ASCII by Jason Scott

Why the BBS Documentary Footage is Taking So Long

Well, first of all, there's a ton of footage.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, I mean this collection, where I've been uploading raw footage to archive.org on and off for the last two years. Mostly off. However, it's already at 20 hours of footage, which has to count for something, right?

I love the reviews that the uploaded footage gets, too. Complaints that it's not edited well (it's unedited). Critiques of my interview style. Critiques of what I say during questions. Accolades too. Mostly critiques, though. It looks like we're getting about 100 downloads a week of the raw footage, which is pretty cool. In the case of John Sheetz, who died before the production was finished, his interview has been watched roughly 16,000 times. Not bad at all.

What takes so long is this. I have to basically dedicate a machine to the process, a process where the tape I recorded it on is digitized to a 12gb file, that 12gb file is put into an editor, and I listen to the tape to make sure nothing too unpleasant gets on there (unpleasant meaning "legally actionable" or "the interviewee asked that it be struck during the interview"). Then I have to render it to a MPEG2 file, then upload that 2-3gb MPEG2 stream up to archive.org, which then derives 5-6 variations from that main stream. I have to do this for every hour, and there's 200 hours. This prevents me from doing other stuff at the same time, and I have a lot of stuff I need to be doing.

So, I'm going to make a little dedicated digitizing machine for a while. I have a laptop that was recently made redundant, and it has vegas and capture software on it; I'll put a fat USB drive on it, grab the goods, and start my rendering. That will fix some amount of the issue in terms of machine dedication.

Every once in a while I consider an intern, but an intern often comes with a college, and a college often comes with a request for credit. No thanks. I contacted the person, arranged an interview, flew or drove there, interviewed them, and did the camera and sound and questions. I'll do the last bit myself as well.

Outside of the criticals who don't get it, people seem to appreciate and enjoy them. I was given a few BBS video artifacts and I'm uploading them as I go. A TBBS training tape is up already and is a personal favorite, and I have others as well. (I used part of the tape for the beginning of one of the episodes, but you can now see the full wonder.)

I'm sure there'll eventually be something I upload that causes some trouble, for some reason I can't fathom, but for now I'm enjoying flying blind and taking reasonable steps. There's a lot, and I mean a lot of BBS material covered here, some redundant and a lot unique. I think that when this is done, an awful lot of the history of the BBS will be there for people to enjoy.

That Old Frog

I was sent mail informing me that Ryugen Fisher had had a heart attack and died suddenly. It had actually been a year since it had happened, in Chicago, while he was on a retreat.

Naturally, when someone dies, I don't expect that any documentary filmmakers who interviewed them would be notified. We didn't run in the same circles, so I wouldn't have gotten news that way. I am grateful I was eventually sent some mail about it, of course.

Ryugen was one of my best interviews; he's the middle guy in the Fidonet Living Room interview I conducted in St. Louis in the room where Fidonet's biggest revision was hatched. I used footage from this interview extensively in the Fidonet Episode of the documentary.

I was told he was very excited by the filming coming up and talked about it for some time afterwards. During the interview, the other two gentlemen (Ken Kaplan and Ben Baker) also talked about how much Ryugen had influence on the steadying of emotions and the halting of battles internally in Fidonet.

Ryugen called himself "That Old Frog"; he did this in a lot of documentation and in a lot of messages, so finding him within the history of Fidonet probably requires that bit of information. He was a tattooed biker, a technical junkie, a consulting programmer, and a Buddhist Sensei.

Here's a photo of Ryugen in 2005 from a party he attended.
Here's a touching tribute written about Ryugen from one of his friends, with an excellent photo.

Of course, I have two hours of Ryugen speaking about Fidonet, politics and ARC-ZIP. I've moved them up on my (very slow moving) BBS Documentary Interview Collection queue, and the two hours in which he attended the interview are here:

Baker, Kaplan, Fisher Interview, Hour 2
Baker, Kaplan, Fisher Interview, Hour 3

We go all over the place in these two hours, but I think it's quite informative, much more information than was in the Fidonet episode.

While contacting some of the interviewees about this, I found out another had been battling cancer for a year, and is back to health.

I don't think this is going to get easier.

Sketch the Cow

My XBOX gamer tag is "Sketch the Cow" and this causes some confusion. My IRC handle is "SketchCow" and it's being used to say the same thing and to get around length restrictions. But it's meant to be "Sketch the Cow" as well. Very occasionally, people wonder what the hell is going on, so here's a very quick, very short primer.

In 1986, deciding to start a band with my friend Jeremy Stone, we spent a lot of time on what most reasonable high school bands would find important: the band name. We had a working title of "J.S. Squared", since that was both our initials. This was fine and good. We started making music, and things went along.

At some point we knew we wanted to start building an elaborate, overly complicated backstory and statement associated with the band. This resulted in us working on "job titles" in the band. We were coming up with all sorts of crazy titles; one of them was "Rodent Motivation Supervisor", as I recall. Somewhere down the line, one of us devised the title of "Bovine Ignition Supervisor".

We looked at each other, and said "This is too good not to name the band this way."

So the band became Bovine Ignition Systems.

This led to several things. First of all, our songs started taking on more and more of a "cow" theme. Heck, cows were inherently funny and so there you go. But more critically, people were starting to kind of associate us with cows. We were sent cow gifts, or referenced cow things, and it got kind of crazy there.

Ultimately, though, we found an ad for a cow suit. I ordered one immediately, for the time that we would perform live.

The suit was cool, and so I wore it here and there, and on our big live gig, I definitely wore it onstage, to great acclaim.

As I went to college and Jeremy as well (different colleges), we each had, in our possession, both our songs written by Bovine Ignition Systems (We'd do a few more after high school) and a ton of cow-related items. And by this time our families were well aware we had a "cow thing" going.

There's "the cow". Now, to switch gears...

In college, like at high school, I liked drawing. I liked drawing a lot. So in a lot of cases, you would find me drawing cartoons and art throughout classes, in hallways, and specifically in the common room area in my dorm. There was a fellow, his name long lost to time, who would come in to find me sitting around with my pad, and say "Hey, Sketch". He did this for a full semester we were both in the same dorm. I thought this nickname was great; it said what I did, and it was one syllable. I thought it was pretty cool but didn't force it on others.

When I got into the MUD world, co-founding a game called TinyTIM, I named my account "Sketch". My description said I was a guy with one eyebrow and a big pencil. It was this way for about a year on the game.

For halloween, it became a suggestion and then a fad to re-describe your character on your MUD into a costume. So, naturally, I "dressed up" as a cow for this online costume ball.

Problem was, I forgot to change it back.

Months went by, and I was still a cow. Sketch the Cow. People assumed this was on purpose, and it became how I was known. A little cow, with drawing supplies. I liked it, and to be honest, people found an administrative type who was a cute little cow to be at least a slightly less problematic hurdle to approaching me. The fact I had a fantastically bad temper and a vice-like grip over the environment was still a bummer for some folks. But again, at least I was a cow.

I was a cow on this MUD for a decade, before retiring in a shitstorm of classy controversy. By that time, it was cemented. I was Sketch the Cow, and that was that. References abound to me in this fashion. Remember, it wasn't until 1998 that I started this whole "archive" deal, and 2001 before I did documentary stuff. So there were many years of me, cow-hood and the rest before I ever got onto my current gigs.

This is also the reason, by the way, that I own cow.net. A good opportunity, a fun idea, and moooooooo.

And now you know. Handles are weird things. They come from strange places, and go places even stranger still.

One other bit: when it came time to make a company to do my documentaries, I decided that my old band name was too cool not to bring out again, and this is why the production company is called Bovine Ignition Systems. The name has confused the living hell out of nice folks signing releases or doing business deals (and in fact the abridged name BOVINEIS is on the inside rim of the BBS Documentary DVDs), but that's where it came from, a special time earlier in my life that has stuck with me ever hence.

The Melee

I don't just get into something; I tend to live it, breathe it and eat it, for weeks on end, then move away to something else with that passion. These days, there's been a lot of Halo 3 multiplayer happening.

It sounds almost sad to one segment of my audience; hours spent with a game? But in this case, there's a lot to it I've been enjoying and a lot I'm observing now about the current state of communication and technology. It works for me.

I have been told of other, superior programs and of course many more will come along, but there's a slight bias on my part that I won't play (or don't enjoy playing) realistic portrayals of wars the world has actually lived through. When the armor is real and the other team's language is a real one currently in use and the locations are based on actual places where some very good people died, often for no reason, it's just not my thing. So no Call of Duty 4 or America's Army for me, thanks.

In Halo 3, it's essentially insane paintball, with returns to service and a crazy tracking system. For example, you can see my entire history of playing this game online, updated within 2-3 minutes of each time I finish a game. And the amount of information up there is gigantic: which weapons I prefer, how I tend to do in different locations, how I tend to be killed or kill. And honestly, my entire game history! It's astounding they're keeping this on every player, in toto, and all the interrelationships from it.

(That also shows you my Xbox "Gamer Tag", Sketch the Cow. There's a story behind that name, which I'll probably dump out in my next enty.)

The game itself attracts me because depending on the players involved, it can be a complicated tactical experience or a complete and utter rout. And to be honest, it's the addition of the voice aspect that makes it particularly compelling to me.

The game uses voice communication extensively; everyone can chat before the game, and during the game a team can send messages among themselves, devising on-the-spot strategy. Congratulations can occur during or after the game, and in a few cases you can even learn a little more about the other players than you might expect, like where they're from or why they're awake at a given hour.

Or, and this is much more likely, more likely than Bungie (the creators) or Microsoft (the console makers) would want to admit... it goes into a massive, decimating clusterfuck.

The game is rated M for Mature, which means it's supposed to be for people 17 or older. This is a lie and garbage in actuality; cascades, no, torrents of children are on this game, children who are obviously unable to drive a car, venture more than a mile or two from home, or possibly across the street. They are young, they are very high-pitched, and they are more than willing to explain to me, in stumbling-syllable fashion more suitable for a swing set, how they are going to kick my ass.

The majority, of course, seem to be in the 18-22 year old range, young men primarily, full of energy and life and also prone to the wild mood swings of the unnecessarily prodded slacker variety. I've had the pleasure of listening to them actually compare and contrast availability of drugs in the southeast versus central United States, obliterating whatever small amount of tactical response they might have otherwise been incapable of. Naturally, this is a contrast of priorities between them and me, and I am at peace with that. I do not need to know which bag of what costs what.

I am also struck anew, in nearly every evening of playing, how completely randomly various epithets are thrown out into the air in response to perceived wrongs. Just as the world of networked computers have enabled us to know rather comprehensively what hardware is popular and what configurations are most likely to be used, so too will a person playing Halo 3 discover the veritable rainbow of definitions for the word fag. I've heard it used as a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Subsequent to the noun usage, I've heard it to mean (I believe), "poor player", "player using a powerful weapon over and over", "excellent player", "player who just said something you don't agree with, and, ultimately, "player".

I keep thinking that I will eventually grow inured to this, this consistent mutation of homophobic language used as a direct swap-in for the term huckleberry, but I just don't. I've tried to stand up against this perceived problem, ideally to change some minds, but to call it ineffectual is an insult to things that are ineffectual. This is in fact an impossible-to-repair situation. I think it's endemic to the entire process of growing up in society now; to the vast majority, you insult someone by implying they are homosexual, or that they are showing, in some way, the obvious inferior traits of homosexuals. It is so rampant it may have actually lost its original meaning. Or maybe not. Either way, I could see why a truly queer person would be inclined to stick a pen knife into his own neck. The fear and shame must be smothering. So thanks, Halo 3 by Bungie Studios, I appreciate this life lesson you've given me.

Another excellent situation is when I reveal, in the process of normal conversation during a game, that I am 37. You would think this would be minor trivia, but on several occasions I have been greeted with a barrage of profanity from another team player or random conversationalist indicating how horrible it is that I am playing Halo. This may sound off the wall, but I am talking about actual umbrage and outrage that someone so old would be playing. This is then followed up with speculative language about my life, my priorities, my time management, and my quality of existence. That I am playing such a game in a house I bought with a car parked outside that I bought on a massive TV I bought and none of these involve the direct involvement of my parents is apparently a crime. Who knew! Thank you again, Bungie Studios and Microsoft.

But I am downplaying, of course, the heights of this experience.

I am sometimes thrown among people having a genuine good time. Sure, one might apparently use random racial epithets as frequently as you or I might use the word "that", and another might be, in actual life, a dope. But their words are warm, encouraging phrases and right-on shouts of happiness as the team accomplishes something. Recently, it was somewhat relevant to my "rank" in the game that I achieve a win, taking my number from 299 to 300. I mentioned this, and throughout the game, a person I didn't know, who I'd never met before, would be shouting for everyone to go the extra mile, to "get Sketch his 300". This is a very special thing, to hear this fellow wanting me to achieve something in the game, something he wouldn't in a million years benefit from, but who was doing it so my enjoyment was that much more. That's very special. And those special things happen all the time, patchworked within the bad.

My heart will sink, my evening tarnished, to have a directed, unstopping personal attack waged upon me by a random knob. But my heart will lift to find myself among a randomly assembled gang of players chanting "nerves of steel" or "good job" upon one of us accomplishing a particularly skillful move. It is a base feeling, an instinctual one; getting along, feeling bonded, moving forward. That this comes out of a game is an amazing thing. That I will likely never meet a single one of them, could never hope to, is the dark cloud that runs through the bright day, like the knowledge of remembering the dug hole waiting for you at your ultimate end. But in the moment, the moment these games have been designed to keep going as long as you possibly can, it is sublime.

We have come a long way from "Zaxxon".

The Cave of Dreams

Some of you know what this is. Some have an inkling. Others are likely utterly confused.

Well, the guy on the right is me. I'm in a helmet, kneepads, and am using a tiny HD camera called the Canon HV20. On the left is Bruce, one of the four people who accompanied/protected me.

And we are in Bedquilt Cave, which is the actual cave that Adventure, the game, is based upon.

To be specific, we're in the Debris Room, the description of which is "You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says "Magic word XYZZY". A three foot black rod with a rusty star on an end lies nearby."

To end up in this cave, filming locations for www.getlamp.com, required about a year of e-mails, arrangements, forms, and multiple trips. It was a long road and it was utterly worth it. The final production will credit all involved appropriately, but I do want anyone who has gotten here via a link to know of the efforts of Dave West, Peter Bosted, Bob Lodge, Pat Kambesis, Dennis Jerz, Rick Olson, Vickie Carson, the Cave Research Foundation, and Phil DiBlasi.

I learned so much and have had such an experience there, a true life-changing experience, that I'm working on a full travelogue and photo album separate from the work being done for the documentary, and I will link to that soon.

I call this the Cave of Dreams because I had a dream of doing this when the movie production began, or really, years before that, and to have one's dreams fulfilled so completely is rare. I recognize this, and will carry it to the end of my days.

Greetings From Time Warp

This entry says November 23, but in fact it is December 9th. I am writing entries as fast as I can, pulling in stuff I was thinking about from the time that the "official" date says, but writing it with the advantage/disadvantage of two weeks of passed time.

That this situation occurred is a result of a silly promise/intent I made to myself and my wanting to fulfill said promise beyond a reasonable measure. As part of becoming more prominent a public figure, I figured a frequent, well-written, content-heavy-and-punditry-light weblog would be a good item to have around. It certainly would, among other things, give me the skillset of writing a lot and writing it quickly, and the advantages therein. It would also give me a body of work.

At first, it was going to be seven days a week. A little while in I determined this was insane and knocked it to weekdays. I also took the position (and still do) that one day is one day; if I had another thing to write, I'd do it the next day. This way, people wouldn't be crap-flooded like I see other weblogs do, where each day is this running torrent of stuff to wade through, and a lot of "oh, wait, one more thing" happens. So I had to compromise the initial promise, but it was structural.

But I've discovered another thing, which Flack and I discussed on the telephone following his lapband surgery - maintaining a weblog is not the same as "doing" stuff. If I put more and more weight into my weblog writings, I will inevitably have to pull that time and energy from somewhere else. Conversely, if I am working on ANY of my projects, be they outside or on the computer, there's just no time for me to effectively write in the manner to which I am accustomed, that is, with actual content.

I could easily pull this off if I did indeed sink into that approach that I see many take: include a link, ass-yammer for a paragraph, talk about yourself for half a paragraph, and push that puppy into the world. I hate that and think it does little for the writer or the reader. It's when I see someone take something they bumped into, be it online or off, and then use that little grain of intellectual sand as the base for something grand and greater that I think this whole medium of communication really takes off. I enjoy reading that and I hope they enjoy writing it. So, my insistence that my readers are fed by the entries alone and the outside links are dessert means this is a pretty intensive situation.

So my intention, currently, is to continue this catch-up, and post all the way to December 31st with a wrap-up, a review of my year, and then I will kick things back to a more appropriate situation: updates and postings as I am capable of doing them. This means weekend postings will likely return but that a day or a week might go by with nothing from me. If I'm skipping, it more than likely means I'm up to something. Just recently I redid artifacts.textfiles.com over, scriptwise, in preparation for making it better than it current is. That was a 4 hour project. That time has to go that way and that's less time to write about, say, shadow narratives or the stunning quality of my butt.

Anyway, back into the time machine.

The Shadow Narrative

I'm sure there's a name for this but I never heard it in film school and I suspect it's a writer's term that's used instead.

My experience has been that there is a secondary narrative in presented works, whether they be films, books, or even music. This second, shadow narrative, is being told by the nature of the media and most importantly the structure of similar works at the same time as the work's creation. It is in some cases capable of overwhelming the primary narrative, losing it completely, but other times it exists merely as a hum of distraction or an opportunity to surprise/entertain certain members of the audience in a new way.

Very haughty, I know. But I've thought about it for years and so it's taken on this sort of elaborate construction, no matter how I try and simplify it.

Let me give some examples.

• When you watch a movie, the people who you know are famous will be treated special in the world the film takes place in, regardless of where it is. They will survive where others don't, or if they are killed/removed from the narrative they are going to be complete in their lives/place in the film. Things or people they interact with are likely to be important or function with ease for their needs. If they don't, then nothing is functioning at all and so they will consistently not-function just like everything else. In doing so, they will be helpful to the person's goal to fail. The shadow narrative is once there was a person whose existence had a vital point worth observing.
• A story in which there is a mystery will have that mystery solved. When you hear people speak, they are discussing actions or ideas that in some way will resolve and answer a hanging question in the air, one either mentioned or not mentioned. The shadow narrative is here was once a world where a story had to be told, and that you will soon hear.
• A song in where there are lyrics about people will eventually clarify what those people are and why you are listening to a song about them. The lyrics may repeat and diverge from where you expected them to go, but they will eventually relate what happened. The shadow narrative is there are people you should know about and you are going to hear about them.

This contention of mine, which is a little difficult to defend and I even lose the thread of it myself occasionally, is something that is probably the hardest single context to maintain for historical purposes. This is why I bring it up; I think that it's important for someone working with historical items to know these shadow narratives and provide them with the material.

This is all separate from "backstory", like where you find out that a newsletter someone made was done at the expense of their marriage, or that a computer was designed due to the release of a competitor's amazing computer at a recent trade show. In those cases, the work's motivations or lack/height of quality has some explanation outside of the work. That information is generally harder to find but is still pretty findable. During the creation of my documentaries I often find these backstories, some of them vital to know, others unprintable or racked with human emotional pain. But that's a separate situation.

The shadow narrative is almost always a function of culture. An example of the imposition of a shadow culture is the Hays Code of movies, established by the film industry to prevent legislative control of the outcome/production of films. By having a set of rules of what could be acceptable in a film, film companies were more than happy to comply with them. Guidelines, no matter how arbitrary or unfair, are still preferable to the terrifying black hole of uncertainty, after all. As a result of this Hays code, films made during its imposition ensured that you would never see certain sexual or "immoral" acts portrayed on film. In other words, there was a parallel understanding while watching a set of actions, that which certain things could never happen. A character not only was unlikely to take drugs to stay awake, he couldn't. It would be as unexpected as having a pet dog and it spontaneously growing wings; you would never arrange things in your home concerned about your flying dog getting stuck in the rafters.

This shadow narrative would lie dormant except for the situation that people occasionally break it. And in some cases, break it on purpose. Agatha Christie comes to mind as an author who broke shadow narratives consistently; in one of her books, the narrator did it. In another, everybody did it. In many others, the most dead character was the murderer. As a reader, you would have an expectation of surprise in being given a set of people and deducing the culprit, and you read a mystery novel like Christie's with that expectation. Christie knew this and would craft her books in such a way that even though there was a plot and a set of actions and dialogue occuring, those were one set of "world" and the endless pairs of eyes watching this set of events, waiting for the inevitable conclusion. Characters would make references that were of little use to the world they inhabited but which a person intent on "solving" the events would take interest in.

I am saying that a person who did not know that mystery books needed to be "solved" would read these books and probably be annoyed that someone was killed and all anyone could talk about was this murder. This doesn't happen because we generally understand what mystery books are.

There is a recent book by Stephen King in which he breaks the shadow narrative in two, writing a work in the form of a mystery and then never solving the mystery. The book, devoid of the context of "oh boy it's Stephen King" but bearing the context of "it is a mystery book", is annoying as living hell to anyone who fell for that. The book, in fact, has an afterword with you being given a pleasant talking to about how brilliant it was to have no solution to the mystery. Like a piece of metal that's magnetized being twisted away from the natural magnetic field it wants to follow, a broken shadow narrative can really cause distress in the audience.

I had a friend give me Beethoven's complete symphonies as a 30th birthday present. To accompany this, he gave me a one-hour lesson (it was very entertaining) on the history of music and specifically the rules and expectations of how music was crafted in Beethoven's time and before. As it turns out, there were a bunch of expectations of format, construction and implementation that are, very simply, lost to a lot of modern ears. Beethoven, you see, would love to screw with the audience and knock them off guard, going in unusual places or mix-mastering up the structure. Now, however, most people just listen to them and enjoy them; there's no broken shadow narrative for them.

This idea needs expansion and explanation, but it sits in my mind; I have a shadow narrative in the BBS documentary episodes, and there's one for GET LAMP as well; I feel the movies are better for addressing it.

The Magic of Recommendation

It's getting to be time to finally put all people who were on the screen for the BBS Documentary up in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). As part of that, I browsed the entry to remind myself who's missing.

IMDB has kind of tarted up since it was taken over by Amazon, and in fact it gives good information (generally) but pastes it over with crazy ads and integration into Amazon (although a "buy this right now" link isn't so bad, even if it's only for Amazon).

But the recommendations at the bottom got my attention:

Suddenly it became a interesting puzzle: Why was the Amazon/IMDB recommendation engine relating me with upskirt and panties-fetish movies?

I'm theorizing it's either because they also got high ratings and were direct to video, or that someone named "Jason" is responsible for a lot of the work, including directing and cinematography. But it could be that hundreds of people, after reading my movie's entry, spontaneously searched for upskirt videos. I don't know, any of them seem plausible.

Bayesian Classification is fascinating to me, because I don't get it, not even a little bit, but love the results. So it's like raytracing, but with information. I just love the outcome. In this case, I'll bet the engine has an amazing justification for "BBS + direct to video = Tits", and if so, I WANT THAT ROUTINE.

Zero Punctuation

If you've not heard of it before, there's a "web feature" out there called "Zero Punctuation". It's basically a once-a-week video segment from a fellow named Yahtzee, who wrote a few adventures but is also, apparently, blessed with one of the best wits in the universe.

You don't need to have played these games he talks about in his segments; you possibly don't need to have played many video games at all. Instead he whips up, regularly, a beautiful and damning blend of biting sarcasm, deep cuts, and soaring highs into a five-minute animatic that leaves you truly breathless.

It is so good, it's worth starting from the very beginning (an attack on the Sony game Heavenly Sword) and playing each segment twice to see all the details. He does one of my favorite narrative tricks, saying one thing but showing another and having the two points blend into an even funnier third point. That kind of work is rare these days and Yahtzee does it in episode after episode.

You even get to one of my favorite situations, where something goes by and it's so clever that you end up pondering it, and by that time he's made two more points and you're desperately trying to keep up and you fail, forcing a restart from a few seconds before the first point. That's not annoying, that's breathtaking. Keep up, kiddo.

The episodes have a really annoying ad banner on them that you need to dispel and which doesn't entirely go away, but even with that little lameness, the brilliance of the work shines through. Bravo.

That time in the Haystack

10 years ago, I ran an anonymous remailer.

Before I explain it, let me show you the insanely pissed-off message I wrote when I closed it:

*** IMPORTANT NEWS REGARDING HAYSTACK@HOLY.COW.NET ***

- The Haystack Administration.

If that thing makes no sense, that's fine. I'll quickly explain it, along with a decade-past perspective on it.

So, way back when on the Internet, people were terrified. By "people", I mean "White College-Educated Libertarians" and by Internet I mean "The somewhat closed-off-but-with-more-and-more-people-coming network" and by terrified I mean "terrified".

Anybody who used the Internet for any amount of time knew that there was a good thing going on. You could connect all over the world, you had instantaneous connections, and you had a burst of free speech and transfer of information unlike anything the world had seen. This was what was so cool: you couldn't over-exaggerate how fucking great it was. You would run out of superlatives before you ran out of Internet.

But part of what made it cool was that it was so free-feeling. Your little favorite idea or fetish, lambasted and marginalized in the world, could flourish and make its own space. Someone could say "fuck" as easily as they said "hello", and it was all sorts of rough and tumble. This was heady, heady stuff. And there was, therefore, a terrified feeling that it was all going to go away.

Bad things happened back then, and still do. Laws were discussed and proposed that would ruin things. Policy fucks and law fucks and library fucks and academic fucks, all were slowly creeping into some massive shit-ball of dreary clampdown onslaught that was going to take this great Internet out and shoot it.

Bear in mind, of course, I mean the Internet between 1988 and 1995. There was a different Internet before that and a different Internet after that. But thanks to magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000 and all the Ziff-Davis crapshoots, there was this belief that the Internet had, by the early 1990s, achieved a manifest destiny of freedom and wonder that would be unsurpassed in our lifetimes and oh fuck here comes a law.

So in response, people started pushing ways to protect themselves against government and prying eyes and despicable boring people and all the general what-about-the-children types. One way was cryptography and another was anonymity.

Cryptography's its own mess, but you basically could send pretty-likely-to-be-protected messages, between others, and even more importantly, could generate a hash table indicating that you were receiving an unmolested message, untouched by the government agents who were out to get your crap and make you look bad. If I'm making it sound like a touch of paranoia, well hells yes, this was paranoia. Not your garden variety paranoia with the slight unease of materials and natures you didn't comprehend, but the even worse paranoia where you knew full well that people were entirely capable of doing crazy monitoring and life-destroying things to you and succeed. So you were paranoid, with some good reason.

Anonymity is the idea that people aren't free unless you don't know who they are. Otherwise, they are targets for reprisal, attacks, and general squashing of their ideas and lives. It is, one might say, a necessary vitamin strengthening the body of conversation and knowledge. If people can't feel they won't be targeted and pilloried for their statements, the ones they make will be hopelessly crippled and gaunt, lacking in the full force of ideas, like when you say the words ass flap while anonymous and aren't poked with a stick. Very important, anonymity.

Whoever knew the right people got into Wired magazine and one of the groups who knew someone who knew someone was the "Cypherpunks", their name a play off "Cyberpunks", which was dedicated to strong cryptography and a host of other platforms I'm entirely at a loss to recall. Here's Steven Levy's big wet kiss to this organization, which is probably the main driving force that I can even remember them. Note that this is the second issue of Wired ever.

So I myself, being a rather young fellow at the time, was totally taken in by these lofty ideals. Promoting freedom and cryptography and anonymity was on my "will do when I can" list that stayed rather dormant through the years when I actually stopped being able to afford to eat regularly. I knew I would one day get regular meals and also be in a position to provide some sort of blow of these cypherpunkish ideals and the rest.

As it turned out, I got the position before I got the regular meals.

The position was running COW.NET, my totally off-the-wall what-the-hell internet service provider I ran from 1995-1998 as a for-profit entity before kicking out of that entirely. I will, more properly, write entries about cow.net's South Boston period (as opposed to its Quincy period, Medford Period and other Periods) but now let's dial back to the whole remailer thing.

Cow.net ran on some aging Sun 3/280s. These Suns had cost a bank and an airline $20,000 when they were bought, and I'd paid $300-$500 for them. One of them had come from X.ORG, actually, and I was slow in paying them (SEE: NOT EATING), and they had a whopping 30mhz CPU and 32megs of memory and pushed something like 15-20 amps. Huge, horrible things. And they were connected to the net by a 56k connection. Note, not a modem; a dedicated dropped-in telco line going to an RSU/DSU and the whole expectation we have today with a network room. This cost me roughly $500 a month. It was in a weird location and I was starving and people weren't buying accounts as fast as I'd have liked but damnit, I was doing it!

So there I was in my position, and I thought I'd better make good on my promises to myself. So I put up an anonymous remailer.

A remailer (in my case, the software was called "mixmaster") was a program where you could send out e-mail through an e-mail address, which would strip the headers, hold it for a random bit of time, and then blow it out into the world, or another remailer. Eventually, this message would make its way into the world, either posted on a newsgroup or in someone's e-mail box, and there'd be no way to really trace where it came from.

This is all in theory, of course. Someone who was particularly paranoid could point out that I might be a federal agent, or my lines could be tapped, or someone could hack the box, or .... you know, good solid theoretical breaches. So people would often "chain" remailer stuff, bouncing a message between them, or sending them from anonymous-as-it-could-get-back-then connections and so on. In this way, your precious message and anonymity would be preserved.

What kind of messages would go through?

Oh, it ranged. I know of companies that would give my remailer e-mail address with instructions, so employees could honestly make anonymous suggestions. I know of people who used it to post messages about their medical experience as a doctor without revealing who they were. (Privacy to exploit privacy!) I know of people who threatened each other's lives....

...oh, did I mention that? See, anything could happen, so naturally folks were assholes. I had someone use the remailer to tell someone that when he gave that speech this Friday, he'd be on a roof with a sniper rifle. I asked my friends what to do, and they suggested "wait until Saturday". I did. Nobody died.

But this is the crunching-bone reality of these pie in the sky implementations of positive-outlook human interactions: just a dash of dumbass and many come crashing down. Relying on goodwill or a stern talking-to/indication of disappointment upon your shiny new tool being used to poke someone in the eye.... well, it's what the kids call "full of fail". You end up with a certain percentage of ass and eventually the ass minority becomes the ass majority and then you are trapped in ass.

So somewhere a year in, I gave up. My machine was being overused by all this, my connection (remember, 56k) was being hosed, and I was being consistently beat up for my actions, those kind of numb-nut rants that only a truly self-righteous somewhat-wronged individual can conceive of. I saw the writing on the wall.

But I'd done the good fight; haystack@holy.cow.net was a heck of a cool e-mail address, the theme of "you are the needle" was clever and in line with the "be revolutionary and fun" idealism I sucked down with a side of fries, and most importantly, I was not sued or arrested.

You can actually do a search to see some of the many fine postings used by the service over the year.

Would I do it again? Oh, likely. I do have ideals of doing the "right thing", even if it gets a screwdriver in my nose. But either way, I won't forget my lessons learned anytime soon.

The RV

Driving from San Francisco to San Diego to Seattle and back to San Francisco is a lot harder than I remembered.

It's something like 3,500 miles in total, including waylaid stops and additional sideways driving as needed for interviews. This 3,500 miles, conducted as it was over eight days, resulted in six interviews. (I also spent some time with close friends both in LA and Seattle, as a bonus). By the time you get past 1,000 miles of driving alone, you start to go a little nuts. I used to be much better at this, and I can still do long drives, but the long drives coupled with interview considerations and the weight of getting good shots is becoming a bit much. I am getting old, sadly. I can't do this to myself over and over, even if I never spent any time in my twenties doing insane driving like this.

I suspect next time I'll rent an RV.

In this brilliant idea of mine, I rent an RV and bring friends. One of us is driving and we never get to the sleepy stage, taking 3-4 hour shifts and then the others get to rest or hang out. The time of all this travel allows work to be done in other quarters, to plan, or just to sleep. It takes some getting used to, putting your life in someone else's hands for many miles, but the alternative is putting my life in my own hands and trying to break the 400 mile mark in a single shot.

Work on GET LAMP has now completely overshadowed the Arcade Documentary, so until it's done I'm not working much on Arcade. (A lot of work has been done but much more is left to do.) I'm sure I'll be able to find people with the stated goal of "We will drive around the country and see or talk about Arcades". It's a good pitch, that.

Who wants in!

The Goog

So, I spoke at Google.

This was one of my dreams, actually; to at least walk through Google at its heyday, to see the thing myself so I could remember what it was like in years to come. No entity, none, lasts forever in the state it is, and whether Google has peaked already or merely will be going through a bunch of Apple-like morphings remains to be seen. Either way, something big is there and I wanted to see it for myself.

To this end, a friend invited me on campus to speak about Wikipedia. Now, I'd made a little promise to myself that the next time I'd ever speak on stage about Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales would be on stage with me. But still, this was an opportunity too good to pass up. So I agreed, and gave a few paragraphs of text on what I'd speak about, and then continued doing interviews for GET LAMP. I cleared that particular Google Day of all interviews, though, just to be sure.

I signed a non-disclosure agreement and I'm going to honor it, so I won't discuss the things I saw in anything but a general sense. But I will say that my expectations were exceeded as to how wonderful things were, both as a spectacle and as someone who has spent many hours studying and discussing corporate culture.

I spent time, as part of my dad's desperate moves to be able to handle full visitation rights and keep a job, at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Westchester County, New York. This was, by most standards of a young boy, an amazing place. The curving architecture was out of this world, the hallways going for what seemed like infinity (I'd walk/run the length of them for fun) and insane machinery likely designed to pluck eyes from aliens scattered throughout. It was also where I met David Chess, albeit through a constricted tour no doubt forced upon him because my dad was a manager. But David was inspiring in his own way, with his great programming and cool office with a bunch of screens and magic going on. David's example became a part of what I hoped to be. And did.

But all of the magic of the IBM research center pales to the now-revised life at a place like Google, still brimming with untold amounts of cash and a whole range of ideas about office life, architecture, activity and approach. It was as I'd dreamed it'd be, and that places like this exist on Earth and not just in dreams makes me happy. I've had actual, real dreams of working at a place like Google, going back many years before a Google existed.

There was a feeling in the halls, that's hard to describe, but basically one of assured expectation. That is, a feeling that of course amazing things happen here, because this is a place where amazing things are expected to happen. It is a place where you are not fighting for resources in the same way that other places do. In some of my jobs, I have received blowback and horror at my request for a paper shredder. Not so at Google. My buddy RaD Man came with me to the presentation, and a person who'd once done art for RaD Man bumped into us in a lounge area. His reaction, and this gets to the heart of it, was not "Oh my goodness, my old buddy RaD Man is here", but "Oh, hey, and today's interesting thing of coolness was that RaD Man is here." That is very precious, that feeling. It does not happen often.

Also, and this is a somewhat unusual but not disturbing feeling... I just don't feel smart or driven enough to work there. I think I'd like working there, if I lived in California, but I can't think of a single reason to hire me. I remember when they brought an original Google cluster to the vintage computer festival, partly as a recruiting tool, and I said to the guy there, "You ought to hire someone to archive history of the company." He then took out his card, showing that he was, in fact, listed as a "Google Historian". Oh well.

So I gave a talk on Wikipedia, which you've no doubt heard the content in various forms before, although I'll post the speech itself in the future. I covered the usual items, but geared it for the Google audience. This mostly consisted of not getting hung up on criticisms of specific current choices in Wikipedia but instead how the environment it set up causes certain trends and issues which a place like Google, as it moves more into user-controlled content and presentation, needs to think about.

This talk was also unusual for me because I actually had something up on the screen. In this case, it was a series of cards with simple text headers on it. But you know, it totally fucked me up. My timing was affected by them, and I diagnosed, about halfway through, how to fix this for the next time I do such an approach. So maybe I'll have more visual aids in the future, or maybe I'll stick with my usual just-me technique, which has worked well so far.

Someone asked me what it was like, this place of Google and this was the best I could come up with:

"It's like Mount Olympus having rough sex with a Rubik's Cube factory and knocking over a Whole Foods Supermarket."

Take from that what you will.

On Objects and People

A muffin is a muffin. You like it or you don't like it. But there's not much to the muffin beyond it being a muffin.

Now, if that same muffin is being eaten by someone who is keeping you captive and they have declared that you will be slaughtered when they finish the muffin, then the muffin takes on a whole other nature.

The muffin is a measurement of time. It's an indication of a scary end. It's also a combination of hilarity and terror as you realize that the bastard is actually enjoying this muffin as it makes your demise. You have, in other words, a whole range and spectrum of feelings about the muffin, far outside of the muffin-esque aspects of its nature.

I bring this odd idea up just to help understand an even odder idea.

A lot of my work is collecting artifacts. But that's just what they are... artifacts. Representations of activity. A program or .ZIP file represents not only the work that appears in it but the work that has gone into that project, over time, of which you are getting the most recent revision as of the time of the ZIP file. You lack the revisions now gone, the letters written, the phone calls made over pizza, the hours of walking and talking (possibly alone) and all the rest of that critical, human interaction.

A lot of the games I play on my XBOX become a dozen times more compelling with the addition of people. The interaction is not just in a matter of the words they say but the style with which they play and the actions they take both inside and outside the game well away from the base "rules", which are "get a point for killing, most points win". It is the difference between a cup of water and an empty cup.

This human interface aspect, being transient and ethereal, is one of the first things lost in collecting artifacts. You can have a program but not really understand the programmer. You can have a BBS but not know the voice of the Sysop.

This is why I do video recordings of people. There is so much additional information you get, listening to someone talk; the modulation of the voice, the pauses, the way they make a face. We are built to understand and read this, and pull information from it not easily translated into words and text. It is one of the hardest things to preserve and a factor often cleanly forgotten when looking over the stuff I collect.

As time goes on, the people disappear. We're left with the shell, the cover, the basics. But I wish there was a way to easily capture more. Lacking that, the discipline is on the historian to constantly be aware that even the collection of every file, every piece and scrap of a historical situation, is still less than half the story.

It is just a muffin.

Software's Marked Failure

The previous entry talked about how well things have gone with software.bbsdocumentary.com, but there are a few exceptions. Obviously, they have not had a major detriment on the site's function, but they're worth noting because they're part of what contributes to my contentions about people, and conflicts within.

The "Make it Pay" episode of the BBS Documentary is missing one little chapter that I couldn't find a way to portray without doing backflips in the narrative. In the 1992-1998 period, people started buying the rights and intellectual property of commercial bulletin board software, often speculatively and almost always to personal and financial detriment. The real peak of this activity was around 1996, by my observations. People usually bought the rights for somewhere in the range of $10k, and then waited around for the payoff.

When I was filming the documentary, some of them thought this was the payoff.

So there was a situation where there was money, serious (to individual investor) money being passed around, with BBS software. And where there's money, there's transactions and agreements/contracts, and where there's agreements/contracts, there's the potential for endless fire of death. And a few people burned in the fire of death, and some of them contacted me hoping that my documentary would highlight their product, which of course wasn't their product, just one they bought.

But this isn't about that set of folks.

No, at some point I had an entry in software.bbsdocumentary.com that described a software package. This package had been around in various incarnations and some incarnations were not even the same package but the name was generic enough that it still got around a bunch. I had the usual smattering of information, along with some old copies of the thing that had been distributed around.

At some point, someone wrote in with a paragraph of information. I recall it being generic and declarative from one of the people who'd bought rights, along the line of stating it was a good program and those were good times. I dropped it in.

Some months later, actually, many months later, a second person wrote in, furious about the first person.

Turned out they'd had a little business together. This business included buying this program. As far as I could tell, the business then changed core competency from purchasing rights to the program to making no money with the program. Eventually, the business ended.

But, apparently, one guy sued the other. The second guy had sued the first, that is. He demanded I put in a second paragraph, and by a second paragraph, I mean a collection of ranty self-obsessed paragraphs. Naturally I obliged. More is more, after all. I also notified the first guy about the new paragraphs.

First guy wrote me and said he was sorry he ever brought the thing up. Second guy went ballistic I'd mailed the first guy. Demanded to know why I'd not notified him upon the posting of the first guy's paragraph way back when. We'll leave the logic of that argument hanging.

Actually, we'll leave most of that argument hanging, because things went downhill quickly. It turned out the lawsuit was still underway, with a years-in-the-making fight still going on over perceived lost revenue, running of the company, what efforts were where, and whether the first guy had somehow flushed the second guy out of some percentage of zero, which I believe is zero.

I've encountered this template before. I call it the fuckwit-dupe matrix. In this matrix, a fuckwit and a dupe get together on a project. The fuckwit is often the energy/promotion and the dupe is either the money or the effort. Together, they launch on an outing but stuff is kept kind of handshake-based because it's usually not a big deal. The fuckwit talks all pie in the sky as if you are currently eating said pie and dupe is happy to have an environment to achieve his dreams.

This shaky foundation will last until things go south, or even more bizarrely, if success rains down. Then the already-fatally-flawed relationship becomes even more an issue, and by an issue, I mean a hands-in-face-get-off-me raging battle over scraps or piles. And it can never end because the two sides both want it to end, but in their favor: fuckwit with a vault of cash and dupe with being totally washed clean of the thing with no attachments.

Here's some free advice, loving audience: Someone who is unnecessarily "up" about the project and prospects of your shared endeavor is someone who will be unnecessaily "down" and "completely ass-nut insane" if the shared endeavor encounters failure or lack of traction. Choose wisely and sign contracts. Even when you're buddies. Especially when you're buddies.

So the little battle waged in my mailbox, watching the two interacting, and finally, fuckwit went far enough to imply that I, by putting up these paragraphs, had made myself legally liable within the context of the lawsuit/settlement's success.

Well, that did it. I removed the entry completely, blanking it out and hiding off the text. (I never delete anything completely, just make it non-browsable). I said "Yeah, so I blanked out all your insane shit."

First guy again mailed me, going "Thank you."
Second guy mailed me and said "Great, and when this lawsuit is settled you can put up the real story."

I explained, patiently, that no, I was not going to put up the real story, that the page was going to be blank until both parties were dead, and then I'd put everything back. That's my current plan. Until then, all individuals involved can swallow Draino.

So sometimes, an entry is blank for a reason, and I am reminded that, in the fields of happiness I traipse through in my daily life, there's the occasional landmine of dumbassery to send me skyward.

DEAR GUY THIS IS ABOUT: I am not interested in any further mail from you and I will turn any further mails into a filesystem delete function test case. Eat a rock.

Software's Quiet Success

One of my most successful side projects has been software.bbsdocumentary.com.

When doing research for the BBS Documentary, I wanted some idea of what I was dealing with. I had, buried in different places, the software and mentions of various packages that had lived and died, but I wanted something comprehensive, something that I could tell, at a glance, what types of software had come out for what platforms.

The resultant site is a combination of bourne shell scripts and endless acquisition and donation. I have gathered hundreds of packages and people have sent me hundreds more. This was hugely valuable during the documentary because it gave me ideas of people to contact and also provided a reference collection when people would refer to something I'd never heard of.

The site sits at over 800 packages at the moment, ranging from full-blown commercial productions to one-off shareware blurps that made a single appearance and then disappeared forever. Writing BBS Software was a natrual outgrowth for someone who used BBSes; why not try it yourself, assuming you could get the communication routines right?

I wrote my own, but it's not on there. My rule, so things wouldn't get crazy, was to only include packages that were distributed - custom one-off collections that had no software you could ever reach weren't to be included. If someone had the package of the software a custom BBS used, I'll take it, but this is almost never the case and it's usually impossible to track that stuff down at this late stage.

In an ideal world, you have entries like the one for PBBS for the Model 100. The authors, a short paragraph, and the software. The actual program for the software is particularly enlightening in this case, as the Model 100 had almost no space and storage; note how there's no spaces between the commands, to get back those precious characters! The system could store SIXTEEN MESSAGES. SIXTEEN. I am reminded of the pocket fox, an animal that lived for fifteen minutes in the 16th century.

More occasionally, the entries are patchy, like the one for VBBS. And some are heavy on the description, with little software to show for it, like Stonehenge. Others have almost nothing at all.

A small band of determined folks are out there, acquiring rare copies, processing them, and sending them to me. That includes Bo Zimmerman, Mark Firestone and Lance Lyon. I'm very grateful for those contributions.

The larger issue, of course, is that there is only one guy who can make changes to the site; me. Because of this situation, updates are slow, coming in refined bursts over the years. With this site almost 6 years old, it has a lot of things in it but could have a ton more. It is a classic example of what I'd hoped I'd be able to get from Wikipedia; a place where I'd be able to mirror and refine work from a whole host of contributing folks, and then put them into my site. But it's hardly worked out that way, with Wikipedia deleting articles on specific programs left and right, due to being non-notable or otherwise someone having a bad day at just the right time for a program's information to be lost forever. It got me on the golden road to not editing Wikipedia.

That said, I certainly collaborate with regards to this site: people send me information, or programs, or link me to other locations, and the site gets those changes added. I also, when time is long and I'm enjoying some nice music, go through the directories and do better jobs of describing items, adding pieces, pulling documentation out of archives to put up separately. (I find people often just want to read the docs and get the idea and move on.) It's just that even so, how I put the stuff down is how it looks when I come back months later. A shame, but I do my best.

The syndrome between all my sites is "piled together syndrome", where even a cursory inspection by a driven individual will show that the software.bbsdocumentary.com site has no collection of files for whosis, while cd.textfiles.com will have a bunch of versions of whosis in various directories. They're piled together on the same general set of sites but they're not acknowledged as being so. In one way this works out great because people get to be the hero and point them out to me and feel good about it. But on the other hand, it's a shame that I can't just make stuff "just find it". Doesn't work that way; likely never will for this set of data.

I don't know how much others get out of this site, how much this site is found and used. I can see hits but they could be false ones. Someone who used a BBS or heard a version had some feature or otherwise wanted to know what a given technology person was doing before he got all the accolades for current work... well, if that's what they're trying to find, it's there. That's the success I speak of.

It's at one gigabyte of BBS programs. Anyone who says the BBS days lacked variety compared to today are on crack. Those were some good times. And when I have time myself, I improve my collection of those moments.

Lying McLierson and the Lying Liefaces

So, browsing around on Google's new "Products" section, I found this little guy:

http://store.gameasylum.us/bbsdocumentary.html (Webcitation)

The original link is here but I don't expect it to stick around.

What's going on is a nice store is selling copies of the BBS Documentary. And by "copies", I mean "copies" like you get with a couple of DVD-ROM burners and a half an hour. I can't imagine this person is buying copies from me and then selling them at a markup. I CAN imagine he's selling them at a markup, whatever they are; his webpage claims the "list price" is $70, which is news to me, and that you're getting it at a bargain for $49. Meanwhile, my site sells them at $40 and you can get an autograph besides.

The description on the page is a direct copy and paste from the Wikipedia entry about my BBS Documentary, including the "[1]" reference tag which doesn't work on his page. Of course.

Can I "do" something about this? Well, basically what I'm doing now, which is making fun of this corncob for duping unsuspecting folks that they might get a professionally printed package when it's obvious they're going to get three DVD-R dual-layer disks and a pat on the ass. The Creative Commons license I put them under makes what he's doing not only "legal" but encouraged. The whole point of Creative Commons is that I don't get a say in this sort of stuff, and I can't spontaneously change my mind about how I released it before, just because something "new" comes to me later, like a sense of regret or capitalism.

I am reminded of my time at Psygnosis when we would get a strange tech support call for a game not officially out yet. What we'd have on the phone would be someone who bought, as in went into a store and bought, a tarted-up copy of a demo program we'd put out on a magazine or online service or whatever. You'd have the 3-level demo out there to get attention, and people would take that demo, put it into an amazingly nice-looking sleeve, and sell it for $10. Now, naturally it would say "This is a demo" on it, but it would be buried in the graphics and wonder and kissy-kissy on the back of the sleeve, so some people would think they were getting a bargain. And then it would stop working, and we'd get a call.

Of course, I could be wrong, and am besmirching one of the finest videogame establishments in Wyoming, by implying they're duping DVD-ROMs when in fact they're merely selling it at a 25% markup. If so, I'm sorry, assholes.

Merry Christmas.

Update: This entry was titled Stealy McStealerson and the Stealing Stealfaces, but my little joke fell on clever ears, who pointed out that even jokingly using the term "steal" with Creative Commons implies I don't understand it, which I assure you I do. I have since made it more accurate (but less funny). Thanks to everyone concerned about my mental state.

A Substantial Volume of Man Meat

I was browsing some of my spam recently. Good stuff, that.

Yes, I archive my spam, just like I archive everything else. There's stuff to be learned from it, if nothing else that spam works; nobody would do this as much as they do without it working. The introduction of Bayesian anti-spam scanning made flat-out spamming less effective, and the resulting backlash by spammers has been quite marked and intense.

Specifically, they have to do their best to make spam messages appear as much as human-sent mail as possible; where before you could just spray the world, now there's some (minor) amount of craft, trying to negotiate the defenses people are erecting around their mailboxes.

So, speaking of erecting, an awful lot of spam wants you to grow your penis. Or, more accurately, wishes you to purchase some items that will ostensibly grow your penis. Mazel Tov! This sure beats a visit to Dr. Whitehead.

The problem is that a lot of people don't have a penis, or don't want to enlarge their penis, and specifically don't want to be queried on their current penis status via e-mail at work, sandwiched between their expense reports and meeting scheduling. So they have filters in place to prevent this penis mail from showing up.

The result, then, has been an amazing amount of effort to get around this with what can only be hand-crafted subject lines, all intended to both negotiate past the automatic filters and make the reader want to open it.

Browsing my most recent pack, I found the following hopelessly elaborate subject lines informing me that I need enlargement, should immediately pursue enlargement, and that sans enlargement I am a worthless being. Check these actual subject lines out:

• Have you ever felt a kiss of a womb? With your new big rod you'll feel it!
• Your obtained manliness will be surely noticed by every girl
• Your baby-maker needs to be bigger in order to perform its functions well
• CAUTION! she might be tight when you reach your new size, stretching may be required
• A real man will never exchange his big penis for anything.
• are you the next man in the world to get super sized in the pants?
• True masculinity is impossible without a substantial volume of male meat
• This remedy is a true godsend for your little willy
• Men with big penises go to heaven.

I am struck by the attempts to craft subject lines that beckon you to click on them or otherwise read the contents. It's a tough thing to cold-call someone into genital enhancement therapy that doesn't actually work. Themes of self-worth and confidence make a huge showing, while implication of power and control abounds elsewhere. The implication that penis size leads to actual ascension into heaven is a nice desperate play as well.

There's some insights to be gained here in terms of the realms of privacy and interaction; in a world where it is costless to communicate, communication intended to enrich the communicator becomes the de-facto dominant message. Right now, spam far outstrips any other communications I get through e-mail, percentage-wise: of the 52,000 e-mails I received in a recent 28 day period, 51,200 were spam. At that point, communication with humans is a rounding error.

But at least, buried among the shit and scandal in my spam folder, some poor dope is crafting elaborate calls to regard his penis enlargement scam, trying to rise above it all.

And failing.

Vintage Computer Festival X

Over the weekend of November 3rd-4th, I was at my old haunt, the Vintage Computer Festival, which was held once again at the Computer History Museum. This was VCF X, the tenth anniversary of the festival.

I've been going to this festival for about half that time, starting with a east coast VCF that was held (I went to it before I started work on the documentary, and talked up a few later interviewees) and going to as many of the west coast (original) VCFs as I could. This year was special, as I attended all three VCFs: East, Midwest, West. I figured it was worth doing, and the difference between the events is notable.

At the Midwest festival, I bumped into the Welshes, who wrote the excellent Priming the Pump, which is a history of the TRS-80 and its context in the history of microcomputers. I called Sellam Ismail, and left a message saying they should speak at the West VCF, the big one. As it turned out, they did! I'll give a detailed review later, but here's the short form: it's worth buying.

A personal highlight for me was the presentation on Phone Phreaking by Phil Lapsley. I've been helping Phil a tiny tad with his years-in-the-making project, a book about the history of Phreaking, and I can personally attest that Phil is the real deal, a guy who has been devoting countless hours of his time to getting the story "right". There's nothing better for a person who thinks they know a lot about a subject to sit in a talk about said subject and learn a raft of new stuff. In Phil's talk, I did. I'll be sure to cry to the world when his book is generally released, likely in 2008.

Somewhere in the middle of seeing old friends, hanging out with legends, browsing the exhibits and attending the talks, I gave a short presentation about GET LAMP that ended up being multiple hours. Sellam was kind enough to ask me to show some stuff from GET LAMP, but the inherent problem is that there isn't a lot of stuff from GET LAMP at the moment; it's merely hundreds of classified clips. So I threw some amusing ones together with no intercutting and totalling seven minutes in length, and put everyone's names below them as they spoke. Simple enough.

I showed the MC Frontalot video (twice, as a miscommunication put 90% of my audience in the wrong room) and then the footage I threw together. Then I talked a lot, an awful lot. And I answered questions and talked even more.

Devoid of too much structure and no real limits on the room (I was the last person to speak in it), I rambled on and on for hours, covering my philosophy in shooting, what I was going for, things I'd discovered, plans I had. I talked way too much about my thoughts on life in general, places I'd been, stuff I'd accomplished. People stayed, and very few ran for the door, which I appreciate, but I have no idea if it was actually an enjoyable experience.

I am pleased the interviews look very good; some kind soul in the audience asked how I'd gotten all the locations to look similar and sound similar and that's 100% pure luck and practice. I have now officially filmed over 300 interviews in my documentary "career", so there's stuff I just "do" now. That was my favorite question, by far.

I should say that I certainly enjoyed myself giving it; I just can't attest to people enjoying getting it. I think I need more structure in the talks.

I don't get tired of these events; always a lot of fun, always eye-opening. I'm glad to be a part of them, where I can.

420

I've been somewhat fascinated with the term "420" recently. Not so much what the term signifies (hey, let's smoke pot) but to watch it really break into mainstream usage and spread in crazy places.

I play online on the XBOX 360 and so many handles are variations of the term. "420 Bunny" was my favorite, but you get stuff along the line of "420killa", "Go420", "FourTwoOhGal" and so on. 420 seems to have penetrated even the most out-of-way locations; I see it in user icons, in newspapers, in messages, signatures, classifieds and, as mentioned, usernames.

High Times apparently has tracked this term back to 1971, with a group called The Waldos who used the term as a code around parents for smoking dope. That would make the nomenclature something like 35 years old, which is pretty far off the mark of when I would have nailed it. I'd be pressed to think this was anything that happened before 1999. It goes to show one of my little rules: stuff happened earlier than you think.

The ubiquity of the term, which ostensibly indicates a crime in most countries, is phenomenal. There's something to be said of the layer of protection one thinks online existence affords in terms of self-declaration. And speaking of the self online:

The fact is, the world has changed in terms of self-identification; the easiest way for computers and databases to classify people and objects is via boolean flags. I am this, I am not this. And the flags themselves are most easy to code when they're short and direct, even if they overlap to a massive spectrum of activity. I am Straight-Edge. I am 420. I am Geek. I am Gamer. You call yourself a thing or not a thing and that makes it easier for the machine to tag you. In return for this ham-fisted but ubiquitous world outlook, you are easier to search for, easier to find others who fall under this heading, easier for you to hit a button and find more stuff.

This is all fine and good until you start to pair or group up people under these tags, and then the myriad flaws in the system are obvious. There's intense gamer geek and there's slow-moving chess-by-email geek. There's don't drink at parties Straight Edge and there's seeking-converts-to-jesus Straight Edge. There's good-time 420 guy and there's barely functional 420 spiraling loser. Shared flags are not a bond. They might help, or they might hurt. But it sure is easy to classify.

A fundamental aspect of this is objective observation of the self, which is a rather difficult process. When 90% of the people think they're above average, you run into issues related to honesty and usefulness of a graph. When a group decides to ban a member, the resultant shudder can tear it apart.

420 is now morphed into a brand, a lifestyle, a commercial front, but people do that with anything. That there's now "rallies" on April 20th (4/20) and 420 shows up on clothing is a separate situation, the same reason that any assembling of more than 300 people causes a balloon vendor. Focusing instead on the 420 as flag-within-itself, it's rife and ready for misuse.

"420 friendly" is a term that shows up in places, and to the weary eye of the browser it can be interpreted several ways: "I smoke pot", "I don't mind if you light up in my house", "I'm going to keep going to the bathroom and light a joint at your party", or "I am going to consistently, whiningly beg for some of your pot".

Robert Hayden, faced with this inevitable issue of booleans being poor nomenclatures, created The Geek Code, which enabled a person to delcare their entire life and outlook in a large series of codes, each with a myriad of variations:

 Books
 
 b++++
    I read a book a day. I have library cards in three states.
    I have discount cards from every major bookstore.
    I've ordered books from another country to get my Favorite Author Fix. 
 b+++
     I consume a few books a week as part of a staple diet. 
 b++
     I find the time to get through at least one new book a month. 
 b+
     I enjoy reading, but don't get the time very often. 
 b
     I read the newspaper and the occasional book. 
 b-
     I read when there is no other way to get the information. 
 b--
    I did not actually READ the geek code, I just had someone tell me. 

This system is not perfect, but note how the self-identification is along concrete standards, with a few "general" variations as well. You don't have to say "I'm pretty smart", you say how many degrees you have or what you've accomplished. This system is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than "420" on its own.

Remind me to hammer the "fish symbol" and the "ribbon" magnet next.

Slow Time

I hate slow time.

Slow time happens when I am in the middle of multiple difficult things that require more than a single sitting to accomplish, and I find myself going between these projects in a round-robin fashion, stuffing days of effort into a multi-hour box. It does not work, it never works and I end up taking way too long.

The frustrating thing is that I am often in a position with one project to want to work on another. That is, while I'm driving around doing interview I have weblog postings I am thinking about. When I'm sorting papers I have people I want to be correponding with. When I'm fixing a long-overdue misconfiguration I want to be editing video. And so it goes.

By now wily people will notice I am backdating entries again. I went back and forth on this and I am committed to doing five-a-day entries for the rest of 2007 and then I will go to a as-it-happens format as things really heat up elsewhere in my life. So then, when I disappear for weeks, I'll just come back with why I disappeared and that'll be that.

Until then, here's some thoughts and writings that have been building up for a while....

The Guitar on a Stand

Here's how a minor point becomes a really odd obsession and a hard-to-explain result.

My fifth interview on the BBS Documentary was Brian J. Bernstein and David Fleischer, who had run a New Jersey BBS back in the 1980s. This intersected with a bunch of my interests, as I'd been in NY and called all sorts of NJ BBSes whenever I had a chance. I loved the Apple II and they ran a BBS on it, and they also interacted (making fun of) diversi-dials, which I also wanted mention of. So I went down to New York City to interview them.

While setting up (and it took me a while because I was so new to this) I marveled at Brian's excellent apartment. It had all the earmarks of excellent urban living: large living space, huge countertop island in the kitchen area, and halogen lights hanging from the finished-yet-unfinished ceiling. I just thought it looked great and was happy to capture this on video. Here's some shots of that apartment:

When I saw the DJ setup in the corner, I said, out loud "Man, the only thing missing here is a guitar on a stand."

Brian said "Oh, I have one of those."

I said "Let's bring that in!"

So, if you look at the back of the final shot, you can see a guitar on a stand:

A little joke, a little bit of me enjoying myself.

Well, within a short time, I started noticing a LOT of people had guitars on stands. And each time I saw one, I requested it be in the shot. And people complied.

Beyond the interviews that had them, the number of shots of each person in the final episodes meant that once you noticed one, you just keep on noticing them. It is entirely a construct, something I did in the middle of production on a whim and which stands there, finally, probably confusing someone down the line. But it doesn't affect what people had to say and nobody referenced it.

The movie's full of those little stories. I'll tell more as I recall them.

Non-Alcoholic

Sometime ago, I mentioned a steakhouse (called Alexander's) that I ate a very expensive steak at. (The cost was $250, in case anyone goes back and reads it and wonders what the number was).

At this steakhouse, while we were waiting for our table, the kindly person whose job was to keep waiting customers happy asked if we wanted something to drink. Well, I don't drink. I don't have alcohol and never have. So I asked what might be available in a non-alcoholic fashion.

People usually offer juice, or chocolate. This guy asked me if I wanted some Pinot Noir grape juice.

Pinot Noir... grape juice?

Well, naturally I'd want to try that!

It turned out to be a beautiful exquisite taste, so unlike grape juice you might find in a store, with all those excellent things that people who drink wine probably mean when they talk about finish and full-bodied and all that stuff. It was just great.

I raved about it for days afterwards, then I'd mention it occasionally and then not again.

I went back to that restaurant recently, and had another glass. Actually, I'm lying. We ordered two bottles of it, and that's when we found out the name of the place: Navarro Vineyards. They even ship, which is why I'm ordering a bunch of bottles for myself.

I get all that goofyness of wine-ordering, with the cork and the chilling and the special pouring, except there's no actual alcohol involved. Works for me.

I could now launch into a whole considering of my non-drinking ways, but it will seem pedantic to someone who doesn't drink and will seem weird to someone who does. Needless to say, if you don't drink, your wine selection is severely limited and so this grape juice will do nicely.

P.S. Do not offer me a chance to learn how wonderful it is to drink alcohol.