ASCII by Jason Scott

Giving you the finger, Healed

Everyone who wrote to me when I announced my finger nearly being severed will be happy to know that the finger has 100% healed and you couldn't tell in a million years that the finger ever got stuck in a fan. The nail's entirely back and the whole thing has grown back like nothing ever happened. Score one for luck.

Actually score a billion for luck, because I've had more ludicrous close shaves, more cases of waking up driving, more cases of stepping away from a thing that's then imploded or gone killdozer than I really deserve, statistically. I acknowledge this and let you know that if I end up perishing in some absolutely ludicrous fashion, it will merely be the one fatal false step in what was a towering pile of non-fatal false steps. The house wins, but I broke even most of the time.

This isn't some suicide note or anything, just mentioning my appreciation of my good luck. It's good to be aware that you don't necessarily "deserve" a break, especially when it comes at the end of spectacularly risky behavior.

And I can vouch that I am much slower and methodical about the process of loading USB drives into a cabinet with a fan in it.

Grr Guy

I love Grr Guy. Grr Guy is awesome.

Grr Guy's messages are (usually) short, snappy and to the point. If you could translate them from whatever language Grr Guy writes in to useable english, it'll look like this:

  TO: Jason Scott
FROM: Grr Guy

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Now, granted, Grr Guy can sometimes take many paragraphs to say this, or just a few lines, but this is the gist of it.

Grr guy has to be considered separate from Wronged Guy or Guy I Called a AssMunch, people who I am specifically targeting or bothering or otherwise in conflict with. No, Grr Guy actually has very little direct interaction with the subject at hand. It's not about being mistreated by me; it's about being incensed and not approving. Disapproval is Grr Guy's fuel for his anger engine, which he is revving very menacingly at me.

BBS days had less Grr Guys simply because the barrier to entry was higher; you were calling a BBS and leaving messages and sending one directly to the person meant that you had to be, with few exceptions, a member of that BBS, had been doing stuff on it, was a part of it. Like I said, Grr Guy's about disapproving something he has no direct pain from. That was pretty rare, back then.

But now, you can go to a website, read a paragraph, and bang out some half-assed Grrrr within seconds. You don't have to know anything about the paragraph-writer, the site, or even the subject being discussed. Just drop a bomb and move onto the next waiting target. It's very easy, very simple, and the resultant waves of response don't really wash over you because Grr Guy is Gone.

When I get one of my little prominence bursts, Grr Guys come out from all sorts of places, and the next thing I know everything's up for grabs. The result, often, is a decision to ignore all incoming Grrs until they're gone.

This is sort of a mistake. Sort of.

Even though the signal to noise ratio is like running your ipod through a degaussing magnet, there are very occasional bursts of useful information in the pool of Grr. One of the things I love doing is browsing a slashdot story at "show me every last bit", because sometimes down in the sewer of anonymous assery is a real insight that's simply been pounded down into obscurity by overzealous on-topic cops.

Unfortunately, the method of deployment for a Grr and for a totally-nails-it, cut-out-the-bullshit assessment is the same. People make brilliant insights in short, snappy writings, often doing so with a dash of insult and a hint of dismissal. This is the same container as a Grr but the payload is precious. Devoid of context, missing the vital personality-cult veneer friends and fans make, someone is potentially going to give you some really good advice, although delivered with all the panache and love of a claw hammer. But that advice, it's vital! Or it's a Grr.

For all his annoyances, for all his propensity to be a time waster, I really do like Grr guy. I can hear him late at night, disapproving, dismissing, running away.

Grrrrrrrr.

The Last Mile (Twice Over)

FiOS was installed into my home today.

This augments my T-1 line, which is where a lot of my other servers not handled by outside hosting goes. When you go to cow.net, or this weblog, you're yanking from the T-1. FiOS will up my current download speed from 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps, and upload speed from 1.5Mbps to 5Mps.

I am not 100% fantastically happy to be utilizing Verizon's service, but they're the dominant monopoly and I went for the one year signup. If they blow, they go. And believe me I'll know.

I see gabillions of "I got FiOS Installed" weblog postings out there, including this excellent one from Dan Bricklin, so I won't fill your screen or time with yet another one, even if I thought I could make it "funny". My installer is on the ball, friendly, young and knows his crap. Hooray for that; it harkens me back to the early days of my phone life and meeting the Bell engineers who were on top of stuff.

So, if you find anything slow this evening, blame me as I begin downloading the Internet.

Movieland and Machine475

When I was a student at Emerson College, I worked at and studied near the campus FM radio station (WERS, 88.9). The radio station took up all of a floor in one of the multiple interconnected buildings. The combination of doing some stuff there and being in the building meant I went by their entrance, often.

At the end of each semester or so, WERS would throw out dozens of records. Most were freebies sent by record companies to get played at college radio stations. A few were sets dropped off by hopeful artists trying to get their name out. They were usually scribbled on, or marked up. They were also often notched, because then the record company could report them as "damaged/discarded", and then not pay the artists for the distributed music.

ANYWAY.

I, being who I am, would scarf up way too many of these freebie discards, and one of the discards was a strange album called "Movieland". The cover was almost pure white except for the name of the band (in Arial Bold or thereabouts) and three people, two guys and a girl, one guy in bright colors and the other in a prim suit. The back of the album was similarly strange, with a list of credits (as one would find in the inner sleeve of a CD) and another odd photo of the three people. It went on the stack with the rest.

So when I finally got it back to the dorm and played it, I was quite struck by it. It turned out to be a combination of pop-synth music, and sample collage! This, for someone who loved Art of Noise, was a big deal; another cool band with off-kilter sample stuff!

And off-kilter it was. While some of the music was not out of place on top-40 radio, other pieces were almost horrific, with cries for help and sobbing punctuated by upbeat crescendos of drumbeats and chords. It was fun, weird stuff and it stuck with me. I couldn't even tell you one other album I got from the discard pile.

So, years later, it's 1995 and I own cow.net, my beloved bovine-themed ISP, and on the site I can put anything I want.

So I put up a Movieland Fan Page.

Very basic stuff. I put up a scan of the album, a transcription of the credits, and whatever meager information I could dig up on the members. They didn't have long pedigrees that I could find online at the time, and the names weren't all that easy to find. Interestingly enough, some fonts are now huge because I made the site in a text editor on a Sun 3/280 in 1995, utilizing the Netscape browser circa 1995. Not quite as compatible, these days.

So then I left it. I had my little fan page up, I was happy. Occasionally, like, every few years, I'd get some drib of information and off it would go into the page, or I'd find a link somewhere, and add it. It was way in the background. I'm sure in the last 12 years it's been up, I've spent a total of 5 hours on it.

So what's interesting to me is how it functioned as a beacon, a catch-all.

As search engines got more and more of a grip on things, my page got bundled up into them. As Altavista flattened the world wide web, turning any insanely-addressed page into a findable piece of information, so too did this put me in front of the face of people who were actually looking for Movieland.

Bear in mind that in 12 years, only one person has ever contacted me about the page, purely as a fan. So there's your one-to-one.

But in fact, I was contacted by one of the recording engineers, a person who knew one of the band members, and ultimately by a student of one of the members... who lived in Massachusetts! This was Richard Lewis, who was one of the songwriters and vocalists of Movieland.

So, I contacted him. And he wrote back!

It turned out that one of his students (he teaches at Salem State College) had told him about it some time ago, but his letter to me didn't get to me for whatever reason. So he'd known about it too.

He answered some questions for me about the band and the outcome of it (short form, he did some work with the eventual co-member, who got them hooked into the "industry", they did the album and later a few gigs and then RCA dropped them). And he also mentioned he had a new band, called Machine 475. (Warning: Plays Music)

Machine475, really, is basically Movieland 3.0. It utilizes better equipment, but his vocals are in there, along with a whole range of other cool influences and co-writers making it even more engaging and dynamic. And now they're doing live gigs!

I went to one last night, limping with gout and woozy from the medicine I've been taking. I got some good shots, although I used entirely the wrong lens.

The full album is here.

The songs were great, live. It's heavily pre-programmed but with a collection of ingredients mixed onstage between the members. Richard Lewis' wife played the harp for three songs, and he played the Theremin besides a range of samples and keyboarding, as well as vocals.

In between sets, I introduced myself and he knew immediately who I was. And was delighted I'd shown.

I mention all this because of the serendipity of things, finding this album completely randomly, and then a few years later I meet one of the members. My web page, going from a side effort, gains notoriety and linkage into the world, introducing hundreds to this band (I've seen the hits go up and down over the years). It's all very fun, very exciting.

And has a great beat.

Flash

So, here's an example of how I archive without utilizing, you know, me.

4chan.org, which is a popular image posting board, has a sub-board in which people post flash animations. All the time. 24 hours a day. Many are funny and many are disgusting and some are sublime. They repeat often and occasionally good ones are turned into "shock" versions that go horribly wrong and basically every thing you can do under the sun ends up going by there.

I used to go out and hunt down flash animation collections because I found them fascinating (when done right) and because you'd grab a little file (if it was done right) and you'd see something amazing (if it was done right).

Well, anyway, the page that 4chan runs is here. I don't suggest clicking on anything from work or home. I suggest having a teenage runaway click on it from a truck stop using a stolen computer while you're safely thousands of miles away and ideally have never met the runaway. I understand these optimal circumstances cannot always be easily met.

So, I wrote a script that downloads all the flash animations uploaded. And deletes already-grabbed ones. And puts them where I can do sorting (headings include MUSIC VIDEOS, VIDEO LOOPS, ANIME LOOPS, EPICS and so on).

I've been doing this all year.

I now have 9,000 of them.

What do I do with them? Well, I have a directory with the best of what I've seen gone by, and that always represents amusement to me. I send along amusing ones to friends. I study techniques in the more epic ones. And so on, all the stuff one does with artwork they acquire.

Is there bad stuff in here? Oh, oh yes. This is a completely unrestricted board, and even more critically, they do delete stuff that's way way way over the top, and my script downloads them before they're deleted. As a result, I can assure you, there are real actual flash video files in which you see actual animals die. I do not recommend seeing them. I don't even recommend seeing them for myself; I have these files in my collection mostly so my doubler can get rid of them immediately. They end up getting names like "happybirthday.swf" and "calculator.swf", because, as you know, people are jerks.

That unpleasantness aside, I've really seen some amazing works. People work hard on good animations, and if you use Flash properly (just like PDF), you can make simple, well-working and smooth-flowing animated works that border on broadcast-quality art and animation. I hold out for those.

So yeah; if you were wondering if anyone was collecting 4chan (and other) flash animations, I'm your point man. 9,000 of them, totalling over 12gb.

And now you know.

Some Random, Unsorted Thoughts on Sorting

A few people, when I recently talked about the new hard drives I bought, asked me about how I sort things, since they have absolute tons of random files as well. Totally understandable, and I'll happily talk about it, but I have to warn you that I don't do anything according to any known code or formatting. I do what works for me.

If nothing else, I have to stress the most important rule, which I picked up, from all places, AEleen Frisch's book "Essential System Administration". In her book, she tells an anecdote, which I will now tell to you.

"I learned about the importance of reversibility from a friend who worked in a museum putting together ancient pottery fragments. The museum followed this practice so that if better reconstructive techniques were developed in the future, they could undo the current work and use the better method. As far as possible, I've tried to do the same with computers, adding changes gradually and preserving a path by which to back out of them. "

A little white-hot cube of brilliance, that is. And that's the #1 thing: any methods I provide or come up or which you do must be ones that, down the road, you can completely undo as better technology and techniques become available. Specific to the sorting of files, this means I don't kill off compilations, delete metadata, undo ISOs, or otherwise split apart that which can't be immediately unsplit. I also, whenever possible, try to keep things together that were always together. In all cases, it's because as time goes on, things get better.

I have a FreeBSD file server using samba to allow my Windows box to interact with the hard drives. This is important because it lets me choose utilities that work in Windows as well as scripts and applications that work in FreeBSD/Linux. So I get whatever does the job best.

You can't survive, once you go past a few tens of thousands of files, without some sort of doubles checker. I use a freeware program called CloneSpy as well as some Perl scripts that find duplicates. I actually have a version of the perl script that always deletes the newest files that are doubled; this lets me run it automatically as needed and kill off the redundant newcomers.

I am always erring on the side of "get it again" if I can't recall if I downloaded anything. As a result of that, I have a lot of doubled data; I just found recently that I had over 40gb of redundant data collected on 15 hard drives across three machines. That's a lot of downloading the same stuff. But better that than the sad keening I get from people who can't believe that yyysite.com has gone under and nobody kept a copy. I keep a lot of copies.

So first, I split stuff into generic massive folders. In my case, it's IMAGES, MOVIES, AUDIO, WEBSITES, APPLICATIONS, and DOCUMENTS. I acquire something, and throw it into one of these massive headers. That's good enough sorting for my needs, on the spur of the moment. At least it's generally there.

Underneath each one are arbitrary collections. So, for DOCUMENTS, I have sub-folders like MANUALS, MAGAZINES, BOOKS, and so on. Under MOVIES we have sub-headings like MUSIC VIDEOS, MUSICAL EVENTS, PRESENTATIONS, TECHNICAL DEMOS, CAMERA DEMOS. I built each one up when I had a collection of movies that would fill such a directory. As you can see, these are arbitrary. Is something a technical demo or a camera demo? Is it both? I choose one, randomly.

Under DOCUMENTS/BOOKS I will likely have thousands of documents representing books (and textfiles and PDFs and so on). So, if it starts getting big, I add subfolders under THAT like POSTERS, FICTION, TECHNICAL, SCIENCE, HAM RADIO, and so on. Each one gets a bunch of books.

Now, you would likely split things up differently, and we would probably disagree on what goes into TECHNICAL and what goes into SCIENCE. And indeed, sometimes I will yank something out of one folder and put it elsewhere.

But what I'm doing in all this is reducing the size of any given directory. Instead of having to stare, dumbly, at a multi-thousand-file data dump that I can barely get though the "A"s without glazing over, I have a few trees I can browse in.

We get into an advantage of my personality, which is that I have an unnatural attraction to classification and sorting. I will sit for hours and hours and hours, taking a big pile and adjusting it into dozens of smaller piles, arranged along a hierarchy. I do this all the time, both on my computer and in my office and in a bunch of other locations. (I straighten places I visit, for example.) So for me, this whole approach works because I have so much fun sorting it.

Now, and this is important (and I've mentioned this before), what is going on with this data is that it is all STATIC. That is, as opposed to dynamic. This stuff has a specific aspect about it, that is, once I grab "it", "it" is basically done as far as my interaction with it. I might read it or look at it, but "it" stays the same. This works for movies, documents of a collected nature, music, and so on. I have it and that's that. So this data is all kept in one place.

In other folders, I have more dynamic stuff, like e-mail I've sent, documentary in-process stuff, raw footage, work documents, and so on. This stuff is still being worked with, still being engaged. So it doesn't make ANY sense to put it on this static location. I might, if it strikes me, put a backup folder on the same drive as the static folder, but that's simply for redundancy, not because it should be there. I'm basically piggybacking on the infrastructure already there, like leaving my valuables at work because work is unusually protected or secure.

That said, once my dynamic stuff becomes static (new job, documentary is complete), then it becomes static and is shoved on the drive as needed.

So this, in a very simple nutshell, is how I approach my data. I do not pretend it would work for everyone, and I'm not overly interested in hearing about improvements to my system. It morphs, adds and deletes ideas. But for now, that's how the terabyte storage is split up. And I tell you, I can get an idea in my head (where's that podcast I wanted? Where's that old website with the cool pictures I saved?) and I can get to it within a very short time, sometimes a few seconds. That's good enough for me.

Gout

Another day, another gout attack. These things are fantastic.

Gout manifests itself in many ways, in hugely variant amounts of pain or discomfort. For me, I have a range of situations I go through with my gout that makes it especially interesting. Specifically, my left elbow swells up, which lets me know the fun's coming. Then, my left knee starts to swell. Initially, it's not a big deal, and I limp a little, but then it swells to the point that you can no longer see any kneecap, and then I basically can't move.

So, I end up propped in front of a computer or on a couch, kind of lumped there, with enough pain that I can't quite concentrate on things. That's been the last couple of days.

This, as I mentioned previously, motivates me to want to really get stuff done when I return to normal. And return I will. Just not today.

Fred Fish's Quiet Goodbye

Fred Fish died in April of this year, many months ago. Research into my previous weblog entry on raytracing caused me to discover this.

When someone like Fred Fish dies, there isn't that sort of reverberating echo throughout the world that a standard-issue celebrity might achieve. This is the price paid for doing something good but not then following it up with a series of infamous-enough actions or projects that your name lives in infamy and your death even more so.

No, Fred Fish merely did some really great stuff for the Amiga and then went on to do some great (but not leader-oriented) stuff in computer programming and then he died, at age 54.

Fred was an archiver and organizer, like myself. In his case, it was Amiga shareware. As shareware became available, Fred would assemble them onto floppies, archived and described, and then make them available. They were called the "Fred Fish Disks", or sometimes the "Fish Disks". Just looking for his name will get you lists like this one. Basically, if you were looking for stuff for your Amiga, it passed through Fred's hands. Fred worked for years on this, creating over a thousand of these floppies from the usual BBS morass of files, making it that much easier to find stuff.

There's an impulse I have these days to go and interview someone, and their death and my not meeting them means that interview would not happen, but I don't think that would have been overly relevant here. Fred was a collector, and he shared his collecting with others, and the world was better for it. I know I benefited from his years of effort and I know many, many others did too.

Thanks, Fred.

The Render Junkie

A long time ago, I was a render junkie. I got better.

Like a lot of people, my real introduction to Raytracing as a concept came in the form of the Amiga Juggler, a had-to-be-impossible animation created by Eric Graham that was doing some sort of amazing trickery with graphics and reflections that were well beyond anything I'd seen before. Well, more accurately, I had seen stuff like this before, but it was off in the realm of however-they-do-movies, stuff like the Tron films and Juggler Adam Powers. This was stuff that people could be using most anything to accomplish, but the Juggler that I saw was being done on my Amiga, and I simply could not fathom that.

As an example of the disposability of graphics, you might look at this animation with a weary eye and conclude it is simplistic, easy-to-pull off and no great shakes. But at the time, I do assure you, it was a miracle. Specifically, the reflections of the glass balls are a miracle, while the rest of it is merely astounding beyond normal measure. Raytracing, you see, was one of those innovations that far outstripped my own abilities and understanding, yet its output was obvious and fascinating. You could tell me that you'd mathematically constructed a model for simulating rays of light as they would appear to bounce around a scene and therefore could create highly realistic and accurate images, but I wouldn't really understand how you would do that. I suspect I still don't. Others, naturally, have an innate ability to understand all this; one of my heroes Drew Olbrich not only wrote ray-tracers for fun and learning but even did one with a calculator and markers, which is up there with the kind of magic that sends you immediately to hell.

If my salad bar of superlatives seems over the top, this is really how raytracers and the concept of them excite me.

Somewhere after the explosion of the Amiga Juggler, came DKBtrace, a command-line raytracer for the Amiga written by David K. Buck and which dropped, into my waiting hands, the ability to actually do raytracing. Bear in mind, of course, that raytracing under these circumstances might seem a bit strange. Without a graphics interface, all scenes and lights and everything else were pure textfiles. Here's how you'd make a red sphere:

      OBJECT
         SPHERE <0 0 3> 1 END_SPHERE
         TEXTURE
            COLOUR Red
         END_TEXTURE
      END_OBJECT

I assure you, a person who is motivated enough can put up with and learn anything. Being given the tools with which to accomplish something wanted beyond all measure, no matter how strange the tools, is a minor hurdle. I learned the arcane DKBtrace language and how to do light sources (you created a sphere and colored it what was needed and then declared it a light source) and all the rest of it, and I could raytrace before I turned 20.

That said, bear in mind that rendering a 320x200 image on an Amiga 1000 was an overnight, 8 hours+ commitment. The system was doing a lot of calculation to generate these images, and it taxed the system completely. And sometimes it would crash. Still, of course, I immediately shot for the moon and wanted to do a movie on it.

My movie, which I haven't given much thought to in the last 15 years, involved having shopping carts recreating a dance scene from West Side Story. I don't even know how I expected to accomplish this, but I figured, probably reasonably so, that by the time I got one aspect of the approach down (making the shapes, doing the test renders), technology would slowly increase to the point that I would either be able to get what I wanted or know somebody who did.

I did some basic work with florescent lights (huge rectangles, add width, color white, add second rectangle, color gray) and with making shelves of products, and so on. Bear in mind, we're talking weeks, with the computer left to "render" out my test models and other items while I walked around the streets of Boston in the 1990-1991 period. A very strange time.

However, more critically, as I got into the Internet (pre-web version) and was finding myself on UNIX boxes, I made the delightful discovery that DKBtrace had been ported to UNIX! Not only that, I loaded up some of my data files, and they worked, and not only did they work, but they worked fast. A UNIX box could render these images in less than an hour, and do it in the background (as this was my inspiration to learn about the "&" backgrounding command in UNIX), and have it waiting for me the next time I logged in.

So there is this period of time in my life, going from around 1990 to 1993, when I am a complete and utter rendering junkie. What I mean by that is that I would beg, borrow and steal my way onto any machine I could find, anything with a unix account and an ability to compile, and I would upload DKBtrace (and its later incarnation, POVray, compile it, and then start sucking up the CPU cycles. And again, this is not minor computation I was doing, especially as I jammed things up to 640x480 images. We're talking one of the most active processes on a machine, easily noticeable, a hostage situation for the processor, making my images.

I'd start out rendering one of the default images, just to get a handle on how powerful the processor was. One of my favorites was this pac-man image done by Ville Saari, because you got this wonderful reflection-filled creation and based on how many minutes it took to render, you knew exactly how good a machine you'd snagged.

I have this great memory of visiting Clarkson University related to my online game for a party, and hanging with a guy, and then finding out he had access to a bunch of UNIX machines. "Oh, REALLY," I said, like an drunk finding out your dad had a liquor cabinet downstairs. Next thing I knew, I was on a bunch of boxes, just rendering like a maniac, drinking in the fast CPUs, pulling in the reflections, making those machines my little slaves.

Like I said, I got better.

I'm not quite sure why I stopped, but I did. I still visit the POVray Hall of Fame, and love going to Pixar movies and still go out of my way to see the computer-generated films even if a lot of them suck. The love is there. But I guess it's similar to why I don't work on videogames anymore; too many people with too much more time than me doing way too much cooler stuff. "Core Competency", that easily-thrown-out term by a million middle managers, applies here. It's not where I'm really good at things and so many people are kicking ass. So I don't.

In the middle of my work at Focus Studios, the game startup I spent my 26th year at, there was a need to create a mock-up computer animation of a game being worked on. Two months went into that, utilizing 3D Studio max and textures in Photoshop and so on. I thought it was very good, what came out the other end, but I don't have much record of it. What I was struck by, at the time, was how much easier things were. Graphical Interface, render times, choice of textures, reflectivity... it was all slick and easy compared to my earlier days, strung out on CPU cycles and traced rays. I think that was the last time I really did much in the way of 3D graphics work that was anything like my misspent early 20s. I do miss that, the waiting for the picture to render, the anticipation that I got things right, and the dim glow of reflected metal in what I ultimately produced.

I miss it very much. Like any recovered junkie.

Not a Frame

I didn't record a frame of film. It was a roaring success.

I mention this because the whole reason I work the way I do on my films is to specifically avoid the kind of disposable relationships and interaction with others that plague a lot of professional productions. I maintain the goal of having nobody regret having been interviewed or dealing with me, during my documentaries. Of course, this is never 100% the case but the resultant percentage where people are unhappy are usually because of one of two reasons:

• They thought I was making a different documentary than I was.
• They agreed to be interviewed without really understanding what that meant.

So one of the ways I avoid these problems is to give folks warning about my coming in with camera and questions, and talking to them, if not extensively, at least once or twice beforehand. My experience and rule of thumb, for example, is that if you interview someone within a week of them hearing of your film, it's probably going to go pretty badly. Probably the biggest misunderstanding is thinking I can do the filming in a local restaurant... followed by not understanding the the interview is on camera. It just leads to heartache.

So I spent all of today driving 230 miles, to meet twenty people and record none of them. Of course, my camera, lights and other stuff was in my car, and I'd flown it all from Boston to be at the ready, but it was never brought out, never used.

Instead, I talked. I talked about my production, about the community I was hanging with. I was talked to about interesting events, books to read and research and about various details. I'll be heading to the location again, a month later, a little more money spent.

But instead of focusing on the cost, it's about doing things right. I lose some opportunities here and gain others. I do know, however, that nobody was used and the resulting footage will be real and honest.

I mention all this because people sometimes might see the result of my work and wonder both how I get people to talk like they do, and what my methods are. They might surmise I spring surprises on people or mislead them. I do not.

So lacking not a shot at all, my documentary will still benefit. Sometimes that's how it benefits the most.

To PhreakNIC

I head to PhreakNIC Thursday morning, flying down and sticking around until Monday morning, then back home. After this, it's off to Atlanta for a weekend, then the west coast for two weeks, and likely Kentucky, as well as Chicago. Yes, this is almost all to do with my little film.

I put off the pain until it wasn't feasible to anymore. Now I'm taking it on. Wish me well.

Love in the Time of Two Terabytes

I purchased two terabytes of disk space yesterday, as one might buy a loaf of bread or a magazine off a rack. For roughly $500, I had two boxes, each containing a disk drive with 1 terabyte of raw space. This translated to roughly 960 gigabytes of disk space when I formatted them into my system.

They function as a mirror, synchronized two times a day, allowing me the freedom of committing an action on one and not having it on the other, such as whole-scale deletion or misdirection of files. So these two terabytes function as a much more robust single terabyte.

This new partition, mountable via Samba to m video editing and web browsing machines, holds static items. These are the things I download or acquire, the stock in trade of data for a lot of my disk usage outside of the editing. I see something, I grab it. I desire many of some thing, I torrent it. A foolish rube puts something for download of questionable wisdom but great popularity, and I archive a copy, marking its context and storing it away for a rainy day that may never come. Surprisingly enough, that day sometimes does.

Much of what I collect is the digitization of others' works, works that took months or years to create. Weeks to scan and digitize. Minutes for me to download. Seconds for me to store.

This has yanked a lot of data from a lot of disparate locations I had, letting me team up collections of music, movies, websites and scans into one understandable and classifiable place. It's a wonderful thing to have.

Within 20 hours, I had filled this new drive pair up to 70%. By late tonight it will likely be at 90%. And my online collections will be right there, waiting for me, when it amuses or excites me to see it.

It's a wonderful time.

Thank you so much, Jimmy

I've been very good, haven't I? It's been months since I mentioned Wikipedia on here in any amount. That's on purpose. It gets old. I sound one-note. I'd rather be known for doing stuff than bitching about how others do stuff.

But I did want to say something, because sometimes I'm driving and I grip the steering wheel tighter, or I'm working on something and my face gets redder. Just a little wave of anger, a little passing torrent of pissed-off. I should get it out.

I wouldn't care so much about criticizing Wikipedia if I didn't see such potential in the approach. If I didn't think that, at the core of it, there was such an amazing potential for goodness to come out, and then to see it not be that, I wouldn't give Wikipedia a second thought. I don't give sites like Everything or H2G2 much of my attention because they're cute and all but I don't actually get excited thinking about them. If they're run well or not well, this doesn't affect my life all that much.

But Wikipedia does. Wikipedia sends tons of links my way. People have taken material at great handfuls from my works and put it, wholescale, on articles without attribution. They are in my face constantly when I do searches. I get to watch tons of people link to the Wikipedia Article something as the sum total of their explanation to a newbie or uninformed compatriot. I can't get away from it.

So every once in a while I browse it. I browse it for things I couldn't possibly have my life affected about if it was entirely wrong, so that basically means I use it to browse comic book plots and.... well, basically comic book plots. You could vandalize the hell out of the comic book plot entries and big deal, I now got my Plastic Man history wrong, woop-de schnoz.

And when I browse it, I remember why I hate how it actually works. And what I hate the most is the notability debate.

I don't mean just hate it, like you hate how you missed the train, or hate a food that tastes horrible to you. I mean loathe it, loathe it like nothing I can remember in my adult life. A long time ago, someone launched into a multi-month terror campaign against me, calling me on all my phone lines (including ones not assigned to me) to tell me he was waiting near my house with a shotgun to kill me, tapping my phone lines (from within his job in the phone company) and then calling me later and using details of the tapped conversations to threaten me further. Eventually, friends of his blackmailed me for hundreds of dollars to stop the campaign (which did stop immediately). I hate that guy, and his friends.

But I hate the notability debate more than that.

The notability debate is this:

Obviously, Wikipedia can't have an article on every single thing that everybody creates for it, because sometimes people make redundant crap, make crap nobody else can even verify (list of things in my dorm room), or crap that doesn't actually exist ("On the other side of Saturn is Basar, a moon in the shape of a unicorn"). Thus, there are procedures in place on Wikipedia to handle these situations. If someone puts a totally fictional or utterly unverifiable entry into Wikipedia, then there are deletion "discussions" that take place about them. The discussions range from utterly brilliant to pants-on-head retarded, depending on the phase of the moon and the popularity of the subject or even the personality of the party initiating the deletion "discussion". At the end of this, if the fictional/unverifiable item is deemed to be just that, it is deleted out of the wikipedia database (actually, it's simply marked unbrowsable).

If the entry is considered to be redundant or unable to stand on its own, then it is often merged or "redirected". An example might be an entry on pumpkin seeds, which might be a short entry, which becomes a single paragraph in the "pumpkin" entry. Attempts to look up "pumpkin seeds" are redirected to the pumpkin entry. The discussion over whether an article can stand on its own or be a small part of another begins to get heated because instead of focusing on it being a mere classification discussion, it becomes a worthiness or value discussion. By the way, there's more than enough information on pumpkin seeds to warrant a separate article.

These value discussions are cancer. They infest Wikipedia everywhere; instead of being about how to fit in the maximum amount of information while still maintaining accessibility and consistency and quality, they become about what "deserves" to be in Wikipedia. You know, the honor to be bestowed.

Among the mutations of the cancer is the aforementioned notability. In the notability discussion, Wikipedia is thought of as a high-water-mark, where only items, persons and entities that would normally acquire collated information and the need for information of a certain level should be in Wikipedia. The alternative is thought of, among a portion of users, as an untenable quagmire of unmaintainable slag. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, you see, and should hold encyclopedic standards. Never mind that it's not an encyclopedia and has never been able to maintain that facade properly; at the end of the day you shouldn't expect to be reading articles in Wikipedia that have no encyclopedic value. Well, unless it's lists of porn stars who appeared in mainstream films. Or a list of fictional guidebooks. Or Brainfuck.

I can cherry-pick shit all day; obviously there are now millions of articles to choose from. Some of them are completely out of the realm of significant to the vast majority of humans; in fact, a lot of them probably share this classification. But they mean enough to people to want to write out entries and maintain them. And improve them, and fight the inevitable grey-gooing that occurs to a lot of Wikipedia articles by bot, incompetence and hostility. These items exist. They are classifiable. They are information.

But the notability cancer makes it simple enough for a do-gooder or person looking for brownnoser points to come along, delcare a subject "not notable" and shift the resultant process into one of defending or detracting the article. And make this clear: they detract not only the article but the subject matter.

Go spend time on this page. Specifically, you will need to browse over to the daily list of defendants brought before the High Court of Wikipedia. Here are the 105 discussions opened yesterday.

First, ignore the actual discussions. Click on the headers, the actual articles being discussed. Go browse them, see the weeks or months of work put into them. See ones that are a few scant lines and a bunch that are basically fully formed.

Then go back to the discussions.

Watch the arguments. Watch how "notability" becomes the core discussion the vast majority of time. Keep an eye out for how many times someone not only dismisses the notability of the subject but the subject itself. Watch the times when someone who actually cares about the subject stands up for it, and the debate becomes whether the subject itself is worthy to be in Wikipedia. Note the fear that if one of "this type" gets in, many more will follow. In rare occasions the subjects or experts in the subject show up, and then the real knives come out.

What is the fear here? Why is there concern that an article maintained for months on end (go check the history of an article and see how long it has been around) by many different people who obviously thought it worthy enough to stay will somehow infect the Wikipedia collection with its obscurity? When did the classification of information become an incredible black art that only a few could fathom? Where is the effort obviously being sprayed down the well in writing these articles redirected to classify them?

Once, the internet was considered such a powerful new technology and such an expensive experiment, that the idea of it going for any information outside of the core values of scientific and academic spheres was not just downplayed but grounds for termination of employment and connection to the greater internet. Here, for example, is a discussion showing how Xerox cut off usenet access to a newsgroup due to too much "Star Trek" traffic. This concern was valid, in 1983; the transfer of massive amounts of messages could equal many (and I do mean many) thousands of dollars in additional costs for bandwidth. Consumer-level disk storage was measured in the hundreds of dollars per megabyte. Hundreds of dollars per megabyte. This was a real and valid issue.

As time went on, these costs and concerns reduced. Subject matter diversified into not just items of pop culture and trivia but also sexuality, classifieds and fiction. The facility sustained these expansions. People worked very, very hard to ensure these expansions were maintainable. They increased political discussions, cries for help, declarations of bravery and stupidity. And engineers spent weekends at ray-guns destroying their vision to advance classification and routing mechanisms to ensure this information could be found. This happened. It is happening.

And now in this modern era, we live in the shadow of this promise, this goddamned promise that Jimmy Wales makes in endless speeches and presentations and writings to the world, where "the sum of all human knowledge" shall be accessible, even one riddled with crappy writing or stunted committee-led construction. High Watermarks, Jimbo, they're not just for speeches, anymore.

I sometimes stumble upon them, these great leap backwards, these popularity contests, these endless procedural dodgeball team tryouts where people are encouraged to dismiss, deride, flaunt their ignorance of a subject as proof of its unworthiness for the Wikipedia, and that's where the anger comes from. That such things happen now, in 2007, where a USB key that could hold days of music or centuries of text could be had for a paltry sum, is beyond reckoning.

I lay this travesty, this waste of energy, time and good faith, on Jimmy Wales. He sets the tone for the project, he talks the endless game, he sits for his never-ending schedule of shallow interviews. People cite him like he's a new version of the bible. He could step in and with deft words stop entire ranges of actions should he so choose. I've seen him do it. That Wikipedia has a "Ignore All Rules" rule is directly from his pen and left in to give himself enormous veto power over any action. He has used this "rule" many times. He will continue to. He should use it here.

Otherwise, all I can do is thank him; thank him for making it clear how much energy I have saved myself the past three years by not contributing to the project, thank him for showing others the dangerous pitfalls of turning all knowledge into an essentially rules-based game, and thank him for not, on any given day, getting better at hiding his baser motives.

Something great will grow from Wikipedia's mulch. The notability fad poisons this potentially fertile ground. Stop this madness, this backward-thinking unlimited popularity contest played with the efforts of real people to do real things.

It is a joke, a mad sick joke, and I have long stopped laughing at it.

Aperture

I walk a fine line here. Let's see how well I do.

The fine line is to accolade without spoiling. I hate spoiling, especially when so much about the greatness of something depends on you not knowing much. Knowing more and more about how something comes out pulls you a few paces away from your experience. If someone says "Ah, that game, with the flaming monkey head", then you will likely find yourself no longer playing this new game, instead cleaving the experience into pre-flaming monkey head and post-flaming monkey head. It's what people do, and I don't want to do it for you here.

Sometimes, too, the reason you like something is less that thing than where you are in life. I've found that I adore a creation, and to others who do nothing but watch things in the same genre it's just another one. I like the horrible movie The Apple simply because I am stunned at the level of choreography, costuming and set design put into this forgettable plot and badly-stitched set of scenes, especially because I make films myself now. Just as you can blow your mind realizing that the Leaning Tower of Pisa was built over hundreds of years and contractors on the job knew it was screwed up halfway through, I find myself attracted to some things because of the story of its creation. Or because I've never seen anything like it.

So yes, I am speaking of Portal. This is a game that came out this week for computers and consoles. I have the downloading network known as "Steam" installed on my computer, so I paid my $20 and got Portal and started playing it, considering it a little throwaway jaunt of a short few hours.

I did not expect a transcendental experience. But I sure as hell got one.

So I can't, of course, tell you anything about the game in any concrete sense, other than to say it starts out somewhat simplistic and funny and then somewhere down the line my head exploded. And as I was picking up pieces of my exploded head, I got my head super-double-exploded, all while laughing what was left of my head off.

But I believe if I knew ANYTHING about the game beforehand, I'd have not had half this good experience. If I'd traipsed through a bunch of youtube videos or reviews or even backstory, I bet I'd have been enjoying it but not a combination of side-swiped and floored. (And then hammered and then head-explody, as previously referenced.)

So take my advice and download it now and play it and don't read anything more about it. Just do it.

But more than this advice, something else here reminded me of effort I am making with GET LAMP.

GET LAMP is meant to eclipse BBS DOCUMENTARY on some levels. Obviously not in terms of pure length or number of interviews, but in image/sound quality, interactivity, adherence to the subject, crazy tangential references, and so on, I want you to be amazed when you go through it. Obviously, people who watch a lot of stuff may not be "amazed" by anything I do, or really have the capacity to be "amazed" by any movie that arrives on a DVD. But for a segment of people, I want them to see this film and be blown away on a bunch of levels. I want them to go in, expecting it to be OK, and then be blown away when it's fantastic. BBS Documentary did this to people, but I want this one to be an even larger group of people.

And sometimes, when it's dark and I'm tired, I look at footage to be shot and footage shot and think "This won't be fantastic as I wish it to be". But then, a little later, I look at it all from another angle and think "yes, if I pair this with this and add this, it will be, very much".

Things like Portal remind me that there are people who, like myself, sit and stare at something and go "How can we make this even better. How can we make this go from being amazing to being beyond amazing. What will happen if I focus on this aspect for a week. What will happen if I take this risk."

And that's a great reminder.

Now go get Portal.

A Plea for Compuserve Forums

This entry does not expire. If you find it months or years onward, it is still valid.

I've had a request for some Compuserve forums and messages, and the fact is, I just don't have that much. When I was on Compuserve around the 1983 period through a stolen account, I downloaded megabytes of text over time. But I didn't do much with the forums and I didn't do much past the early 1980s.

If you have copies of these forums, of material from Compuserve, please contact me. I will build a separate archive of Compuserve forums and memorabilia. It's time to save that historical treasure, definitively.

The Eventual Big Day

I've given some small amount of thought (really, quite small), to where GET LAMP will premiere. BBS Documentary was first shown in rough cut at the Vintage Computer Festival but I won't have this thing in time for this year and next year will be too late. Right now, GET LAMP is 600 clips totaling roughly 5.5 hours, so it has some way to go to what would be called finished; right now, there are 30 seconds of edited footage. But it doesn't hurt to speculate, does it?

Some suggestions were made that I do this at GDC (the game developers' conference). But the fact of the matter is, GDC is basically about money and design, not history. The less history the better. I'd like the group who see a premiere to be a bunch of text adventure fans composing of some game designers, not the other way around.

The event would likely have a bunch of Infocom and text adventure people at it. It would be nice if it was somewhere big, since that way more people could enjoy it. It will probably be in Boston, I guess, because of so much text adventure stuff there, specifically Infocom but there's a tradition in this location anyway.

Decisions, decisions.

Update: A friend of mine has stepped forward and proposed a Boston-area event with lots of support that will be quite exciting and interesting. I think that wins. Bear in mind, people suggesting other events, that I don't mean I will be showing it once and then never mentioning it again; I will happily be promoting it and going to events to show it. I hope the whole world sees it! Well, OK, most of the world.

Last Century

This past May, I found out about a horrible article about "philes" in the Fall 2006 issue of 2600. I wrote a weblog entry about this article, which was entitled "Where Have All the Philes Gone?" The upshot of my entry was that the original article wasn't very good or accurate, and it was a shame 2600 printed it, especially considering how even basic efforts to fact-check it would have left it in the slushpile. On the urging of Flack O'Hara I sent in a version of my weblog entry to 2600 as a letter to the editor, so that it ended up somewhere.

They've printed it in the Fall 2007 issue. They even put a paragraph of response.

Here's that response:

"While we understand your obvious passion for what you do, it is possible to convey knowledge of the information you provide without insulting us or our writers. People submit articles with the knowledge that they are aware of, others with additional knowledge add to this or correct the mistakes. It's not about trying to fill pages or speaking out of ignorance. It's a process that results in a dialog amidst the clearinghouse of information that passes through here. To us that dialog is as important as the conclusions since it gets people into a thinking mode. When you put people down for not having the same knowledge as you, then that dialog is poisoned and overshadowed by negativity. There's already enough of that to go around, past and present."

Ah yes. So here we go.

Make no mistake; I've been reading 2600 on and off for 23 years. Really. Since the beginning. I even got to go to one of the first 2600 meetings at the Citicorp center and even had the privilege of going to the aftermeeting that inevitably happens when you ditch the losers, a tradition that continues at many 2600 meetings to the present day. I consider Emmanuel/Eric a colleague if not a friend (we interact way too little for one to throw the term "friend" around). I have gone to a majority of the HOPE conferences. I've spoken at a few. I'm not the fuckin' enemy.

I don't know who writes the responses; I believe it's a rotating set of editors but it could easily be Eric doing the whole thing, so I won't assume either way. I will however, assume the response represents an accurate representation of the opinion of the 2600 staff.

Regarding being hostile, I can only say, "bite me in the ass". Let's move on.

The core of the response seems to be that 2600 magazine, to my honest surprise, does not function like a magazine, that is, a printed collection of researched articles and photographs overseen by an editorial staff and assisted by fact checkers, copywriters and researchers. Instead, apparently, it thinks of itself as a paper based forum, where each article is an entity unto itself with the responsibilities of accuracy and research incumbent upon each individual author. This is, of course, fine. But it's not what I would have expected for a publication printed 4 times a year.

The idea that printing an entirely inaccurate article (and I must again stress, the core issue is that the article is entirely inaccurate) is a contribution to dialog... that, like lighter fluid, it functions merely to get things started and will then be improved by later interactions, is crap.

The definition of "thinking mode" surely can't be "here is some paranoiac, historically false and chronically retarded writing.... GO". I don't know who or what would be inspired to go into a thoughtful contemplation upon being told that the world has closed up since the "good old days" and that you have much less access to information that you once had. This is so not true, on its face, I can barely contemplate it being something someone isn't presenting cynically, as a talk show host drops a psychic bomb on their listeners to ensure reaction and continued audience/ratings. Simple as that; hence my reference to page-filling.

As often is the case, my own cantankerous personality is a contrast to the archives I make available, and I do my best to ensure the Fellow doesn't affect the Files. If you don't like me, you barely have to go by me to get to my stuff. "Negativity" is a general dismissal of efforts. There was no effort in this article. A magazine of any substance would have thanked the submitter for their contribution, smiled helpfully, and then fed it to a goat.

So while I'm here, I will say again what I hinted at in the previous entry: 2600 has made more and more effort to be utterly and completely irrelevant over time. What drives me and what surely must be a significant number of sometime-readers mad is how much potential it exudes while gleefully rejecting this potential at any turn.

In January of 2007, 2600 started an online forum. January. 2007. Yes, they had a BBS way back when, and in fact I may be one of the only sources of copies of some of the messages that ran on this BBS. It was called "The Private Sector" and wasn't actually run by 2600, instead run by fans who 2600 lent their name to. The BBS was taken down in summer of 1985 and that's been about it for 2600-based online discussion mediums until 2007. 22 years is a long time.

To read 2600 in PDF form, you must depend on crappily-scanned efforts, available on torrents or newsgroups. Text of old articles is not searchable; nothing is on the site to give you anything but a prideful collection of covers. 2600 certainly has a news section on its site, but it primarily informs you that a new radio show is available, a schedule that should be in its own separate location, providing it to people for whom a radio show is a preferred method of gaining new information. There is no "basics of 2600" or "basics of hacking" information on the 2600 site. There is a collection of payphones, however, although there is no information on the payphones beyond the basic information one would expect of any photo, or even Flickr. Flickr, by the way, has over 4,000 tagged photos of payphones as of this writing.

So yes, negativity, that is, pointing out something is lacking, is what I do.

Who do I think gets it right, does what I think 2600 should be doing, does it better than I could have ever dreamed? MAKE. Yes, Make, magazine of tinkering, electronics, building. Make, it of slick advertisements and owned by O'Reilly Media and published quarterly. This magazine gets it right, gets it proper, and if you blinked and missed it, has dumped more information of a quality nature in 12 issues and supplemental packages than almost all of 2600's entire run.

How do I make such a bold statement? Well, Make is the work of, among other people, Dale Dougherty and Mark Frauenfelder, two people who know how to put a goddamned endeavor together. The magazine's website and projects reek of endless meetings attempting to not just "get it", but "improve it". All issues available in PDF form for subscribers (with no limits on the PDF). RSS feeds everywhere. A weblog to accompany the magazine to get on-the-spot information to you. Forums. Accompanying books that cover the basics of electronics and building, which is vital for not repeating mistakes.

The choices of stories range wildly, from how to make simple projects a dog with a screwdriver could accomplish up through to injection molding in your kitchen or a profile of a vodka-maker and the process by which he does so.

But what of the hacking, right?

Well, the thing is that Make exudes hacking, drips from every page the excitement of creating, of assembling, of testing, and even of breaking or unexpected dead ends. The ethics and internal "heart" of hacking, instead of being constantly referred to in each article in 2600, is simply the resonance that each article provides in its writing. This comes, of course, from articles being edited, fact-checked, quality-compared, and so on. And the articles are, to some extent, timeless. News-related information is disposable as expected, but the lessons learned in how to 'do' stuff build on each other, such that assembling all the current issues of MAKE has inherent value, the value of a combined set of processes that give you tools.

2600's portrayal as a martyr, distrusted by the bulk of the world and in a constant locked-horned battle with the forces of censorship and fuddy-duddies is a tired song, long bereft of its melody, an attractive glitter to children but not reflecting of a world where the wires are rapidly disappearing and a year of music fits in your pocket.

It is last century.

I am enjoying this one.

I will continue to.

I just wish 2600 was along for the ride.

Catch-Up

This week is catch-up week, trying desperately to get a bunch of stuff done that isn't documentary related as well as doing my day job. I can put some things off for months, and it's good to set a little time aside to make the calls, ship out the packages and envelopes, and generally be on the ball.

At this stage in my game I am hovering to the point where a personal assistant would make sense, but poor planning in that realm means that I simply don't have the means to properly have one, either money wise or space wise. That's a shame. And what a miserable person they'd be!

Superchickens

So there's some stories I like to tell.

OK, fine, there's a lot of stories to tell. Like, I'd never run out, and if I had to fill 3 hours of talking in a conference or on a podcast or some other forum, I could just sit there and spin them out indefinitely.

Most of the stories stand out on their own. Usually, I'm an eyewitness or the progenitor or otherwise able to verify the story. Unless it's movie trivia, which I often repeat verbatim and then find out 10 years down the road I was entirely wrong. But hey, movie trivia.

For most of the rest, I can know that the story is true and verify it. For example, I remember during my childhood I was at a snow hill on the back of a elementary school in Brewster, NY. Brewster being what it is in the intelligence soup, this snow hill went down a bunch of sizable bumps and then ultimately shot over a 6 foot wall directly into traffic. Obviously, it was incumbent upon children/teens going down this hill to veer off at some point before going off the wall onto certain death, in the path of cars going between 20 and 50 miles per hour.

So, not content to rest on the mere idea of hurling towards a road on a sled down bumpy hills, someone devised an even better idea: take a Red Ryder sled, put some inner tubes on it, and load THAT with a bunch of kids.

So there we have it, a bunch of kids perilously loaded on a sled piled on another sled, going down a very steep hill that was in fact a series of large jumps, ending in a drop-off into traffic. We did this. We piled into it and we went down this hill.

For the happiness of all involved, the sled naturally capsized after two major jumps and sent 7 kids tumbling in all directions and tumbling the sleds instead of sending them flying at top speed into some hapless driver's passenger window.

I was there, this happened, and if I think it fits into a conversation (or weblog entry), it goes in.

On the other hand, the superchickens story was unverified, and that was a shame because I saw a neat lesson in it.

The story goes like this.

For most of the 20th century, there's been aggressive breeding of most farmstock, be it cows, horses, what have you. This includes chickens. You take an animal that shows promise in some aspect of itself that you want, let it make lots of little friends, and the resultant baby animals are checked for that aspect. Then you let the ones with that aspect breed, ideally with others of the same quality, and so on. You watch out for inbreeding, you make sure the little suckers are happy, and so on. Pretty simple.

The result of intense breeding resulted in the Leghorn Chicken, which is heralded for its prolific egg-laying. You can get well in the triple digits with these gals, some of them laying over 300 eggs a year. This is from nearly a century of selective breeding for egg-laying abilities.

The problem is, they didn't check a lot of the other attributes. The reason that this strain of chicken lays so many eggs is because it's an asshole.

The chickens attack each other mercilessly. They freak out in close quarters. By breeding for egg-laying abilities, they were also breeding for meaner, huger chickens. These things are massive (for chickens) and will eat a nearby neighbor if the mood strikes it. The mortality rate is through the roof, as much as 80%.

The solution, therefore, was plain: debeak the chickens. Hundreds of thousands of these White Leghorn chickens have their beaks ripped off by machines so they won't kill each other. Regardless, tons of them die anyway, and they can't be jammed together in close quarters dependably.

So I had no direct links to any papers or sources about this. But now I do. Trust in the Chickens: Group Selection and Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems by Benjamin McGee Good (April 26, 2000) which specifically references the work of Muir, W.M. (1996). Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and direct responses. Journal of Poultry Science 75, (pp 447-458). Once I had that, the world opened up to me and I've found a lot of citations of this paper, in many locations online.

Now, why do I care about this? Because this whole situation is a perfect parable for unintended consequences. And I was inspired, some time ago, by a small rash of comparisons to chickens and Enron. Here's a good entry on such with bonus over-the-top conspiracy theories in the comments, trying to derail the conversation! Two for one.

Anyway, it's good to have the papers and links for my stories. They feel stronger and healthier, that way.

The Bridge

The bridge is simply astounding.

I first heard about this documentary about a year ago, in bare terms which you might be first hearing too: a film guy named Eric Steel traveled to San Francisco, got a permit to film the Golden Gate Bridge for a year, and proceeded to do so. What he didn't explain in his permit was that he was recording suicides. Utilizing a crew that shot every daylight minute of 2004, he captured 23 suicides on camera, then tracked down witnesses, family members and friends and recorded their thoughts on the jumpers' lives and motivations. He did not tell them he had footage of their final moments.

You are some variation of aghast or intrigued. I was the latter. I also knew how wrong this project could go, or how ham-fistedly it could be handled. Recently, I saw it was on DVD, bought it, and watched it.

The Golden Gate Bridge dominates this film; shot after shot from many places show how the bridge is seen from throughout the landscape near it, one of the wonders of the modern world. You can see what draws people to it, what makes them want to walk across it, what makes it stay in their minds, even as their world grows dark, even as there's no hope.

I do not think I would be doing this film justice to do some sort of reviewer play-by-play of what goes on in the film and coating it with my thoughts on each little decision, each little branch the film goes. I'll keep it simple: the stories are real, the people are eloquent, the images are crisp, the emotions you feel are many.

People who make it their stock in trade to complain will complain (and have complained) about all aspects of this film: the subject matter, the ethics, the approach, the editing. This is a film about suicide, and it changed my opinions on the debate to some degree. That is a great film that does this to its audience. And this is a great film.

People will look back many years later and wonder why it was so little heralded, so slighted by its contemporaries.

On the Other Side

I am positive I used to be a better game player.

I was very good, I think. I was certainly pretty good at video games that required me to learn a few basic rules and then apply myself towards a bunch of simple sprites who worked in a fairly predictable manner. My control was a joystick and a button, or maybe a spinning knob, or even smattering of large buttons. I could play the games for some time, although I never would call myself a world champion. But I knew, in the grand scheme of the population of the world in raw numbers, I was in sight of the top.

Those days are over.

I play Halo 3, this newest game of newest manner, and I have my ass handed back to me with a side of potatoes. I am not being exaggerative, when I say that I play the part of the tree branch and the other players play the part of the wood chipper.

I know I can punch the person in the head and win, and I run towards them and I am dead. Half the time I don't know why. Another half I don't know the rules, or where I am, or who is killing me. Sometimes I don't know what team I'm on or what weapon I'm carrying. And many, many times, I have the same general resources as someone else and yet in a person-to-person showdown I am a pancake.

Oh, sure, I could claim that I "have a life" or that there's something genetically or mentally wrong with my opponents or I am in some way superior in some other measurements. But come on, that's lame. The fact is, they're better. They want it more. They practiced. They got good.

I play these multi-person melees like I do a lot of things; scooped with a dollop of humor, talking incessantly, lackadasically running through the rules and ignoring most of them, and hoping that I have some sort of golden boy luck that lets me finish the assignment having done none of the homework. So guess what. I'm not the leader of the pack. I'm not even the hunter. I'm the rabbit scurrying into the super-obvious burrow with his white tail sticking out the hole and I'm someone's dinner.

We all want to be the hero, all want to be the person who comes in, unexpectedly, and turns into a Mozart before the very shocked eyes of our colleagues, friends and family. But it doesn't always work that way. Here's one case where I will not hide behind my successes of a quarter-century ago, my advancing age, or my priorities. I play this game and I am a wall mural, over and over. If I concentrated more, I might do incrementally better. But I will never be a champion, never be the top of the heap.

And so it's up to me to be willing to not be the lead dog and still want to be on the run. And I do.

HV20 Test Footage

I bought a Canon HV20 a little while ago. This is basically a handheld high-definition camera that costs $1000, with accessories. It shoots in HDV, which is a lower-bandwidth high def format that can fit on the old MiniDV tapes instead of the P2 cards I currently shoot with.

Am I moving to a new camera? No. The $6k I spent on my camera has been worth it and I've been getting some great shots; this new thing is for second-unit-type shots, that would put the other camera at too much physical risk, or be too cumbersome to conduct stuff with. I am then giving it to a filmmaker I'm working with, where I am helping produce a new documentary. Yes, a third one. I refuse to make the mistake I made with ARCADE and give much in the way of details.

Anyway, I took it with me to the Penny Arcade Expo, and did some test setups and shooting and the rest. Some of the still frames from that footage is here in thumbnails. I then took an MC Frontalot song about Penny Arcade and cut some of the test footage I shot. I have gone ahead and rendered it out, in the three sizes you might want: youtube, large, gargantuan.

Here' the youtube link, which is pretty much good for getting a feel of if you'd want to download the other two.

So here's the large size, 75 megabytes, MPEG video, 1:40.

And here's the gargantuan size, 325 megabytes. MPEG M2T video (plays in Videolan VLC).

Bear in mind, this camera is tiny, about the size of a regular has-a-separate-lens digital camera, or a baseball. And I put it through some paces here, intentionally. I shot in low light, bright light, moving crowds, masses of flashing stuff, people walking around, and so on. I'm rather impressed with what came out.

One of the issues of the current stream of consumer level video hardware (and that's definitely what this is) and even the I-hate-the-name "Prosumer" level is that there are certain situations where the camera's output just doesn't look good, specifically very low light and high-motion shots. As a result, someone shooting will end up either eating the lower quality, or shoot stuff and turn it into the look they wanted. I've discovered the hard way how tools can end up controlling you without knowing it, so this isn't a good thing, although time will likely fix this. The other issue is that the sound on this is a major step backwards, taking in what's basically a headphone jack instead of the XLR jacks I ran too after the sound issues on BBS Doc. This means that you'd have to record sound somewhat separately, which means you have to play SYNC SOUND GAMES like the old film days. That blows, but at least the solutions sitting out there, instead of you having to hack it up. One more annoying step.

Also, this footage is good for showing off PAX, which was fantastic.

Argh

Some time ago, I wanted to license some music. I had plans for that music.

As luck would have it, the artist had heard of what I was doing in terms of a project, and he was excited, and wanted me to use his music too. He'd written it five years previously, for a band that didn't exist any more, so what a nice way to have the music get used in a new and interesting way.

He told me I should speak to his record company, who he cc'd and told them they should let me use the music.

The record company took months to get back to me. When they did, they asked exactly what I was going to use it for.

I wrote and told them what I wanted to use it for. They took a month or so to get back to me.

They quoted me some theoretical costs for using the music, I said I could pay those.

They then explained to me (a few weeks after that, now putting us roughly six months from when we'd first made contact), that the price they gave me was going to be just for the rights for playing it at festivals, and then they told me how much it was going to be to put it on a set number of copies of DVDs, and then how much it would extend if I happened to make more than that number of DVDs, plus how much extra it would be if it ended up on TV or anywhere else other than the DVDs. The amount was more than the entire production had cost up to that moment. I passed.

Later the thing came out, and the artist asked me why his song wasn't on the documentary anywhere. I told him, and he was really bummed. And by bummed, I mean on fire. His record company, you see, hadn't told him they'd given me this massive price to use the music (money, by the way, for them, not for the artist). So his old song didn't end up on my project, and he wasn't even told what was going on.

So yeah, fuck record companies.

I mention this because I've had a couple similar situations with GET LAMP, where my playing things by the rules are costing me more money than I want, are making me bow and scrape to people to get the privilege of putting my money down and go through the physical effort of filming, and where I was hoping to be a beneficial entity but I am being treated like a dynamite-strapped terrorist running deep into a nursery.

This happens. I have contingency plans in place for all occasions; I never put myself in the position of having anything "completely vital" to the projects I do such that I am utterly and totally beholden to another entity's whims, especially where it's obvious I mean as much to that entity as a twist-tie. But people sometimes end up thinking I "forgot" to do something or I "missed out" on a situation, and in fact there's this whole ugly screaming match or endless looping bullshit parade that represents the dull and lifeless outcome.

I mention all this because sometimes I might paint things as too easy. Way way back in film school, my kick ass film teacher explained to us how he had a friend who worked in the Industry who had a huge woodpile out in back of his house. Not because he particularly needed wood, mind you, but because sometimes, dealing with the brain donors of his daily life, he needed someplace to go and split things in half with an axe.

Everyone, if they work at something that needs the assistance of others, or even the non-obstruction of others, will find themselves stymied with what apparently is even worse than malicious sabotage but in fact in needless complication, done by people who consider inertia their personal gods. It happens. Don't let it stop you from your stuff, just realize that what comes out the other end is rarely 100% as you dreamed it would be.