ASCII by Jason Scott

The Speech of Forever: Talk Notes

You are either a fan of my presentations I've given over the years or you are not. I am not here to dissuade you in either direction. But I figured that since a lot of people think presentations are "magic" or otherwise a talent they are utterly incapable of, and because I happen to have a nice artifact lying around, I'd talk a little about my process.

I gave a talk last August at DEFCON, called "The Edge of Forever: Saving Computer History". The entire presentation is located on Google Video, and is about an hour and a half. Here it is in a window:

If you were to have attended DEFCON last year and looked at the program, you would have found this description of the talk, written by me:

THE EDGE OF FOREVER - MAKING COMPUTER HISTORY, by Jason Scott, TEXTFILES.COM
Too often, "Computer History" gets shoved into a forgotten bin of irrelevancy, devoid of use for lessons and understanding. Even more often, people often fail to realize they're making history themselves. Jason Scott will walk though the basics of computer history, what to save, how to ensure things last for future generations, or perhaps how to ensure it's never found again.

Very general, and it was intentionally so, because I was leaving it open until the last possible moments to nail down specific details about the talk. I know computer history and I know about archiving (although my cousin would be quick to point out that I am not familiar with all the library science and archiving terms for doing so). The DEFCON call for papers happens a few months in advance (the starting date for submitting talks this year is March 1st, for example, with it closing on May 15th, for an August conference) so I knew things might shift between close and the conference.

In a case like this, I am relying rather strongly on two aspects to get my talk/presentation accepted. One is my reputation, that is, I actually show up and give the talk and it's actually a talk, and the second is the relative obscurity/uniqueness of my topics. If you look at the list of speakers for DEFCON 15, there's only a few in the same space: the UFO talk by Richard Thieme (which was an absolutely lovely historical talk and editorial perspective, and is available here), and Self-Publishing and the Computer Underground, which had several historical and historical-minded figures on the panel (and who I count as friends). That second talk is here.

As a result, my sort of talk is somewhat of use to a situation like DEFCON, where the talks are rather heavy with discussions of exploits, malware, and security. Security, in fact, dominates DEFCON as it does in a lot of other conferences, ostensibly because it packs them in. I don't actually attend security talks all that often, because there's nothing in them for me. I'm sure for people choosing talks, they look around for a little spice, and they know I will at least show up and give a cohesive work, so I get chosen.

There are two talk types I give, which I organize internally: narrative, and fact-filled. Narratives are talks where I have a story arc and move through the arc through the given time. The majority of my talks work this way. The others are fact recitations, which I enjoy less but which have more hard information for the benefit of the audience that wants this. I've probably given less than a half-dozen of these, whereas I've given probably two dozen talks of the narrative stripe over the years.

When I work on a talk, I try to understand what audience I'm working with. It helps if I've been to the conference before, because then I can recall the sort of folks and the sort of venue I was dealing with. If I haven't, I try and listen to any talks or presentations given before and gauge the audience reaction, looking for what was liked the most. I am a very huge fan of racking back as far as possible and trying to understand the greater context of the talk I'm going to give and where I'm giving it. It is one thing to give a presentation before a slightly buzzed or loose audience and another to give one to an audience who feels they owe their employers maximum attendance and are therefore going to every talk they can fit in and I happened to fit in. The emotions are different, the reactions are different.

For my fact-filled talks, I will have a whole sheet of researched stuff. If I need to know the exact date of something, the populations of organizations, the exact names of people, then I have all this planning to do and research to do. I don't enjoy these because they're essentially book reports, but the alternative is making up facts and I won't do that either. Ultimately, though, the fact-filled talks simply have more rigorous pre-planned flow notes, done weeks or months before my presentation. This is OK because I choose subjects not beholden to dynamic forces that will have an effect over that time.

The day or sometimes within the hour of my talk, I will assemble a flowchart for myself to keep myself in check, and to make sure that in the heat of talking I don't skip an important point. What prompted this weblog entry was that we happen to have at ready hand both my video performance (available above) and the actual notes I wrote for myself two hours before my presentation. Here they are:

(Sorry for the photos instead of flat images; my scanner's on a spiritual journey at the moment.)

Watching the talk and then browsing along with the notes I have in front of me will likely pull some of the magician's trickery out from your eyes. What might look like I'm musing about where to go next is in fact me glancing over the page and deciding if I need to go further down the current line or jump over to the next big idea. Some of my notes are utterly incomprehensible, little codes I say to myself to provide touchstones. AUDIENCE SCAN is my note to do what I often do now, ask people where they heard of me or any projects I'm up to. The LOD in a little circle means "start that story of hackers and history, which includes the Legion of Doom as mentioned in Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling". Not intuitively obvious, I guess.

I found out just before this talk that there was nobody scheduled after me. I then decided that it would be cool to have optional longer stories and shove them in the middle of the talk. This is how I bloated a 50 minute talk to an hour and a half. There's three stories in there (Amish, ARC-ZIP, Aleshe) that are utterly optional. This is why they're all grouped together in the notes. "Should you decide to, here are more quills in your quiver. Otherwise, skip."

Some stuff, I hear at the same time as the audience. The story of the Saved By The Bell collection is, for example, composed on the spot (the story is true but it's not mentioned on my notes). My reaction of "It's a constant maintenance nightmare!" is improv. A lot is improv. The key is to move on, listen to how the audience breathes, see how they are, and realize you have to keep moving if you're not grabbing them.

Some people might find it terrifying that three and a half hotel-notepad-sized sheets of paper are all that stand between me and an hour and a half of speaking. I don't find it terrifying at all, but maybe it's because I really know that given the need, I can jump off into any old subject and hold forth. The narrative structure might suffer, but at least I can pull something out that would be amusing.

Anyway, here's hoping something in here gives you insight to my approach.

Jumper and Childhood

I saw the movie Jumper last weekend with a few family members. I enjoyed the movie immensely, but for entirely wrong reasons. I am not recommending it for you unless these reasons have meaning to you as well.

Jumper's plot is simplistic by even high-concept standards, so I will provide it for you in a few simple sentences: An abused boy whose mother left him at 4 discovers in high school he can teleport short and long distances. He leaves his town and runs roughshod on the world for seven years, until he finds out there are people who can stop him from doing so and possibly kill him. He goes home and picks up an old girlfriend, gets into a fight with another jumper, and ultimately finds out his mom works for the people who are trying to kill him, which is why she left. He is victorious until the sequel.

Most of the movie is, therefore, exotic shots of locales he teleports to, fights he engages with another jumper or the people trying to kill him, and short conversations he has with people before doing one of the other two activities. It is truly and utterly soulless.

It is entertaining, though, in that way that watching a basic acrobatic act is entertaining; people come out, they do the trick, they move on. Eventually, someone changes up a trick so you go "woo" and then you're back on the track for the next trick. But sometimes you get surprised and you're basically more entertained than if you stared at a brick wall for an hour.

This review probably sounds cynical. I don't entirely mean it to be. But why do I enjoy this film?

Simply put, it is just the kind of film I designed in my head when I was a teenager.

You have a lot of spare time as a teenager, or, more accurately, you are often put in a position of powerlessness as a teenager meaning you have to wait around a lot or you're unable to make the most of your time. People tell you where to go or not go and what you're allowed to think about and while it's not entirely successful, it can be rather oppressive sometimes.

I loved movies so I would often make movies in my head. However, they were not very good movies. I'd have some basic ideas or a neat little trick, and then I'd construct this film in my head (which I thought was fantastic) and when I walked around the various towns I lived in, I could imagine them as locations or what I'd want to capture in the film and so on. It's one of those time-passing things you do.

Looking back, of course, these movies are often quite shallow. A kid who is suspiciously like me gets some crazy power and he shows everybody up. Over and over. Until the movie ends. This is basically the plot of Jumper. Even the name, Jumper. You might as well call it Teenage Power Trip Movie with Samuel Jackson. Did I mention Samuel Jackson is in it? He is. He has white hair and he's the "bad guy", sort of, although you have to admit, watching it, his character kind of has a point.

Actually, looking at the movie from almost any angle but the central character's self-centered point of view is a somewhat unhappy exercise, because then you realize nearly every other character is betrayed, mistreated or punished, often for no good reason. Alcoholic dad has his son run away one day, is really sad about this, cleans himself up a bit, thinks he hears his son nearby seven years later, comes in and finds he isn't there, then is killed. Pretty sad, really. Dad was a bit messed up and he then gets killed. He doesn't even find out why his wife left him, which was basically to avoid killing her own son.

But I am overthinking that aspect of things. Thinking of how Jumper came about, it's as if I was given a nice office on the movie lot, and asked to make a film, and then some nice people worked out the logistics, and I was so happy someone was finally paying attention to me, that I let them make a few changes to make it easier to film. I wonder if, somewhere down the line in the production, there really was a twelve year old calling the shots. I know it's based on a book, so I guess I'll pick that up and see how it reads.

Either way, it was kind of fun to see this movie from this perspective. I can't imagine it being a lot of fun from others, though.

I can't wait for the sequel, in which people teleport a lot and fight.

Subtitle Your Fucking Movie

Hi, filmmaker. I hope you found this weblog entry in the dark depths of your film production, when you're desperately begging someone for the rights to some music, or when you're stressing over whether to include that sequence with that really funny girl, even though you think it runs long. My advice: cut it and make it bonus footage. You can thank me later and your audience will thank me a thousand times over. Anyway, filmmaker, let's chat.

Because search engines are weird, you maybe found this weblog entry because you searched for How to Subtitle Your Movie, Subtitle Software for DVD, Oh My God This Rave Is Amazing, or Sure-fire Techniques for Selling Your Film to Festivals. These last two don't apply to what I'm going to talk about in this weblog entry, but you're here now and you better goddamn sit down anyway. You sat through who knows how many paragraphs of how-to sites and speeches while making your movie, so what's one more.

Filmmaker, I know the difficulties you've encountered, believe me. I remember when I made one of my student films and I slept overnight on the floor of one of the sets, using a bookbag as a pillow and the fetid air as my only blanket. I am not even lying to you, filmmaker, this happened. I also worked on a production where we made the two nice actors who were supposed to play brother and sister suddenly play lovers and we made those nice actors get it on in a couch in a registrar's office at a college that looked sort of like a dining room. So I know uncomfortable and the itchiness of lying to actors and standing around while sin happens. I am your friend, filmmaker.

So filmmaker, take my hard-won advice and subtitle your fucking movie.

I have popped in so many DVDs over the last few years, filmmaker... so very many. I have watched films on skateboarding, on making zines, on live action role playing, on videogames and board games and word games and something called the Lesbian Film Festival because the chicks looked hot. I have sat through films on fonts, on throat singing, even on people who love watching movies. Think about that, filmmaker... I have watched a movie about people who watch movies. That's how many movies I've watched; I've come out the other side and am now part of the movies being watched. That's meta-, filmmaker. You know what meta is.

And through these films, I tolerate a lot of bullshit. Maybe you got a shot that's really pretty but anyone with a brain cell would wonder what it's doing in here. I've seen shots where it looks like the camera was strapped to the back of a great dane high on ketamine. I watched a documentary where the subjects had to hold their own shitty mikes, filmmaker, making the whole thing look like some hellish version of Bowling for Dollars. But I tolerated them, just like people will tolerate your little movie and all the mistakes you made.

But please, filmmaker, subtitle your fucking movie.

I know you hate the deaf. A lot of people can't tolerate the deaf; they can't hear you, after all, and you love the sound of your own voice. Someone who can't hear this magnificent instrument is fucked up, filmmaker, and they will never know the true joy of you. But subtitles are the next best thing; not every shot is so obvious with the sound turned off that you can know what's going on. People sometimes speak off-camera. And get this, filmmaker... some people just don't talk all that good. Even more importantly, deaf-hating filmmaker, there are even better reasons to subtitle your movie:

• Some people answer the phone while your film is playing and that makes it easier for them to keep track of what's going on. Yes, it's a blasphemy that someone is going to do this during your magnificent film, but that's what's going to happen, and you might as well come to terms with it.
• Some people have kids and so they leave the thing muted so the kids don't hear the bad words. You know what kids are, filmmaker? They're time sinks that smear peanut butter on your good stuff. If you curse at or near them the government takes them away, which isn't so bad but then you miss them after a while.
• Some people can hear but not so well, filmmaker. Isn't that weird? But these folks have trouble with overlapping dialogue or weird audio effects on voices or echoes or any of a bunch of other stuff that you thought made your film better. They need help, and subtitles help.

There are many more reasons, filmmaker, so don't worry that you're giving into the deaf's terrorist demands. People who can hear like you can will want to have subtitles too.

Subtitling films is easy, filmmaker. Considering what you had to do to convince that restaurant you could shoot there after hours, or what you had to sell out of your family's assets to buy a nice camera, this will be a piece of cake. It's so easy you could subtitle a feature film in a single day. Think of it; a complete new audience and a great feature added to this film you slaved over for weeks, with just an added day of work. It's so simple, interns could do it. You'll want to let it sit for a day or two afterwards and proofread it of course, but you know about going that extra mile, filmmaker; that restaurant owner had horrible breath and he kissed you like a drunk sailor. Subtitling is easy.

There's this program called subtitle workshop, filmmaker. I know you don't read very well, which explains that stilted dialogue in your love scene, so let's make those letters nice and big:

GET SUBTITLE WORKSHOP.

It's free, filmmaker. You love free. Free is what you've been mainlining the whole way through your film. When you talked about how great it would be and how hard you were working on your film, you were probably getting a free coffee from your buddy or an understanding person who was worried about the poor filmmaker. A lot of people are worried about you, filmmaker, as I am. So when I say this program is free, I mean it. It's free and free. A popup will happen because those people are probably starving because filmmakers are taking their program for free, but you know how to kill a popup, I know you do. After all, you killed your gag reflex hanging out with the kind of people who hang out near people who make films but don't make films themselves. You can do it, filmmaker. I know you can.

Hell, you probably have a Mac, filmmaker, because all filmmakers have Macs instead of me. Maybe you edit on Linux only. That's just awesome, in a way that watching a house burning down the street is awesome. You can now, in the back of your mind, consider ignoring my advice, but I tell you that they make free subtitling software for your machine too, latte-sipping filmmaker, and you can find it in no time. But I use Subtitle Workshop and it works with almost any format of movie, and can output the subtitles dozens of ways. It works for me, and it'll work for you.

Subtitle workshop is very easy to use, filmmaker. I learned it in no time, and subtitled 7 hours of film. I subtitled bonus material, introductory material, and all the actual films. I even added subtitle tracks on top of other subtitle tracks! One of my episodes has a bunch of people in it, too many to put their names under. So I made a subtitle track with their names on it, so you could watch the movie and see who was talking. Isn't that slick, filmmaker? I did that. And you can do it too and claim it was your idea, just like you think it was your idea to have the murderer be the priest. Whoops.

Filmmaker, I haven't wanted to insult you through this, but it's hard not to. You somehow got all this way, before finding my weblog entry, thinking that subtitling is unnecessary or hard. It is neither, filmmaker, and now that you know the secret of subtitle workshop you can go ahead and subtitle your film, or do that special thing you do to make some poor sap do it for you.

I love you, filmmaker, like all those people you meet in the film industry love you.

Subtitle your fucking movie.

My Five Movies

While I registered the domain name in 2002, production in earnest of GET LAMP started in October of 2005. It is now February of 2008. Assume for fun that it will take into the summer to finish this, which is starting to look cheery and optimistic. This means it will have taken three years to make this film. The previous film, BBS Documentary, was started in October of 2001 and started showing up in homes in May of 2005. That's about four years.

I assume the arcade documentary, when that rolls around in earnest, will be at this same rate, 2-4 years. At that point I'll be in my 40s.

Cleaving things like this, I end up thinking I've probably got five movies in me. One's finished, one is almost done. One is planned and somewhat in production. That leaves probably two I don't know about yet.

This is me assuming that by the time I'm about 50 I won't want to be making this films. Considering how unpredictable life is, I could be quite wrong and I'll drop dead in between interviews when I'm 70. Or maybe this one is the last one I'll ever finish. I don't know, after all.

Anyway, it's an interesting thing to ponder, every once in a while, what those two movies would be. I look at the vectors of other documentary guys and how they transitioned over time, and I am concerned I will end up with a dreary political film of some sort, trying to "do something" with my documentary skills to get a "message" out there. Here's hoping I don't do that.

Or I could move into fictional filmmaking. Like a guy who's tasted the thrill of building his own engine who then rents a car, it just doesn't seem like it'd be as much fun. But others have done it to great success and even seemed to enjoy themselves. I couldn't see myself wandering the hallways in LA trying to get it made, though; LA is where I visit my buddies who live out there, and I never set foot in any of the "stuff". In fact, I made it a point to bittorrent under the Hollywood sign.

Oh, speaking of bad investments, actually... that trip to Hollywood was part of something called the DeviantArt Summit, an event held in this beautiful theater that had been around forever. We got in essentially free because of RaD Man's connections; we thought we'd make major bank on the whole thing, so we invested in this really swank setup for selling my documentary and some ACiD related material. I think I paid $600 for the machine rental and the big BBS Documentary poster, and of course flight and hotel. I sold two copies. Two. But here's where you have to take in the whole value of things, because I got to meet Michael Robertson of MP3.COM fame (gave him a copy), Bruce Sterling (gave HIM a copy), verified the real story of Sonique, stayed at the amazing Roosevelt Hotel, ate at some fine fine restaurants, drove over and hung out with Tom Jennings to get him his copies of the documentary, and generally had an amazing time. So do we judge the "value" by the sales or what happened? I go by what happened.

I'm at no loss of suggestions of films I should do; many of them are along the line of "Usenet" or "Internet Culture" or "Slashdot". I could see "Usenet" but even that'd be a little much for me, and it doesn't make my heart and head burn. That heartburn is where the energy comes to see something to the end. Every day I work on my little text adventure documentary, I am full of pure glee. Months of research and travel and work and I still thrill at it; I don't know many subjects besides arcades that will have this effect.

I don't spend too much time considering those mystery films or what my film career will do or where it goes; I'm just happy that after making my dad drop eighty grand into my college education for film, I actually made back that 80 grand doing film. That's got to count for something.

And the best part: When I'm done with these five movies, people will look at my IMDB entry and go "Wow, he didn't do much of anything."

On the Occasion of 100 Simultaneous Connections

I had a new record rather recently: someone decided to download textfiles.com through 100 simultaneous connections.

I have to be clear that I don't mean 100 files downloaded or they connected to me 100 times in some period of time; I mean that they maintained 100 separate connections to my server and had them going full bore for hours. They were obviously on some sort of connection not unlike the satellite-death-ray at the end of Akira; the pipe that textfiles.com rests on had been dropped to emulate an acoustic coupler running during a GWAR concert.

How many leeches can dance on the end of a pipe is a question that's been considered for decades; the guys who take and don't give, what they are in the scheme of things. Personally, I consider them vital links in the chain, people willing to be distribution points across time and distance, even if their collections don't make it out into the general pool for some time. When I collect piles of disk images from 1980s era 8-bit home computers, I know full well these are the products of man-years of gimmie-gimmie downloads, someone hooked to a BBS overnight and cleaning them out.

In this case, however, the folks involved are trying to acquire the data through insane means and literally ruining it for everybody. I now use the textfiles.com server for other projects, not because I don't have servers locally that could do the work, but so I can feel the heartbeat of the connection over the day.

Good thing I have a Defibrillator handy.

This Defibrillation device comes in the form of a script, which I call OINK. Here it is:

#!/bin/sh
#
# OINK OINK
for oink in `netstat -an | grep ESTAB | cut -f5-8 -d"." | grep ^80 | cut -c11- | sort -u`
    do
    ponk=`netstat -an | grep ESTAB | grep $oink | wc -l`
    if [ "$pork" -gt "5" ]
       then
       echo "$pork     $oink"
    fi
    done

Oink will tell me of anyone who has more than 5 connections. It doesn't DO anything; I have to do whatever I feel necessary, which shifts over time. Currently I just do a software firewall and block people completely. I could put something into the webserver software, but that's making apache do all sorts of work it doesn't need to; better to just forget Mr. Multiconnect ever existed for a while.

What makes this effort worth it are the letters. Oh yes, the delicious, luxurious letters I get from people who slowly, methodically determine that textfiles.com is in fact up, but they are in fact down. Oh, the positions, the promises, the junkie trying to plead his case while you notice all the furniture is missing. It's a great thing.

And it takes very little bandwidth!

The Unfeelies

In my pile of incoming documentaries and DVDs to watch, I seem to have stumbled onto a new level of scant packaging. I ordered a copy of "Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox", a documentary about Dr. Bronner. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine; that's the whole point of a documentary, to be about something you don't already know cold and bring you into that world, if possible. Short form, Dr. Bronner was a holocaust survivor who made a soap and beauty products company and put crazy-go-nuts messages on the label. I especially like the completeness of Cecil's overview of the subject.

This is the sum total of what showed up in my mailbox:

Sara Lamm seems a nice enough kid from her various interviews she's given in support of this film. And as far as cross-product promotion goes, you have to hand it to her for having a situation where you can actually buy the documentary with some soap from the soap company.

But wow! A piece of cardboard and a disc!

Kudos for making the DVD Region 0 (this means it can be played on any DVD player, anywhere in the world). At this point, the retardation of Region Encoding should be self-evident, but I'm going to say, good job there. Point to the production.

The menu system is enjoyable, the reference to "All One!" on the packaging was cute, and then there's this ugly over-restrictive copyright line on the packaging declaring you can't copy it or lend it to anybody, or play it in public. Wow! That sure brings me back to the good old days when people were worried there'd be illegal speakeasy movie theaters, or that someone would cut you out of your cash because they let someone down the hall at the dorm check out your movie. (Yes, I realize "unauthorized lending" likely refers to a library; but that makes it better how?)

I'm positive they threw that bit of yuck on the packaging because it's always been done that way and it's a pleasant expected out of date decoration, like the little cornices on the tops of buildings. It's cute, it's familiar, it takes you back.

But then, the more I sat there cranked at how weak the packaging is, I started to think about it.

Why am I so fucked up about this?

I mean, it's only packaging, right? It's about the movie, the quality of the production, the stuff on the DVD that you get, and that it all got to me at my house safely. Surely, if the packaging is efficient and made of delightful cardboard that's probably recycled (although the text doesn't crow about this, which makes me suspicious), then everything's howdy-dory, right? Why don't I shut up and enjoy my fuckin' movie?

In my case, I don't feel like I was particularly rewarded for buying this. I got punched on when my movie sold for $50, and this one sells for $25. There's nothing to recommend buying it to get the package. You might as well rent it. And if you rent it, by the way, I think you're violating the cute little text cornice on the back. But really, if you were renting it you'd just get the little DVD and you'd have gotten well over 60% of the total weight and experience of the original package!

I feel like there's some serious not-getting-it going on here.

Similarly, I get that ooky feeling reading about the release of AJ Schnack's new documentary out on DVD. He and I run in very different circles (although we were in the same room once!) and so I can hardly speak for him and act like we're close buddies or anything. But there's this sense of distance from his own DVD that bothers me, like it happened "over there" and now it's finished and there we go. I'm trying to imagine having that level of separation from my projects and I can't do it. And I'd be on my weblog (AJ started his as support for his newest documentary) yammering off about the technical specs, the process of fitting stuff and what worked and didn't work. Just serving as a warning to others on what not to do or what to avoid seems pretty cool. I bought a copy of his newest DVD, but I'm having the feeling I'm going to get another little package in the mail, one that doesn't compliment the work within.

I think of the theatrical run as a little party, and the DVD packaging as a promise. It's the final work, the total control of the created "product" that you are sending along to people. I'm starting to wonder if I'm totally off book with everybody else. Isn't that where your work will have the most effect, in someone's home, their special place where they watch these things? Or is it that critical that you know it's in a huge commodified popcorn-stank sticky box on the outskirts of town, for a week or two?

Unnecessary

This is a delightful salad of concepts, chopped up and presented for your perusal.

My buddy Chris and I have this running joke/theme going for the last months or so, where we send each other basic how-tos in each other's field, his being writing and mine being filming. We also bump into a lot of how-tos in our own fields, just boppin' around on the world wide web. A lot of them say the very same things, sometimes couched in humor, occasionally misstating them, and occasionally buying into ideas they themselves have obviously never tested. People often offer advice! It's freely given and generally it doesn't hurt to look them over. If you're so unsure of yourself that someone giving you advice is a terrifying or despairing experience, you haven't field-tested your methods enough. Don't avoid work to hear advice, but don't ignore advice because you think it'll affect your work.

The upshot is we ping a lot of shit at each other.

So in my travels and thanks to Chris' suggestions of places to check out, I've formulated this idea about creating "stuff" in the contemporary frame. I've been living this idea for years now, but I don't articulate it often. I keep bumping into other people articulating it, so I figured it was my turn.

Robert Rodriguez got a bunch of fame because he shot his film Mariachi very cheaply, doing an unbelievably low ratio for shot footage and ending up with a flick that could rival a lot of low-budget Hollywood features. His secret was utterly abusing his crew/friends and instituting crazy risks and jumps towards making his film. It does not scale, but given what he was working with, it was very effective. Later, he's gone on to make more films, notably shooting in digital format. In recent presentations about his digital work, Rodriguez mentions how he leaves the cameras running almost constantly during shooting, working stuff out with the actors and jamming the cameras all around to catch lots of stuff dynamically. In other words, his frugal footage style, this huge hallmark of his work, went right out the window at the first opportunity. Instead, he knew that digital footage is absolutely cheap and so he would just let stuff run constantly so he'd capture every last bit of his actors' output - which itself is not cheap, so he was actually switching one overexploited scarce resource for another.

There's a book I enjoyed reading called the DV Rebel's Guide, which is done by one of the founders of an effects house. It's a pleasant little read, although if you don't edit on an Apple using Final Cut Pro with After Effects, his exacting technical walkthroughs aren't overridingly useful to you. No mind; he often gives you advice that would work with an 8mm handheld film camera, so it's worth browsing.

Specifically, he mentions how you are bursting, filled to the brim, really, with one resource that Hollywood just does not have: time. If you need to wait to the next rainfall for the best shot, you can. If you have to wait 3 months before that family vacation out west will enable you to get some good establishing vistas, fine. In one chapter, he mentions how a fire down the way from his home enabled him to round up his actors and shoot a scene out in front of the smoking building, giving a sense of realism to his film he could never afford. Shooting your film to take advantage of someone else's terrible personal tragedy is morally reprehensible and I love it.

In these cases, you are looking at what you have at your disposal and exploiting it instead of bemoaning the lack of other advantages you don't have. Winona Rider is not going to be 18 again and be the perfect girl for your role, and work for you for cheap. Another actress, however, one of many who would jump at an opportunity like what you want to work on, definitely will. You can't shoot downtown and fire weapons. Shoot in a park and fire fake weapons and do sound effects later at your desktop.

This is all interesting but not where I am commenting today.

What has my interest is my theory that a lot of people get hung up on doing stuff because it was always done that way, and the way that their judgment works is that if they don't do things in a similar fashion, they're not valid. That's a huge mouthful, and I think I can reduce it down to: stop doing unnecessary things. If the output of your effort has the same look, effect and result of doing it the old way, and a new way is easier, cheaper, or whatever, then do it the new way. There's no shame in doing it the new way, and if someone is shaming you, they are lame and should go in a hole.

A concrete example. You can use a digital camera, of which there are ones so cheap they should come with a side of fries, and shoot stuff at a great resolution for animation. You click in a remote, which many come with, bind that camera in a tripod, and then shoot at a huge resolution that would be more at home on an HD screen than an iPod. And the feedback is instantaneous. You see right on the little screen that you're shooting well, got the lighting right, got it in focus. There's way to chop these little cameras so you can yank the pictures off as you go, too. Plug in the end of the USB camera, yank the newest shots you took, unplug, keep shooting. Why would you do this in 16mm film? Nostalgia? Because Will Vinton used to? Because that's what your favorite animation was shot with? I shot that film I talked about earlier this month in 16mm. I would never, ever, ever do that again. There is no benefit. It is unnecessary.

It's easy to focus on the small stuff and think you're living with this philosophy. You used your buddy's band for some music instead of paying insane rates for a similar-sounding band. You used a really good poem from the 18th century as a prologue instead of making one up. Not bad! But let's take it out even further.

Why are people often making films as linear 1.3 hour narratives?

I mean, sometimes it makes sense to do this, but more frequently than not, you're shooting the length because that's what movie houses preferred/prefer to get more showings in a day. It's a single piece because you can easily ship the film canisters around with numbers to indicate what reel should go when. Make no mistake, I find technical film aspects fascinating. I was even trained in some, but it is utterly unnecessary now. This was the genius of Pete Chvany, my college film mentor; his lessons still work for me even when the medium has completely changed. Good is good!

BBS Documentary was seven hours of content, 5.5 of that film episodes. There were another few hours of audio recordings too. GET LAMP may, in the aggregate, end up rivaling BBS Documentary for the amount of content you get within the final product. There'll be a main "film" but I already know of three "featurettes" (really, shorter episodes) accompanying it. The work will exploit the DVD format for multi-angle, subtitles, menus, and interactivity. Why not? I'm already there, I'm already making this work available in DVD, there's no reason not to.

I am not pursuing film festivals because I don't see any point. I suppose I could prowl around a few with my film being shown and enjoy things that way, but there's not an overriding reason for me to do so. Various events have asked me to show a film and accompany the showings. I will do that, since I get the benefits of travel and meeting people without looking at everyone I meet who has any success as a "get". The medium of film festivals, that is, a meat market where you often pay money for the hope that some big names will find your film and watch it and give you a gabillion bucks, is not something I see being relevant for the things I do. GET LAMP has several rough goals that I hope happen:

• People who have never heard of text adventures will be interested in this film.
• People who make or play text adventures will feel good about the film.
• The final product will take the average person a week of effort (40 hours) to fully regard.
• That average person could just see just a small bit of that and still be satisfied.

None of these is particularly impossible; I am leveraging my obsessiveness and regard for the subject and not getting hung up on being just like a film I might have seen in the theater in the last week. We're different things and we each can do what we do well enough; why waste our talents trying to be like the other?

The Feelies

An occasional surprise or insight has come out of my interviews for GET LAMP that's unlikely to get the amount of depth it deserves in the final work. I could be wrong and it'll be prominent, but let's assume for today's entry that this isn't the case. I'd like to talk a little bit about feelies, but specifically, the Feelie that started it all, which appears to be Murder Off Miami.

To explain what I mean by "Feelies" in this context: Infocom packaging (and really, a bunch of other software packages of the 1980s era) came with additional knick-knacks wrapped in, accompanying the disk or cassette and the manual. Sometimes these knick-knacks were simply copy protection items, like a code wheel or a map with information you'd need to refer to to go far enough in the game. Other times, they were neat stuff that provided you with an additional dimension to the game. I've interviewed a lot of people who have said this was what set an Infocom game ahead of other similar products for them; you opened the box, and stuff fell out, and even before you played the game you were part of the game, if that makes sense.

There are exhaustive galleries of all the contents of the Infocom boxes; they range from plastic rocks to a map with pieces to Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (always opaque).

The term "Feelies" harkens back to the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which was his term for a movie which provided tactile feedback. In other words, it could be claimed that the Infocom games were providing tactile feedback in each game with stuff you could hold in your hand while playing. I should mention this term was not 100% beloved within Infocom, but it has persisted and everyone at least knows what you're talking about.

And what else I found out was that nearly everyone I talked to who had something to do with Infocom's feelies had owned or knew of this interesting property, Murder Off Miami, which had originally been published in... 1936.

1936! Of course, that's not the edition that everyone owned at the time of the dawn of Infocom... they owned the 1979 re-issue, which did its best to recreate the original work. This was, in fact, an edition I owned myself, because my dad got it for his kids and we did our best to honestly solve the mystery within.

The "book" was basically a bound folio, with what seemed to be a massive sheaf of papers inside, including photos, maps, telegrams and even pieces of evidence like hair. You were basically being given the "case file" of a sensational murder case, and as you browsed through the writings and clues, you were to come to the conclusion of who committed the murder and why, and at the end you would open a sealed portion of the book to see if your answer was correct.

It's very well done. Here's some shots of the inside:

You might imagine the feeling, especially as a youth, opening this treasure trove of items to pick through, this pile of evidence towards a crime that might help you solve a case, and there's really no narrative in the strictest sense. Stuff is happening and there's dates, and some of the essays within this collection read like prefaces, but generally we're talking a big non-linear story. Right at home, one might say, with the sort of interactivity the later computer games would display.

As an adult you would likely recognize this for what it is, a fulfillment nightmare. Trying to imagine how much it cost to put together this collection of oddly-shaped items, bound by a string, means you really get a sense for how out of this world this thing was. There are a variety of websites describing the process of putting this item together, this one being the best. You really understand what a monumental undertaking and risk this was.

I must also stress, this item is worth getting, still. You can go to Amazon and pick up a used copy elsewhere, and you can read this thing and it will still have the same punch, 70 years after its initial creation.

The impression I got from the Infocommies was that this book was a real eye-opener of what "could" be done in printing. While the industry moved from the baggie-and-disk approach and did some basic cardboard printing, Infocom shot ahead with their package design, including the Starcross saucer and the Suspended plastic mask, and all the feelies inside. And it all comes back to this odd little book and its 1970s reprinting.

ROFLcon

I've been tapped to speak at ROFLcon.

ROFLcon's one of those ideas that is either going to be a spectacular one of a kind event or a complete mess; either way it does promise to be utterly memorable. The premise is simple; assemble a bunch of "Internet Memes" and see what happens. Have some talks so there's something to do. Tailor it in a pleasant academic cloth so sociologists and cultural anthropologists can get out of their boxes for some air, and make sure there's adequate bathrooms.

The guest list reads like a laundry list of fads of the last few years, but more pressingly, includes some heavy hitters in the realm of online content generation, the first set of people making it their full-time primary source of income and outlet to be a website. Some of them are friends, other colleagues that have written about me or me about them or otherwise. Many, many are not. I am famous in some small sector of life; others here are famous too, in differing sizes and amounts. Pretty much all can buy groceries without being hassled, which is my metric for "comfortable celebrity". Some discussion was underway for me to record some interviews with people, maybe chat with a few; I don't know how realistic this will be but it's possibly there. I would think endless cellphone snapshots wouldn't do this assemblage justice.

My talk is called "Before the LOL" and will function as a historical context to Internet Memes. I'm sure it'll be adored by some and questioned by others, but at least my concern I raised some time ago about history being regarded for this is being nicely addressed in my favorite way: "OK, Captain Fingerwag, YOU steer."

ROFLcon descends to Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 25th and 26th. I predict it will be a hot ticket indeed.

The Modem Man Rap

This little gem got contributed to me this week: a recording of people screwing around on a phone conference in 1987, doing a little ditty called the Modem Man Rap. Here's the 866k mp3 file.

I figured I'd transcribe the greatness for you.

All right, take it from the top.... the Modem Man Rap

Yo my name is Modem Man and I'm K-Kool
But some people think I'm one big fool
I hack out Sprint and ITT
Wherever I go I make calls for free

All the kids call my phreaky phone line
And get the new codes all the time
Here is an Allnet for you
It's 5163452
Tell me if it works, cause I don't know
'Cause it was hacked out by the Toad

In case you haven't heard the news
Magnus got busted he's one dumb dude
He hacked out 90 codes from MCI
And knocking down the door came the FBI
They busted in his door the very next day
Took his crystal ball and his brand new Hayes
They got all his numbers and even his loops
So he jumped on the phone and called Zarniwoop!

Word man, word man, that was bad, word

My name is Style, and I am fine
So call me on the other line
Style, please get off the phone
So your little sister can call home
Please go use the other line
But don't be long, it's dinner time
Better yet, go clean your room
And don't forget to use the broom
I'm going to unplug your BBS
If you don't start cleaning up this mess

Listen guys, I got to jam
Dinner's ready, and we're having spam
Too bad, cuz I'm having a ball
I just love conference calls

I'll repair the gaps and mistakes if the original contributor gives me corrections, or others help me out with them. I did my best.

Notably, this 1987 rap calls into question a whole discussion that I got yanked into recently over the origins of "woot". Obviously this rapper uses "Woot" within the same context that many people online do 3-4 years later, even explicitly rhyming it with "loot". I doubt this was the origin for it, but at least it brings another artifact to the table. An Update: I am wrong, and it's been corrected to reflect that.

The rap, now twenty years old, mentions a few pieces of phreak/hack history worth noting. It mentions having an Allnet, which was one of the also-ran phone companies. I'm going to use a paragraph from elsewhere to describe it:

"One of the first independents out of the gate after the 1984 breakup of AT&T, Allnet Communication Services was once the fourth-largest long-distance provider in the US. The product of a merger between Chicago-based Allnet and Detroit-based Lexitel, Allnet stood apart from its competition by being the first major player to lease its network infrastructure rather than purchase soon-outdated equipment. While AT&T and MCI employed analog microwave (the hissy long-distance that we remember as kids), Allnet leased digital microwave and fiber from other players, resulting in clearer calls and more network flexibility. Despite this technical superiority, Allnet got dinged frequently on its customer service, which seemed to suffer from high turnover and low consistency. Allnet was acquired by Frontier Communications in 1995. " [1]

By the way, the 10xxx code for Allnet was 10444. When the rapper mentions Allnet "codes", what he means is you would call Allnet's access numbers (because using a 10xxx number would bill the phone you calling from), and then you'd type in a numeric code to charge it to your account. This way, you could use your account to call from anywhere in the country.... and so could others!

Also notable is the use of "K-Kool", which is well in use at this point in history, accompanying the still-in-vogue K-Rad as a tech slang term. However, nobody appears to still use the term "Got to jam" to mean "I have to leave now."

Health and Exercise Update

About a year ago, I told you I was starting a new exercise regimen. And that I did! Man did I work out.

Here we are a year later, and I didn't go to the gym, mostly, for the last 3 months.

So, am I slacker? Well, no. My gout and kidney stones increased to the point that walking became difficult. Very difficult. I missed quite a few productive days to it. And if you can't walk, you can't work out very easily.

I now have an appointment with a sleep lab (to see if I'm sleeping properly), an allergist (to see if my environment is trying to kill me more than usual) and I'm on a new regimen of pills.

As soon as I'm better generally, I will be back at the gym regularly, and hopefully looking better. If you see any photos of me from Shmoocon, it looks like I had a backslide with Kirstie Alley over the winter; not the case. I'm just sick.

And knowing you're sick and being willing to treat it appears to one the major hurdles to overcome.

Shmoocon Success

Another great shmoocon. Attendance was highest ever, the location within the hotel had been recently built, and the competency and brilliance shine all throughout the event. It skews professional, but I can live with that for the great times and opportunities it gives.

I took almost no photos this time around, sadly; I just didn't focus on that. I suspect there will be plenty of photo albums to browse shortly, if not already. You really have a choice of being an attendee or photographer when you whip out the camera, and I chose attendee.

I reconnected with a bunch of people; I've given up being able to guess what people thought of me. Hero? Chatterbox? Freakjob? Leech? I'm sure everyone's got some good opinion. The hak5 crew was especially forgiving of my endless monologues stepping into their area; for my own part I was impressed with how they've put together a show and crew. I was on a crazy live streamed thing they did on Friday night, and I have no idea how that went.

My talk went well. I didn't have a single note written down; I knew the big challenge would be to fit it all into an hour presentation, not having to arrange the meager contents to fill the slot. I covered caving, the movies I make, the culture I spent some time with, and some of the footage I shot. Responses have been positive; I don't know if we actually get the Talk Review scores they had people fill out.

All in all, a great time. I expect by next year my health will be back to where it'll be 72 solid hours of Shmoo. I can only hope.

Face to Face with Luna City

I've been mentioning Peter Hirschberg and his arcade for some time now, as well as his other projects. All positively, I might add. And by positively, I'm using that as a shortcut for "drooling incessantly over how much style he exudes in everything he does". It's really just a great thing to know guys like this are in the world.

So during my planning for Shmoocon, I realized that I'd be relatively nearby where his arcade is, and that, with my rental car, I could probably go there and back without too much trouble. So I brought this up with Peter and he was all for it.

In doing this, I had to sacrifice a little bit of my time at Shmoocon; a real shame, because I really do enjoy these things. But come on, I've been following this guy for a decade and here was my big chance to meet him for the first time, as well as see in person his big project. So grabbing a few random attendees (Dan and Nick), we set out for the sixty-or-so-mile trip out West to where Luna City is.

Something's definitely up with me, energy-wise, so Nick ended up having to drive a bit of it. (Additionally, on the way back, everyone got to see me tiredly swerve in a highway, so it was thrills all around). We got there around 8pm, and wouldn't you know, Peter and his wife had the whole thing up and running beautifully to greet us.

As promised, I bought my collection of vintage quarters, which Peter is of course loathe to go down the road of. He is just as likely to go for adding tokens, so that people not only can play the games and he doesn't have to worry about stuff, but they could be souvenirs for their time spent at Luna City.

And make no mistake, Luna City is the sort of place you carry memories of for some time afterwards. It's almost a temple, a place of worship, for arcade games. It's the cleanest, nicest arcade you've ever been in, because it's been created from the ground up on the template of all the classic 1970s and 1980s arcades that flourished around video games and pinball machines. It's futuristic, yet of the past. It is otherworldly, yet as familiar as a favorite dream. Peter and I discussed this place for a while, and I think what I was trying to get across was how for many people out there, he's achieved their dream too. In other words, the fact that someone, somewhere, did this represents for others a vicarious triumph of their own dream. A lot of people wanted something like this, and he did it.

I forsee myself coming back many times, if only to get better pictures! The ones I took were sub-par, mostly me playing around a bit when not talking to Peter (we had a decade to catch up on, after all) or playing a few games. It's been a long time since I touched a working Space Wars cabinet, and Peter indulged me a few games. In fact, the last time I'd touched a Space Wars was 1979!

This City has a great future. Feel free to browse my uneven photo album that I took there.

A Carrier Detected for Three Decades

On January 16, 1978, Ward Christensen started his Monday trying to dig himself out of a snowstorm. Unable to successfully do so to commute out to his job as an IBM sales engineer, he went back inside and talked to his friend Randy Suess, a fellow member of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange. Ward had been on an Arpanet-based mailing list where it had been postulated that these new modems and a kit computer could be combined to make some sort of computer answering machine. Nobody, however, had sat down and actually done it. Ward and Randy cooked up an idea to make one of these computer answering machines/bulletin boards as a project. Having previously come up with the XMODEM protocol for transferring binary files dependably over modems, Ward was just the guy to get cracking on it, and Randy, a tech and chip geek, was just the the guy to build the hardware it'd run on. Ward started on the code and Randy the hardware, and within a few days they had a rough prototype. By two weeks, it was working enough to let people test it, and 312-545-8086 got you the first Computerized Bulletin Board System, CBBS.

As Ward mentioned in his interview when I visited him in 2002, testing continued for some time, and since they didn't think anyone would believe they got it running in two weeks, they made it four, and ever since then the official birthday/anniversary of the first Bulletin Board System is February 16th, 1978.

30 years ago today.

Bear in mind that in 1978 there weren't many auto-answering modems; this was a time when Ward had a second trash can in his office, to put on top of the acoustic coupler modem so that ambient room noise wouldn't corrupt the data. The solution to auto-answering was this: a ring detect circuit built by Randy would reset the machine, making it restart and run the CBBS program, which would then pick up the phone. Time from machine reset to blasting a carrier down the line: two rings.

In a stroke of luck, the first BBS was attached to a line printer so that Ward could do bug-fixing and see how the BBS was running. These thermal paper rolls, records of the first few months of the first BBS, have been entrusted to my care for now and I've been transcribing them. You can actually browse these scrolls now. I have a bunch to finish. I think I should make them a priority...

CBBS as a board went down in the 1990s. A version of it is online as a webforum. Ward started running his own BBS, the Ward Board, for a number of years; it has also gone down but he was kind enough to give me some samples of the last years of that BBS.

Both men have been "done" with the whole BBS thing for many years; they haven't talked in a long time. But Randy was kind enough to sit for an interview and Ward has been really gracious over the years in getting me artifacts and discussing it and helping people with their questions about it. There's something surreal about the co-creator of the BBS posting on Slashdot but that's what happens when we go from amoeba to alpha centauri in a couple generations.

Their story and the story of what happened to their creation is why I picked up my camera and started booking flights, and for that I thank them very much. How lucky we are that both these gentlemen still walk the earth and have seen what has happened to their side project, so long ago.

Danger Safely Outside the Danger Zone

The refreshing cascade of new faces to the weblog over the last week have reminded me of all the ways online communication enables us to not just interact, but hate remotely.

I had forgotten, I guess, how easy it is for people to take a few quick glances at some data and shove their two-line thesis out the door. Or to then proceed to make even more conclusions based on this thesis. And then, how easily it is for this quarter-baked half-thesis to become an addendum to the original data, as if, you know, they deserved it.

Every time I think about changing the retro-yet-lively white-on-black color scheme the weblog has, I get one of these high-popularity commentaries that includes people saying how much their eyes hurt, or I'm an incompetent webmaster, or that they couldn't finish reading, and my natural reaction is to leave it so. Suddenly, it's not a point of discussion, but a warning that one of my weblog entries has broken a tad wide and the tourists have arrived.

I like nothing more than to browse people who have no idea who or what the hell I am, what I've done, what I'm doing, or any other data points, and then just make all these great conclusions about me. It's refreshing. They're neither friend nor foe. They're just observers, as so much of this medium turns us into.

On the other hand, objectivity never means that you're necessarily informed, just that you're lacking direct hanging-with-me biases. So that comes into the mix as well.

I don't write this weblog to garner hits, otherwise I'd apparently goatse random people all the time, write incendiary text about others' works, and offer free PDFs forever. I'll stick with what's on my mind, and what's on my mind is this: it's a pretty big world out there, and while we may think that piloting our amazing browser-mobile over the web's landscape makes us experts about it, it really doesn't.

Here's to unexpected and unexplored terrain.

The Power of Reddit

Someone on the site Reddit linked to a story where someone threatened a site legally for removing an image that he was hotlinking. Someone quickly wrote "THAT's not hotlinking, THIS is hotlinking" and linked to the entry about hotlinking I wrote in the first days of 2007. Someone else was taken enough by this to then make this weblog entry a story of its own on Reddit, and suddenly it shot up the charts. Again.

I've been through many Slashdottings, Diggs, and BoingBoings, and I don't recall this level of pain before. To wit:

That's a T-1 line maxing out. Serving a blog entry. All day. Happy Valentine's Day!

In all, 35,000 people have visited me today. A few were around to get my opinion on videogame documentaries, but others have apparently learned for the first time my little tale of an unforgettable anus seared into the minds of hundreds of thousands.

I think the goatse story is timeless, so I don't really go "dude, that's so old" if people link to it. I write a lot of the entries to be unrelated to the moment, and apparently this one has the qualities people look for. That is, a butt.

Anyway, excuse me... I'm going to go throw an icepack on the machine.

Caretaking Fun

One of my buddies mailed me and said "Hey, you seem to have two files lifted from a Robert Anton Wilson book." And I checked and did some searching and yes, that's the case, somebody typed in a paragraph from a Robert Anton Wilson book and uploaded it to a BBS many years ago, with no credit. He asked what I'd do, and what I did was change the description of the file in the directory to clearly indicate the source. But I kept the files since I consider them artifacts and representative of information about BBSes that should be maintained for the future.

More notably, though, I saw that the Fun directory was really in disrepair.

The downside to a single caretaker of an archive this large is you stumble onto some pretty badly maintained parts, hidden away or in a half-state. The question is what to do when you find them. Put them on the list? Figure nobody complained for a few years (it's been like this for a long time) and keep going?

Well, in my case I dropped everything and put in descriptions for the 80 or so files that were in there. The "Fun" directory has always been my version of miscellaneous, dating back to when I started maintaining it at the age of 15. Stuff that didn't quite belong anywhere was "fun". I don't think this is the most credible sorting methodology, but it'll do for the moment. All of the files are reachable and now have some vague description, so that's better than it was yesterday. Or this morning.

This is one crazy selection of stuff. Cold Fusion, Astronauts, Pet Care, Gardening, Martial Arts.... it's like a typical overwhelming list of conferences and message bases back when you'd log onto one of the online services. So much stuff you didn't know where to begin. I like that feeling. I think it stays.

Nice Try, Archiver-Hater

I find it easier to generally just grab anything that catches my attention for more than a few seconds. Copy it, download it, PDF it, whatever makes the most sense, shove it into a directory with a description of it (if any) and then forget about it. It takes me 10 seconds, and I think of all the times we wish somebody 5, 10, 15 years ago did this, and how we'd all be a little happier for it. So I do this all the time.

One of the ways I do this is to use a program called wget, which can be poorly summarized as "a web browser that does a single thing". In fact, it can do many things, but what it basically does is allow you to interact with web-based and net-based assets such that you can say "go get this". So if there's a URL to an image, you can wget it. If there's a site you want to download, you can say "wget the site and everything it has on it". It can even let you go to password-protected stuff and grab a copy, update just what's new, and so on. It's very nice. I use it all the time.

Here's my incantation:

wget -r -l 0 -np -nc http://www.somewebsite.com

Every once in a while, though, it doesn't work. I go to download something and I get a big fat error. Like here:

wget http://stevenpoole.net/th/TriggerHappy.pdf
--23:57:37--  http://stevenpoole.net/th/TriggerHappy.pdf
           => `TriggerHappy.pdf'
Resolving stevenpoole.net... 64.13.232.191
Connecting to stevenpoole.net|64.13.232.191|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 500 Internal Server Error
23:57:37 ERROR 500: Internal Server Error.

Hey! Something broke. I can't get this file. The file, in this case, is a book about videogames, some academic nib-nob, that the author has released to a creative commons license, in PDF form. It's perfect for pdf.textfiles.com, so I tried to wget it. And failed.

I am then forced to pull out the big guns, the secret weapons that ensure my continued success in this rough and tumble world of high security:

wget --user-agent=EatDeliciousPoop http://stevenpoole.net/th/TriggerHappy.pdf
--03:01:33--  http://stevenpoole.net/th/TriggerHappy.pdf
           => `TriggerHappy.pdf'
Resolving stevenpoole.net... 64.13.232.191
Connecting to stevenpoole.net|64.13.232.191|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2,633,505 (2.5M) [application/pdf]
100%[====================================>] 2,633,505    647.63K/s    ETA 00:00
03:01:38 (585.47 KB/s) - `TriggerHappy.pdf' saved [2633505/2633505]

Wow! That's amazing! By merely indicating that my "User Agent" (the tag sent along with a browser) was NOT wget (the default), but that old standard "Eat Delicious Poop", suddenly I downloaded it with no problems.

So what's at play here is there's a rule in the webserver's configuration that if the user-agent string is "wget", return a 500 error and throw that bastard out. If it's anything else, however, roll out the red carpet and let that esteemed colleague download your precious data.

I'm picking on Steven today, but I run into this crap all the time. Bear in mind it's not checking for number of links, or bandwidth utilization, or any metric that would actually indicate abuse. It's just looking for the most basic, most surface judgment, profiling really, and then making a snap decision: NO. Oh, I'm sure some people are unaware their servers do this, but a lot actually think they're helping something. They're not.

You want to be all super-hacker and automatic-defense systems and shit? Easy enough; bury a link in your site, somewhere at the surface, with a link to a textfile. Don't make it embedded or load. Make it so you have to actively pull that file down. If someone does it, then they're spidering. Pretty simple. A browser wouldn't do it and someone like me, targeting a file, doesn't get ensnared in your bear trap. Ban that IP for 24 hours. Congratulations, warrior.

Of course, if you're offering a book online, or an artifact, or some other item, one would think you'd be happy someone was wgetting it, meaning they were attempting to place it somewhere, instead of just viewing it inline in their browser, ready to switch off to the next animated GIF or site that cathes their eye.

Don't hate archivers. We outlast you.

The King of Wrong: Final Words (Many of Them)

Those who are not into reading long self-referential articles can content themselves with the short version of this article posted two days ago.

If I'd known last week what I know now, I'd probably have not written a weblog entry about the documentary The King of Kong. And by weblog entry, I mean a vicious rant cutting to the very heart and soul of this documentary, declaring it fraudulent and beneath contempt.

Oh, not because I was mistaken or anything, and not because I didn't mean every word. It just seems that what I stumbled onto was one of those mystical memetic blends that occur when you send your feet flying into the right faces, at the right time. You're suddenly out on a very long limb on a very tall tree and you realize that you might have mis-prioritized your goals. I blew off some steam about a documentary I had a poor opinion about and have therefore subjected myself to a range of opinions and insinuations reverberating far outside where I usually tread. And this debating has been done regarding points of order few people care that much about, meaning the elaborate opinions I end up reading are almost entirely critical. It is not, in the aggregate, a positive and forward-thinking endeavor.

But here I am, the King of Kong hater, called to back up his opinion, and so let's see what I can do.

Recently I had the pleasure of a visit by Flack O'Hara, author of Commodork, a book I gave a positive review of some time ago. He was in town from Oklahoma, one of only a handful of times he's ever flown, for a week of classes. We determined he was flying back later in the day on a Saturday, so I suggested I take him up to the Funspot in New Hampshire, since Flack was really into video games (had a nice game room at home) and you can't do better than to check out the Funspot's Classic Arcade Museum. We knew it'd be a tight squeeze (it's about an hour and a half from my house up to the location) but figured it'd be worth the effort.

It certainly was. I gave Flack a very brief tour of Laconia, New Hampshire, and then through the amusement area of Weirs Beach and finally the Funspot. We played skee-ball and a bunch of old games and had a good time.

When we first walked into the Funspot, one of the counters had a small stack of "King of Kong" posters. I saw one, picked it up, and went "oh yeah, one of the arcade films". I hadn't given the movie a thought for many months. I also saw it had come out on DVD. I asked if they had one for sale, and they didn't and suggested I check out the website, billyvssteve.com. Just hearing that domain name reminded me more about the film, and then reminded me this was the one I hated.

Now, some disclosure is in order: while working on my documentary on text adventures I also started doing rough preliminary work on a documentary on arcades. During my preliminary phone calls and e-mails over the last couple of years, I had more than one case of a person talking about "the other video game documentary" and my having to say no, no I'm yet another guy. There were five documentaries I bumped into at various points: Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, High Score, TIlt: The Battle to Save Pinball, The Joystick Generation and King of Kong. While for some people my doing this is a conflict of interest, I'd rather point out that this explains why I didn't just watch the movie and move on, like I did with countless others. The subject is important to me that I was (and am) ready to dedicate years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars to filming, so I am not just a mere bystander, I'm an active participant and a very deeply embedded interested party in this history being told.

Arcades, you see, mean a hell of a lot to me. I grew up in arcades. I can remember the places I went to in the New York area: Dream Machine arcades in Poughkeepsie and Fishkill, the massive arcade in the back of the Nathan's in Yonkers down the road from Crazy Eddie's, the bouquet of pine trees and ozone in the Lake George amusement halls, and the times I begged my dad to drive me to the sketchiest parts of Asbury Park, New Jersey, just to slide around on the near-dead funhouses and play ancient rotting amusements near the salt of the sea. My ears still ring with my mother's screaming as she found me deep in some Atari or Midway masterpiece an hour after I said I'd meet her at the entrance in "20 minutes". I remember playing a test version of Pengo that used a version of the song "Popcorn" by Hot Butter, only to find when it was generally released they'd replaced it with some generic-sounding classical piece and I spent years trying to find out what that original song's title was. The drug den arcade in Mount Kisco, the brutal take-all-comers arcades in New York City... these are a part of me. I don't want that story not told.

So yeah, this subject is close to my heart and I wouldn't otherwise have planned to spend so much time on it in the future. (I still plan to, lest anyone be misled.) I heard of these other films and in some cases contacted the filmmakers and in other cases waited to see what would arrive. I figured if they got finished, I'd hear about them soon enough.

Now, the other part of me, the documentary filmmaker. This was never going to be my profession, or at least, I never thought I'd have a part in doing documentaries when I graduated from film school. I had had a great time and learned a lot, but I didn't see it as a vocation I wanted to be involved in. Bear in mind that at the time I graduated, I was trained in things like focus pulling, processed negatives and understanding variant grindings of lenses. I knew if I went pro I'd have an inevitable slide towards getting my ass reamed trying to break into the professional film business. If I was lucky, I could be a film loader or grip or abused production assistant. Some fellow graduates were excited at this prospect but it left me cold and I went into temping and later video games and later computer administration. So filmmaking went dormant, but I kept my little dreams and my outlook on things and went bravely on in life.

I did in fact begin, film, edit, and finish a movie. The BBS Documentary, maybe you've heard of it. To one perspective, this makes me a fine critic, as I've slept in my car outside a house to be on time to a 8am shooting schedule and watched a sequence hundreds of times to get the timing just right. But to another this makes me a perpetual agenda-pusher, watching other films as a zero-sum game in which every time they succeed I get a bite out of my ass. Subsequently, my analysis of films can seem informed, petty, bracing, bitter, or any combination. I can't do anything about this. I am me. All I can do is be upfront about who I am and hope that the informed portions of my personality are dominant in my language while the conflicted aspects waves from the back of the room to let you know they're there but not officially participating.

My mom enrolled me in my first film school when I was 11, back in 1981. It was pretty inexpensive, just $13 a month. And I made the most of it. Divorced, lucky enough to get a two-bedroom condo in Fishkill, NY, she paid for cable. This was, more than now, an enormously cool thing, like finding a free soda machine at work or winning a drawing and getting just the prize you wanted. The video signals were clear, the channels many and myriad, and I loved watching TV. I don't mean watching the TV like many people do, like a cat idly watching cars going by, not absorbing, just watching. I mean I studied those shows and channels like a future musician hearing his first notes of jazz wafting out of a club or a future surfer coming to a beach for the first time with his family. I wasn't about the plot line and who shot J.R. and what was the plot of the Jeffersons; I watched these films as windows into another place where things were being done and I wanted to do those things too. Our basic cable included one free "premium" channel as a gimmie: The Movie Channel, which surprisingly still exists in a messed-around form. This channel played from a rotating set of 30-40 movies every month, showing various recent Hollywood films next to banged-up 1960s and 1970s exploitations. And this is the thing: I watched them all. And not just all of them; I mean I watched individual movies plenty of times. I saw Caddyshack over 200 times. Motel Hell, a few dozen. Same for Times Square and Fort Apache: The Bronx and what has to be in the realm of 300-400 films across the couple of years. I learned angles, pacing, actor presence, set direction, lighting... all the aspects of film production by just watching the things endlessly during these preteen years. Some people watch a film and go "Get 'em, Sheriff". Other people watch them and go "Why does the gun sound entirely wrong?" I was of the second crowd. I love film. I wouldn't have it any other way. We didn't have a movie theater in my town that I could easily get to (or afford), so this was my theater, in my little crappy room in a competent little condo on the edge of town.

With this sort of upbringing, films end up generating questions for me, not answers. I don't look to movies to go "Ah, so this is how I should feel about a subject." or "I really hope the bad guy doesn't get away." I look at films and go "How the hell did they get clearance to shoot there?" and "Why wasn't that stuntman killed instantly?" With age has come not less questions, but more nuanced ones: Why does this documentary have a reverse shot where it shouldn't? Where is the sun in the sky related to the last shot that's supposed to have just happened? I heard the actor got his tooth chipped doing this shot; did they keep the contact in? What lens could this possibly be?

Maybe this seems like I'm ruining the magic; but in fact it's even more magical. The card-master Ricky Jay has said that the manipulations required to do some of his tricks are much more complicated and amazing than the tricks themselves, and he has no way to easily reconcile that.

Is my movie-watching experience ruined? Well, I don't think so. It's certainly different than most but it's hardly unique. Many people keep parallel narratives going on in their mind; I stumbled around on this concept on a recent entry and this was part of what I was talking about, this awareness of the medium you were observing and how you would build up tensions in strange ways that you wouldn't in real life. If a psycho was chasing you and your friends in your actual home, you wouldn't be thinking to yourself "which of us will survive to tell the tale?". You're thinking you're deader than dead and that's the end of it. The universe of movies is different, and we let it off the hook for some things and put it on the hook for things we wouldn't expect of regular living.

Into this way of seeing things comes my relationships with documentaries.

Since I don't watch films like a freshly-minted puppy, I don't watch documentaries any other way than with a critical eye, seeing what is on the screen and knowing what's not on there. I've had to browse through a lot of commentary on the tired tack of "because you can aim the camera a certain way, fuck objectivity in documentaries, fuck seeing them as anything but a different realm of fiction, stop acting like they have any real weight of meaning". I have to disagree. Writers take reality and scrunch it into a few dozen written characters. This does not mean they can't maintain some level of truth in those characters, or prevent the most common pitfalls of portraying non-fiction: omission, caricature, desecration. You can actually film things and get a good general sense of something without having every single moment appearing on-screen. Believe me, I've seen it. It happens, it can be done. It's not perfect but we're not talking about perfect, we're talking about not horrible. And I've seen horrible. I think horrible can be avoided.

I now want to discuss a number of BBS Documentary episodes I made, and where I found myself with choices similar to those presented to the makers of King of Kong, and where I like to think I did the best I could and not be a sensationalistic fucknut whore. I'll leave that decision to you.

I knew very quickly my documentary would likely be a half-dozen or more documentaries, all held under one group name (BBS). The question became what these "episodes" would cover. Some ideas came quickly and made it into the final work, others were discarded as reality reared its head, others made themselves known as footage came in. An example of a "lost" episode was Worcester, which was going to cover the BBS scene of Worcester Massachusetts, completely, from the late 1970s to 2000. In this way, I'd have a portrayal of a "scene" showing how it all related in a linear fashion across time, instead of the scattershot combining of many different "scenes" across the country and the years. This turned out to be unrealistic, although I did get an excellent set of 5-6 interviews of people in that area which got into the other episodes.

Another one was Artscene, which was going to be about the use of BBSes to spread art. So I'd cover things like ATASCII artwork and GIFs and NAPLPS and ANSI and MODs and all the great stuff that happened. Two things happened to derail this: size, and RaD Man. Size was just that I realized this was too big a subject to cover in less than an hour, and there were too many players. RaD Man was the interview who, realizing his big chance to get the story of ANSI told, started contacting everyone he knew from the ANSI scene, friend and enemy, and throwing them at me by the truckload. When all was said and done, I had something like 20-25 ANSI scene related interviews, well over 30 hours of this stuff, and so I really had little choice but to focus on that sub-sub-sub-culture the best I could.

The resulting artscene episode gets a wide variety of reaction. Believe me, the pettiness of the ANSI art scene, a scene primarily run by teenage boys, could outdo and outlast anything you might find in King of Kong. Bearing in mind that the conflict was over finding the best text-based artists, you might be stunned to truly comprehend the backstabbing and conniving to yank the best artists from other groups and promise them warez and gifts in return for their jumping ship. The late-night calls, the brow-beating e-mails, the intense backroom negotiations to drive a wedge between friends so that one could be pulled up into the big leagues... it's in the artscene episode to be sure. I just chose not to make the people relating these stories seem like they were completely messed-up manchildren reliving past meager glories in the sanctity of their grotty homes.

Yes, choice. I chose where to set up cameras so that people were front and center and in pleasant locations. I chose to ask them questions in the form of looking back, not to play the part of still living those times. And I certainly chose to have them give perspective and overview of their scenes instead of hanging them up in shot after shot of mulling over a long-forgotten slight from a decade previous. These are choices I made, and you can argue these are a fiction, but I don't agree. They're a construction of truths, real statements given to me and assembled so that the focus falls not on the people as caricatured losers, but on the incredible accomplishments they managed as early teens, the amazing art they created, the way they fought to be the best at this stuff and the works I show speak for themselves. It is hard, objectively, not to look at the artwork these kids created and not be amazed at what they did. I made sure we had plenty of art in there, plenty of examples. I zoomed in to show the level of detail. I had the prideful artist discuss in loving terms the amount of love and honor they put into their works, the kind of virtues that any creator of works he cares about can relate to.

Similarly, there is an episode named Fidonet about the subject of the largest volunteer-run computer network of all time. What the episode very quickly turns into is a meditation of group politics, the manner in which the interaction of at-odds motivations can result in truly destructive battles, battles that ruin lives. And realize this: there were people in that documentary who have never seen it. They told me flat out they were interviewed by me because they felt a duty to tell their stories but they could never bring themselves to actually watch the result. I had people who told me in no uncertain terms that my camera could go to hell. (Some relented later.) The fidonet episode is dedicated to a sysop who, his life in tatters, couldn't afford to pay the phone bill to keep his fidonet BBS up, the last connection he had to a social group that respected him, and he committed suicide soon after. There is a ton of sadness and pain and anger related to this subject. And it's in the documentary. And at the center of it all is Tom Jennings, a man whose relationship to his creation ranged from proud papa to deadbeat dad to raging domestic abuse depending on who you talked to.

Tom Jennings could have been mined in any way a filmmaker wished; he's brash, profane, brilliant, introspective, cynical, openhearted... a true character, in the positive sense of the word. He's done so much, in so many different ways, and been at a lot of incredible places. He would say things that were truly shocking, followed by an overview of a technical decision that was both insightful and hopelessly obtuse. He understood where mistakes were made and took blame and credit as needed through his multi-hour interview, one I conducted with almost no warning in his workshop in Los Angeles. Tom initially told me he only had a short time for an interview, so I set up very quickly and we just went at it. It turned out he was enjoying the questions and the discussion enough that we extended far out of his imposed deadline; I take this as a compliment and sign of respect for where the interview went.

Subsequently, Tom later sent me a personal collection of history he'd built up over the decades related to Fidonet. This collection of images, essays, e-mails and code, which I called the Tom Jennings Collection, is up on textfiles.com as we speak. There is some insightful stuff in there, and painful stuff as well. That was quite a thing to pass along to me, and I appreciate it to this day.

When the documentary came out, the discussions on Slashdot included an appearance by Jennings, this fellow I made the centerpiece of one of the episodes, and this is what he wrote:

"As one of the victims of this horrible plot, I have to admit it's pretty good. OK it makes me look good, which is probably an accident or mistake; but it does present some of FidoNet's complexities in a realistic, non-trivial-making light. Which is not easy. For better or worse, things are NOT oversimplified to make a digestable story, which probably took a lot of nerve on Jason's part. Simple linear stories probably sell better."

This is critical: this comment came post-release, and this is Tom Jennings saying this after he's seen the episode that covers Fidonet. (He was in attendance at the showing of the beta version at the 2004 Vintage Computer Festival.) Did I soften the blows delivered to Jennings? No. Did I make him out to be a pussycat when he wasn't? No. What I did was focus on the man's work and show how his character imbued that work with certain qualities, such as resilience, simplicity, adaptation. People will come away from it thinking he's a strange guy, or be even more amazed by him, or be surprised that that was the famous Tom Jennings. Nobody, I think, comes away hating him. Certainly nobody is provided with a story in which it's Tom Jennings "versus" anybody. Tom is what he is in that story, and through a very large combination of interviews (well over 40), we are painted a rounded picture of what made Fidonet so alluring, but also what drove almost every major character away from it over time. I am very proud of that episode.

I could have "punched up" the story, focused on just one or two people. I'd do this for two reasons: to make the story more "interesting" and because, in some way, I would have contempt for my audience they they couldn't sustain more than one "story arc" in their heads. I could have used these people, people who felt burned and abused by Fidonet, and been one more slap in the face for the entertainment of thousands. It's not hard to do, really. Cut this statement in with another, let them linger too long on a question I just posed so they seem lost... wait for them to say something off camera or indicate they have to use the bathroom and cut it against someone asking tough questions and there we have it, everybody's a weasel hypocrite who won't own up to their part in the "mess". It's easy. It's too damn easy.

If you watched any of my stuff (and you can certainly watch it for free in a lot of locations) and didn't know of all this choice and agonizing in the background, well, fine. It's not your job to consider what balancing acts and ethics I traveled through to come to the final cuts of the episodes. But I assure you, it was there.

As a result, I am a very tough critic about films and specifically documentaries that let their audience down by taking the easy route or who treat their subjects with disrespect for no good reason. I know the hypothetical situation where the subject is evil or criminal and so to bend to his wishes is to give voice to his propoganda; and such a film ensures placement in the stage of public opinion so that a man who wrongs appears wronged himself. This is a situation so rare in documentary filmmaking that it's a rounding error.

Have I made myself clear.

So now we come to King of Kong, a documentary in which, according to its packaging, "An unprecedented rivalry rocks the electronic world to its core!". Not only that, we "join novice gamer Steve Wiebe on his quest to destroy the top score of gaming legend Billy Mitchell, the uncontested champion of the Donkey Kong world for over 20 years".

Let's spend a few moments on the DVD packaging and presentation, because I think it's got some indications of the "heart" of this production.

First of all, your purchase gets you three physical items: a DVD, an amray case, and a reversible label on the amray case that allows you to flip over the cover and replace it with a wide cartoon drawn by Scott Campbell. The packaging says he's an "acclaimed artist", and I don't know him, but that's not saying much since I don't know a lot of people. He certainly made a nice cover, even if it's hidden by default.

These three items are all you get. No booklet, no inserts, no nothing. DVD, cover, plastic case. The question naturally comes as to why you even need to be buying this physical item at all; there's absolutely nothing special about it. An ISO and two TIFFs will give you the same experience. And there's even a bonus: putting this DVD into your drive makes it attempt to install the InterActual DVD player, a software DVD player that, among other things, phones home to New Line Cinema, distributors of the DVD. Oh, that's excellent, that's truly awesome. We're told that we can't experience the full features of the DVD without installing this software, which I am going to assume for the time being is an utter lie; feel free to correct me if you know differently.

I'm saying a relatively puffy torrent could give you 100% of the experience. This is petty and trivial but it is true. And ostensibly a torrented version wouldn't ask you to install a home-phoning software DVD program every time you stuck it into your computer. That this does that very thing signals, to me, old-style thinking and cynicism about the audience and their role in the ownership of this DVD, that is, gape-mouthed zombies.

Every interviewee from the BBS Documentary I could track down (some have moved, some were filmed at conventions) were sent a copy of the documentary, free of charge, my cost. They were sent this with no prompting and due to a promise I made to myself at the onset of production. Imagine my surprise to find out that people featured in the documentary had to buy their own copies. Of a New Line release of a DVD. Man, that speaks volumes right there.

But okay, fine, nobody's overly interested in my sniping at choices likely outside of the filmmaker's hands. The fact is, they probably had no say in their packaging being done dirt cheap and the DVD installing quasi-spyware into the machine of anybody unfortunate enough to own a computer and want to watch a movie on it. Once you get signed up to the big boys, these little choices are entirely out of your hands and all you can do is take your money and buy a swimming pool. I got it. C'est la vie. Verdict: Not Guilty. Let's just go in on the core of what pisses me off about this movie and its structure, and then leave it at that.

The King of Kong has a relatively simplistic situational conflict here, which is exemplified by the domain name of the website selling it: Billy vs. Steve. Billy Mitchell, Hot Sauce seller and videogame champion, versus Steve Wiebe, family man and pretender to the throne of Donkey Kong domination. It sounds simple because it is simple. It's meant to be simple. Man Vs. Man, one of the core conflicts of story. One has the crown and another man, true of heart, means to win this crown. That the man at the top would rain down any and all obstacles in his path to prevent him would be expected. Additionally, it makes a parallel to the game itself, which features this very metric. Well, except the man at the top is an ape. But stick with me.

The fact that story is so simple is because it has been edited that way in this film. You saw off any parts that don't quite fit and suddenly the bed is exactly the right size. Both my episodes Artscene and Fidonet had stuff that made the stories I told more complicated; the question I asked myself was if they fundamentally changed the stories as well. If they didn't, then I would cut for the sake of clarity or brevity. But if the element being considered was a fundamental aspect and motivation, then I had to find a way to shoehorn it in, even if it got a little weird and complicated. I trusted my audience could take it.

So let's stick with a couple examples of where I don't like King of Kong's style. I am not going to go after every single last detail in every bit of the movie, because that would simply be a waste of time; many other articles are written, statements made, and evidence collected to rage over specific debates. I'm going for a couple whoppers and will imply strongly that this indicates stylistic/ethic choices that riddle the film. And you can take that however you want to.

The core of the story is this: Billy Mitchell is the World Record Holder of Donkey Kong for 20 years and counting. Steve Wiebe wants to get a better score than Billy Mitchell and become the new World Record Holder. Steve is thwarted at every turn, mistreated by the establishment, and considered a pariah by the petty and bickering nerd nest that is Arcade Recordkeeping. He wins, and then is beat down by Mitchell. The fight rages on.

Great. Now how about Tim Sczerby.

The King of Kong FAQ has this to say about Sczerby:

"While our movie focuses on the rivalry between Billy and Steve, one other gamer has a very high-score in the Twin Galaxies database on Donkey Kong, Tim Sczerby. After repeated investigations into the validity of Tim's score, and after finding one dead end after another in our Twin-Galaxies-assisted attempts to reach Mr. Sczerby, we determined that his consistently disputed record was impossible to verify and did not merit inclusion in the film. The experts on the subject of Donkey Kong, especially Brian Kuh, always referred to Billy Mitchell as the reigning champion and maintained that his unrivaled skill put him on top of the record holder chart."

Walter Day has this to say about Tim Sczerby:

"Billy Mitchell scored 874,300 points at Twin Galaxies on November 7, 1982. His record stood until August 17, 2000 when Tim Sczerby scored 879,200 points in Auburn, NY. When Tim scored this new record, his achievement was published on the Twin Galaxies website and the story was sent out all over the Internet. Also, Walter Day, Chief Scorekeeper at Twin Galaxies personally phoned Tim and congratulated him on his great accomplishment. A few days later, Billy himself phoned Tim and congratulated him."

Day cites this interview conducted with Sczerby in September of 2007, in which Sczerby shows disappointment at not being mentioned in the documentary.

Let's go to the proper archives. Google Groups has this posting by Sczerby asking where and who he needs to talk to with his new record he recorded on videotape. Here's Walter Day looking for Tim based on news getting back to him. Here's a thread where Sczerby was a little late sending along some equipment, and after a short time made things right. I cite this simply because of the idea that he couldn't be found; here were a couple people who certainly found him. Here's an interview with Sczerby regarding Donkey Kong, winning it, his thoughts on the game itself, and so on. (This was a tad buried, but I did find it). The article is from October of 2000. I also have the official press release from Twin Galaxies, dated in 2000, announcing the beating of Mitchell's record by Sczerby. It has not been "updated", "clarified", or "corrected".

This is all problematic truth, you see. It complicates and muddies the simple story of Billy Versus Steve. It means that the world records were a vaguely vigorous competition, with occasional advances in the top score, to be sure. But it was hardly a case of the Great Master being approached by the Brave Knight to win the kingdom from darkness. Assuming they were unable to make the phone calls to get a hold of Sczerby, they opted to not mention him at all, rather than make any mention of him and complicate matters. I don't think that's right. I don't think any slickly made statement by anybody can justify that action. I'd walk off a production doing it.

Now, before I mention the second issue, let me spend a little time on trivia.

Did you know the gearbox of a F1 racing car needs to be used in 4 events or a weight penalty is added to the cars each time they switch one out? Or that a car may not issue electromagnetic radiation between 2.0 and 2.7GHz without written permission? (Rule 79). Did you know a Battlebot-acceptable entrant must be able to be turned on with 45 seconds and turned off within 60? (Rule 4.2). Or how about the fact that a batter in major league baseball is entitled to two base advances if his fair ball bounces into a bush? (6.09e).

I mention all these delightful rules because they're a fact of life. If you have people competing for anything, from glory to cash, you will have to have people making sure the playing field is level. And those people will have to institute rules. And then somebody is going to come up with something that entirely blows the ruleset, and they will have to make more rules, often after careful deliberation, shouting, accusation and conspiracy theory. This is the same in all sports, whether you physically or mentally exert yourself.

That these exist in the context of videogame records is not shocking or weird or pitiful; it'd be such if there were none at all.

Walter Day's "Official Video Game and Pinball Book of World Records", which I have here in my office (autographed by numerous people), has an massive section (hundreds of pages) about his history with video games, running his arcade, and the conflicts and drama resulting from trying to be a dependable record-keeper for scores. Initially, anybody who had Twin Galaxies' phone number could call up and declare their score. No verification, no anything. It only took a few screw-overs for this to change. The realization that boards could be modified added more rules. The dipswitch settings were a factor, as were chipset revisions. Over time, the rules were added to, refined, modified as needed. They function, in every single way, like every other known competitive event. This wasn't done to lock people out of competing, keep the cabal in power, hog the fading glory. This situation has existed in all sports; it's just that this one is relatively young in its life, when weird controversies are still the norm and within living memory. I promise you, go spend some time on the short career of Edward Gaedel and you will be rewarded far beyond King of Kong's controversy.

It is so easy, such low hanging fruit, to pick up on a discussion or rule-based debate, focus on the machinations of this debate, and then cut it so it seems they're out to "get" the person. Wiebe played his submitted game with an odd board. The rules team dealt with this what appears to be clumsily, but most certainly not in an out-of-bounds manner. I agree it's a frustrating thing. I also agree that people a decade earlier didn't get this level of scrutiny. Later record-claimers will harken back to the relative lack of scrutiny people in 2005-2007 were getting. This is normal, I am sorry to say. The movie, however, smells a conflict, and then joins the pack.

A particularly acerbic review mentioned that the fighting is vicious because the stakes are so small. (This is actually an old Henry Kissinger quote about university politics.) Reviews on Rotten Tomatoes naturally use the film to determine the character and soul of the people in the movie. Terms show up like "nerdy obsessives", "stranger than fiction", "people for whom time has stopped somewhere around 1982 ". And these are the positive reviews.

Well, they're positive because as far as the viewer is concerned, the story is great. The arc is well-defined and satisfying. And for a lot of people, that's as deep as it goes. Whether it's all actually true is kind of beside the point. In the spate of deeply-debated political documentaries that have shown up in recent years, that idea of "truth" in a non-fiction film has been worn down to irrelevance. That's sad, and I hate to say this is the case, but it's a fact. Real is no longer real. Non-fiction means you didn't pay your actors. Journalism is what newspapers used to do. Documentaries mean the camera shakes more.

I've had to wade through dozens of people explaining in earnest that this position of truth within the context of a documentary is irrelevant, beside the point, and much ado over nothing. Well, really, in the era of the microtheft, a lot of ethics are much ado over nothing. Whether to copy that data, whether to say something that would get you sued if you printed it in a paper but which you happily post to a world-wide forum, whether you can sniff the first matches to a concept in Google and consider that due diligence... that's all kind of neither here nor there unless there's money involved. I realize this is how things are and I am not above engaging in this myself.

But please see clear to forgive me, after I spent 10 percent of my life on a single film project, sweating over the details and despairing over the accuracy and fairness within it, to hold a candle to other such projects and call into question actions and choices that hurt people.

So let's bring this over to Billy Mitchell, and while we're at it, Thom Henderson.

Was Billy Mitchell hurt by King of Kong? I guess it all depends on your definition of "hurt", doesn't it. Is he physically cut and bleeding, and has his home and workplace been vandalized or burned? No, not that I can determine. He hasn't been driven from his places of comfort, made to answer to a court of law, lost his livelihood... no, he's doing fine there. Are his children teased at school? Maybe. I haven't heard anything to that extent, so I can't tell you.

But how many times has Mitchell been pilloried, his name called out in anger, his reputation smeared, insults flung in his direction? Well, all initial measures seem to fall somewhere in the realm of countless. I interviewed a number of controversial figures for the BBS Documentary, and one of them was Jack Rickard, who was the editor of Boardwatch magazine and quite a rabble-rouser in his time. I asked him, during his interview, how comfortable he was going into these controversies, and he said, clearly, "Jason, this is your movie." Later, he made this statement, which I am paraphrasing: "At the end of the day, you realize there's a guy in the lobby who people throw vegetables at and who they hate, and that guy ain't you." This is the attitude of a true celebrity, someone who realizes the nature of that, and who's come to terms with that. Billy Mitchell may or may not have hit that level of celebrity. Maybe he was totally prepared for this. Maybe not. His interviews on the subject, now coming fast and furious, don't seem to indicate that. He is not enjoying his fame, not delighting in the attention, not feeling like he's got a whole new audience. I would prefer to think, at this point, that he feels pretty fuckin' used.

Seth Gordon, the director of King of Kong, has this compassionate view:

He's such an icon, kind of like a WWF wrestler. The thing about Billy is that he's a self-created construct as an icon. I never met anyone like him in my life. It was truly eerie to spend time with him. Everything was so rehearsed and p.r. savvy. You never got the sense of talking to a real or complete person.

Bear in mind here, Seth Gordon has what are called the "life rights" to Billy Mitchell. This means they have a contract where they can use his life as the basis for a fictional movie, one in which they're working on as I write this. They are going to construct a movie out of this documentary and any limits they had internally for what could be on screen or not will be gone. Dollars to donuts there will be a fistfight, or a car chase. Maybe a machine gets smashed. Maybe there's a love triangle. You get to say it's based off a true story, make your mint, and go home. Gordon will drive around or live in an object acquired off Billy Mitchell, and I wonder if he'll remember that in his later years. I wonder if anyone asked to sign a contract with him of any nature regarding any film project will remember it too.

Is Billy Mitchell "real"? I have no doubt that he says things that are over the top. I have no question that he goes off the rails on certain subjects. I also know that if you interview people for hours on end, at various days, you will get some pretty crazy stuff. How you choose to deal with that stuff is a little bit of who you are as an interviewer and editor and director. There's no question you can "filter for crazy", or "filter for nice", or filter for whatever the hell you wish to. I never claim that Billy's not capable of throwing out whoppers. I'm saying that when you lace his words with an implication of malice, of cheating, of lying to stay on top, then you are moving into caricature and needless trashing of a real person to achieve your goals. Chasing Ghosts has Billy Mitchell and a whole other range of players, and gives you the story without turning the whole experience of video games, and arcades, into a petty small-minded pissing match.

Let me tell you a little story about making a film featuring a person who was involved in a conflict.

An unavoidable, one might say critical, juncture in BBS history is the ARC-ZIP or SEA/PKWARE battle. Waged in the late 1980s, it centered around intellectual property with regards to compression software. This sounds dry on the outset but once you realize the lives involved, the stories, and how history changed because of it, it is anything but dry. I knew I had to make an effort to research it and, if possible, get the figures involved and do a segment or episode on it. The two main figures were Thom Henderson of SEA and Phil Katz of PKWARE. Phil Katz was dead; he'd drank himself to death in a hotel room 2 years earlier. All indications were that even if I'd attempted to interview him 3-4 years previous, it wouldn't have been informative, but I'l