypassing the need for any trickery to do so. He was a humorous, fun fellow, one of the big names. And now we've lost him.

Just a few days after my speech, Joybubbles had a heart attack and died in his apartment in Minneapolis. He was 58.

Unlike a lot of figures in history, we are blessed, in our sudden loss, to have a collection of artifacts and recordings of Joybubbles to remember him or learn about him for the first time. He started recording recollections of childhood on a phone line, and called these recordings "Stories and Stuff". I've been keeping an archive here, which is the work of many others who called and recorded them.

Here's some links to get to know him:

• An article that mentions Joybubbles in detail.
• A memory of meeting Joybubbles.
• Short documentary filming of Joybubbles in action, circa 1970s.

He was a good one. I hope everyone takes some time to find out who he was, even if it makes them miss him as much as I do.

Caught Up

This entry was written on August 12th. It's filling the August 10th slot.

The last few weeks of entries were "catch-up", written many days after their "official" date. I had the ideas in various states of readiness and non-readiness, life got complicated, so I fell behind.

I really wanted to keep things to five days a week, so to do that I had to back-fill. It's not pretty but I did it. I hope the entries were of sufficient quality.

I'll do my best not to let this happen again.

Undeveloped

Like anyone who went to film school or liked watching movies, I always harbored a set of "properties" (books or short stories or other written material) that I'd like to make into a film of my own. Two of mine share a similar situation: the play Hackers by Mike Eisenberg and the book The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J. Ryan.

They share a positive and a negative: they were lifelines of artistic justification for an interest in computers that I held, and they both have really fatal flaws.

I saw Hackers because of an article I read about a play being produced that would be about computer hackers. This was absolutely mind-blowing to me at 13 because I couldn't imagine what that would entail. Really, I didn't understand plays much at all either, having gone to a couple local "shows" of various types and not having been at full-scale professional theater much at all. I'm sure my dad dragged me to a few plays or events during this period, but a lot of them are dim memories at best. This, however, was me wanting to go to a play and dragging my dad to one instead.

I should ask him what he thought of this idea, his 13-year-old having to spontaneously see an off-broadway play, but the fact was I'd dragged him deep into New York City for "Pac-Man Day" in recognition of the release of the Atari 2600 pac-man cartridge, so I guess this wasn't entirely a surprise. But still.. a play!

Hackers was mounted along a theater row off-broadway deep in New York City, and my father and aunt came along as I attended an evening performance in what I probably thought passed for theater clothes but which I'll bet looked like I fell out of a laundry hamper. I thought the play was just fantastic; people talking about computer hacker, adventure games, chess playing, Turing machines... this was a play for me; this is what I expected them to be like. I was one happy fellow, and good memories were made that evening.

Similarly, I had picked up a book just a couple years earlier, in the home of my friend Chris. His grandparents, who he lived with at the time, were quite technologically savvy. This was, in fact, the first time and place I ever encountered a BBS; Mt. Kisco NY, in the spare bedroom of his grandparents' home, using an acoustic coupler to call a Dial-Your-Match BBS. Besides the tech, they were also avid science fiction readers (avid anything readers, really), and they had a copy of this book, The Adolescence of P-1, lying around. One afternoon over at Chris' house, I picked it up and read through a lot of it, and was again stunned at the powerful idea of a computer, specifically a computer virus, that would spread itself through networks and seek out its creator. This was heady heady stuff for an 11-year-old, and I never forgot that book.

So both these creations stuck around in the back of my mind as things that, some day, with my requisite million dollars, I could make movies out of. The questions of budget and rights and all the little logistics were another set of problems, but I felt that there was potential here, going for "properties" that nobody else might pick up.

So fast-forward to 1998-1999.

It turns out to be a relative pain in the ass to acquire the script for a play, especially once that hasn't been mounted in a significant amount of time. I don't have any evidence that "Hackers" was ever mounted after its initial run, but I do know the publishing rights were picked up by the Samuel French company, which is where I bought a copy of the script.

Buying an old book, meanwhile was extremely simple in the era of Amazon, where it was just a matter of deciding what amount of money to pay for what quality of book. I think I ended up paying $50 for my particular copy ("like new") and it was pretty nice.

So, in the tail end of the 20th century, I read these two works that had played a major part in several memories of mine through my early teen years. And guess what!

They both fall flat in the third act.

Both are, like I had expected, interesting takes on computers and technology, P-1 especially so considering it was written in 1977. They both put together some cool thoughts on technology, and the virus-as-intelligent-creature take in P-1 is especially great, as is the adventure game sub-plot in Hackers. But by the time we get to the third acts, they both fall apart: the climactic line in Hackers is a cheap knockout, and P-1 nearly becomes incomprehensible at the end.

So I guess I could get the rights and rewrite them, but at that point I'm making the movies in my head, not the ones written on paper. And seriously, I might as well just make up my own stuff, then.

Now, as it turned out, I'm a documentary filmmaker! So I don't have to worry about licensing novels for plots anyway. (Although a lot of documentary filmmakers have made fiction films, to a wide spectrum of success and failure). But my plate's filled for years, so I don't have to worry too much.

Now, if someone was to take these creations and make movies out of them, I'll be the first guy in line at the premiere. But I'll guarantee they'll be pretty radically changed. And I don't want to be the one to change them.

Here's the New York Times theater section review, if you'd like another take on the play. Here's the amazon.com page for Adolescence of P-1, which will serve as good as anything.

Standage

Entry written on August 12th.

How lucky I was to talk with Richard Thieme at a Shmoocon a number of years ago, and to discuss the topic of my talk, which was finding pre-20th century parallels to hacker cons. And how lucky it was that Richard then asked if I'd heard of a book called The Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage. I had not, but I purchased it minutes later online and it was waiting for me soon after I got home.

The Victorian Internet is a look at the history and events of the Telegraph, the morse-code-driven communication over wires that dominated trans-oceanic communication for a number of decades. But more than that, it is a brilliantly arranged historical narrative drawing together threads and parallels to the modern-day Internet, both in discussions of human interaction, commerce, law and most importantly the resulting crash of life before and after this new technology. It reads like a novel and comes off as accurate, with an awful lot of citations and a lack of need to exaggerate that comes from having done actual research. It was brilliant.

To my delight, I have found that Standage continues to write historical books in this vein: The Neptune File (about the rush to claim discovery of the planets Herschel/Uranus and Neptune), The Mechanical Turk (Of automatons, a chess-playing robot, and the nature of human intelligence), and A History of the World in Six Glasses (concerning a tracing of human history based on the beverages consumed). All are wonderful. All are an easy read. And all should dominate the sales charts; books like this make their readers smarter.

My talk at DEFCON at the beginning of this month centered around historical narrative and how deriving information based on narrative is going to be inherently faulty, so better to focus on source materials and objective gathering as best one can. That said, I am entirely happy with quality narratives derived from the source material, providing a linkage for people to read about which itself can be researched from the source material. I feel the same way about people who sort through archives I or others have and do little stories based on some subset of the material; the source material and alternative/additional resources are right there for the initiated, and a delightful candy of story is there for the uninitiated. Winners all around.

Standage is my gold standard; if I think I can write a narrative with his level of quality, I'll have considered what I've done a success. Otherwise, I'm not trying hard enough.

Do not hesitate to buy his books, every one.

TEL

Entry written on August 11th.

It would be unfair to heap another bit of recognition onto YIPL/TAP without pointing out a slight-less-known phreaking magazine called TEL. PDF.TEXTFILES.COM has a collection of the seven known issues of TEL, which I will not hesitate to make clear is a mirror of a collection from the Green Bay Professional Packet Radio group. GBPPR is a strange entity; dedicated to hacking, dismissive of many other groups, and of the opinion that my site is the "best site on the internet". Naturally, I will therefore recuse myself of discussion or judgment of a lot of their website, although I'll state for the record that I lose hours reading it every time I wander by.

TEL (Telephone Electronics Line) hit the ground running with an overview of Traffic Services Position Systems consoles and just went on from there, covering payphone functionality, credit fraud, and interesting codes/numbers throughout the Bell system. You can see a lot of what made TAP famous and interesting in the pages of TEL as well.

After a mere seven issues, the zine was shut down permanently by Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Booooo! Subscribers were also told to destroy all copies of the magazine in their possession; this didn't work out all that effectively. But good try, PT&T.

The only bummer is that some of the scans aren't so hot in the collection; I've seen collections of this magazine go by and as soon as I can purchase one, I'll scan it in for top quality and get that up on the site as a replacement.

As time goes by, I hope more of these little creations show up in my collection. The more the better.

DEFCON 15

Entry written on August 11th.

I could probably stretch post-defcon discussion into a bunch of entries, but let's just go with one big one.

From the Thursday evening of the 2nd of August through to early morning of the 6th, I probably walked 20 miles. You can't get much of anything done in Vegas for any amount of cross-hotel activity without walking a bunch. I stayed at the Wynn Casino and attended Defcon in the Riviera, visited Cesear's Palace and the Mirage and Bellagio and Paris and generally made my way around a lot of locations. Trust me, I got a bunch of miles in there. And so I hurt.

This was the second time DEFCON was held at the Riviera, which is a dump, but on the other hand its got a lot of space and they used this space much better than last year. More talks were near the entrance to the conference area, and there were five tracks of talking. The odds were that you would have two talks you'd want to hear at the same time, but it was a risk they were willing to take. I didn't experience this problem myself, because I don't ultimately go to many talks.

What problem I experienced in droves this time around was time management. DEFCON serves so many purposes for me at once that I simply don't have any time to do anything. I have friends who I only see at DEFCON/Las Vegas, I have events that I want to attend, and I have people who want to talk to me who I don't know who I want to make maximum time for.

It might or might not surprise you to know I have to use a flashcard-like system to remember names to faces; I have a pretty bad visual memory problem so I have to keep track of people who I only see 2 or 3 times a year by keeping a collection of names attached to pictures. So this becomes a problem with people who I met at a previous convention who are now coming up going "remember me?". The thing is, I want to remember you but I am simply not that good at it.

I have fans. It's nice to have fans, as long as they're not fans for the wrong reasons or I start to judge my self-worth based on the existence or non-existence of fans. I can go shopping at my local grocery stores with no harassment, so I am quite happy with my level of fame. And at places like DEFCON and HOPE, people notice figures they've conversed with and read about and so on, so they strike up conversations. The problem for me is that I actually talk to thousands of people a year in e-mail, and so I won't easily remember you that way, and if I've never met you before, I'm not so good at knowing that either. So when someone walks up and talks to me, I appreciate it and like talking, but I also won't know who you are just by osmosis. I'm just not that good at names and faces.

At Shmoocon a while ago, I found out someone had attended Shmoocon just to see me talk. When I found out who he was, I hung out with him at the hotel bar, chatting, for a few hours. I know that if I'd gone to a show just to hear someone, it'd be a great thing to talk with them about the stuff they do and get that much time; I'd really treasure that. So there we go.

So poor planning meant that a combination of friends, fans, commitments and parties ensured I did everything about half as well as I'd have hoped. Next year, I'm going to do my best to juggle all that much better.

I gave a talk, "The Edge of Forever", which was about computer history; I got a nice large room and a few hundred folks (somewhere in the 400-500 range) who sat through most of it. The talk was an hour and a half; it would have been an hour except I threw in a few extra stories to give what may or may not have been a bonus. I was very happy with how it came out, all told. I like it enough to want to publish the notes and write out further ideas on what I was talking about in it, with regards to history, personal narrative and perspective.

Attending other talks at DEFCON is not something I entirely do; I tried to show support for my buddies' talks but more often than not the fuckin' things were packed so tightly that my presence was neither comforting nor necessary. In at least two cases it was a fire hazard! But one theme continued through a lot of the talks I did glance in or sit through: The Slide Ride, where a person puts up slide after slide on some powerpoint or keynote presentation software and then just dully reads off most or all of it to the audience. No sense of timing, no dramatic pauses, no improv based on audience reaction... everybody's locked into a poorly designed amusement ride. Half the time I want to give classes in presentation, although I have set in presentations that utterly and completely kick the ass of anything I'm capable of. But if I'm minor league, at least I'm aware I'm minor league and what I do well or don't do well. Maybe I ought to put my money where my mouth is and do something about it....

Enough about me.

That DEFCON continues to function well at all with over 7,000 attendees is a tribute to its organizing staff; people who don't know what it takes to put one together are inclined to complain about this aspect or another aspect but at the end of the day, nobody was hurt and pain was minimal. That says something for the skill of the people involved in running and maintaining this party year after year. I salute that.

The Hacker Foundation created a "hacker space" in a side room to show what they were trying to accomplish; this I thought absolutely brilliant, and while the version 1.0 they did lacked some aspects of what people might look for, it was quite an incredible 1.0 regardless and I expect 2.0 to be even better.

The hotel, like I said, is a dump, a holdover from "old vegas" that feels like a worn-out-sock and which imparts all the grandeur of a lunch pail full of twinkies. I realize the reasons for DEFCON being there but I doubt I will ever rent another room in that place. It's like having a bed in the back of a convenience store. That said, there's something about those skyboxes.... those little rooms of pleasure and sight over the conference floor just seem to capture my imagination and I love being up there.

It is a rare place indeed where I really do feel that dozens of little stories are playing out simultaneously, tons of parallel locations which are experiencing fully-formed events with many contributors; at DEFCON I feel this all the time. The hundreds of milling attendees are a pleasure for me; I love walking among the crowds, seeing all the smarts, knowing people are having a good time, and envying the youth who walk the hallways when all I could do at their age was dream of such a place existing.

All in all, this was a wonderful time; I wouldn't miss it for anything.

YIPL and TAP

Entry written on August 11th.

Like a healthy, extended walk in the woods, a browse through the TAP/YIPL archives is always good for the soul. I recommend a little jaunt through them about once a year. I shirk away from calling them "The Original Hacker Zine", or "the beginning of it all", because that isn't the case, but in terms of bulletin board system culture, they were pretty influential, with transcriptions of articles from its run appearing on BBSes (often without citation).

If you've not encountered these issues before, then let me say by way of quick introduction that there was a New York City-based pamphlet for the Youth International Party (the Yippies), which became, over the course of time, a photocopied "zine" that blossomed into a sort of general hacking magazine, before ultimately going under and having its audience mostly replaced by 2600 magazine, which continues to this day. In all, roughly 93 issues of this magazine were created in the years 1971-1983.

There's multiple ways to see them; probably the most convenient for the general populace is the PDF version, which compiles pretty much every known issue of YIPL and TAP and even a few flyers and related materials. My copy of this collection is located here (It is also 28 megabytes).

I started on coming up with alternate ways to browse the issues, including this still-in-progress sub-page, which is basically broken. Vertical sheets in a horizontal-screen world is still an annoying, clumsy process, for no good reason.

Variations exist; one of my heroes, Bioc Agent 003, presented this transcribed version of YIPL #1 for people to look at, including attempts at capturing the layout and flow of the original using ASCII.

But what makes this little endeavor so interesting, so worthwhile to click through again and again?

Mostly, it's a combination of how-far-we've-come with a dash of the lost attitude and hubris.

A lot of the early issues are hand-written. Many after that are the product of typewriters. In most cases, you can see the result of hand-assembling/gluing in the strips of print into place. Circuit diagrams are sketched, headlines and reprints show tell-tale black lines of the cutouts. In a world where you can create a picture-perfect, beyond-the-capability-of-1980s-publishing-companies document, just realizing how much manual effort was required is worth the trip.

But more than that is the writing. These are angry screeds in some places, pissed off at the dominance of AT&T, the profiteering of war and the common man, and the repositioning of one's self and technology when the world conspires to use you up. Within a short time, however, everything's up for grabs; TAP presents ways to mess with most anything out there, and the latter-days artifice of textfile and zine, "for informational purposes only" starts to raise its head.

It wasn't always for informational purposes, you see. It was originally to fight a power that looked to be crushing freedom and bilking citizens of their wealth and voice. We were, to some small amount, at war. That much is obvious in the initial issues of this zine.

Later, however, things are more clean-cut. The peace sign is given furtively in between "fitting in". Better to smash the system from the inside, you figure. Pick up an OK paycheck but work peacefully. Cause a little trouble, but deal with the way things are, as best you can.

Obviously I'm reading a tad into the trends of the magazine, but that's part of the gift of it; read it yourself and you'll find your own interesting meanings and roots in it. After all, it's free.

Speaking of which, this collection has been up for sale for years. Decades, really. There's some punk who sells copies of it in the back of 2600. My friends and I used to call it the "2600 Index", because you could figure out the trading value of hackerdom by how much was being charged for this collection. Currently the index seems to be at zero, with no copies being sold. Quick! Dump your shares!

Enjoy the walk through the woods. I highly recommend it.

Arcade Manuals

Entry written on August 10th.

If you were saying to yourself "Now, where can I browse over 1,700 arcade manuals in PDF format?", your prayers were just answered. This is over three gigabytes of manuals, schematics, and general information about arcade machines, scanned in by an anonymous army of dedicated people, and going back up to 30 years.

My collection was previously at around 300, but that initial collection was from a different source, and the filename structure isn't compatible with what I got in my latest set. So I've knocked it to a separate section from the main collection. They are likely doubles, and I'll deal with that in the future.

The collection is one I got from usenet newsgroups months ago, and I just hadn't gotten around to throwing it onto the site. I now have scripts that deal with this sort of stuff quicker, and so here we are. The filename structure of the current set is in what's called "TOSEC Format". TOSEC stands for "The Old School Emulation Center", but at this point TOSEC format covers a ton more than just old-school game ROMs, which is what it was designed for. Here's the document explaining TOSEC format, and since it's not handled by any standards group in the typical fashion, it's subject to some modifications, but also isn't overloaded by nerds trying to break the thing in half to satisfy commercial interests.

I find the TOSEC format really easy to understand. If a filename says "Mario Bros [Schematics] [English]", you know what you're getting. Most of my stuff is in "8+3" format, that is, eight characters, a dot, and then three more characters. I wish TOSEC was available for this other stuff as well, but we do what we can with what we have.

Arcade manuals are this fascinating thing to me; as a kid I can count on one hand the times I came into contact with one, and somehow I thought they held all the secrets to the game. If I could just understand what these crazy schematics meant, I'd beat the game handily, truly master it.

I can even remember my first manual. You never forget your first manual; mine sits on a shelf just behind my head in my office. It was for Asteroids, and I swiped it out of an abused, dying, broken Asteroids machine at a dude ranch my dad brought his kids to. The back of the machine was open, agape, and I saw the little book on the floor of the machine and thought there it is, the key to mastering this machine. So somehow I got it into my jacket and home in a suitcase without dad noticing.

Now, of course, one merely has to grab the manual off my site; the dude ranch has been completely stricken from the equation.

What shocked me, going through the manual back then, was how it was possible to set up the coin return for different currencies, and the fact that you could manipulate dip-switches on the machine to make it run differently. This should have been obvious, but there you go, it blew me away at the time.

Enjoy the manuals, watermark free, ready to go. Now let's make those games work!

You Are Not Your Thing

Entry written on August 9th.

Philosophy Chat Time. These never go well for weblog entries, but it can't hurt.

I have a lot of friends who show me stuff they've worked on, or intend to send out there, or which is out there and they want me to review. I get sent a lot of stuff from my friends because they want me to see it, and I'm always open to checking stuff out.

One problem is that if something isn't so good, I let them know. I'm not entirely into the whole "encouragement" thing where you lie and say something is good and it isn't. I think this isn't being a good friend. I'll certainly give my reasons why I think it's not so good and what I'd do to improve it, of course. But still, it can be a bit surprising to some of my buddies when something shows up and I say it's sub-par.

The difference of opinion in here is whether your thing is you. I don't think it is. Your thing is something you made and it's likely it reflects a lot of what you are, but it also reflects how you go about making things. And sometimes that's not so hot.

My one thing I will do if I don't like a thing is to not mention it at all, that is, not officially come down on it anywhere. I figure that's the least I can do. So perhaps that's an error or slight of omission, but we're talking about friends here.

The flip side of this is that when I see something I like, I really go off about it, sometimes for weeks. I shove your creation in the face of everyone I see, I write reviews and promote it, and I constantly throw people towards the item if I think they'll be improved by it. I do this all the time, serving as some go between between neat people and neat crap.

I've sometimes had to deal with the cold shoulder for a few weeks or months, but I'd rather that be the case than for someone to walk out into the wide world thinking a project has my seal of approval and completely support. And when people hear me praise something of theirs, they know it's the real deal.

This has been another Philosophy Chat.